César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

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.

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.