César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

That wasn’t small talk, not at all. But I don’t really know what small talk is. I thought I did, but now that I’ve begun to doubt its existence, I’m not sure anymore. If those two women are representative, maybe people always talk because they have something to say, something really worth saying. I’m starting to wonder if there’s such a thing as “talking for the sake of talking,” if it’s not just a myth I invented to disguise my lack of life, that is, basically a lack of things to talk about.

Or is it the other way around? Maybe those two ladies are the myth I’ve invented. Except that they exist. And how! I see (and hear) them every day. And their existence is not confined to the “magnetic field” of the gymnasium. As I said, I’ve seen and heard them in the street as well. Just yesterday afternoon, as it happens. I’d gone out for a walk and I ran into them; they were coming out of a perfume store, in the midst of an animated conversation. I managed to catch a couple of sentences as I went by. One was telling the other that she and her daughter had argued the day before, and the argument had ended with the daughter declaring that she was moving out to live on her own. . It was seven in the evening, and they’d been together and talking all day (I’d seen them at the gym that morning). I’m leaving aside the possibility that they say these things “for my benefit,” not just because, as a practical joke, it would be too complicated, but also because they haven’t even noticed I exist, nor is there any reason why they should.

One way to solve the problem would be to make a list of all the topics they cover in a day, and see if there’s a basically plausible progression from more to less important. I would be better placed to undertake this task than almost anyone because I have access to them first thing in the morning, at the gym, for two long hours. But I haven’t done it and I won’t. I’ve mentioned the physical obstacles already, and I said that there were psychological difficulties too. These come down to one thing, in the end: fear. Fear of a certain kind of madness.

There’s a bylaw in Buenos Aires that forbids the transportation of animals in taxis. Like all laws in Argentina, this one can be bent. In these hard times, if a lady wants to get in with her lapdog, ten out of ten taxi drivers are going to let her. But the law is still in force, exerting a pressure on the conscience, giving chimerical grounds for caution. According to one of those tenacious urban legends, one day a woman got into a taxi carrying a capuchin monkey dressed up as a baby, with a little coat, slippers, a nappy, and a pacifier, and the driver didn’t notice the ruse until the monkey bit off half his ear. Embittered and coarsened by a life chained to the wheel, he’d probably been thinking (if anything): “Gotta pity her, with an ugly kid like that!”

Someone once told me you can even take a goat in a taxi, as long as you promise to hold it down on the floor and give the driver a tip. That shows just how flexible the laws of our “autonomous” province can be. And yet a taxi driver can turn away a passenger who’s carrying a plant. Amazing but true, as anyone can verify. I’m not talking about a tree or a rhododendron with a six-yard circumference: just a regular little plant, in a pot or a plastic bag, an oregano seedling, an orchid growing on a piece of old tree trunk, a bonsai.

And the drivers can be intransigent, if they feel like it. There’s no point objecting or trying to argue. Convinced that they’re acting as designated agents of the law, they’ll leave a passenger standing there with his or her little plant, even if it’s an old man, or a mother with small children (and pregnant to boot), or a disabled person, even if it’s raining. The law, of course, says nothing about plants; it mentions only animals, and extending the prohibition to the vegetable realm is a clear and indefensible abuse of power.

But that’s the way it is. What is and what should be the case are superimposed. Although they’re contradictory, both continue to exist in reality at the same time. The same “simultaneous superimposition” is more clearly apparent in the following attempt to answer the question: How many taxis are there in Buenos Aires?

The number is huge — as you can see just by stepping out into the street. If you really wanted to know how many there are, you could ask, or do some research, for example by checking the city’s list of registered automobiles, which I guess would be in the public domain. But there’s a way to work it out that doesn’t involve any asking or talking or even getting up from your desk. All you have to do is apply your powers of deduction to something that’s very widely known.

From time to time, remarkably often in fact, there’s a story in the papers about an honest taxi driver who finds a briefcase on the backseat containing a hundred thousand dollars and returns it to the rightful owner, after a more or less difficult search. It’s a classic news story. It might be a bigger or smaller sum of money, but it’s always enough to solve all the problems a taxi driver might have (or an average, middle-class newspaper reader). That’s what gives the story its impact: the exorbitant cost of honesty. Let’s suppose — this is the first in a series of minimal estimates that will, I hope, enhance the credibility of the calculation — that such an event occurs in Buenos Aires only once a year.

So, if we consider the occupied taxis passing in the street, we can ask, for a start, how many are carrying passengers who have a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars in cash. There must be very few. As a result of the widespread use of checks, bank drafts, credit cards, and electronic transfers, handling large amounts of cash has become rather anachronistic. I’ve never gotten into a taxi (or gone anywhere) with that amount of money, nor do I know anyone who has, but there can be no question that such people do exist. Leaving aside illegal or criminal activities, there are people employed by large companies that pay wages in cash, or people doing property deals, trading on the stock market, or whatever. Let’s say, and this too is a very conservative estimate, that one in a thousand passengers is carrying that much money.

Now, considering that limited set, how many of the passengers riding in taxis with a hundred thousand dollars would forget about their briefcases and leave them behind? I know I wouldn’t, no matter whether the money was mine or someone else’s (though I don’t know which situation would make me more vigilant). It really is the height of absentmindedness. No one’s indifferent to money these days, whatever they say, especially when large sums are involved. So we can reckon that of a thousand passengers who take a taxi carrying a hundred thousand dollars, not more than one will leave the money behind. (Though maybe there would be more than one, because a familiar psychological mechanism ensures that the more you worry, the more things go wrong.) And even if it’s fewer than one, the overestimation will be offset by the cautiousness of my previous estimate.

So, given the very restricted set of taxis in which someone has left that enormous amount of money, we still have to work out how many of the drivers would demonstrate a superlative probity by finding the owner and returning it. This is trickier, and I suppose that estimates will vary according to people’s ideas about human nature. Some will say no one’s that honest, while others will consider such a claim to be abstract and theoretical, and prefer to think that, confronted with a real situation of this kind, most people would obey the voice of conscience. Personally, I’m not sure what to think. I’ve never had to make the choice; I’ve never faced the test.