César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

My sister burst into tears, more upset by guilt and fear of punishment than by the sight that had appeared before our eyes, which was probably beyond her powers of comprehension. I, however, was old enough to intuit what had happened, though struggling in the throes of a horrified confusion, which my parents must have shared.

The pink crust of the Musical Brain had shattered on impact, a sign of its fragility, since it had fallen only a few feet. Inside was a solid, glassy mass, like gelatin, perfectly molded by the shell. A certain flattening, and perhaps a certain wobble from the aftershock (though I may have imagined this), suggested that the substance wasn’t hard. The color was unequivocal. It was semi-coagulated blood, and it wasn’t hard to figure out its origin, or origins, because two dead bodies were suspended in the middle of the mass, in fetal position, head to toe: the male dwarfs, the twins. They were like playing-card images, dressed in their little black suits, faces and hands as white as porcelain; the color contrast made them visible through the dark red of the blood, which had escaped from wounds in both throats like open, screaming mouths.

I said that I saw this scene with supernatural clarity and that is how I see it now. I see more now than I did then. It’s as if I were seeing the story itself, not as a film or a sequence of images, but as a single picture, transforming itself by freezing repeatedly rather than by moving. And yet there was plenty of movement: it was a whirl, an abyss of irrational atoms.

Mom, who was prone to hysteria, started screaming, but her screams were drowned out by a sudden uproar coming from the theater. Something unexpected was happening. The great Leonor Rinaldi had already received her ovation, and the cast had taken seven curtain calls. The actors were about to walk off after the final bow, and the members of the audience were already rising from their seats. At that moment, as the characters began to fade from the skins of the actors, who were standing all together in a line across the stage, each face and body still identifiable as a part of the comedy, but a comedy whose plot, with its surprises and errors, was jumbled in that row of smiling, bowing figures, as if it were up to the spectators now, as they clapped and ran their eyes along the line, to recompose the story and bid it farewell as the fiction it was, along with the make-believe living-and-dining room, the armchairs, the fake staircase, the painted windows, the doors that had opened and closed in a cascade of comic revelations, and all the rest of the set. . just then, as the festivities drew to a close, the large plaster effigy of Juan Pascual Pringles that adorned the apex of the proscenium arch burst open. The features of the founding father exploded like a nova of chalk, and in their place the astonished audience beheld the strangest creature ever produced by a theatrical deus ex machina: the female dwarf. That had been her hiding place, and no one would ever have found her. It might have seemed accidental: perhaps the vibrations caused by the clapping and the shouts of “Bravo!” had loosened the aging molecules of the heroic grenadier’s plaster head; but that supposition soon had to be abandoned when it became clear that the bursting of the effigy had been produced by an internal cause — namely, an increase in the size of the dwarf. Once impregnated, this killer chrysalis had withdrawn to a safe hiding place in order to allow nature (of which monsters are also a part, after all) to take its course. And, by chance, the process had reached completion just as the actors were about to walk off; a few minutes later and the creature would have emerged into a dark, empty theater.

As it happened, this provided an encore of a kind never witnessed before or since. Two thousand pairs of eyes saw a large head appear from the niche, a head without eyes, nose, or mouth, but crowned with curly blond hair, then two chubby arms ending in claws, and a pair of opulent pink breasts with eyes where the nipples should have been. The creature kept coming out, horizontally, up near the high roof, like a gargoyle. . until, with convulsive shudders, she freed her wings, first one, then the other — enormous iridescent membranes that made a sound like cardboard when they flapped — and was airborne. The rear part of her body was a bloated sac covered with black fur. At first, she seemed to be falling into the orchestra pit, but then she stabilized herself at medium altitude with a series of rapid wing-beats and began to fly around erratically.

Terror broke loose. A fire would not have caused as much panic as that flying mutant: there was no telling what she might do. The aisles were jammed, the exits blocked; people were jumping over the seats; mothers were looking for their children, husbands for their wives, and everyone was screaming. Frightened by the commotion, the dwarf flapped around aimlessly; she, too, was looking for a way out. When she lost altitude, the screaming in the stalls intensified, and when she climbed again, the loudest cries came from the boxes, where spectators were trapped by the choked stairways. In desperation, some people climbed onto the stage, which the actors had already deserted. Some refugees from the front boxes also climbed down and crossed the semicircle of footlights. Noticing this, other members of the audience, who had been shoving their way down the aisles, but could see that it would be impossible to get through that chaotic human mass, turned, ran frantically back and leaped onto the stage. It was like breaking a taboo: invading the space of fiction, which is precisely what they had paid not to do; but the instinct for survival prevailed.

As for the winged dwarf, the giant dragonfly, after crossing the theater’s airspace several times with her terrifying flap-flap, picking up speed, and repeatedly bumping into the ceiling and the walls, she too plunged toward the mouth of the stage, which was, after all, the most reasonable thing to do. She was swallowed by Leonor Rinaldi’s bourgeois stage set, and all the drop scenes came tumbling down.

The audience finally fled the theater, but naturally no one wanted to go home. Calle Stegmann was seething with an agitated crowd. Diners came out of the hotel’s restaurant, some with their napkins tucked into their collars, many still holding forks. The news had spread all around town; an unofficial messenger had taken it to the big top and arrived just as the show was ending, so the circus audience transferred itself en masse. When the police arrived, with sirens blaring, they had trouble making their way through the crowd, like the ambulance from the hospital, and the firefighters, who came on their own initiative.

Pouring out through the lobby, the crazed horde had thoughtlessly trampled the globe of blood. When the owner of the circus came to collect the bodies of the dwarfs, he was given two wrinkled silhouettes, which the clowns identified, handing them around. There hadn’t been time for the clowns, or any of the other circus performers, to change out of their costumes. Riders, trapeze artists, and fakirs rubbed shoulders with actors from Leonor Rinaldi’s company, and with Tomás Simari and la Rinaldi herself, and all mingling with the mingled audiences, not to mention curious onlookers, neighbors, and assorted night owls. There had never been anything like this, not even at carnival time.

The first search of the theater, conducted by the police with pistols drawn, and led by Cereseto (only he knew all the ins and outs), proved fruitless. The creature had disappeared again, wings and all. There was a rumor that she had found a way out and flown off. The hypothesis should have provided some relief, but people were disappointed. By now everyone was in the mood for a show, hanging out for more. Hopes were revived by an unexpected event: from the imposing mass of the theater countless bats and doves came flying out in all directions. Because doves don’t usually fly at night, they gave this exodus a fantastic twist. Those little creatures had obviously sensed a monstrous presence and cleared out helter-skelter.