The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (9 page)

For the particle, there was no such thing as a closed door. So to find her appearing
(as it were) at a party to which she hadn’t been invited, or at all the parties,
could hardly come as a surprise. She was the prototypical interloper. Her
gate-crashing was systematic, unstoppable, and supremely elegant. So many might have
envied her! All the outcasts, the embittered, the paranoiacs, eaten up by jealousy,
left at home alone while the others gather to enjoy themselves in the glittering
salons of the Universe. But the envious would have had to consider the price the
particle was paying: diminution, insignificance. Was it worth it, under those
conditions?

V

AND EVEN GRANTING THAT NO space was exempt from the little
wanderer’s intrusions, it’s still hard to accept that she could have snuck into the
most exclusive gathering of all: God’s Tea Party, the legendary party held to
celebrate His birthday. It was a bit too much, even for her. Not just because the
whole point of the gathering was to exclude the uninvited, but also because it was
governed by an absolute. It was, in other words, a kind of fiction or artistic
construction, and as a result each of its details, whether big or small, subtle or
crude, had to correspond to a meaning or an intention. And the particle was not a
detail in a story; she didn’t contribute any information or advance the plot: she
was an accident and nothing more.

On the other hand, it was bound to happen. Because the particle was one of a
countless multitude, falling through the Universe. That’s why it’s called a “rain of
particles,” and although the analogy is misleading (this “rain” is falling in all
directions, and never ends, and doesn’t wet things), it does at least quash any
hopes of detailed monitoring, because even the briefest local shower is composed of
more drops than anyone could count, let alone name. And since these particles are so
numerous and intrusive, why should it be surprising to find one passing through the
scene of God’s Tea Party?

Perhaps it wasn’t an exception. It hasn’t occurred to anyone to look into this
question systematically, but it’s entirely possible that particles are attracted by
parties. Why would that be strange? Or to put it the other way around: parties may
well be a natural sieve for particles. (The resemblance between the words is not a
mere coincidence.)

Coquettishly, the particle identified as a geometric point, which meant that her
manifestation in reality was linear, because over time a point will always trace a
line. And since a line is the intersection of an infinity of planes inclined at
different angles, when this line entered God’s Tea Party, something like a windmill
of superfine screens appeared, screens tilted at various, changing angles, over
which the apes went slipping and sliding, tumbling over and getting up, finding
themselves somewhere else altogether, climbing a slope only to realize that they
were actually descending, or whizzing down a slide that, to their surprise, was
going up. Since there were so many planes, it was very rare for two apes to be on
the same one, which didn’t stop them fighting—on the contrary. Their leaps became
multidimensional, as if they wanted to jump through spaces that space did not
contain. Suddenly they would discover that the floor beneath their hairy feet was
also beneath the feet of an ape on the other side, defying the law of gravity. Or
the space across which they stretched their extralong arms, reaching for a
profiterole, was narrowed by the pressing in of two spaces from neighboring planes,
squeezing the arm into a superthin ribbon. Or the tea they spilled flowed upward,
downward, sideways, backward, and forward, like a thousand-pointed liquid star. All
this intensified their silliness and drove them crazy; they treated the phenomenon
as a theme park specially built for their amusement, and that’s when chaos
really
began to reign. They started moving like wonky robots loaded
with explosives. They jumped in all directions, put their hands and feet in the tea
and their tails in the pompoms of Chantilly cream on the cakes; they yelled as if
competing in a noise contest, choked, vomited, and crawled under the tablecloth,
sending the dishes flying, as you can imagine.

It was amazing that such a tiny being could produce such far-reaching effects. The
particle seemed to be everywhere at once, although, of course, she wasn’t. At each
moment she was in one place only, but present there as a cause, so her effects were
simultaneously present in many other places, and while they were still being
produced, she was already generating new planes and scrambling the apes into new
configurations. The size of a cause doesn’t matter: a cause is a cause, whether big,
medium, or small. Even when it’s the cause of madness.

