César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Our refusal to think it through had a number of consequences. We knew that it didn’t make sense to talk about “half an infinity,” because in the realm of the infinite the parts are equal to the whole (half of infinity, the series of even numbers, say, is just as infinite as the other half, or the whole). But, returning surreptitiously to healthy common sense, we accepted that two infinities were bigger than one.

“Two infinities.”

“Two hundred and thirty million infinities.”

“Seven quintillion infinities.”

“Seven thousand billion billion quintillion infinities.”

“A hundred thousand billion billion trillion quintillion infinities.”

And so we continued until the word made its triumphant return:

“Infinity infinities.”

This formula could, in turn, be included in a series of the same kind:

“Ten billion infinity infinities.”

“Eight thousand billion trillion quadrillion quintillion infinity infinities.”

We didn’t pronounce these words, of course. I should make it clear that in general we didn’t actually articulate all the little series that I’ve been transcribing here; neither these particular ones nor others of the same kind. I’ve set it out in this long-winded way to make myself clear, but it wasn’t our intention to labor the obvious; on the contrary. All these series, and in fact all the series that might have occurred to us, were virtual. It would have been boring to say them. We weren’t prepared to waste our precious childhood hours on bureaucratic tasks like that; and, above all, it would have been pointless, because each term was surpassed and annihilated by the next. Numbers have that banal quality, like examples: they’re interchangeable. What matters is something else. Stripping away all the stupid and bothersome foliage of examples, what we should have said was:

“A number.”

“A number bigger than that.”

“A number bigger than that.”

“A number bigger than that.”

Although, of course, if we’d done that, it wouldn’t have been a game.

The word returned once more:

“Infinity infinity infinities.”

Only one number was bigger than that:

“Infinity infinity infinity infinities.”

I mean: that was the smallest bigger number, not the only one, because the series of infinities could be extended indefinitely. And so we ended up repeating the word over and over in a typically childish way, at the top of our voices, as if it were a tongue-twister.

“Infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinities.”

There was, believe it or not, an even bigger number: the number that one of us would say next. It was pure virtuality, the state in relation to which the game deployed all its marvelous possibilities.

Amazingly, given our greediness, it never occurred to us to add the name of a thing to the numbers. Bare like that, the numbers were nothing, and we wanted everything. There’s no real contradiction between the two half-wild children I’ve been describing, in a society that seems archaic and primitive today, and the fact that we were greedy. We wanted everything, including Rolls-Royces and objects that would have been no use to us, like diamonds and subatomic particle accelerators. We wanted them so badly! With an almost anguished longing. But there’s no contradiction. The supernatural frugality of our parents’ lives had apparently achieved its goal, and perhaps that goal was us. They were still using the furniture they’d bought when they got married; the rent was fixed; cars lasted forever; and the mania for household appliances would take decades to reach Pringles. .

What’s more, we always had enough money to buy the few things on sale that interested us: picture cards, comic books, marbles, chewing gum. I don’t know where we got it from, but it never ran out. And yet we were insatiable, greedy, supremely avid. We wanted a schooner with a solid-gold figurehead and silken sails, and in our fantasies about discovering a treasure — doubloons and ingots and emeralds — we weren’t so rash as to spend it at once on this or that; we converted it into cash, placed the sum in a bank and, as the compound interest mounted, bought ourselves Easter Island statues, the Taj Mahal, racing cars, and slaves. Even then we weren’t satisfied. We wanted the philosopher’s stone or, better, Aladdin’s lamp. We weren’t deterred by the fate of Midas: we were planning to wear gloves.

The numbers were numbers and nothing more. Especially the big numbers. Eight could still be eight cars; one for each day of the week, and one extra with swamper tires for rainy days. But a billion? An infinity? Infinity infinities? That could only be money. Why we never talked about this is a mystery to me. Maybe it went without saying.

The tree, a giant dark-green triangle hiding half the sky, kept watch over the little red truck, with the two of us inside, tireless and happy. The day was a stillness of sunlight.

