César Aira: The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

I don’t need to be reminded that every memory is a screen. Who knows what this memory — one of my earliest — conceals. It has been with me, perfectly vivid, all these fifty-six years, and, within it, Miguel’s round smiling face on the other side of the glass. He wasn’t offended by my father’s abruptness; he just dropped back to the ground. And I wasn’t bothered either; no doubt I was fascinated by the novelty of the exercise book and the pencil, and pleased, perhaps, by the fuss being made of me at home, and convinced, deep down, that I’d be able to go on playing in the street as much as I liked, because, timid and unassuming as I am, I’ve always ended up getting my own way.

It’s strange: in the days that have followed Miguel’s death, that fleeting vision of his face in the window has seemed like the last time I saw him: a farewell. Strange, because it wasn’t the last time but the first. Although not really: it’s just the first sight of him I remember. That’s what I had in mind when I began to recount this memory. The reason my parents and I were so quick to interpret his presence was that he came to fetch me every day. That first memory, while still the first, is also a memory of what happened before, of what has been forgotten. Forgetting stretches away, before and after; my memory of the first day of school is a tiny, solitary island. There are a few other childhood memories, also discrete and isolated, erratic and inexplicable. Nevertheless, I treasure them, and I’m thankful for the screening mechanism that has preserved them for me. All the rest has been lost. This so-called “infantile amnesia,” the total oblivion that swallows up the first years of our lives, is a remarkable phenomenon, and has been explained and understood in various ways. Personally, I subscribe to Dr. Schachtel’s explanation, which runs, in essence, as follows:

Small children lack linguistic or cultural frames to put around their perceptions. Reality enters them torrentially, without passing through the schematizing filters of words and concepts. Gradually they incorporate the frames, and the reality that they experience is stereotyped accordingly, becoming linguistic and therefore retrievable in so far as it has adapted itself to being consciously recorded. That initial phase of immersion in brute reality is totally lost, because things and sensations have no limits or set formats. The immediate absorption of reality, which mystics and poets strive for in vain, is what children do every day. Everything after that is inevitably an impoverishment. Our new capacities come at a cost. We need to impoverish and schematize in order to keep a record, otherwise we’d be living in a perpetual present, which would be completely impractical. Even so, it’s sad to realize how much has been lost: not only the capacity to absorb the world in its fullness, with all its riches and nuances, but also the material absorbed during that phase, a treasure that has vanished because it wasn’t stored away in retrievable frames.

Dr. Schachtel’s book, so persuasive in its dry, scientific eloquence, avoids what, in this context, could only be a false poetry. It also avoids giving examples, which would lead inevitably to poetic falsification. Poetry is made of words, and every word in a poem is an example of that particular word in its everyday use. To give a truly adequate example, every word would have to be accompanied by a chaotic enumeration encompassing, or at least suggesting, the entire universe. We see a bird flying, and at once the adult mind says “bird.” The child, by contrast, sees something that not only does not have a name but is not even a nameless thing: it is (although the verb to be should be used with caution here) a limitless continuum involving the air, the trees, the time of day, movement, temperature, the mother’s voice, the color of the sky, almost everything. The same goes for all objects and events, or what we call objects and events. It could almost be an artistic project, or the model or matrix from which all artistic projects are derived. What’s more, when thought attempts to examine its own roots, perhaps it is trying, unwittingly, to return to a time before it existed, or at least trying to dismantle itself piece by piece, to see what riches it conceals.

This would change the meaning of nostalgia for the “green paradise” of childhood: perhaps the object of longing is not so much (or not at all) an innocent state of nature, but an incomparably richer, more subtle and developed intellectual life.

It is my belief that all the lost memories of my early years are recorded in the two thousand films I saw in that time. I will try to illuminate the nature of that vast archive by describing an invention that Miguel and I came up with. I said that North by Northwest —or International Intrigue , as we knew it — made an impression on us, no more perhaps than many other films, but in a different way. The day after seeing it, we decided to create a secret society dedicated to international intrigue. Now that I think of it, the sound of those two words might have been what triggered our initiative: intrigue , an intriguing word in itself, which could refer to just about anything; and international, indicating importance, the world beyond Pringles. Without secrecy, of course, there would have been no point. Secrecy was at the center of it all.

We were possessed of the easiest and safest means of keeping secrets, simply by being children and letting the adults think, rightly, that there was no need to investigate our games because they belonged to a sphere apart, separate from their reality. We must have known — it was obvious — that nothing we could do would be of the slightest interest to adults, which devalued our secrecy. In order for a secret to be a secret, it had to kept from someone. Since we had no one else, we would have to keep it from ourselves. We had to find a way to split ourselves in two, but that was not impossible in the world of play.

We named our society the “ISI” (for International Secret Intrigue), and its operations began immediately. The principle rule, as I said, was secrecy. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other about the ISI; I wasn’t supposed to find out that Miguel was a member, and vice versa. Communication was to take place via anonymous written messages placed in a “letter box” to be agreed upon. We agreed that it would be one of the cracks in the wooden door of a derelict house on a corner. Once we had established these rules, we pretended to have forgotten all about the ISI and started playing another game, although our heads were buzzing with plans for conspiracies, investigations, and stunning revelations, which we were scripting in advance. Both of us were itching to go home and write the first message, but we had to hide our impatience, so we went on playing more and more distractedly as the texts took shape in our heads, until nightfall. Only then, with some plausible excuse (“I have to do my homework” or “I have to have a bath”), did we go our separate ways.

The rules, as you can see, were purely formal. We didn’t worry about the content: it would take care of itself. And as it turned out, there was no shortage of material. On the contrary, there was an excess. Writing and drawings filled up the sheets of paper; sometimes we needed two, and the folded wad was so thick we had trouble wedging it into the crack. We tore pages from our school exercise books: it was the only paper we had, and in those days of abundance they made it thick and tough to resist the assault of erasers. We learned the art of folding, and may even have discovered for ourselves that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than nine times.

What did we write? I can’t remember how we began, no doubt by inventing some imminent danger, or giving each other instructions for saving the world, or indicating the enemy’s whereabouts. It became more intense when we started accusing each other of blunders, denunciations, and betrayals, or simply of being dangerous enemy agents who had infiltrated the ranks of the ISI. Threats and death sentences were frequent. Meanwhile, we went on playing together, going to the movies, building tree houses, organizing stone-throwing battles in the vacant lot opposite the school (this dangerous game was a favorite among the local kids), and doing target practice with our slingshots. We never mentioned the ISI, of course. We were leading parallel lives. And we didn’t have to pretend; it was something that came naturally. We had split ourselves in two.