César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

JUNE 12, 2011

I

ACCORDING TO AN OLD AND immutable tradition in the Universe, God celebrates His birthday with a magnificent and lavish Tea Party, to which only the apes are invited. Nobody knows or could know, in those timeless regions, when this custom began, but it has become a fixture in the great year of the All: it seems that the patiently anticipated day will never come, but come it does, precisely on time, and the Tea Party takes place. It is said, plausibly enough, that the original reason for the ceremony was negative: the idea was not so much to invite apes as to not invite humans. Apes are a sarcastic joke, a kind of deliberate and spiteful (or, at best, ironic) slight on the part of the Lord, aimed at a human race that has disappointed Him. It may well have begun like that. But as soon as the arrangement was in place, it was accepted as an ancestral tradition, without a clear meaning, but saved from blatant absurdity by the hefty weight of precedent.

Traditions cannot be separated from the societies that created them. A community’s traditions function like a sympathetic nervous system. They tend to be rather irrational, because their historical components were produced by an intricate web of causes that not even the most careful study would be able to disentangle. The case of God’s Tea Party, however, should be simpler, because it’s a tradition of the Universe, so there was nothing particular or historical about its origin; instead of a causal network, there was the gong of the absolute, no less. Yet, whether simple or difficult to grasp, its origin and reason for being remain obscure, perhaps just because the theologians never took the ceremony seriously, or were afraid of compromising their reputations by attending to something so grotesquely silly.

Nevertheless, to clarify, it can be said that it’s not a natural occurrence like the spring thaw or an eclipse or the migration of ducks. It’s a social event. It doesn’t have to happen, should the Master of the house decide that He doesn’t feel like having a Tea Party. Up until now, the custom has been observed and will, most likely, continue for all eternity. Even He respects the old established traditions, perhaps simply out of habit.

Like every social occasion, this one has its formalities. The first, which is really a sine qua non, is the issuing and distribution of the invitations. (This too could be different. Were the judgment to be rescinded or the sentence commuted one day, the guests might be human.) The invitations, addressed “To Evolution,” are automatically transmitted to the ape’s instincts, like the sound of a doorbell. They are sent out all at once, en masse, and the operation may consist of no more than the divine enunciation of the word “apes.” That is enough for all concerned to know that the day has arrived.

But what day is it? When does the uncreated Creator celebrate His birthday? Any time at all. It could be today. Except that “today” could be a lapse of countless eons or a slice of a microsecond — it depends what plane you’re on — since His universe is a puzzle of days, hours, months, and centuries, all of different shapes and sizes, locked together in a polyhedron without end, on whose faces dawns and midnights, emptiness and plenitude, ends and beginnings coexist. Naturally, He who created time has the right to celebrate His birthday if He so desires. All the same, “God’s birthday” has an odd ring to it, and the slight surprise provoked by the expression is the reason why the whole thing is so odd.

II

MORE THAN ODD, IMPOSSIBLE: a five o’clock tea impossibly happening outside of time, in a realm of pure fantastic invention. Were a witness present, he’d see a sheer frenzy of senseless movement. The apes can’t keep still. They leap up and down as if possessed, on their own chairs and those of the others. Incapable of staying put, after barely a moment in one place, they’re looking for somewhere new. They squeeze in wherever they can, and there’s always a space, because the others keep shifting too. They are possessed, truly possessed, by an enthusiasm without object, as if they knew that, just for a while, eternity was theirs to play havoc in, and were determined not to waste the opportunity. With their giddy diagonal leaps across the table, they knock over cups, send the spoons and forks flying; their stamping feet scatter the pastries, their tails swipe at the cream-laden cakes and come away spotted with white. What do they care! Their faces, hands, and chests are sticky with cake, tea, crumbs, and chocolate. The cups of fine porcelain implode in their clumsy grips, and to counteract the scalding tea they splash themselves with cold milk. They’re constantly fighting; there’s always some pretext, and if they can’t find one they go ahead and fight all the same. Sometimes it looks like a battlefield: they bombard one another with sugar cubes, spit marmalade, hurl trays of scones. Inevitably one of them rises above the melee by swinging from the chandelier, until he gets distracted, lets go, and comes crashing down in the middle of the table, devastating the china and scattering the confectionery. And how they scream! The racket is so deafening, a fire truck’s siren would be inaudible.

Exercising His omnipotence, God pours tea into all the cups at once. And while He’s at it, He repairs some of the breakages. In a circus like this, of course, His good intentions only aggravate the chaos, giving it a velocity it wouldn’t have in the natural order of causes and effects. The cataclysm becomes as inextricable as a tangled-up thread a million light years long.

And yet it’s as if there were an order of ceremony, because every time God has a Tea Party, the same things happen. Every leap, every stain on the tablecloth, the trajectory of every slice of strawberry tart thrown from one end of the table to the other, exactly repeats what happened the time before and anticipates what will happen next time. The whole thing is identical. But there’s really no reason to be amazed, because, after all, every event is identical to itself.

This identity explains why the party is repeated over and over. Without it, God may well have decided not to invite the apes to tea again, having seen what an awful mess they can make and just how badly they can behave. But yielding the initiative to the automaticity of the same takes all the risk out of repetition. The bad manners of the guests become a given configuration of reality, like a landscape. Nonetheless, the question of whether manners are subject to evolution does arise. Detached one by one from the apocalyptic block in which they manifest themselves at God’s Tea Party, and isolated like signs, perhaps they could develop, becoming part of a story, and after a great many centuries or millennia, we would arrive at a divine, unprecedented spectacle: a gathering of apes sitting quietly around a table, lifting their teacups in one hand, their little fingers pointing at the surrounding void, dabbing at the corners of their mouths with napkins, perfectly demure and genteel.

III

THE PROBLEM OF THE BAD behavior might be due to the fact that God doesn’t preside. Or rather, He does and He doesn’t. As we know, God is omnipresent, which turns out to be very handy for carrying out His functions, but it has the drawback of preventing Him from being visibly present in a particular place, for example sitting at the head of the table, keeping things under control. His absence (if His omnipresence can be counted as an absence) could be regarded as a discourtesy that legitimates all the subsequent discourtesies of his guests: a host who fails to turn up to his own party thereby authorizes his guests to behave as they like (this is the household version of the well-known saying “If God does not exist, everything is allowed.”) But taking a wider view should allow us to see that His behavior is the transcendental form of the solicitude that characterizes the perfect host, who “thinks of everything” in order to guarantee the well-being of his guests, ensuring that plates, cups, and glasses are never left empty, all the provisions are of the finest quality, sweet and savory, hot and cold are balanced, the lighting and the temperature are just right, the tablecloth is well ironed and doesn’t smell of mothballs, and the conversation never languishes or strays toward inappropriate topics. There are so many details to attend to! Only God could keep track of them all.