Among the many daydreams prompted by the natural world, an especially frequent variety explores the perfection of the mechanisms by means of which living beings function. Gills, for example. A fish, as it swims, lets water pass through what I presume is a sort of hydrodynamic valve, and extracts from that water the oxygen it needs. How it does this doesn’t matter. Somehow. To simplify and conceptualize, as I did in the two previous sentences, it’s relatively straightforward: you can imagine an apparatus, an alembic, in which water is broken down and oxygen retained while the hydrogen is allowed to escape. Daydreaming retains something, too, and lets something else escape. What it retains in this case is the size of the fish: some fish are tiny, no bigger than a match, and in a fish so small the apparatus becomes a marvel. . Or does it? To put it together and take it apart, we’d have to use magnifying glasses and microscopes, screwdrivers and tweezers and tiny hammers the size of needle points; it would be a feat of patience and dexterity. A feat that might be pulled off once, at a very optimistic estimate; but there are billions of those fish in the sea. . At this point we should bow to the evidence and admit that the reasoning behind the daydream contains an error. Two errors, actually. The first is having overlooked the difference between doing something and finding it done. No one has ever set about making gills for little fish. They are ready-made. Constructivism is an empty illusion. The second has to do with size. Here the error lies in taking our human size as a fixed standard. In fact, the demiurge chooses a scale appropriate to each case, or rather he chose it at the outset, in the process of creating all the sizes. It’s a fluid, elastic studio, where it’s always a pleasure and a joy to work, in comfortable conditions, by hand. I think that’s why concepts are so attractive, why humans cling to them so stubbornly, from childhood on, scorning all reality checks. It’s examples that are cumbersome and unwieldy; for them, we’re never well proportioned, we’re always giants or dwarfs.

Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples. I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example.

MARCH 21, 1993

CIRCUMSTANCES HAD REDUCED ME TO begging in the street. Since direct and sincere requests were ineffective, I had to resort to fraud and trickery, always on a small scale, pretending, for example, to be paralyzed, blind, or afflicted with some terrible disease. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at all. One day it occurred to me that I could try a subtler, more ingenious strategy, which, even if it worked only once and wasn’t very lucrative, would at least give me the satisfaction of having carried out a well considered, and, as I saw it, almost artistic plan. I needed someone gullible to come along, preferably in a place where there would be no witnesses. I walked for a while, on my aching feet (they really were aching), through alleys that were all too familiar to me, since I lived and slept in them, until I found a corner that was, I felt sure, well out of the way. That was where I settled down to wait for my prey. I leaned against the wall, half hidden by a Dumpster, holding a shallow box I’d found, which someone must have thrown away: this box was what had given me the idea of trying a trick to get some money. I should explain that at this point I still didn’t know what the trick would be. I was going to improvise it at the last moment. Suddenly it was night. The corner was very dark, but accustomed as I was to gloomy places, I could see fairly well. And just as I had predicted, no one passed by. It was what I needed: a quiet place with no witnesses. But I also needed a victim, and after some hours had elapsed I became convinced that no one would come along. I must have fallen asleep and woken up again several times. The silence was deep. I’m guessing that it would have been midnight when I heard steps: someone was approaching. I didn’t move. It was a man, that’s all I knew; there wasn’t enough light to see details. And before I could move, or call out, or get his attention, I saw him go to the Dumpster and start to rummage in it. I couldn’t really make him the target of my clever scam. All the same, I would have given it a try, if only to get a coin out of him so I wouldn’t feel I’d wasted the night. But before I could even begin to move, the stranger lifted something heavy out of the Dumpster and stifled a cry. I exercised my penetrating night vision. It was a bag full of gold coins. I was overcome at once by the most bitter regret I have ever experienced: it was a fortune, and it had been there, within arm’s reach, for hours — hours I’d wasted waiting for some innocent to come along so I could trick him out of a tiny sum of money. And now that innocent had come and snatched the treasure from under my nose. He looked both ways to make sure that no one had seen him, and started running. He hadn’t noticed me down on the ground. I’ve never had quick reflexes, but on this occasion, which was, I felt, momentous and unique, something like desperation impelled me to act. I simply stretched out my leg and tripped him. Just as he was speeding up, his foot caught on my leg and he fell flat on his face. As I’d predicted, the bag fell with him, and the coins scattered over the uneven paving stones of the alley with a loud jangling noise, shining auspiciously. I thought he’d rush to pick up as many as he could before running away, and that I’d be able to gather coins too, unchallenged, his fall and the scattering of the booty having put us on an equal footing as misappropriators. But that was not what happened, to my surprise and horror. Agile as a cat, the man picked himself up and hurled himself at me from a crouching position, pulling a huge knife from his pocket. In spite of living rough on the streets, I hadn’t toughened up. I was still timid and would run away from any kind of violence. But there was not the slightest hope of running away this time. He was already on top of me, raising the knife, then plunging it into my chest with tremendous force. It almost came out the other side and must have gone very close to my heart. I could feel death coming, with utter certainty. But imagine my surprise when I saw that the wound he’d inflicted on me had appeared in his chest, in just the same place, and was beginning to bleed. His heart had been wounded too. He looked down, baffled. He didn’t understand, and it was no wonder. He had stabbed me, and the wound had appeared in his body as well. He pulled the knife from my chest, and, with death beginning to cloud his vision, as it was clouding mine, stabbed again, next to the first wound, as if to test the strange phenomenon. And sure enough, the second wound appeared in his chest. It, too, began to bleed. It was the last thing I (or he) saw.