César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

There was a moment of suspense, then a shout, a pointing hand. Every head rocked back, and all eyes converged on the pseudo-Gothic crenellations of the theater’s facade. There, crouched between two turrets, was the monster, with her wings outstretched and her body seized by a tremor that was visible even at a distance. The fire truck’s powerful spotlight lit her up. Down in the street, two of the clowns, with their motley costumes and painted smiles, climbed up on car hoods and waved the flattened bodies of the dwarfs over their heads, like banners.

Although the inhabitants of Pringles had never seen a mutant of this kind, they were mainly country folk, familiar with the principles of procreation. However odd the forms that nature’s children take, the basic mechanisms of life are common to them all. So it was soon obvious to the crowd that the dwarf was about to “lay.” All the signs pointed to a reproductive process: the sexual encounter, the period of seclusion to allow for the metamorphosis, the crimes, the enormous abdominal sac, the choice of an inaccessible place, and now the hunched posture, the air of concentration and the trembling. What no one could predict was whether she would lay one egg or two, or several, or millions. The last hypothesis seemed the most likely, because her closest morphological affinities were with the insect world. But when the furry silk of the sac began to split, what appeared was a single, white, pointed egg, the size of a watermelon. An enormous “Oohh. .” of wonder ran through the multitude. Perhaps because every gaze was fixed on the slow extrusion of that fantastic pearl, the surprise was all the greater when another figure appeared beside the winged dwarf: slowly it entered the circle of light, becoming entirely visible only when the egg had fully emerged and was balanced upright on that vertiginous cornice. It was Sarita Subercaseaux, with her big beehive hairdo, her pink, abundantly powdered face, her blue dress, and her little wedge-heeled shoes. How had she got up there? What was she trying to do? She was just inches from the creature who, having now finished her labor, turned her eyeless face to look, as it were, at Sarita. They were the same size, and both had the same aura of supernatural determination. A confrontation seemed inevitable, perhaps even a fight. The whole town held its breath. But something quite different happened. Shaking herself, as if waking from a dream, the creature stretched her wings as far as they would go, and, with a single flap, lifted herself a few yards into the air. With a wing-beat she turned, with another she began to pick up speed, and then she was flying, like a pterodactyl, toward the stars, which were shining like mad diamonds for the occasion. She disappeared among the constellations, and that was that. Only then did the gazes of the crowd return to the roof of the theater.

Sarita Subercaseaux was unperturbed by the departure of the mutant. Now she was alone with the egg. Moving very slowly, she raised one arm. She was holding something in her hand. An ax. Contradictory cries rose from the crowd. No! Don’t! Yes! Break it! Opinion was, of course, divided. No one wanted to subject our quiet town on the pampas to the unforeseeable consequences of a monstrous birth, and there was something precious about the mere fragility of an egg. On the other hand, it seemed a pity to forego the possibilities offered by that unrepeatable occasion.

But when the movement of Sarita’s arm brought the ax clearly into view, it turned out to be not an ax but a book. And her intention was not to break the egg but to balance the book on top of it, delicately. In the legendary history of Pringles, the curious figure thus produced has come to symbolize the founding of the Municipal Library.

JULY 26, 2004

ONE DAY THE MONA LISA disappeared from the Louvre, provoking a public outcry, a national scandal, and a media frenzy. It wasn’t the first time: almost a hundred years earlier, in 1911, a young Italian immigrant, Vincenzo Peruggia, who had free access to the building because he was working there as a painter and decorator, walked out with the masterpiece under his workman’s apron. He kept it hidden for two years in his garret, and in 1913 took it to Florence, with the intention of selling it to the Uffizi gallery, justifying the robbery as a patriotic act, the restitution of a national treasure. The police were waiting for him, and the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre, while the thief, who by this stage was going by the name of Leonardo Peruggia, went to jail for a few years (he died in 1947).

