César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

AS A KID, IN PRINGLES, I went to the movies a lot. Not every day, but I never saw fewer than four or five films a week. Four or six, I should say, because they were double features; two for the price of one, and everybody watched both films. On Sundays the whole family went to the afternoon session that started at five. There were two cinemas to choose from, with different programs. As I said, they were double bills: a B movie first, and then the main attraction (the “premiere,” though I don’t know why it was called that because they were all premieres for us). Sometimes, almost always in fact, I also went to the matinée session at one o’clock on Sunday, which was a double feature, too, intended for children, although back then they didn’t make movies specially for children, so they were westerns, adventure films, that sort of thing (and I got to see some serials, including, I remember, Fu Manchu and Zorro ). A bit later on, when I was twelve, I started going in the evenings as well, on Saturdays (the movies were different) or Fridays (it was the same program as the afternoon session on Sundays, but since there were two cinemas. .) or even on weekday nights. And at some point one of the cinemas started continuous screenings of Argentine films on Tuesdays, all afternoon. How many movies would I have seen? Calculating like this is a bit silly, but four a week makes two hundred a year, at least, and if I kept going that often from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, that makes two thousand movies. It’s even sillier to take the calculation to its ultimate conclusion: two thousand movies at an hour and a half each makes three thousand hours, or a hundred and twenty-five days, that is, four long months of uninterrupted viewing. Four months. A span like that is more concrete than a bare number, but it has the disadvantage of suggesting one excruciatingly long film, when in fact there were two thousand of them, each one unique, spaced out through a long childhood and adolescence, anxiously awaited, then criticized, compared, retold, and remembered. Above all remembered: hoarded like the manifold treasure they were. I can testify to this because those two thousand movies are still alive in me, living a strange life made up of resurrections and apparitions, like ghost stories.

People have often complimented me on my memory, or been amazed by the detail with which I remember conversations or events or books (or movies) from forty or fifty years ago. But the admiration or criticism of others is immaterial, because nobody else can really know what you remember or how you remember it.

It was precisely for that reason (because if I don’t do it, no one else will), rather than as a remedy against “the tedium of hotel life,” that I began to write this account of a curious incident that occurred last night in connection with a movie. I should point out that I’m in Pringles, in a hotel. It’s the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel in my hometown. I came back to see my mother, who has had a fall and is confined to bed, and I’ve found a place on the Avenida because her little apartment is occupied by companions who are looking after her. Last night, as I was flipping through TV channels, I came across an old black-and-white English film (the steering wheels were on the right), which had started but only just (for a seasoned cinephile, a couple of shots are enough to identify the opening scenes of a film). There was something familiar about it, and when, after a few seconds, I saw George Sanders, my suspicions were confirmed: it was Village of the Damned , which I’d seen fifty years earlier, right here in Pringles, two hundred yards from the hotel where I’m staying, at the Cinema San Martín, which no longer exists. I hadn’t seen the movie since, but it was very clear in my mind. Coming across it like that, without warning, was serendipitous. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a film that I remembered from childhood on television or video. But this time it was special, maybe because I was seeing it in Pringles.

The movie, as any buff will know (it’s a minor classic), is about a village that is paralyzed by an unknown force: one day all its inhabitants fall asleep; when they wake up, the women are pregnant, and nine months later they give birth. Ten years pass, and the children begin to demonstrate their terrifying powers. They are all very similar: blond, cold, self-assured. They dress very formally, stick together, and never mix with the other kids. Their eyes light up like little electric lamps and give them the power to dominate the will of the man or woman on whom they fix their gaze. They have no qualms about exercising this domination in the most drastic manner. A man with a shotgun is watching them; using telepathy, they force him to put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and blow his brains out.

George Sanders, who is the “father” of one of these children, realizes what is going on; his observations lead him to conclude that there is only one solution: to eliminate them. Meanwhile, the children make no secret of their intention to take over the world and annihilate the human race. As they grow, their powers increase. Soon they will be invulnerable; they almost are already, because they can read thoughts and anticipate any attack. (There was a similar case in Russia, which the Soviet authorities dealt with in their own way, killing the evil children along with the rest of the local population by carpet-bombing the village concerned.)

The protagonist is at home, wondering what to do. Or rather, how to do it. He knows that any plan he adopts will be present in his mind, which means that it will be visible to the children as soon as he approaches them. He tells himself that he will have to put a solid wall between him and them. . As he says this, he is looking at the wall of his living room, next to the fireplace, which is covered with fake bricks. He murmurs: “A brick wall. .”

At this point the camera follows his gaze and focuses on the brick wall for a moment. This fixed shot of a brick wall, with the voice off camera saying “A brick wall” was what fascinated me. In the movies I used to watch back then in Pringles, every image, every word, every gesture had meaning. A look, a silence, an almost imperceptible delay revealed betrayal or love or the existence of a secret. A mere cough could mean that a character would die or come to the brink of death, although she had seemed perfectly healthy up till then. My friends and I had become experts in deciphering that perfect economy of signs. It seemed perfect to us anyway, in contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality. Everything was a clue, a lead. Movies, whatever their genre, were really all detective stories. Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without significance. In the movies, however, everything was invested with meaning, forming a compact mass that captivated us. To us, it seemed like a super-reality, or, rather, reality itself seemed diffuse, disorganized, deprived of that rare, elegant concision that was the secret of cinema.

So that “brick wall” prefigured the idea that would be used to save the world from the impending threat. But for the moment no one knew what the idea might be, and it was impossible to know. The wall wasn’t easy to decode, like an actor’s cough or the close-up of a sidelong glance. In fact, not even the character knew: for him the idea was still at the metaphorical stage. In order to carry out an effective attack on the diabolical children, he had to put a barrier between himself and them that would be impenetrable to telepathy, and the image that came to mind as a representation of that barrier was a brick wall. He could have chosen a different metaphor: “a steel plate,” “a rock,” “the Great Wall of China”. . His choice must have been determined by the fact that there was a brick wall right in front of him. But despite its visible materiality, the wall was still a metaphor. The children would surely have been able to read thoughts through walls, so a literal wall was not the solution. He was referring to something else, and that gave the shot a disturbing negativity, which made it unforgettable.