VI

WITH ITS BAROQUE LAYERING OF necessary accidents and accidental
necessities, the Tea Party was, it seemed, complete both as an event and as a
symbol. The birthday was duly celebrated, and rather than passing unnoticed, the
date was marked, if not with the ecclesiastical pomp that might have been expected,
at least with the animal (not to say bestial) energy and joy of the primitive and
the authentic.

But, driven on by an obsessive perfectionism appropriate to His status and function,
God wanted to add one last stitch, or sew on a final button, and tie off the end of
the thread. He still had to give the particle an origin. He had to make her come
from somewhere. Or, to put it more precisely, he had “to make her
have
come
from somewhere.” This was a preliminary task, which should come as no surprise,
since all God’s tasks are preliminary; otherwise, the completeness of His world
would be compromised. It wasn’t a problem, given His habitually bold approach to
space and time. The problem came afterward, as we shall see, not that it was really
a problem (partly because for Him
before
and
after
had no
meaning).

God’s Tea Party would have been incomplete without the story of the particle. Because
the Party was a story, and every story is made up of stories, and if it’s made up of
anything else it ceases to be a story. We will never know whether it was a weakness
on God’s part, one of those forgivable little vanities, or a matter of logic, but He
dearly wanted the birthday party to make a good story, a “once upon a time,” every
repetition of which would be a perfectly accomplished rehearsal. He couldn’t allow
the anonymity of the furtive interloper to spoil everything.

The nature of the object meant that his work was already half done: it couldn’t be
hard to find the origin of a particle because the word itself indicated that it was
part of something. All He had to do was find that something, or invent it. God had
made far more arcane discoveries, in the course of His long career. How many times
had He found a needle in a haystack, just to satisfy His creatures’ appetite for
metaphors or proverbs!

In this case, it could have been anything, literally, and more than literally: the
particle could have come not only from a material object but also from an event, a
lapse of time, an intention, a thought, a passion, a wave, a form . . . By virtue of
its size, it belonged in the primordial roundabout, from which the paths of mass and
energy depart, with their respective mutual metamorphoses. The particles were at the
heart of the action. Which didn’t mean that the origin of this one in particular had
to be sought exclusively at the beginning: she could have emanated from any state of
the Universe, even the most recent. The infinitesimal birth of that nosy little
globule could have taken place in a flare from the surface of Alpha Centauri or a
pan used to fry a dove’s egg in China, in a child’s tear or the curvature of space,
in hydrogen, blotting paper, a desire for revenge, a cube root, Lord Cavendish, a
hair, or the unicorn . . . The catalog that God had to flick through, so to speak,
was inordinately long. Not for the first time, it was borne home to Him that
omnipotence is limited by
l’embarras du choix
. Words were his only guides
in that great chaotic enumeration. At bottom, it was a question of language. There
weren’t any things in reality, only words, words that cut the world into pieces,
which people end up taking for things. God didn’t need to use words Himself, but
when He had to intervene, when, as in this case, He wanted to imprint something on
human memory, He had no choice but to take part in the linguistic game. He regarded
it as a challenge. It was quite a bit harder for Him than it would have been for a
grammar teacher, because He had to consider all languages, living, dead, and
potential (each of them carved the world up differently, and, viewed from above,
their coincidences, divergences, and overlaps formed a superintricate
patchwork).

Cutting to the chase: it has taken longer to formulate the problem than He took to
solve it. As if He’d pressed a button, the particle had her birth certificate, which
also served as an invitation to the party, to which she would return for her debut.
And here, the Creator made an exception: He who keeps no secrets kept one on this
occasion. He didn’t tell anyone what He had chosen as the particle’s origin. And
that, ever since, has been the profound little mystery that runs through God’s Tea
Party.

