César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Enough! I’ve done my time. Not even a murderer gets a forty-six-year sentence, and I’ve never broken the law; on the contrary, I’m so well meaning and inoffensive, I sometimes feel I’m a saint. Can’t you leave me in peace? Don’t I deserve a break, at least? I know it’s my fault, but it still seems unfair. I want to be left alone, to fend for myself, if I’m still up to it; I want to be subject to the laws of chance, like other men, and know that there’s a possibility, however slim, that luck might smile on me. I’m fed up with your relentless presence, Poverty. Your homeopathy has made me sick; I wish I could have you eradicated. . If there was any chance you might listen, I’d threaten to kill myself, but that wouldn’t be any use either. .

At this point in my soliloquy, the figure of Poverty appeared before me: gaunt, stiff, ragged, and — in her way — magnificent. My words must have had some effect, because her falsely submissive air had been replaced by a look of genuine fury: eyes aflame, fists clenched, lips opening and closing violently.

“Fool! Featherbrain! Moron! All these years I’ve kept quiet, putting up with your complaints, your immature whining, your maladjustment, your ingratitude for all the gifts I’ve showered on you since you were born, but I can’t stand it anymore! Now you’re going to listen to me, though it probably won’t do you any good, because some people never learn.

“Who told you that my company was a disadvantage? The fact that you believed it just because that’s what everyone says goes to show how incurably frivolous you are. And that’s exactly the vice that I’ve been striving to save you from, with a perseverance that I now see was wasted. After all this time, do I have to spell out what I’ve done for you? I don’t know where to start, because I gave you everything you have. And more than that: I gave you the framework to accommodate it all. I gave you the energy you’d never have been able to muster by yourself. Without me you’d have given up almost straightaway, devoid of ideas and the brainpower to come up with them. I put variation and color into what would have been a monotonous routine. I gave you the joy of always being able to hope for better times. If you’d possessed something, what would you have hoped for? (Except the loss of it, knowing you.) As it was, you were always expecting things to improve. Fearful and timid as you are, and always would have been, however much you’d had, you would have lived in constant fear of thieves and swindlers, who would always have been too clever for you. I gave you a reason to go on living, the only one you had. Do you think you’d have written a word if I hadn’t been there all the time, peeking over your shoulder at your notebooks? Why else would you have written anything? And if you had, it would have been worse than what you’ve produced. Much worse! But I have to explain that too, don’t I?

“Even with your limited intelligence, you must have noticed that the rich are different. And this is why: the rich man substitutes money for the making of things. Instead of buying wood and making a table, he buys a table ready-made. There’s a progression: if he’s not so rich, he buys the table and paints it himself; if he’s richer, he buys it painted. If he’s not rich at all, he doesn’t even buy the wood; he goes to the forest and cuts down a tree, et cetera. Poverty (yours truly) provides a certain amount of process. The rich man gets everything ready-made, including goods and services. Which means that he loses reality, because reality is a process. Worse still: the availability of ready-made things waiting to be used comes to seem natural, and he begins to expect it in the world of thought as well. That’s why the rich use ready-made ideas, copied opinions, tastes invented by others. They delegate the process. Even where their feelings are concerned, which is what makes them so stereotypical and superficial: the caricatures by which they’re generally represented are actually far too complex and flattering. Would you have wanted to be like that? Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Without me, your books would have lacked the one modest virtue that no one can deny them: realism. I gave you that, and you have the nerve to hold it against me!

“And how! With your first thought in the morning, you revile me; with your last thought when you go to bed as well. And in between it’s nothing but protests, complaints, and whining. I’m aware that with the advance of technology and consumerism, the world is adopting the system of the rich, which will be generalized eventually. That must be what makes you feel marginal and old-fashioned, as if I were a burden holding you back in a past of pre-industrial labor. Maybe that’s why you resent me, but it’s the source of all your originality, and given your maladaptation, without originality, you’re nothing.

“Anyhow, I’m not going to go on justifying your existence. I’m sick of being your bête noire; I’m fed up with your insults and rudeness. I can’t stand you anymore. I’m moving out! If that’s what you really wanted, you’ve got it: you won’t see me again. I’m going to Arturito Carrera’s place, where I know I’ll get the appreciation I deserve.”

And with that, she got up and headed for the door, offended, rigid with indignation. It was true! She was going! One more step and she’d be outside. Panic swelled in my chest, unbearable as a heart attack. Speeches always convince me, this one especially, because in a way it had sprung from my own heart and mind (that’s how allegorical figures operate). I leaped up from my armchair and shouted:

“No! Don’t go, Poverty! Forget everything I said, I beg you, and what I’ll say in the future, too, because I know what I’m like; I won’t be able to stop complaining. But I don’t really want you to leave. After all, I’m used to you now. It would almost be like my wife leaving me. I couldn’t bear the humiliation. I wasn’t born to be an orphan. Stay with me, and I’ll get by. Don’t listen to what I say. I’m rude, I know, and I don’t deserve you, but please, please, don’t go.”

She stood perfectly still with her hand on the doorknob for a moment of unbearable suspense, and then she turned very slowly. There was a serious smile on her lips, and I knew that she had forgiven me. She walked toward me with ceremonious steps, like a bride approaching the altar.

And Poverty has lived with me ever since. Not for one day has she left my home.

ROSARIO, NOVEMBER 29, 1995

THE PHOTOS WILL BEAR ME out: on either side of the entrance to the mall on Avenida Kennedy are topiary forms, clipped from a plant with small, dark (perennial) leaves, which represent:

On one side, a perfectly proportioned polar bear, thirty-five feet high, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in his right paw (the bottle is to scale, i.e., huge). Some way off, there are two smaller forms, clipped from the same plant, representing two bear cubs, one standing and reaching out toward the full-grown bear, the other sitting on the ground but also looking at the adult.

On the other side, at the opposite end of the mall’s façade, about a hundred yards away, another big bear, just like the first, with the same bottle of Coca-Cola, and a single cub, but this one is up against the adult with his front paws outstretched as if he wants to be picked up or is trying to reach the bottle.

The sequence of figures sketches out a little story. In the first scene, you might say that the bear is appearing before his cubs and saying, “Look what I’ve brought.” In the second, one of the cubs has rushed up to him and is trying to scale his big body of green leaves, reaching out for the bottle, which the father is holding aloft as if to say, “Not yet.” The cub’s little brother has disappeared.