César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Here an explanation is required. The circus had come to town three days earlier, and almost immediately the troupe had been rocked by a tremendous scandal. Among the attractions were three dwarfs. Two were men: twin brothers. The third, a woman, was married to one of the twins. This peculiar triangle apparently had a defect that made it unstable and led to the crisis that occurred in Pringles. The woman and her brother-in-law were lovers, and for some reason they had chosen our town as the place in which to make off with the savings of the cuckolded husband. We might never have been aware of this bizarre intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that a few hours after the disappearance of the lovers, the husband vanished too, along with a 9mm pistol and a box of bullets belonging to the owner of the circus. His intentions could not have been clearer. The police were notified immediately, in the hope of averting a tragedy. The witnesses (clowns, trapeze artists, and animal trainers) all agreed on how furious the husband had been when he found out, and how determined he was to exact a bloody revenge. His threats were taken seriously, because he was a violent little man, known for his destructive fits of rage. The weapon he had stolen was lethal at close and long range, and there was no need to know how to use it. The police mobilized all available manpower, and in spite of the circus authorities’ vehement insistence on discretion, the news got around. It was unavoidable, because the whereabouts of the runaways — that is, both the lovers and their pursuer — could be discovered only with the help of the public. At first, it seemed a simple task: the town was small and it was easy to give a clear description of the individuals in question, simply by using the word “dwarf.” Police officers were positioned at the railway station, the long-distance bus terminal, and the two roundabouts at opposite ends of the town, from which the outgoing roads diverged (they were unsealed at the time). These measures served only to confirm that the dwarfs were still in Pringles.

Not surprisingly, they were the sole topic of conversation. What with the joking, the betting, and the collective searching of vacant lots and empty houses, the prevailing mood had initially been one of cheerful agitation and delicious suspense. Twenty-four hours later, the atmosphere had changed. Two fears had begun to creep in, one vague and superstitious, the other very real. The first arose from the fact that the case remained perplexingly unsolved. With ample justification, the inhabitants of Pringles had assumed that the town was socially and geographically transparent. How could something as conspicuous as three dwarfs go unnoticed in that tiny glass box? Especially since the dwarfs did not compose a single mass, but were split into a hiding pair and a third individual in pursuit, hiding in turn from the authorities. The episode began to take on a supernatural coloring. The dimensions of a dwarf turned out to be problematic, at least for the unsettled collective imagination. Perhaps they should have been turning over stones, examining the undersides of leaves, peering into cocoons? Mothers started looking under their children’s beds, and children took their toys apart to check inside.

But there was a more realistic fear. Or, if not entirely realistic, it was at least presented as such to rationalize the other one, the fear without a name. Somewhere out there was a deadly loaded gun, in the hands of a desperate man. No one was worried about him carrying out his plan (and this can be explained without accusing the inhabitants of Pringles of being especially prejudiced; caught up in the general panic, they regarded the dwarfs as a species apart, whose lives and deaths were matters to be settled among themselves and were of no interest to the town), but shots do not always find their mark, and at a given moment anyone might happen to get in the way of a bullet. Anyone at all, because no one knew where the dwarfs were, much less where their encounter would take place. The source of the anxiety was not so much the husband’s aim as the elusive tininess of the adulterers. The same fantastic miniaturization that accounted for the failure of the search led people to imagine that every shot was bound to miss. How could he hit a hidden atom, or two? Anybody, or their loved ones, could be cut down by a hail of stray bullets at any moment, anywhere.

Another twenty-four hours later, the two fears had become tightly intertwined, and the town had succumbed to an acute delirium of persecution. No one felt safe at home, still less in the street. But there was something reassuring about public gatherings, the bigger the better: other people could serve as human shields, and since altruistic scruples go out the window when terror reigns, no one spared a thought for those whose bodies would be riddled with bullets. That must have been why we’d gone out to dinner, something we virtually never did. And on another level of motivation, in the realm of magical thinking, it must have been why Dad had brought Pushkin’s famous wallet, which he saved for special occasions. As you will remember, Pushkin was killed by a shot to the heart.

Here I close the explanatory parenthesis and return to the story. But in doing so, I notice that I have made a mistake. The action continues in the lobby of the theater, which means that the drive along the boulevard past the circus must have happened earlier, when we were on our way to the hotel. And in fact, when I think about it more carefully, it seems to me that the sky behind the city hall and above the circus tent was not entirely dark: it was the “blue hour,” with some remnants of dusky pink, and a layer of phosphorescent white along the western horizon. The black starry sky must have been an interpolation, suggested by the hair-raising events that were to take place later, on the roof of the theater. My confusion may be due, in part, to the story’s particular strangeness: although there is a compelling logic to the order in which the various episodes follow one another, they also exist independently, like the stars in the firmament that were the only witnesses to the final act, so the figures they compose may seem to owe more to fantasy than to reality.

It happened more or less like this: Having satisfied their curiosity about the Musical Brain, my parents headed for the street, partly because there was nothing more to see and partly to be gone before the audience started coming out of the theater. The performance must have been over; the applause hadn’t stopped, but it couldn’t go on for much longer, and Mom didn’t want to be seen leaving along with “the great unwashed.” People who didn’t know better might think she had sunk to the cultural depths of the Peronists.

She turned and began to walk out in such a decisive manner that I felt the moment had come: it was safe now to indulge my desire to touch the large pink object. Without a second thought, I reached out. The tip of my right index finger touched the surface of the Brain for a bare fraction of a second. For reasons that will soon become clear, that momentary contact was something I would never forget.

My naughtiness escaped the notice of my parents, who went on walking toward the lobby doors, but not of my sister, who was two or three at the time, and imitated everything I did. Emboldened by my daring, she wanted to touch the Brain too. But, clumsy little devil that she was, she didn’t go about it daintily. For her, there was no such thing as a fingertip. Drawing herself up to her full height — she was barely as tall as the box on which the Brain was sitting — she raised her little arms and pushed with all her might. Sensing what was about to happen, she held her breath, then released it in a scream as the Brain began to move. My parents stopped, and turned, and I think they took a step or two toward us. For me, the whole scene had taken on a phantasmagorical precision, like a play rehearsed a thousand times. The Musical Brain slid heavily over the edge of the box, fell to the floor, and broke.