César Aira: The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

By making an appearance He could put a stop to the uproar, but if He were to be in one place He would cease to be in others and would thus betray His essence. So one of the apes stands in for Him. This King of the Apes is a legendary personage. Nobody believes in his real existence, for good reason: he exists only for the duration of God’s Tea Party. He does what God would do were He to take a fleshly form, but he does it as the misshapen caricature that he is. Standing on the chair at the head of the table, frantic and raucous, intoxicated by his own impatient and capricious majesty, he distributes punches and kicks, yells his head off, hurls everything within his reach, and in his determination to impose order ends up being the most disorderly of all. Sometimes he is so maddened by his own energy that he is the one who starts a new brawl or launches a new campaign of destruction, which he then insists on quashing with renewed violence. The other apes, displaying an atavistic respect that seems to have been instilled in them by the light of divine reason, refrain from challenging the king’s authority (not that it has much effect on their behavior). Indeed, if Supreme Command is diffusely present everywhere, it follows that it must be present in the King of the Apes, and it could even be argued that, while remaining evenly distributed, it is, in a sense, more present in him than elsewhere. However mechanically or automatically God’s representative is designated, a Will is involved, and Will is beyond the reach of calculation and conjecture.

The king is the one who shouts the most, and who shouts the loudest. He prefigures the invention of the loudspeaker. He would like to have a thousand arms, so he could slap all the guests at the same time. Still, he manages pretty well with the two he has by leaping about unpredictably and keeping on the move. Apes are naturally endowed with exceptional agility, but he surpasses his physical limits. It’s as if he were pure mind, and his mind is twisted and perverse, bitter and sadistic, sick with power. Like so many others, “he thinks he’s God.” He persecutes the slowest and most vulnerable apes, and especially the timid ones, at the bottom of the pile; he sprays lemon juice in their eyes, dips their fingertips into the boiling tea, plugs their ears with candy and their noses with marmalade, pushes silver spoons into their anuses. . In the breaks, he downs gallons of tea, to fuel his causeless fury. There must be something in that tea.

IV

ON ONE OCCASION A CURIOUS being interrupted God’s famous Tea Party. As a rule, people who join a gathering to which they have not been invited try to go unnoticed; they don’t draw attention to themselves; they keep a low profile and try to blend in. That’s the interloper’s logic. It doesn’t always work, and some adopt the opposite strategy: assuming they’ll be found out sooner or later, they decide to make it sooner and justify their presence by being “the life of the party.”

In this case, the intruder apparently chose the first approach, for which she was unsurpassably equipped by her natural attributes. For a start, she couldn’t have been smaller, because she was a subatomic particle. One of those pieces of a part of an atom that were left over when the Universe was formed and have been floating about ever since. To her the Void and the All were one; she roamed them both, in free fall, idle and unattached.

Millions of galaxies had seen her go by; or hadn’t, but she’d gone by all the same. A well-informed observer would have been able to recognize her as an archaeological trace of the dimensions that had ceased to exist, or one of time’s wandering milestones, or a messenger from the origin. Her tiny little body, on which not even the finest brush could have inscribed a single letter, nonetheless contained a long history. The most advanced cyclotrons would have been required to decipher that diminutive hieroglyph, but the eminent scientists who operated those costly instruments were busy with more important and beneficial projects. In any case, it would have been hard for them to capture or even locate her, because there were no maps showing her trajectory, and she didn’t draw attention to herself. Discreet to the point of stealth, she slipped away quietly; before she’d finished arriving she was gone. She was there and not there.

The same was true of her path. It couldn’t really be called capricious because all things obey the laws according to which they were created, but when a thing is as small as she was, literally off the scale (when, that is, it exists on a plane that is prior to measurement), there’s no predicting which way it will go, or when. To give an idea of her size (although it’s an inconceivable idea), if you took as many of those particles as there are atoms in the Universe and stuck them together, they still wouldn’t make up the volume of an atom.

This intensified tininess gave her a quality that would have been extraordinary in a normal-size being: she didn’t need to change course and never bumped into anything because she went right through whatever happened to be in her way. It would be misleading to liken this to a bullet’s trajectory because she made no holes; she didn’t need to. From her point of view, solid bodies were not solid. The atoms of a stone, which to us seem so tightly packed, were, for her, as far apart as the sun and the moon. So she glided through a meteorite of nickel and iron as a bird crosses the blue sky on a spring morning. She traversed a planet without even noticing. With the same oblivious fluidity, she passed through an atom. Or a sheet of paper, a flower, a boat, a dog, a brain, a hair.

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.)