César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

The cartoonist: “Sorry, but it’s not true that this was just ‘another comic’ for me.” (His use of spoken quotation marks made the music stop.) “I don’t know how you can say that, because if you really meant it you wouldn’t be here. That comic is my masterpiece, at least in the eyes of the public; it’s the one that made me rich and famous.”

“Come on, stop fooling yourself. They’re all the same to you. Evil, Cruelty, Blood, and Horror are just the morbid hooks you use to make it sell, and if your marketing consultants told you the fashion was over and something else was cool, you’d be onto it.”

“I don’t have marketing consultants.”

“You do it yourself, I know. You’ve got a fantastic nose for it.”

“Artistic intuition is my only guide.”

“Ha!” The blade pressed harder.

“But in that case,” groaned the cartoonist, who hadn’t lost the thread of the argument, in spite of the knife at his throat, “it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m innocent! My only sin is having debased my art for commercial gain; you’re responsible for the course your life has taken — you or the impressionable child you were.”

“Don’t lie. You know very well you’re responsible. . not for the way my life turned out, true, but for the tip-off, the prison sentence. .” The thought of prison made his rage boil over, and he shouted: “You’re going to pay! Right now!”

“Wait! Maybe we’re misunderstanding each other, or I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Didn’t you say the comic predicted every detail of your life as an outlaw, and this was when I was in primary school and hadn’t even dreamed of becoming a cartoonist? So what are you accusing me of?”

“Of denouncing me, what do you think?”

“But how could I, if it was all denounced already, a priori?”

“That’s how you’re going to die, ‘a priori.’”

Music again, exactly as before: the same deep, resonant notes, very far apart, making up a superhuman melody.

“Hold on, explain. If I’m going to die”—it was the first time he’d acknowledged this, but no doubt just as a way to buy time—“at least I want to know why.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

The comic book was quivering; the criminal was still holding it in front of the cartoonist’s face, although he’d clearly made his point. The rectangle of paper was yellowish, almost brown with age, but it stood out clearly in the steadily deepening dimness. The scene took on a posthumous, terminal air. The cartoonist felt this, and his heart, which had been clenched all along, contracted further still, becoming an iron ball. He was unable to stifle a sob:

“It was you, you and the comic. . not me. . It was the comic and you. .”

“ But nobody knew .”

The oral underlining of these words added an unrelated, subterranean tom-tom beat to the musical notes that had been playing since the last quotation marks.

Although his brain was clouded by anxiety, the cartoonist realized the utter irrefutability of the sentence he had just heard. He felt defeated and overwhelmed by the defeat, and yet he knew that irrefutability had been the norm, not the exception, throughout the dialogue. So there was still some hope, like a faraway light: maybe there would be another irrefutable argument, on his side. But then the criminal would produce another one in turn. . There would be no end to it. Only a difference of speed in coming up with these arguments could tell in favor of one or the other, and he had the impression that his killer was quicker. It wasn’t just an impression, either; clearly the killer was always the first to come up with an irrefutable argument. There was a reason for this: his wits had been sharpened by a lifetime of dodging the long arm of the law, while the cartoonist, perpetually bent over his drawing board, in the peace and quiet of his studio, had not undergone that training. In the comics he drew there were conflicts and miraculous last-minute escapes, but they were subject to corrections and revisions; sometimes it took him weeks to come up with a reply or work out an ending.

On this occasion, with the knife blade at his throat, he felt he’d never be able to find a reply, even in an eternity of searching. And to tell the truth (his truth, anyway), every second he spent in that forced, uncomfortable position felt like an eternity. Which must have been why he came out with the answer immediately:

“I didn’t know either! How could I have known? You said it yourself: ‘no one’ knew.”

The quotation marks, indicated orally, put a stop to the deep musical notes that had been playing since the last set; but the tom-tom beats continued, on their own now.

“Now everyone knows, thanks to you, you dirty snitch.”

It was useless. There was no point talking. The irrefutable and the indisputable would go on intervening. Although it wasn’t exactly the case that talking was pointless. There was always a point to talk, because it was the only way to know what was happening. But it was pointless to go on talking, because by the time you knew what was happening, time had spun around, turned back on itself, applying its obverse to its reverse, and the contact between past and future events had created a mass of irresolvable paradoxes.

So there was a silence, punctuated by the monotonous tom-tom. And the silence confirmed the immobility of the characters. Which wasn’t absolute: they had not been petrified or frozen in a still image. Little tremors ran through their bodies; there were imperceptible changes of position, which didn’t alter the overall postures: weight was shifted from one leg to the other, shoulders moved forward or back a fraction of an inch, eyes blinked, breath went in and out between slightly parted lips, occasionally moistened by a tongue. The criminal’s right hand went on holding the knife, with the blade pressed against the cartoonist’s throat, while his outstretched left hand held the old comic book in front of his victim’s face. No one else would have been able to hold up his arms for so long, but living like a hunted animal had given him the strength it took. Each arm performed its function: the knife arm made the threat serious; the comic arm explained it and gave it meaning. One without the other would not have been enough to create the scene, which was a product of their coordination. As for the cartoonist, he kept still for obvious reasons, neck tense and stretched, eyes on the comic.

At a certain point, the light stopped fading, it too froze, in an ambiguous dimness. It had not changed markedly from the beginning of the scene to what appeared to be its end. The effect might have been psychological, the natural illusion of darkening produced by our habitual experience of dusk. But who’s to say that this episode was taking place in the evening? The source of that ambiguous light could have been the morning sun, its radiance dimmed by clouds, or filtered through shutters or venetian blinds, or it could just as well have been the moon, a full moon in a clear midnight sky. . And the lighting could also have resulted from a combination or succession of various hours of the day, or all of them. (Artificial light sources were out of the question, because of the blackout affecting the city.)

Apart from the men, the studio was lifeless. It would have been futile to look for a fly buzzing, or an ant crossing the floor, or a piece of paper stirring in a breeze, or a drop falling from a faucet, or a speck of dust dancing in the air. It was as if even the electrons had frozen in their orbits. Everything that had the capacity to move was concentrated in the two standing figures intertwined at the center. They really were at the geometrical center of that square room, and the empty space around them made it all the more obvious; the drawing board and the ergonomic stool had been knocked over in the struggle and fallen apart. The four walls, equidistant from the human figures, were entirely covered with shelves, and these were chock-full with comic books, of which only the slender spines were visible, pressed up against one another from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling.