César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

So, what was he thinking? Nothing. His mind was blank. Fatigue and anxiety (these words are translations too, like all the words that follow; I won’t be pointing this out again) had left him in a daze.

Translating from “ovenbirdese”: he felt overwhelmed by an accumulation of disasters, which is how he saw his life. So much work, so much suffering, so many obligations! And the constant uncertainty: always having to choose, without ever knowing if you were making the right choice. . The only thing he knew for certain, and this ruled out the only possible consolation, was that there was a right way, a manner of doing things well, of being happy. And he would never follow that way, or he would, but only as far as the first intersection, where he would turn off. He knew this for certain because of the humans, always there right in front of him. Now, for example: the family had come out onto the balcony, after the rain, and they were drinking maté. He envied the automatic instincts that determined the behavior of humans and all the other animals, except for the ovenbird, that accursed species (so he thought). He shivered as he watched them brewing the maté, passing the gourd around, the whole complicated ceremony, involving the use of implements and accompanied by words, gestures, movements. . Human instincts were so amazing! By instinct they were able to perform this intricate ballet (and so many others: he was always seeing them do something new) without hesitation or stopping to think, without wondering if it was the right thing to do or not, without deliberation, just because that’s how it was written in the immemorial archives of their happy species. While he. . Ovenbirds, he thought, had paid for the skills that allowed them to survive with a drastic weakening of the instinctive system. It was futile, and perhaps ungrateful, to complain, but he felt that the price was too high. That’s what the example of the humans was telling him. Humans lived, and they knew in advance how to do it. The ovenbird was subject to the terrifying arbitrariness of ideas and thoughts and states of mind, of will and its endless weaknesses, of climate and history.

How had they known it was time to drink maté? The rain and its stopping had nothing to do with it, because they often drank maté when it hadn’t rained or stopped raining, and they didn’t drink it every time the rain came to an end. The unfathomable wisdom of instinct! And the drink gave them so much pleasure, lucky bastards. To think that the same instinct had sent them to the store to buy the maté, to the kitchen to boil the water, to bed for their siesta. . They were perfect. Perfect machines for living. An object lesson for an anguished wretch like him. But what could he do if he belonged to the only species that nature had neglected to endow with an instinct worthy of the name? There was no point bemoaning that fateful moment in evolution when the species had strayed from the safe path of adaptation. . Maybe the solution was to keep forging ahead into maladaptation until things came good again. . But no, it was futile, and dangerous too; making things worse was not the way to go.

Meanwhile, he was feeling increasingly ill. He was dizzy, everything was spinning. What was he doing there, in the fork of a hackberry tree, six yards from the ground? He was a ground animal, heights disagreed with him. But he couldn’t go down right then because there happened to be a hungry, bad-tempered rat prowling around under the tree. Every time it rained a few drops, that stupid rodent’s burrow would flood, which made him crazy and vicious. It was true that the ovenbird could fly far away and land anywhere and walk for a bit, if only to find some relief from his worries. But it was a bother; afterward, he’d have to come back. . And where would he find a decent place for a walk, with all the puddles that had formed? It was better to stay where he was and try to control the dizziness. Also, he had to wait for his mate, who’d set out before the rain and ended up who knows where; she’d come back wet, muddy, grumbling, and they’d have to sleep in that ruin with damp feathers and empty stomachs. . he turned to look at the half-built nest. His indecision added a mental dizziness to the physical sensation, which almost made him lose his balance and fall like a stone. Sadistically, the rain had chosen the worst possible moment. By stopping just when he was normally getting ready to end his day’s work, it confronted him with another one of those difficult decisions that made up the story of his wretched life: when the sun broke through the clouds, there were still at least two hours of daylight left. He couldn’t start working instantaneously; he needed a while to set up the systems for transporting, mixing, and so on. Two hours was a fair stretch of time, enough to add an inch or two and maybe replace all of the new section he’d built that morning, which had been damaged by the rain. But he’d already wasted an hour watching the humans, lost in his melancholic daydreaming. So was it still worth the effort or not? The mud would have been too thin, but there was plenty of it. . He’d lost the will to work, but he knew he’d feel guilty if he didn’t do something. What could he do, though, in the short time left before it got dark? If he didn’t get to work, he’d just go on being depressed. Which is what happened. A wasted day.

The nest was half built. It didn’t exist. Mud origami. All right: tomorrow, first thing, he’d get straight to work. Or should he do something now? There was more time left than it seemed, he felt sure; the daylight always lasts longer after rain. Oh, well. . Tomorrow. At least he had the consolation that the weather would be fine. The clouds had gone away; there wasn’t one left in the sky.

The ovenbird saw his constructive art as an accumulation of vague and useless forms, from which, by chance, something equivalent to a function ended up emerging. He told himself that he should follow the example of the humans, with their hyperfunctional houses, built automatically, always the same: vertical walls, a roof, openings, a system of ways in and out. . At least they didn’t have to bother with architecture! They did it the way they did it. They just did it, the same way every time, and the houses lasted forever. Take location. Guided by an infallible instinct (that is, by instinct itself), they always built on the ground, right on the ground, on the surface. They didn’t have to choose; nature had chosen for them. An ovenbird, by contrast, was subject to the most unpredictable whims: a post, a tree, a roof, the eaves of a house, five yards from the ground, or six, or fifteen. . And then there was the question of which kind of mud to use, and the proportion of straw or horsehair. . There were practically no fixed standards to go by (or that, at least, was how he saw it). And the accidents! Like the rain today. He was at the mercy of circumstances: the slightest variation could change everything; the consequences of the most trivial events would ramify right to the end of his life, piling up to make it unlivably motley and baroque. Humans, by contrast, like all the other living beings on the planet, had a way of neutralizing the accidental: a healthy and well-structured instinct allowed them to cancel out randomness by improvising new circumstances. But not him! Every other creature but him! That was because the ovenbird was an individual, like all ovenbirds, while humans were a species. The species was firmly grounded in necessity; the individual was up in the air, suspended in dizziness and contingency.

But shouldn’t that exceptional status have had some advantages too? Whenever you pay, thought the ovenbird, in the depths of his terrible wretchedness, you get something in return. And the “accursed race” to which he belonged had paid a substantial price: they had given up the peace of living without anxiety, generation after generation, in happy, trusting submission to the sweet mechanisms of nature. There had to be some compensation for such a great loss. There must have been some advantages. There were: they were great and definitive. A single word summed them up: freedom. He had freedom. All he had to do was enjoy it.