César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

In Oklahoma, far from the land of chrysanthemums, a drop confronted Turpentine in one-on-one combat. Turpentine was a skinny little blond guy, who looked very much like Kant, fashionably well dressed, but not in a showy way. The only showy thing about him was his quiff, which rose without gel (an aid he disdained), by dint of sheer sculptural skill, to the great height of half an inch. This may seem a meager achievement, but only to those who are unaware that Turpentine was an inch tall, or an inch and a half, with the quiff. Among the whirls of dust whipped up by the prairie winds, Joe Peter Drop shouted: “It’s him or me!” One of the two had to die. Deep in his oil-painterly soul, it pained him to destroy so fine a creature as Turpentine — an exquisite living trinket in a world of barbarity — but it had to be done. The world is big and there’s room for us all — if anyone knows that it’s a wandering drop — but there are situations in which incompatibility becomes acute. Not that it’s such a great tragedy. Death for some means that others can live, while life for some, the simple, plain life we’re living — that routine, boring, meaningless life — gradually brings about the death of some brilliant, storybook other. And perhaps repentance gave some meaning to that drift. Turpentine, trusting to his elegance, which up until that day had invariably ensured his triumph, rushed at his adversary with a little cactus pistol, emptying the magazine. Joe Pete Drop had a perfectly spherical nose; in fact it was a rubber ball, which absorbed the nine bullets. The counterattack was a dream that enveloped Turpentine in a Precambrian pastoral, and when his friends from the bridge club came looking they couldn’t find him. He was never seen again. Joe Pete Drop went on running his plant for extracting cactus pink, which he exported to Korea in a gelatin solution, to be used as a photographic developer. He was wealthy, fulfilled, and married, but from time to time Turpentine’s ghost visited him in the form of a sad little tune. He dealt with this by telling himself that all music was sad and that the general weariness he’d been feeling was natural; but in his franker moments, he admitted that by killing Turpentine he’d also killed the elegance he once had, and that elegance is a form of energy.

When it rained, the drop called Euphoria accelerated; she became a brain drop. When all the others fell, she rose. Gravity watched her thoughtfully, wondering, How could she be of use to me? What benefit could I extract from her? Euphoria flew through the clouds shouting, “I am a drop of Extreme Unction!” Water and oil never mix. All their weddings are followed by divorce.

When it rained on the Pope, the Great Bachelor, Gravity deigned to lower the ladder and let his retarded little sister, Mysticism, come down to earth.

One drop, hitching rides with the rain, infiltrated the Vatican, the Holy Vat and Can, and tried to go farther and enter the Calendar of Pluvial Feast Days. He had an affair with the Pope, a passionate romance that couldn’t last. The Pope offered to name him Primate of Turkey, so he could prepare the forthcoming tour; it would be the first time a pope had visited the Anatolian tablelands. They planned it all carefully, but it was really just an excuse to get rid of the drop; the Pope was tired of him. After anal coitus, man is sad.

Once the drop reached Ankara, he opened a school and convinced the Cooperative Association to set up a pencil factory to finance the purchase of teaching materials. In his correspondence with the Eucharistic Synod he hinted at the possibility of a coup d’état. It was set to take place on the thirteenth of June, the day on which Gravity celebrated the anniversary of his symbolic Pact with the Pope. Each year he threw a party and invited the raindrops. Not all of them. He didn’t have enough glasses: just a delegate from each shower. Every twelfth of June there were elections to determine the delegates. The votes were cast in the tears of a young girl, Rosa Edmunda González.

In Turkey, the Pope’s decision to name a drop as Primate had caused perplexity and not a little suspicion. There was a rumor going around that the drop had lived for a whole year in the Pope’s colon, and the new Primate’s shape and size made the story credible. One thing led to another, and the drop decided to canonize himself without waiting for the papal visit. In the minutes before his ascension, he dictated a memo setting out how the pencils were to be sold: there would be boxes of six for poor children, boxes of twelve for the middle class, and of twenty-four for the rich. Plus specially produced boxes of a thousand, for the children of heads of state. At some point, the pencils in the boxes of six turned into burning Minute Candles, to the terror and distress of the children. The child who suffered most was Rosa Edmunda González, whose mother, a humble hairdresser, had made a great sacrifice to purchase one of the smallest boxes.

Shortly afterward, a Japanese delinquent named Photo San published compromising photographs, developed in pink: spherical cubist photos that showed the Pope kissing Drop.

Irresponsible and inhuman, the drop, made up of a thousand drops of the most beautiful colors, was everywhere. It’s the End of Art! announced the eternal alarmists, claiming that in the future the only thing left to do would be to shut oneself in a garret, cut photos from magazines by the light of a Minute Candle, and make collages. But the pieces would never fit back together. There would never be a Mona Lisa again, because once the drops had tasted the salt of liberty, they would never return to the Louvre. And even if, by some supremely improbable coincidence, they did return, how likely was it that each one would go back in through the right hole?

In the city of Bogotá, there was a black dog wandering around in the streets, a great big beast made of black vanilla pods. He scavenged in the trash, slept in the sun, and sheltered from the rain in doorways. His size made him threatening and no one came near him, but he was gentle. Every stray is looking for a master, and the black dog found his in a drop that had come to visit that cold and rainy capital. They became friends. They obeyed each other; neither gave orders. It was a master-slave relation without a master or a slave, a marriage more than a friendship. They bought a little car, and last thing on a Friday evening they would set off for their cabin on the Lake of the Scented Candle. Their petit-bourgeois habits brought the End of Art down to the level of the Weekend.

One drop ended up in the luxuriant vegetation of a tropical land, among emerald leaves covered with dew, and mallows, fennel, and chard. The dew balls with which the drop played billiards had hearts of ice and hair of sun. And in that drop, evolution was stirring: she grew two pairs of rubber antennae; the top ones were long, the bottom ones short, and they were all retractable. She moved over the leaves, ate a green cell, digested it at the speed of light, and expelled a black dot, a suspension point. She turned gray, became almost transparent, and took on an elongated form, with something like a head (and antennae) at one end, a pointed tail at the other, and a hump in between. The excess nutrients that she had not metabolized for the purposes of movement were secreted from the hump as a hard, yellowish layer, forming a hollow spiral, which she began to use as a shelter, retreating into it to sleep.

Some children discovered her by chance and took her home. They put her in a plastic container and adopted her as a pet. They made holes in the lid with a pin so she could breathe. They called her Snailie, and every now and then they said: I wonder what Snailie’s doing? They went to see. They guessed or invented her states of mind, the desires, dreams, and adventures that made up her minimalist life enclosed in transparent plastic. They fed her with moistened blades of grass, celery, and polenta.