The Musical Brain

I WAS A KID—I
would have been four or five years old. This
was in my hometown, Coronel Pringles, at the beginning of the 1950s. One night, it
must have been a Saturday, we’d gone to have dinner at the hotel; we didn’t eat out
often, not that we were really poor, though we lived pretty much as if we were
because of my father’s austere habits and my mother’s invincible suspicion of any
food she hadn’t prepared herself. Some obscure combination of circumstances had
brought us to the hotel’s luxurious restaurant that night and seated us, stiffly and
uncomfortably, around a table covered with a white cloth and laden with silver
cutlery, tall wineglasses, and gold-rimmed porcelain dishes. We were dressed up to
the nines, like all the other diners. The dress codes in those days were relatively
strict.

I remember the continual to-and-fro of people getting up and carrying boxes full of
books to a small table like an altar at the far end of the room. Most of them were
cardboard boxes, though there were wooden boxes too, and some were even painted or
varnished. Sitting behind the table was a little woman wearing a shiny blue dress
and a pearl necklace, with a powdered face and white hair combed into the shape of a
feathery egg. It was Sarita Subercaseaux, who later on, throughout my time there,
was the high school’s headmistress. She took the boxes and examined their contents,
making notes in a record book. I was following all this activity with the keenest
attention. Some of the boxes were too full to be properly closed, others were half
empty, with only a few books knocking around inside, making an ominous sound. Yet it
wasn’t so much the quantity of books that determined the value of the boxes, though
quantity did matter, as the variety of titles. The ideal box would have been one in
which all the books were different; the worst (and this was the most frequent case),
a box containing nothing but copies of the same book. I don’t know who explained
this rule to me, maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That
would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and schemes to make sense of
things I didn’t understand, and I understood almost nothing. Anyway, where else
could the explanation have come from? My parents weren’t very communicative, I
couldn’t read, there was no television, and the kids in my gang of neighborhood
friends were as ignorant as I was.

Seen from a distance, there’s something dreamlike about this scene with the boxes of
books, and the way we’re dressed up as if for a photo. But I’m sure that it happened
as I’ve described it. It’s a scene that has kept coming back to me over the years,
and in the end I’ve worked out a reasonable explanation. Plans must have been afoot
at the time to set up the Pringles Public Library, and someone must have organized a
book drive, with the support of the hotel’s proprietors: “a dinner for a book,” or
something along those lines. That’s plausible, at least. And it’s true that the
library was founded around that time, as I was able to confirm on my most recent
visit to Pringles a few months ago. Sarita Subercaseaux, moreover, was the first
Head Librarian. During my childhood and adolescence, I was one of the library’s most
assiduous patrons, probably the most assiduous of all, borrowing books at a rate of
one or two a day. And it was always Sarita who filled out my card. This turned out
to be crucial when I began high school, since she was the headmistress. She spread
the word that in spite of my tender years I was the most voracious reader in
Pringles, which established my reputation as a prodigy and simplified my life
enormously: I graduated with excellent grades, without having studied at all.

During my most recent visit to Pringles, hoping to confirm my memories, I asked my
mother if Sarita Subercaseaux was still alive. She burst out laughing.

“She died years and years ago!” Mom said. “She died before you were born. She was
already old when I was a girl . . .”

“That’s impossible!” I exclaimed. “I remember her very clearly. In the library, at
school . . .”

“Yes, she worked at the library and the high school, but before I was married. You
must be getting mixed up, remembering things I told you.”

That was all I could get out of her. I was unsettled by her certainty, especially
because her memory, unlike mine, is infallible. Whenever we disagree about something
that happened in the past, she invariably turns out to be right. But how could she
be right about this? Perhaps I was remembering Sarita Subercaseaux’s daughter, a
daughter who as well as being the spitting image of her mother had followed in her
footsteps. But that was impossible. Sarita had gone to her grave unmarried and she
was the archetype of the unmarried woman, the town’s classic old maid: always
meticulously groomed; cool and remote, the very image of sterility. I was quite sure
of that.

