César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

“One.”

“Zero.”

“Minus a thousand.”

“Zero point zero nine nine nine.”

“Minus three.”

“A hundred and fifteen.”

“A million billion quadrillions.”

“Two.”

“Two.”

This didn’t last very long, because it was too dizzying, too horizontal. A minute of it gave us a totally different perspective on what we’d been doing for hours before, as if we’d jumped down off a horse, descended from the world of mental numbers to that of real numbers, to the earth where the numbers lived. If we had known what surrealism was, we would have cried: Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes everything! Then we went back to the normal game like someone going back to sleep, back to efficiency and representation.

All the same, a certain nostalgia crept in, a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. It didn’t happen at a particular moment, after a day or a month or a year. . I’m not writing a chronological history of this game, from invention and development to decadence and neglect. I couldn’t, because it didn’t happen like that. The successiveness of this narration is an unavoidable defect; I don’t see how I could avoid it while still giving an account of the game. The dissatisfaction had to do with the difference between numbers and words. We had made the very austere decision to limit ourselves to real, “classical” numbers. Positive or negative, but everyday numbers, of the kind that are used for counting things. And numbers are not words. Words are used to name numbers, but they’re not the same.

This, of course, had been a choice, a pact that we renewed each time we started playing, and we didn’t complain. The game made thought mobile and porous, loosened it like a kind of relaxing yoga, allowing us to see the kingdom of the sayable in all its amplitude while preventing us from entering it. Words were more than numbers; they were everything. Numbers were a little subset of the universe of words, a marginal, faraway planetary system where it was always night. We hid there, sheltered from the excesses of the unknown, and tended our garden.

From our hiding place we could see words as we’d never seen them before. We’d distanced ourselves from them so that we could see how beautiful, funny, and amazingly effective they were. Words were magical jewels with unlimited powers, and all we had to do, we felt, was reach out and take them. But that feeling was an effect of the distance, and if we crossed the gap, the game dissolved like a mirage. We knew that, and yet some strange perversion, or the lure of danger, sustained our crazy longing to try. .

We were testing the power of words every day. I never missed an opportunity: I’d see one coming, feel that I was grasping the mirage, taking control of its unerring death ray, and

I wouldn’t rest until I’d fired it. My favorite victim, needless to say, was Omar:

“Let’s play who can tell the biggest lie.”

Omar shrugged:

“I just saw Miguel go past on his bike.”

“No, not like that. . Let’s pretend we’re two fishermen and we’re lying about what we’ve caught. The one who says the biggest lie wins.”

I emphasized “biggest,” to suggest that it had something to do with the number game. Omar, who could be diabolically clever when he wanted, made it hard for me:

“I caught a whale.”

“Listen, Omar. Let’s make it simpler. The only thing you can say is the weight of the fish, its length in yards, or its age. And let’s set some upper limits: eight tons, eighty yards, and eight hundred years. No! Let’s make it really simple! Just the age. Let’s suppose fish go on growing until they die. So by saying the age you’re saying the length, the width, the weight, and all that. And let’s suppose they can live any number of years but the highest number we can say is eight hundred. You start.”

Omar would have had to be really stupid not to realize by this stage that I had something up my sleeve, something very specific. And he wasn’t stupid at all; he was very intelligent. He had to be, supremely: he was the measure of my intelligence. In the end, he resigned himself:

“I caught an eight-hundred-year-old fish.”

“I caught its grandfather.”

Omar clicked his tongue with infinite scorn. I wasn’t especially proud of the idea myself: it was an unfortunate attempt to play a practical joke on my friend by recycling a gag I’d read in a magazine, which must have gone something like this: “Two fishermen, inveterate liars, are talking about the day’s catch: ‘I caught a marlin this big.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that was the newborn baby. I caught its mother.’ ” What a flat joke! I worked so hard to set it up, and for such a paltry result! What did I ever see in it? Nothing but the power of the word. The joke contained, in a nutshell, both our number game (the lying fishermen could go on increasing the dimensions of the fish ad libitum ) and that which transcended it: a word (like “mom,” or “dad,” or “grandfather”) triumphed over the whole series of numbers by placing itself on a different level.

So that’s what I was referring to. That was the game’s limit, its splendor and its misery.

Until we discovered the existence of that word . This, I repeat, did not occur at a particular moment in the game’s history. It happened at the beginning — it was the beginning.

The word was “infinity.” Logical, isn’t it? Perhaps even blindingly obvious? In fact, it has been a strain for me to call it the “number game,” when it was really the “infinity game,” which is how I’ve always thought of it. If I had to transcribe the archetypal session, the original, the matrix, it would be simply this:

“One.”

“Infinity.”

Everything else sprang from that. How could it have been otherwise? Why would we have denied ourselves that leap when every other kind of leap was allowed? In fact, it was the other way around: all the leaps that we allowed ourselves were based on the leap into the heterogeneous world of words.

From this point on, we can, I think, begin to glimpse an answer to the question that has been building subliminally since I began to describe the game: when did the sessions come to an end? Who was the winner? It’s not enough to say: Never, no one. I’ve given the impression that neither of us ever fell into the traps that we were continually laying for each other. That’s true in the abstract, in the myth that was ritually expressed by the various series, but it can’t always have been the case in the actual playing of the game. To be honest, I can’t remember.

I feel I can remember it all, as if I were hallucinating (otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this), but I have to admit that there are things I don’t remember. And if I were to be absolutely frank, I would have to say I don’t remember anything. An escalation, once again. But there’s no contradiction. In fact, the only thing I remember with the real microscopic clarity you need in order to write is the forgetting.

So:

“Infinity.”

Infinity is the limit of all numbers, the invisible limit. As I said, with the big numbers we were thinking blind, beyond intuition; but infinity is the transition to the blindness of blindness, something like the negation of negation. And that’s where the real visibility of my forgotten memory begins. Do I actually know what infinity means? It’s all I can know, but I can’t know it.

There’s something wonderfully practical about leaping to the infinite, the sooner the better. It thwarts every kind of patience. There’s no point waiting for it. I loved it blindly. It was the sunny day of our childhood. That’s why we never wondered what it meant, not once. Because it was the infinite, the leap had already happened.