César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

I liked to imagine it in the solitude and silence of midnight, rolling very slowly through the dimness, like a little boat full of holes setting off in search of adventure, knowledge, and (why not?) love. But what could it find in that array of dairy products, vegetables, noodles, soft drinks, and canned peas, which was all it knew of the world? Nevertheless, it didn’t lose hope, but resumed its navigations, or never interrupted them, like someone who knows that his efforts are futile but keeps trying all the same. Someone who keeps trying because he has pinned his hopes on the transformation of everyday banality into dream and portent. I think I identified with it, and that identification, I think, was how I discovered it in the first place. Paradoxically, for a writer who feels so distant and different from his colleagues, I felt close to that shopping cart. Even our respective techniques were similar: progressing by imperceptible increments, which add up to make a long journey; not looking too far ahead; urban themes.

Given all this, you can imagine my surprise when I heard it speak or, to be more precise, when I heard what it said. Its declaration was the last thing I was expecting to hear. Its words went through me like a spear of ice and forced me to reconsider the whole situation, beginning with the sympathy I felt for the cart, then the sympathy I felt for myself, and more generally my sympathy for miracles. I wasn’t surprised by the fact of it speaking; I had been expecting that. Perhaps I felt that our relationship had matured to the point where linguistic signs were appropriate. I knew that the moment had come for it to say something to me (for example that it admired me and loved me and was on my side). I bent down next to it, pretending to tie my shoelaces, so that I could put my ear to the wire mesh on its side, and then I was able to hear its voice, a whisper from the underside of the world, and yet the words were perfectly clear and distinct:

“I am Evil.”

MARCH 17, 2004

I'M POORER THAN THE POOR, and I’ve been poor for longer. An eternity of deprivation stretches out in my resentful fantasy, which is not confined to measuring the duration of the ill. It also gauges the magnitude of the catastrophe. There’s so much I could have, if only I had the means! So many things, experiences, and comforts! Listing them, putting them in order, and calculating their potential contributions to my pleasure leaves me feeling exhausted and entitled to their possession, if only as a reward for that obsessive labor. But my real experience is taking me further and further away from the well-being that money could provide, while sharpening my appreciation of its advantages. I don’t have to fantasize about this; I just have to look around me. I live among people who keep getting richer year by year. I haven’t kept up with the poor friends I used to have, and to be frank I don’t want to. We have nothing in common: no tastes, habits, or interests. Soccer bores me stiff. The people I can have a conversation with are sophisticates with money to spare, but of course the idea of sharing it with me never occurs to them. Why would they do that? In their frivolous innocence, they consider me a great writer, a figure from literary history living in the present. But in fact I’m destitute. I watch them orbiting in spheres that are more and more inaccessible to me, and my resentment grows. I become bitter and depressed; I accentuate my eccentricity — it’s an understandable defense mechanism, and a way of hiding the truth. I’m ashamed of my leaky shoes, my unvarying and inadequate wardrobe, the scruffiness and poor personal hygiene that are symptoms of a repressed desperation. I hole up in my apartment, and I can’t invite anyone over: the furniture’s too rickety, there are too many damp patches on the walls, and our supplies of cheap noodles are too strictly rationed. From the window I see my neighbors in Barrio Rivadavia (a shantytown) and remark that they’re not as poor as I am, because they always have something to spare, while I don’t have enough of anything. I observe their feasts and drinking bouts, their Sundays in the sun; even when they go out towing their rickshaws to rummage through the trash, they’re richer than I am because they find things. Meanwhile, I exhaust myself performing the most abject tasks, engaging in the most humiliating middle-class begging, barely earning enough to feed my children, who have to make heroic efforts to endure the inevitable comparisons with the lives of their friends, and justifiably regard me as a failure. How long is it since I bought a book or a record, or went to the cinema? My computer is obsolete; by some miracle it still works, but I can’t even dream of upgrading. All around me people are buying, spending, adapting, changing, progressing. Crisis or no crisis, my country is subject to periodic rashes of consumerism that end up affecting everyone. Everyone except me. How can I buy anything, even a pencil, when my pockets are empty? I don’t even have a credit card. I’ve had to become a tax evader because I just don’t have the means to pay. And when all my friends and acquaintances get tired of amassing new things and rewarding experiences, and go away for vacations on tropical beaches or cultural visits to beautiful cities, I’m left behind in my sty, chewing over my resentment. Only a miracle could produce a windfall and light up my squalid existence, but it’s already miraculous that I’ve managed to get what I need to survive, and you can’t really ask for two miracles.

Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t it have turned out differently, if, in the end, it would have made no difference to the universal scheme of things? Why did I have to be the object of your fierce persecution, Poverty, demanding and vexatious goddess — or, rather, witch — that you are? Why me? For some mysterious reason you noticed me back in Pringles, when I was a kid; maybe you were drawn to my pretty eyes, which you afflicted with myopia, adding physical to economic misery, making me neurotic as well as a pariah. Our close association dates back to those early days. My little house, echoing with scarcity, was yours as well. That was where I got to know you, listening to my parents’ endless arguments over money, in which I discovered language and a model for life. And if I went out, you accompanied me, you took me by the hand and pointed out the boxes of colored pencils that my school friends had, their rustling pads of tracing paper, the ice creams they ate, the Mexican magazines they bought. . Where did they get the money? Why didn’t I have any? You never told me.

The truly remarkable thing is that when I left town you came with me, as if you couldn’t bear my absence. My mother resigned herself to the separation, but not you. You came to Buenos Aires; you clung to me and settled in my lodgings, and all my ploys for eluding your relentless company failed. If I went to work, you accompanied me on the bus; if I lost my job, you stayed at home watching me read one sad volume after another. When I got married, you were the only wedding present I could offer my wife. You were the only fairy who bent over my children’s cradles. You were the sinister Christmas tree, my psychic roulette, the confidante to whom I poured out the all-too-obvious contents of my heart. Tossing and turning in bed, tortured by insomnia, I hatched all manner of escape plans, shriveling my brain. You always let me choose my course of action freely, but at the last minute you’d come along too. It was like one of those obsessive cartoons: I could cross oceans and continents, and believe that I’d escaped from your persecution, for a while at least. . but then I’d find you in my room, calm as could be, busy with some mean little scheme. It was automatic. I ended up becoming the most sedentary of men. And the metaphoric forms of flight — new jobs, resolutions, self-hypnosis — were, predictably, even less effective: when the literal doesn’t work, metaphors are worse than useless.