César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

And then one day, when they went to look, she was gone. She had turned back into a drop of oil paint from the Mona Lisa and escaped through one of the holes, repeating an ancestral pattern. It was proof that life in this world is not all of one kind; there are many varieties, each functioning according to its own logic, and evolution is not enough to unify them.

Other children, who lived in the city and were playing in the living room of a sixth-floor apartment, saw a wandering drop that had flown onto their balcony and couldn’t find its way out again. The balcony had those wire-mesh guards that parents put up when they have small children.

“Daddy! Daddy! A little bird with a moustache!”

In that little space full of potted ferns and geraniums, the drop flew around as if afraid, back and forth, doing figure eights, loop-the-loops, and spirals, unable to escape. The children in the apartment, on the other side of the glass, were no less agitated. They sensed that the divine fly would not stay, and even though they lived in the fleeting instants of their attention, as children do, they were overawed by the eternity of the flight. They would have liked to keep the drop as a pet. They would have made a little paper house with doors and windows, an igloo, and a tiny bicycle for him to ride.

But suddenly he was gone.

“He escaped! Daddy! Mummy! He escaped! He was round! He was so cute!”

No one believed them, of course.

Meanwhile, in Norway, a drop was heading for the icy north in search of the nightingale of the snows. She ventured into a vast endless day in pursuit of a dubious legend. Dawns of never-ending pink were reflected in a crystalline lake, on the floor of which a Minute Candle in a diving suit burned without consuming itself. Indolent eagles with horses’ heads glided over an endless grid of cold. The drop traveled in a Sherman tank, which crunched through the frost, leaving broad tracks. The natives were terrified. All Norway shook in fear before the advance of the Armored Drop. How far would she go? According to the local legends, which had never been contested, if the nightingale sang, the candle at the bottom of the lake would go out, and the inspiration of the artists would be extinguished along with that flame. In return, they would receive the scent of eternal melancholy.

Inevitably, war broke out. The tank multiplied and became a thousand tanks, each in a glass hexagon, advancing over transparencies of ice. It was a war entirely made up of mirages and phantasmagoria. The Snow multiplied too. She was a fat, white princess, the daughter of King Pole, and rivalry for her hand led to hostilities among the Scandinavian powers. Her lineage was especially illustrious. But when the Snow Princesses began to proliferate, perspectives in those icy wastes were thrown into confusion. General Panzer Drop Kick commanded the operation, enclosed in an engraved dropper. The battles were an incredible spectacle: millions of soldiers on bicycles plowing up the polar ice cap, the eagles growing visibly, and, always there in the background, the silver nightingale in its tabernacle of atoms. And all because of a drop!

Then a crack in the glass of the dropper allowed it to fill with mist. When, on the orders of the Norwegian Prime Minister, the mist was extracted with a pump, it turned out that the drop was no longer inside. It reappeared at the bottom of the lake, suspended over the tip of the candle’s flame. The heat softened and deformed it, brightened its colors and made it give off a strange smell of old flowers.

On the wide grasslands of China, a drop set up a news agency. Village life, with its immutable cycles of yin and yang, was unsettled by the din of the transmissions. The DropToday agency bought a basketball team and the inaugural match (both for the team and for the luxurious stadium built in the wilds of outer Mongolia) was against an NBA all-star selection. The North Americans were keen to conquer the Yellow Empire’s massive sports market, and the visit was managed by the State Department. The Pope promised to attend the event. The team was made up of China’s tallest and strongest men, and Mr. Drop, who had been appointed coach, adopted a novel procedure for the training sessions. Or not so novel, in fact, because it had already been used by the ancient Romans, and was still being used by Hawaiian surfers. It consisted of practicing with a very heavy sphere of bronze instead of a normal ball. In this way the athletes developed powerful reflexes that would enable them to handle the ball like a dream when it came to a real match. The first day they used a twenty-kilo bronze ball, the second day it was twenty-five kilos, and on the third day it was thirty. The Chinese giants buckled under the weight of that hefty projectile. Drop went to the next level: he made them train on a court that was six miles long and two miles wide. Its dimensions were proportioned to the weight of the bronze ball. Drop was very adept at calculating proportions, and he didn’t need to use graph paper. He applied the same skill to news stories, enlarging them while maintaining their proportions. This was the reason for the success of his agency; he pioneered the “Chinese news” technique and made it popular around the world.

It goes without saying that this aggravated exercise drew big drops of sweat from the athletes. It was inhuman, heaving that ball around and racing constantly from one hoop to the other. Heedless of the cost, Drop had hired a consultant: Gravity, who’d come to China to await the arrival of the Pope, with whom he was to be united in marriage. It was the story of the century. The newspaper headlines had quoted Gravity, the Universal Playboy, taking leave of the Holy Father after their first night of love: “SEE YOU ON THE BALTIC!” That northern sea was to be enclosed by a wall of red marble, which was under construction; one of its wings would join up with the Great Wall, making a thunderous crash.

Drop went so far as to get the five giant team members out of bed the night before the match and whisk them away in secret for a last training session by moonlight. They traveled by truck to the outer reaches of Mongolia. They stopped in a silvery desert, got out and looked around. A hoop reared on the horizon, a hundred and twenty feet high. Facing it, on the opposite horizon, was another hoop, the pole half hidden by the curvature of the earth. A motorcycle that had been following them roared to a halt. They stared at the rider, who dismounted and removed his helmet. It was Gravity. The Chinese giants, who had seen him only on television, gaped in amazement. This is what happens with media celebrities: it’s hard to accept that they really exist. Mr. Drop floated over to the motorbike, and together they undid the straps that were holding a large chest in place behind the seat. The Vatican’s coat of arms was carved into the lid. Inside the chest was a golden seal’s head, which weighed fifty kilos. This was what they were to use for the last training session, pushing their strength to the limit, and receiving the head’s famous powers in return.

“Long passes,” ordered Drop. They began. The crushing weight of the seal’s head bent them double. Catching it, they staggered backward; their veins swelled and they grimaced in pain. Drop shouted himself hoarse, demanding more speed, more precision. And to Gravity, who was beside him, looking on worriedly, he said, “A few drops of height are no match for savagery.” The players’ falling sweat echoed throughout Mongolia.

With the movement and the handling, the seal’s head warmed up. The gold began to shine; the fat in the seal’s brain melted, running between the players' fingers, making the large projectile slippery, all the more difficult to catch and throw.

In the end, the group rose up, forming a kind of cone whose apex was the seal’s head, exuding fat, shinier than the moon, with the five basketball players underneath, stretched like phylacteries. They took off, into the black, starless sky. Gravity was irresistibly drawn up in their wake, and the motorcycle followed him. Drop watched them shrink as they climbed, until they disappeared. The only thought that occurred to him was that the wedding would have to be put off again.