César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

All this ingenious and detailed planning got me nowhere. It might have been different if I’d done it at the start. But earlier, when I was planning to draw the men from memory, I’d developed that new way of looking, the gaze with built-in memory, which, although I’d since given up the idea of using it, discouraged me from copying or tracing photographs or drawings, and even from looking for them. There was a vast, yawning gulf between the two approaches. Seeing the men in that new way, I discovered how inexhaustibly rich the form of a body is, and how drastically it is simplified by drawing, which intellectualizes it and turns it into a game. Perhaps if I had gone for a long time without seeing the men, memory would have worked naturally and accomplished the process of simplification. But since I was seeing them anew every day, memory adhered to vision, and was loaded with subjective and objective reality; this enriched it, admittedly, but with a sterile richness, which paralyzed me. My artistic dreams dissolved and left me with nothing.

I don’t know if the men noticed these subtle machinations. I had momentarily taken on the role of hunter and attempted to make them my trophies. It was a short-lived fantasy, soon swallowed up by a broader and darker confirmation of our relationship’s immutability. Though it wasn’t a real relationship, or not what we normally think of as a relationship between human beings. But that only made it more intimate. Again and again I wondered how it had all begun. I had ceased to wonder if it would ever end.

In the course of writing the above and trying to reconstruct my abortive artistic adventure, I realized that its failure was only part of a larger defeat. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t produced my folio or book of drawings; I’d never even tried to draw the men, not even in the sort of idle doodling that you do while chatting on the phone. More than that: I hadn’t even drawn them mentally. It was as if some kind of taboo had been operating. It wouldn’t surprise me: the whole thing seemed to have been placed under the sign of taboo. “Art” had come into in the story more as a means of deep explanation than as an actual project. The men themselves were the “artwork,” such as it was, and they resisted transposition into any medium apart from the harsh reality in which they existed.

If art had been, and was, an unrealizable daydream for me, perhaps it had served to lighten the crushing load of reality waiting for me every day when I had to face that scene in the back room of the house. Which wouldn’t have been all that hard, because there was already something unreal about the scene itself. Yet it was on the side of reality, and probably all the more real for being near the limit. I would have given anything to escape. But I didn’t have anything to give, and I suspected that the limit would follow me: I was myself that blurry line separating the real from the unreal. The flight was within me already, crucifying me.

I don’t think the descriptions I’ve given so far fully convey how desperate I felt. I’m not going to try to remedy that; my means of expression have wasted away under the effects of solitude and secrecy — they’re means of isolation now. I couldn’t even express it to myself. I felt only emptiness as I set off on that route I knew so well, there and back, the mute emptiness so typical of anxiety, an empty feeling that wasn’t opening but closing, enclosing me, forever. I ended up trying not to think at all (which is impossible). I would have liked to be a machine, an automaton; and in a way that’s what I became, at least in part. I brutally repressed all calculations of the time that had passed (the most distressing thing for me). But the calculations performed themselves, using various reference points, the handiest being the ages of my children. I had been visiting the two men in their house since before my children were born (though how long before, I refused to work out), and my children had grown up, they were no longer children, or teenagers, they had turned twenty, then thirty. . I could see the signs of aging in my wife’s face, as she could no doubt in mine. My family, my loved ones, the only ones with whom I could have shared a human destiny, had always been separate from me, leading separate lives. I had lived in the hope that my isolation would come to an end, as a blind man dreams of seeing or a paraplegic longs to walk again. These are not gratuitous comparisons. In some ways, if not in all, I seemed to be a normal man, one of the many who assuage their pervasive ill-being or psychological distress by reminding themselves that they’re healthy, they have money, and that others are worse off. It’s true that I could see and walk. Every day I walked to the house where the two men lived, and I saw them. . The miracle that the blind man and the paraplegic hoped for in vain had been bestowed on me, but only to engender a secret. There was something miraculous about the situation; but it was the worst kind of miracle, the kind that occurs only in real life.

That was what weighed most heavily: the reality of the secret. Not so much its substance as its defiant persistence. That was what I found so mortifying, such an unfair punishment; the secret had given real existence to the most unreal aspect of the world: time. The content of the secret, on the other hand, was not so problematic, because it bordered on hallucination, literature, cinema, and “special effects,” any of which might have provided a justification. It was not a mere coincidence that I had looked for a way out via “art,” whose function would have been to cover reality with a veneer of fantasy, and give me the illusory impression, at least, of having regained control.

But it didn’t work. It backfired. Reality persisted, and the contrast with my artistic daydream made it all the more real and cruel. I began to long for another kind of secret: the kind that is kept in the mind and stops being a secret as soon as it is expressed. Mine was an external fact, with all the willful independence of facts out there in the world. And it wasn’t one of those accidental facts, some fleeting, inoffensive conjunction in time and space. For my benefit and mine alone, it had revoked that temporariness in which the rest of humanity lulled itself to sleep with a beatific smile. I had to go to that room every day and see the men; I had to “believe my eyes,” as novelists used to say in the old days (but the men were saying just the opposite). The golden light coming in through the large window, in mysterious gradations of transparency, was like an oil that made the men’s movements fluid and silent. There was something animal about them; they had the poise and indifference of wild beasts. It seemed as if they could destroy the world from within, at the atomic level, just by being there. . But these are digressions, disconnected ideas, the only kind I ever had when I thought about the two men. Humans have no way to construct the perception of beings like them. That was the source of my solitude, and also, perhaps, of their human inhumanity.

I had intended to scrutinize their faces, in search of an expression, since no one can maintain a perfect neutrality forever. But it was futile. Their faces were irrelevant and inexpressive. They were smooth, regular faces, which seemed to predate the birth of expression, manly but with something feminine or childlike about them, too. They gave the men an archaic, doubly concrete character, making them undeniable. They were a small part of the world, a tiny part, and hidden, but it was a center that moved mountains and seas, all the while remaining a sordid little detail, a regrettable accident that had befallen me.

Yet I couldn’t even be certain that it had befallen me. What happens hasn’t really happened unless it can be told, and the two men didn’t fit into any tellable story. It wasn’t just the need for secrecy, or my shame, that stopped me from telling anyone. There was a kind of obliteration or hollowing in them that made it impossible. The story wasn’t theirs but mine, the story of my failure and helplessness, of something vaguely monstrous slowly growing. In the end, the spiderweb of my lies and miserable stratagems — those flimsy strings of spittle with which I kept provisionally tying one moment to another — solidified, becoming impenetrable, rock-hard. But even rocks wear away with time.