César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

I didn’t really think about this until one day, by chance — they must have been on bikes near mine — I heard what they were saying. I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember that it made a strange impression on me, and though I couldn’t articulate that strangeness at the time, I resolved in a half-conscious and somewhat halfhearted way (after all, what was it to me?) to get to the bottom of it.

At this point there’s something I should explain about myself, which is that I don’t talk much, probably too little, and I think this has been detrimental to my social life. It’s not that I have trouble expressing myself, or no more than people generally have when they’re trying to put something complex into words. I’d even say I have less trouble than most because my long involvement with literature has given me a better-than-average capacity for handling language. But I have no gift for small talk, and there’s no point trying to learn or pretend; it wouldn’t be convincing. My conversational style is spasmodic (someone once described it as “hollowing”). Every sentence opens up gaps, which require new beginnings. I can’t maintain any continuity. In short, I speak when I have something to say. My problem, I suppose — and this may be an effect of involvement with literature — is that I attribute too much importance to the subject. For me, it’s never simply a question of “talking” but always a question of “what to talk about.” And the effort of weighing up potential subjects kills the spontaneity of dialogue. In other words, when everything you say has to be “worth the effort,” it’s too much effort to go on talking. I envy people who can launch into a conversation with gusto and energy, and keep it going. I envy them that human contact, so full of promise, a living reality from which, in my mute isolation, I feel excluded. “But what do they talk about?” I wonder, which is obviously the wrong question to ask. The crabbed awkwardness of my social interactions is a result of this failing on my part. Looking back, I can see that it was responsible for most of my missed opportunities and almost all the woes of solitude. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is a mutilation, for which my professional success cannot compensate, much less my “rich inner life.” And I’ve never been able to resolve the conundrum that conversationalists pose for me: how do they keep coming up with things to talk about? I don’t even wonder about it anymore, perhaps because I know there’s no answer. I wasn’t wondering how those women did it, and yet I was given an answer so unexpected and surprising that a terrifying abyss opened before me.

Suddenly, in the ceaseless flow of their dialogue, one said to the other: “They gave my husband the results of his analysis, and he has cancer; we asked for an appointment with the oncologist. .” I took that in and began to think. Naturally my first thought was that I’d misheard, but I hadn’t. I don’t know if I’m reproducing her words exactly, but that was the gist, and the other woman replied, in an appropriately sympathetic and worried manner, but she wasn’t overly surprised; she didn’t cry out or faint. And yet this was really big news. Too big to crop up casually in a conversation, as if it were just one among many other items. I was sure that the two of them had been in the gym for at least an hour, and they’d been talking all that time; also, they’d arrived together, which meant that their conversation had begun a fair while before. . So had they discussed ten, twenty, or thirty other topics before they got around to the husband’s cancer? I considered a number of possibilities. Maybe the woman concerned had been keeping this momentous disclosure in reserve, in order to drop it “like a bombshell” at a particular moment; maybe she’d been gathering the strength to tell her friend; maybe she’d been inhibited by some kind of reticence, which had finally given way. Or it could have been that the news was not, in fact, all that important: suppose, for example, that the man she was calling “my husband” (for the sake of convenience) was an ex-husband, and they’d been separated for many years, and there was no longer any bond of affection between them. More daring or imaginative explanations were possible too. Perhaps they were talking about the plot of a novel or a play that the woman was writing (for a writing workshop they attended together, just as they exercised together at the gym); or it could have been a dream that she was recounting (although the verb tenses were wrong for that), or whatever. And there was a further hypothesis, which was barely less improbable: that the women had been dealing with more important and urgent matters since they’d met two or three hours earlier and had just got around to the cancer when I overheard them. Absurd as it might seem, this was in the end the most logical and realistic explanation, or at least the only one left standing.

In the course of these reflections, I remembered the previous occasion on which I’d heard them talking and the vaguely strange impression it had made on me. Now I could bring that impression into focus and understand the strangeness retrospectively. It was the same thing, but to enter fully into my consciousness, it had to be repeated. The first time (now I remembered) the news had been less amazing: one of the women was telling the other that, the previous day, the painters had started on the inside of her house, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets; it was utter chaos, the way it always is “when you have the painters in.” The other woman sympathized and replied that, although it was terribly inconvenient, repainting was something that had to be done; you couldn’t go on living in a flaky old ruin, and so on, and so on. The little puzzle that I hadn’t been able to formulate was this: how could such an upheaval in the existence of a housewife simply crop up in the middle of a conversation, instead of being announced at the start or, indeed, discussed for days in advance? The matter of the husband’s cancer had opened my eyes because it was much more shocking, but the same fundamental mechanism had been at work in both cases.

From then on, I began to pay attention. I have to say it wasn’t all that easy, for physical as much as psychological reasons. The main physical difficulty was that the gym is a very noisy place: the machines clang when the iron weights are stacked, the pulleys squeak, there’s a high-pitched beep every fifteen seconds to regulate the time spent at each station, the electric motors of the treadmills hum and moan, the chorus of exercise bikes can be deafening when several are being used at once, everyone talks and some people yell; and, of course, there are music videos on the TV all the time, with the volume up high, and usually, on top of that, there’s the much louder music of the aerobics class in the back room (it makes the windows shake). The two women, as I said, speak loudly — they don’t care who’s listening — so it’s easy to hear that they’re talking, but it’s not so easy to hear what they’re saying unless you’re very close. My exercise routine gave me plenty of opportunities to get close to them because it kept me on the move, but it also meant that I couldn’t stay close for long without provoking suspicion.

Even so, what I heard was enough to nourish a growing perplexity. Whatever the time and whatever they were doing, whether they were coming or going, halfway through their routine or in the dressing room or on the roller massage tables, they were always reporting some important piece of news and discussing it with due zeal. And if, by stepping up my surveillance operation, I managed to hear them two or three or four times in a day, there was always something new and important, far too important to be coming up after hours of conversation — except that their conversation consisted of nothing else. “In the storm last night the tree behind our house fell down and crashed right into the kitchen.” “Our car was stolen yesterday.” “My son’s getting married tomorrow.” “Mom died.”