Getting back to the hotel. The movement between the tables in the restaurant and the
little altar where the boxes were piling up was not entirely fluid. Everyone there
knew everyone else—that’s how it was in Pringles—so when people got up
from their tables to take their boxes to the far end of the room, they stopped at
other tables on the way to greet and chat with their acquaintances. The
acquaintances were careful not to talk too much, politely supposing that the people
who had stopped were carrying boxes of considerable weight (even if the contents
were, in fact, woefully meager). The carriers, in turn, responded more politely
still by chatting on, making it clear that the pleasure of the conversation amply
compensated for the effort of bearing the weight. These little transactions,
informed as they were by a sincere curiosity about the lives of others, which was
common to all the inhabitants of Pringles, turned out to be rich in information, and
that is how we learned that the Musical Brain was being exhibited next door, in the
lobby of the Spanish Theater. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have known, and would
simply have gone home to bed. The news was an excuse to finish with the dinner,
which all of us were finding tedious.

The Musical Brain had appeared in town some time earlier, and an informal association
of residents had taken charge of it. The original plan had been to lend it out to
private homes, for short periods, following a procedure that had been used with
various miraculous images of the Virgin. Requests for those images had come from
people with illnesses or family problems, while the reason for borrowing this new
magical device was sheer curiosity (although perhaps there was also a touch of
superstition). Since the association had no religious framework, and no authority to
regulate the rotation, it was impossible to stick to a schedule. On the one hand,
there were those who tried to get rid of the Brain after the first night, with the
excuse that the music kept them awake; on the other hand, there were those who built
elaborate niches and pedestals, and then tried to use their expenses as a pretext
for prolonging the loan indefinitely. The association soon lost track of where the
Brain was, and those who, like us, had never seen it came to suspect that the whole
thing was a hoax. That’s why we were overcome by impatience when we found out that
it was on display just next door.

Dad asked for the bill, and when it came he reached into his pocket and took out his
famous wallet, for me the most fascinating object in the world. It was very large
and made of green leather, marvelously embossed with complex arabesques, the back
and front adorned with glass beads that composed colorful scenes. It had belonged to
Pushkin, who, according to the legend, was carrying it in his pocket the day he was
killed. One of my father’s uncles had been an ambassador in Russia at the beginning
of the century and had bought many works of art, antiquities, and curiosities there,
which his widow had distributed among her nephews and nieces after his death, since
the couple had no children of their own.

The Spanish Theater, which was part of a complex belonging to the Spanish Provident
Society, abutted the hotel. And yet we didn’t go straight there. We crossed the
street to where the truck was parked, walked around it, and then crossed back. This
detour was for my mother’s benefit: she didn’t want the diners at the hotel, in the
unlikely event that they should look out of the windows and actually be able to see
something, to suppose that she was going to the theater.

We walked into the lobby, and there it was, placed on a box, an ordinary wooden one
that Cereseto (the manager of the theater) had disguised with strips of shredded
white paper, the kind used for packing. The presentation was quite effective: it was
like a big nest, and suggested both the fragility of eggs and that of objects packed
with care. The famous Musical Brain was made of cardboard and it was the size of a
trunk. It resembled a brain quite closely in shape, but not in color, because it was
painted phosphorescent pink and crisscrossed with blue veins.

We formed a semicircle. It was one of those things that leaves you at a loss for
words. Mom’s voice interrupted our rapt contemplation.

“What about the music?” she asked.

“Yes, of course!” Dad said. “The music . . .” He frowned and leaned forward.

“Maybe it’s switched off?”

“No, it’s never switched off, that’s what so strange about it.”

He leaned farther forward, so far that I thought he’d fall onto the Brain, then
stopped suddenly and turned to look at us with a conspiratorial grin.

My sister and I came closer. Mom shouted, “Don’t touch it!”

I felt an overwhelming desire to touch it, if only with a fingertip. And I could have
too. We were completely alone in the lobby. The ticket vendor and the usher must
have been in the theater, watching the play, which seemed to be nearing its end.