This time it was worse, because what disappeared was the painting, literally: the thin layer of oil paint that constituted the famous masterpiece. The board underneath was still there, and so was the frame, but the board was blank, as if it had never been painted. They took it to a laboratory and subjected it to all sorts of tests: there was no evidence that it had been scraped or treated with acid or any other chemical; it was intact. The paint had evaporated. The only signs of force were a number of tiny, perfectly circular holes, a millimeter in diameter, in the reinforced glass case that separated the portrait from its viewers. These little holes were also examined, although there was nothing to examine; no traces of any substance were found, and no one could understand what kind of instrument could have been used to make them. This gave rise to journalistic speculation about extraterrestrials: some gelatinous creature, perhaps, that had applied a sucker equipped with perforating cilia, etc. The public is so gullible! So irrational. The real explanation was perfectly simple: the layer of paint had reverted to the state of live drops, and the droplets had set off to travel the world. After five centuries in a masterpiece, they were so full of energy that no sheet of glass, however well reinforced, was going to stop them. Nor could walls or mountains or seas or distances. The drops of color could go wherever they liked; they were endowed with superpowers. If the investigators had counted the little holes in the glass, they would have discovered how many there were: a thousand. But no one could be bothered to undertake that simple task; they were all too busy coming up with far-fetched and contradictory theories.

The drops scattered themselves over the five continents, eager for adventures, action, and experience. For a while, at the start, they stayed on the edges of daylight and toured the planet several times in the same direction, fanning out, moving at a range of speeds, some in the subtle grays of dawn, others in the passionate pinks of evening, many in the bustling mornings of the great cities or the drowsy siestas of the countryside, in the spring meadows or the autumn woods, in the polar ice fields or the burning deserts, or riding a little bee in a garden. Until one of them, by chance, discovered the depths of the night, and was followed by another, and another, and from then on there were no limits to their voyages and discoveries. When the urge to keep moving petered out, they were able to settle wherever they liked and display their inexhaustible creative ingenuity.

One ended up in Japan, where he set up a factory to make scented candles. They were called Minute Candles, and they smelled of Moon. Protected by strict patents and favored by the night, they were a huge success. Vast dance venues began to use Minute Candles, and so did temples, mountains, woods, and the whole realms of various shoguns. They were sold in boxes of six, twelve, twenty-four, and a thousand (everyone bought the boxes of a thousand). The multiplication of their little pink flames created a shadowless half-light in which near and far, before and after were abolished. Not even the longest winter nights, it transpired, could hold so much intimacy. Drop San, rich as Croesus, had two geisha wives, who lugged around bundles of swords and performed dancing duels to entertain their husband. Absorbed in the study of ballistics, Drop San paid them less and less attention, and finally forgot all about them. Their reactions revealed a stark difference between the two girls, so similar in other ways that everyone got them mixed up. One remained faithful, and loved Drop San even more than when he had been attentive to her; the other looked elsewhere for the love she could no longer find at home. One was “forever,” the other “while it lasts,” and when she felt it had already lasted long enough she said, That’s it, and took up with a photographer. Mr. Photo San was always traveling to Korea for business. One day, when he was away, the Drop family picnicked in the rain, with a big stripy umbrella, various boxes of Minute Candles, and a basket of shrimps. They drank tea, ate, admired the silhouettes of the trees against the violet sky, and then amused themselves with a curious toy: a foldable cardboard tennis court the size of a chessboard, on which four frogs dressed in white played a match of mixed doubles with little raffia racquets. The frogs were real, and neither alive nor dead. They were activated by electrodes, which was rather inconvenient. In addition, since neither Mr. Drop nor his wives knew the rules of tennis, the match was somewhat chaotic. But events took a tragic turn when one of the frogs, subjected to an excessive voltage, jumped onto Drop San’s shoulder, put his head in the magnate’s ear and uttered a single word: cuckold . One disadvantage of having two wives is that in cases of adultery you have to work out which is the culprit. In the frenzy that overcame Drop San, there was no stopping to think: he was going to kill them both. He jumped on the one who was closest and strangled her. As bad luck would have it, she was the faithful wife; the unfaithful one got away, mounted on the frogs’ little tennis ball, believing it would take her to Korea (in fact it went to Osaka). The cuckolded avenger was left looking at the dead body. His status as a supernatural traveling drop exempted him from the consequences that any conventional criminal would have had to face. Or so he believed, in any case. But in fact no being in the universe is immune to bad luck. A suave and tuneful music opened slowly over the picnic, like a second umbrella. The candles were, it’s true, Debussy-scented.