César Aira: The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

In any case, it was a unique piece, singular even among the works of an artist for whom singularity was the rule; it could hardly fail to fetch a record price. Before embarking on one of my habitual fantasies about future prosperity, I took a little more time to enjoy contemplating the masterwork. I smiled. This crooked little queen, who had to be put together again from a whirl of tangled limbs, was touching, with her biscuit-like face (once you found it), her golden chocolate-wrapper crown, and her puppet’s hands. She was the center of a centerless space. Her entourage, a veritable court of painterly miracles, was waiting for her choice; the evanescence of the flowers was a reminder of time, which for her was not a duration but an instant of understanding, a final realization, after a lifetime of illusion.

A crueler version of the joke can be imagined: the queen has always known that she’s lame (how could she not know?), but good manners have prevented her subjects from broaching a topic that she prefers to avoid. One day her ministers dare one another to say it to her face. This may be more realistic, but it’s not what the painting represented. No one would make that queen the butt of a joke; no one would mock her. The courtiers all loved her, and wanted her to know it. Beneath the surface message (“choose”), the hidden message (“is lame”) was meant for her: she would hear it and then, in a flash of insight, understand why the world rocked when she walked, why the hems of her dresses were cut on the diagonal, and why the lord chamberlain rushed to give her his arm each time she had to descend a staircase. They had resorted to the language of flowers, that eternal vehicle for messages of love. She had to choose the most beautiful flower in the kingdom, just as I had been obliged to choose between the two gifts offered by the genie. .

At that moment I too had my flash of insight, and the smile froze on my face. Why this hadn’t occurred to me before, I couldn’t understand, but all that mattered was that it was occurring to me now. As in a nightmare, an insoluble problem loomed, engulfing me in anxiety. I was still inside the museum: sooner or later I would have to leave; my life as a rich man could only begin outside. And how could I leave the Picasso Museum with a Picasso under my arm?

NOVEMBER 13, 2006

WHEN WE WERE TWENTY, ARTURITO and I launched a literary magazine called Athena . With youthful enthusiasm and a fervent sense of mission, we devoted ourselves body and soul to the work of writing, layout, printing, and distribution. . or at least the diligent planning of those activities, the scheduling and budgeting. We knew nothing about the publishing business. We thought we knew all about literature, but were happy to confess our almost total ignorance of the concrete mechanisms that convey literature to its readers. We’d never set foot in a printing works, and didn’t have the vaguest idea of what had to happen before and after the printing. But we asked and we learned. Many people gave us helpful advice, warnings, and guidance. Poets with long experience of self-publishing, editors with ten short-lived magazines to their credit, booksellers, and publishers, they all made time to tell us how it worked. I guess we seemed so young to them, just a pair of kids, so keen to learn and make it happen, they must have been moved by a fatherly concern, or by the hope that our naïveté would alchemically transmute their own failures, and bring about the long-delayed triumph of poetry, love, and revolution.

Of course, once we gathered all the necessary information and began to do the sums, we saw that it wouldn’t be so easy. The obstacle was economic. The rest we could manage, one way or another; we didn’t lack self-confidence. But we had to have the money. And no one was going to give it to us just like that, as we realized when our first timid appeals came up against an impenetrable barrier. In those days, there weren’t any funding bodies that you could apply to for publishing grants. Luckily, our families were well off and generous (up to a point). We had another advantage too: intrepid youth, without burdens or responsibilities, taking no thought for the far-off tomorrow. We were prepared to stake everything we had, without hesitation. That’s what we were doing all the time, in fact, because we were living from day to day.

We managed to scrape up enough money to pay for the first issue. Or we anticipated that we would have the right amount when the moment came to pick up the copies from the printer. Reassured on that account, we set about gathering, organizing, and evaluating the material. Since our ideas and tastes coincided, there were no arguments. We let our imaginations run wild, invented new provocations, discovered new authors, laid claim to the forgotten, translated our favorite poets, composed our manifestos.

But although we were deeply absorbed in the intellectual aspect of the enterprise, we didn’t forget about the money. Not for a moment. We couldn’t have, because everything depended on it, not just the existence of the magazine, but also its physical appearance, the illustrations we could include (in those days, anything other than type required the use of costly metal plates), and especially the number of pages, which was essential for any calculation. At the printers they’d given us a provisional “cost schedule” for various sizes and quantities of pages, in different combinations. The quality of the paper, it turned out, made very little difference. There could be thirty-two pages, or sixty-four, or. . The printers worked with numbers of “sheets,” which was something we never fully understood. Mercifully, they simplified the choices for us. We took it on ourselves to complicate them.

We thought long and hard about the frequency of publication: monthly, biannual, triannual? Had it been simply up to us, dependent only on our zeal, we would have made it fortnightly or weekly. . There was no shortage of material or enthusiasm on our part. But it all depended on the money. In the end we adopted the view of Sigfrido Radaelli, one of our obliging advisers: literary magazines came out when they could. Everyone accepted that; it was the way things were. When we accepted it ourselves, we realized that irregularity would not oblige us to give up our idea of selling subscriptions. All we had to do was change the formula from a period of time (“yearly subscription”) to a number of issues (“subscription for six issues”).

Recounting all these details now, they seem absurdly puerile, but they were part of a learning process, and maybe a new generation is repeating these lessons today, mutatis mutandis , as the love of poetry and knowledge is eternally reborn. The prospect of having subscribers and, more generally speaking, the desire to do a good job led us into an area of greater complexity. The general perspective was important: we felt that whether or not our readers were subscribers they were entitled to a product that would continue over time. The subscribers would be more entitled, of course, because they would have paid in advance. Continuity mattered to us too. We were depressed by the mere thought that our magazine might decline or dwindle with successive issues. But we had no way to insure against it. In fact, there was no guarantee that we’d even be able to get enough money to print a second issue. With admirable realism, we left sales out of our calculations. Even more realistically, we anticipated a diminution of the energy that we’d be able to devote to bothering our families and friends for money. . Basically, the question was: Would we be able to bring out a second issue of Athena ? And a third? And all the following issues, so as to build up a history? The answer was affirmative. If we could get the first issue out, we could get the others out as well.