César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

I’m envisaging it as a statistical possibility, and if I really had to choose, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s important to remember that honesty is an abstract concept too (however much I like to think that my own is beyond doubt). No one chooses to be a taxi driver; not for a whole working life, anyway. It’s hard work, and, these days, a hundred thousand dollars must be equivalent to twenty years of taxi driving. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d say that, faced with a choice of this kind, one in a thousand taxi drivers, on average, would return the loot, and the other nine hundred and ninety-nine would hang on to it.

Having arrived at these estimates, we can reverse the process to work out how many taxis there would have to be for one honest taxi driver to return a hundred thousand dollars to a passenger who happened to leave that amount of cash behind, which is something that actually happens, and relatively often. The result is a thousand million (the product of multiplying a thousand by a thousand by a thousand).

So that’s the answer to our initial question. In the city of Buenos Aires, there are a thousand million taxis. Or rather, there are (as demonstrated by the calculation, which is incontestable) and there aren’t (how could there be a thousand million taxis in a city of ten million people?). It’s simultaneously true and false.

With this apparently paradoxical result (the paradox is only apparent), I conclude the notes that I was intending to make during my trip to Tandil, where I arrived this afternoon. Before beginning the journal of my stay in this pretty hill town, I shall give a brief account of the circumstances that brought me here.

My grandmother turned eighty-five last week. She’s in good health, happy, cheerful, affectionate, and mentally alert, although she has some minor memory lapses, which are normal at her age, and she’s the first to laugh at them. She’s the soul and center of the family, and when she tells us about her forgetfulness, we all have a good laugh, too. It’s not just by telling funny stories that she has acquired and maintained her central position. Her strength gives us the reasons to live that we can’t find within ourselves. We’ve often wondered how someone so full of life could have spawned such feeble progeny. The next two generations (her children and grandchildren) are lacking in vigor, and the same, I fear, will be true of the third, which is just coming into existence. What little energy we have, the meager hope that keeps us going, we draw it all from her, as from an inexhaustible source. We wonder apprehensively what will become of us when she’s gone.

As you can imagine, there’s an undercurrent of worry when we get together to celebrate her birthday. There was a big party for her eightieth, which gathered all the relatives for a kind of grand declaration of our dependence. From then on we began to feel that an ominous countdown had begun. We made a special fuss this year, too, for her eighty-fifth. Though none of us said anything, we were all privately counting and calculating. She looked so well, it wasn’t overly optimistic to imagine that she’d live another ten years. Why not? Ninety-five is not unheard of. And even allowing for her inevitable decline, ten years is quite a long time, long enough perhaps for us to find our respective ways and discover happiness, without relying on her vitality to maintain a semblance of human life.

The day before her birthday, one of my aunts asked if my grandmother was going to use her new age when she played the lottery. My grandmother hesitated for a while, enjoying the attention. They had to insist: “It’s not every day you turn eighty-five!” Which is true, and it’s also true that my grandmother is an inveterate lottery player, who never lets a chance go by. Once, she was hit by a car, which broke her tibia, and in the midst of the commotion and the pain she had the presence of mind to notice the last two numbers of the car’s license plate, and before she was taken into the operating theater, she sent one of her sons to play the numbers, and she won. She spent the next two months with her leg in plaster telling everyone the story.

So the day before her birthday, when she was doing her round of the neighborhood stores, she stopped by the agency to put in her coupon. She’s well known there, a favorite customer; they’re always having a laugh with her. In her usual chatty way, she announced that it was her birthday and said she wanted to play the two numbers corresponding to her age. The lottery man wished her a happy birthday, approved of her idea, took out a coupon and started filling it in as he usually did. So, the number was. .?

“Fifty-eight,” said my grandmother.

It wasn’t a joke. A minor confusion: the numbers had changed places in her head. The man asked her a couple of times, to make sure that he’d heard correctly; at first he thought she was kidding, but she didn’t respond to his complicit giggle. Imperturbably she repeated, “Fifty-eight,” in all sincerity. She left with her coupon, and it was only when she was about to wedge it between two apples in the fruit bowl (that was the Kabbalistic site where she kept her gambling documents) and looked at the numbers again that she realized her mistake. The next day at the party she told us what had happened, with her usual humor. And while the party was still going on, she went to the kitchen for a moment to listen to the radio to find out how River (her team) was doing, and it turned out that 58 had won a big prize.

That’s where the money for my trip to Tandil came from. My grandmother knew I’d been dreaming about it for years; she knew it was important to me. Was there anything she didn’t know about me, and the rest of us? Deeply familiar as she was with the mechanisms of idleness and fear that ruled all her descendants, she knew I’d never make the trip without some kind of prompting, which only she could provide.

I have always felt that I was her favorite grandson. I have lived on that conviction — if evasively skirting around reality, which is what my experience comes down to, can really be called living. My grandmother didn’t hesitate to give me half her winnings, “for your little trip,” as she said. That was all she needed to say; we both knew what she was talking about. But there are many deferred projects of this kind in the family, and almost all of her children, grandchildren, and children-in-law could have benefited, as I did, from her generosity. Had she been obliged to make a choice? What would she do with the rest of the money? I didn’t ask myself these questions at the time, perhaps because they might have led to uncomfortable conclusions. But after all, given my grandmother’s function as our source of life, the fact that she had chosen me could only mean that my need was the greatest.

The trip was (and is) related to what I’ve been claiming as my “vocation” all these years: literature. I know that my grandmother would prefer me to have a life. I’d prefer that too, of course. But I’m stubborn, as the weak-willed often are, and I cling to a profession that’s really no such thing, even though I may not be cut out for it, and haven’t yet shown the slightest sign that I am. I persist in asserting, precisely, that literature does not require proof of aptitude. In my heart of hearts I never felt called to literature, or saw myself doing the work that such a vocation would entail. If I were to reply sincerely to the question of which professions I would have liked to pursue, had I possessed enough vigor to lead a real life, I’d have to list, in this order: ladies’ hairdresser, ice cream vendor, bird and reptile taxidermist. Why? I don’t know. It’s something deep, but at the same time I can feel it in my skin, in my hands. Sometimes, during the day, I find myself unintentionally gesturing as if I were doing those kinds of work and, in a sort of sensory daydream, experiencing the satisfaction of a job well done and the desire to excel myself; and then, as in a dream within a dream, I begin to hatch vague plans to market my skills, build up my client base, and modernize my premises.