César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Melodious voice, voice of the woods.

Evenings of classic beauty in Buddhist lands. Men and women walking through poor neighborhoods carrying little silver pitchers full of water. Everlasting poverty resisted all the interventions of the permanently new. The only permanent thing was everlasting dailiness. And yet. . suddenly everyone looked up into the sky. And in the sky there was a drop, the drop that decided to make itself visible. It was red, pink, greenish, saffron, orange, turquoise, slightly phosphorescent, velvety, tense, and it had a dimple. It was full of itself but hollow, empty, a little hole in the air. It descended slowly, reaching ground level before night fell. The impoverished Buddhists tried to grab it. In its fluid form, it served as a hinge between the public and the private. The existence of the poverty-stricken Asian masses had become a public issue, a social problem, to be measured statistically; privacy and secrets were limited to the lives of the rich. The silver pitchers, purchased with slowly accumulated savings and cherished as personal or family treasures, prefigured the public-private nexus. The drop made them anachronistic. In the end, no one dared touch the drop, and a delightful park sprang up around it, which by virtue of its sacred status served as a sanctuary for the little foxes that would otherwise have become extinct.

But the forest kept invading the Buddhist lands. And with the forest came snakes, which ventured into the villages and drank the goats’ milk and the blood of the children. They coiled around the bare legs of the lotus worshippers and tripped them up. There was a historical solution to this legendary misadventure: as soon as the poor gave up carrying those pitchers, they had both hands free and were able to do battle with the slippery snakes.

The drop, enthroned at the center of the fox park, was named God Prospero Brilliantine. He didn’t move or speak or gesture. But all thoughts converged on him. The anthropologists of tea studied his social effects and his composition. Was he made of gel? Cerebral matter? Nougat? They couldn’t tell. From the smell, they thought he might be a lunar particle. They gave up on the effects, because they were always indirect, too indirect. The poor folk established a tradition of making silk caps for the foxes; each family had its particular color and pattern. As with the pitchers, they spared no expense, saving up to buy the best silks, even if it meant going hungry. The anthropologists were puzzled. They felt they were touching on the secret of poverty, but from a distance, by remote control.

A drop settled in a foggy country. He lived in a three-story, French-style house, an incongruous, stately edifice, built on top of a cliff. He withdrew to his study on the third floor, set up a camera with a telephoto lens on his desk, and, dressed in a tartan bathrobe, smoking three pipes as he watched the churning of the waves, managed his companies and investments all over the globe. None of his many employees in the world’s great capitals ever suspected that the mastermind behind the operation was a drop. They knew he was eccentric and suspected that he was a misanthrope, perhaps even slightly mad. He had adopted a communication system based on images, which were decoded by computers. It was exceedingly inefficient: tens of thousand of images were required to translate a single word (and even so there was often confusion). The method could be justified as a security measure, given the confidential nature of his messages, but that was just an excuse; its real purpose was to cover up the supremely implausible fact that the great financier was a drop of Renaissance paint.

Not all the drops adopted such capricious ways of life, or were engaged in such memorable adventures and discoveries. Most of them, in fact, adapted to the usual ways of getting by: the skeptical conformism of the majority, the minor pleasures of home and work, a comfortable enough routine. They had the same dreams as everyone else; their opinions belonged to the common stock. And when they had to vote (since democracy was spreading around the world), they wondered, as we all do, about the ultimate meaning of life.

All the drops were the Mona Lisa , and none of them were. The submarine goddess of the Louvre no longer existed, in the Louvre or anywhere else, although millions of memory membranes preserved her reflection for a human race without illusions, but not without images. Déjà vu sprang from the heart of every being, smoke without fire, flower without fruit. There are no two people in the world (this calculation has been confirmed) separated by more than six common acquaintances. Both the living and the dead can serve as links. And the law of social entropy always ends up shortening the chain. The general, irreversible tendency is toward recognition. Demographic explosions are really implosions. The time will come when a single man, Anti-Adam, will run into himself and see that the two of him are exactly the same, like peas in a pod or two drops of water, or, rather, like a single drop.

One drop settled in Argentina, the land of representation. He took the very Argentine name Nélido and set about finding a girl to marry. A few hours would have been enough for anybody else. But he was shy, awkward, and conversationally handicapped. He tried for years, without any success. He seemed to be under a curse, or to be dogged by bad luck, but not even he could pretend not to know that luck, good or bad, was a thing of the past. He never turned down an invitation to a party or a gathering, went dancing, took yoga and painting classes, participated in demonstrations and marches, searching desperately, almost like a dog with his tongue hanging out. He knew that opportunities had to be seized as they arose, that it could all depend on an instant, so he sharpened his attention, cultivated his spontaneity, practiced his charm. It’s not that he wasn’t sincere; on the contrary. He wanted, he needed to find a soul mate, and at the end of each day that had passed without breaking the divine porcelain of his solitude, he could feel the bitterness of failure shriveling his tiny droplet’s soul.

He even thought about turning queer. After all, a partner is a partner, love is love, and maybe it wouldn’t be so noticeable in a drop. But he soon put the idea aside, not because of any moral or aesthetic scruples, but simply because it would have been more difficult. And anyway, he didn’t want to do anything unusual; he wanted to have a wife to hug and kiss and cuddle on cold winter nights like everyone else. . You can’t get more normal than that. It’s the original urge of every living being, the motor of eternity that powers the car of time.

Perhaps that was the problem: he didn’t have mortality to spur him on. After all, in his franker moments, he had to admit that there was a difference between a drop of oil paint and a young man, from a woman’s point of view, at least. This was brought home to him every day, not only in his fruitless quest, but also in his work. And it was a mistake to think of those two aspects of his life as separate; he had read in a magazine that eighty percent of relationships begin in the workplace. He had a job in a factory that manufactured cardboard boxes, but there was no chance of starting a relationship there because he worked all on his own in the little printing unit, and anyway there were no women workers. (They had hired him to roll his tiny round body over the spring-loaded stamp that printed the words “MADE IN ARGENTINA” on the cardboard.) So the only possibility was at his other job, selling candy and cigarettes in a kiosk (he started at four after leaving the factory and worked till ten p.m.). Opportunities might have arisen there, and they did, but they weren’t the right kind. Customers approach a kiosk from one side or the other, and they see the vendor at the last minute, suddenly, without any time to adjust. They’ve come to buy something completely banal like a chocolate bar or a pack of cigarettes, so they’re not expecting anything beyond the kind of everyday interaction that people generally have with their fellow human beings. Encountering a colored drop a millimeter in diameter instead of a familiar human form, they were unpleasantly surprised. It was hard to establish, or maintain, any kind of rapport. As for the regulars, they simply stopped noticing him and conducted the transaction in an automatic, absent sort of way.