César Aira: The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

A brick wall . . the expression went on resonating.

I’m not the only admirer of this film, and I certainly didn’t discover it as a cult classic. Nevertheless, I can claim a certain priority, since I saw it when it premiered. That was two or three years after it first came out, as was usually the case in Pringles, but it was still a “premiere” movie, and I was part of the target audience, who watched it without the distance introduced by cinephilia and historical perspective. We were cinephilia and history, both of which I would eventually convert into intellectual pursuits.

And there was something more: I was the same age as the children in the film. I probably tried to make my eyes light up with that electric gleam, to see if I could read people’s minds. And Pringles was a small town, not as small as the one in the film, but small enough to suffer a “damnation” of that kind. For example, the mysterious paralysis of the opening scenes: our town was often empty and silent, as if everyone had died or left, during the siesta, say, or on a Sunday, or any day, really, at any time.

Still, I don’t think anyone in the capacity audience at the Cinema San Martín on that Sunday long ago would have made the connection between the two towns and the two damnations. Not because there were no intelligent and cultivated individuals among the inhabitants of Pringles back then, but because of a certain decorous restraint, prevalent in those bygone days, which kept people well away from meanings and interpretations. Cinema was an elaborate and gratuitous artistic fantasy, nothing more. I don’t mean that we were consummate aesthetes; we didn’t need to be.

The priority that I mentioned owes less to these chance coincidences than to the fact that between my first and second viewings of the film, I accompanied its transformation from commercial product for a general public (that is, for the public, period) to cult object for an enlightened elite. And it was accompaniment in the fullest sense of the word: I was personally converted from public to elite. My life and Village of the Damned have followed the same path of subtle transformation, changing without having changed.

I suppose the same thing happened with the rest of the two thousand movies I saw in those years: the good and the bad, the forgotten and the rediscovered. It must have happened even with the classics, the great films that make it into Top Ten lists. They all crossed over from directness to indirectness, or withdrew to a distance, which is logical and inevitable, given the passing of time. Hitchcock’s North by Northwest , which I also saw at the Cinema San Martín in, I’m guessing, 1960 or ’61 (the film dates from 1959), is a case in point. In Argentina it was called Intriga internacional , or International Intrigue , and I probably didn’t find out what it was called in English until twenty years later, when I began to read books about Hitchcock and think about his work in the light of my intellectual concerns. Perhaps because the original title is abstract, or because of the way the translation resonates for me, I still think of it as International Intrigue , though I know it’s rather absurd; the translations of film titles were often ridiculously inappropriate in those days, and they’ve since become a source of jokes.

Few other films, none perhaps, made such an impression on Miguel and me. Miguel López was my best friend in early childhood, and as it turns out — another coincidence, though not a happy one — he died yesterday. They announced it on the local radio, and I heard only because I was in Pringles, otherwise it would have taken me months or years to find out, if I ever did. No one would have thought to tell me: we hadn’t seen each other for decades; there weren’t many people left who remembered that we’d been childhood friends; and here in town it’s generally assumed that the locals have already heard and outsiders wouldn’t care.

And yet, up till the age of eleven or twelve, we were inseparable. He was my first friend, almost like the big brother I never had. He was two years older than me, an only child, and lived across the road. Since we used to play in the street, or in the vacant lots between the houses, I’m guessing that our adventures began as soon as I could exercise a minimal autonomy, at the age of three or four. From a very early age, we became serious movie fans. So did all the other kids we knew, inevitably: the movies were our major source of entertainment, the big outing, the luxury at our disposal. But Miguel and I took it further: we played at cinema, “acting out” whole movies, reinventing them, using them as material for the creation of games. I was the brains, naturally, but Miguel followed me and egged me on, demanding more brains: being a physical, histrionic sort of boy, he needed a script. I greedily consumed the inspiration that each new movie gave me. International Intrigue was a great inspiration, and more than that. I’d almost go so far as to say that we made something out of that film that encompassed our whole childhood, or what was left of it.

I couldn’t say just what it was about International Intrigue that made such an impression. Our enthusiasm was pure and simple, without a trace of snobbery or prejudice: we didn’t even know who Hitchcock was (or maybe we did, but it made no difference), and it can’t have been just because the film was about spies and adventure, because we saw films like that every Sunday. Any hypothesis I hazard now is bound to be contaminated by everything I’ve read about Hitchcock and the ideas I’ve had about his work. Recently someone was asking about my tastes and preferences, and when he came to cinema and my favorite director, he anticipated my response: Hitchcock? I said yes. It wasn’t hard to guess. (I’m one of those people who can’t imagine anyone having a favorite director other than Hitchcock.) I said I’d be more impressed by his perspicacity if he guessed (or deduced) my favorite Hitchcock film. He thought for a moment and then confidently proposed North by Northwest . This left me wondering what kind of visible affinity there might be between North by Northwest and me. It’s a famously empty film, a virtuosic exercise in emptying the spy film and the thriller of all conventional contents. Thanks to the bungling of hopelessly incompetent bad guys, an innocent man finds himself caught up in a conspiracy without an object, and as the action unfolds, all he does is stay alive, without understanding what’s going on. The form that encloses this emptiness could not be more perfect, because it’s nothing more than form, in other words, it doesn’t have to share its quality with any content.

That must have been what fascinated us. The elegance. The irony. Although we didn’t know it at the time. Why would we have needed to know?

My earliest memory of Miguel dates back to when I was six: between a week and two weeks after my sixth birthday. The reason I can be so precise is that my birthday is near the end of February, and the school year begins at the start of March, and this happened on the first day of school. It was my first day ever (there was no preschool in Pringles back then), and my parents were taking it all very seriously. The teacher had given us homework, practicing downstrokes or something like that. After class, or maybe the next morning, they sat me down at a desk in a room facing onto the street, with my exercise book and pencil. . Just then, Miguel’s face appeared at the window, as it always did when he came to fetch me so we could go and play. It was quite a high window, but he had worked out how to jump up; he was very strong and agile (there was something feline about him), and tall for his age. My father went to the window and sent him packing: I had work to do, I had responsibilities, my days of going out to play at all hours were over. . He didn’t say it in so many words, but that was what he meant. And there was something more as well, beneath (or above) the words he did say: I was beginning the middle-class journey that would turn me into a professional, and indiscriminate fraternizing with the kids on the street was no longer appropriate (Miguel was very poor — he lived with his parents in a single room in a sort of tenement). The second part of the prophecy was not fulfilled, because we went on being inseparable friends all through primary school, and the time I spent playing was hardly reduced because, given my natural brilliance, I could finish my homework in a flash and didn’t need to go over my lessons.