“How could you hear it, with all this racket!” Mom said.

“It’s barely a whisper. To think that people give it back because they find the noise
annoying! It’s a disgrace!”

Mom nodded, but she was thinking of a different disgrace. Dad was enthralled by the
Brain—he was the only one who’d heard its music—while Mom was looking
around and seemed more interested in what was happening in the theater. Thunderous
laughter was coming from inside, shaking the whole building. It must have been a
full house. Leonor Rinaldi, Tomás Simari, and their troupe were performing one of
those vulgar, broad comedies that used to tour the provinces for years on end;
people never seemed to tire of laughing at them. The secret, tremulous music
supposedly emanating from the Brain could hardly compete with all the guffaws and
stomping.

My mother, proud heir to a line of sophisticated music lovers, reciters, and
tragedians, disdained those products of popular taste epitomized by Leonor Rinaldi.
Indeed, she actively campaigned against them. The theater, for her, was disputed
territory, a battlefield, because it was there that the classes of Pringles waged
their cultural wars. Her brother directed an amateur dramatic society called The Two
Masks, which was devoted to serious theater; the town’s other club, directed by
Isolina Mariani, specialized in comedies of manners. All of Isolina Mariani’s
devotees must have been in the stalls that night, keen to learn, admiring Leonor
Rinaldi’s demagogic stagecraft, absorbing her mannerisms like an invigorating
syrup.

Mom’s aversion was so extreme that on several occasions, when one of those popular
companies was coming to town, she made us have dinner early, then drove us to the
theater just as the play was about to start and parked the truck near the entrance
(but not too close, choosing a place hidden in the shadows), so that she could check
on who was going in. Usually there were no surprises: the audience was made up of
poor people from the outer suburbs, “the great unwashed” as my mother used to call
them, hardly worth a dismissive remark such as “What can you expect of ignorant
fools like that?”

But occasionally there was someone “respectable” among them, and then she became
zealous. She felt that her spying had been worthwhile, and that from now on she’d
“know the score” when dealing with certain cultural hypocrites. Once, she went so
far as to get out of the truck and rebuke a cultivated dentist who was climbing the
steps of the theater with his daughters. She told him how disappointed she was to
see him there. Wasn’t he ashamed to be supporting that vulgarity? And bringing his
daughters! Was that his idea of education? Luckily, he didn’t take her too
seriously. He replied, with a smile, that for him theater was sacred, even in its
most debased forms, and that his primary objective was to expose his daughters to
popular culture at its crudest in order to give them some perspective. Needless to
say, his arguments made no impression on Mom.

Anyway. To return to the memorable evening of our encounter with the Musical Brain.
We got into the truck and off we went. We had a yellow Ika pickup. Although the four
of us could fit in the front, I usually sat in the back, in the open air, partly
because I liked it, partly to keep the peace—I was always getting into noisy
fights with my sister—but mainly so that I could spend some time with my good
friend Geniol, the family dog. Geniol was very big and white, of indeterminate
breed, and he had a large head (like the man in the Geniol ads, hence the name). We
couldn’t leave him home alone because he howled and made such a racket the neighbors
complained. But in the back of the truck he was well behaved.

There was also a more arcane reason why I liked to travel in the back: since I
couldn’t hear what they were saying in front, it meant I didn’t know where we were
going, and the itinerary would take on an unpredictable air of adventure. I knew
where we were going when we set out, if I’d been paying attention, but as soon as
Mom climbed into the truck she was bound to be overcome by a sudden curiosity and
ask Dad to make a detour down one street or another so she could see a house, a
store, a tree, or a sign. He was in the habit of humoring her, which meant that
instead of going a few hundred yards in a straight line, we’d often end up driving
five miles, following a tortuous, labyrinthine route. For my mother, who had never
left Pringles, it was a way of expanding the town from within.