César Aira - The Literary Conference

I have now revealed the entire secret of my scientific activity. My famous clones are nothing more than the duplication of style cells. Which should lead me to question my appetite for styles. I think the answer resides in the mere necessity to persist. I have sought an outlet for this need through love, without any success, so far.

We were crowded together on a bench pushed against a wall; next to me, at moments talking to me, sat Nelly, one of my young Venezuelan friends, a graduate student in literature. I admired her and I had a tendency to feel toward her that rare kind of envy that crosses sexual barriers. She must have been twenty-one or twenty-two, but she was the embodiment of an ageless ideal. She was small and thin, her features were unusually pure, and she had enormous eyes and an aristocratic air. Her suit — wide pants and bustier — was made of brown satin; her perfect breasts were almost exposed; she wore very pointy Asian slippers on her feet. Her blond curly hair fell over her shoulders at an angle, covering one eye. Part of her charm lay in her incongruity. She was mulatto, perhaps also with some indigenous blood, but her face was French. Her hair color was recent, judging by the comments I heard from her friends; I had met her as a redhead, years before. One could never guess what she was thinking. In the discotheque she was calm, relaxed, a glass of rum in her hand, her beautiful eyes lost in contemplation. She seemed to be elsewhere. She spoke only when spoken to; when not, she allowed a peaceful, cozy silence to envelop her. She spoke in a whisper, but she articulated her words so well that I could understand her perfectly over the loud music.

“You are enchanting tonight, Nelly,” I told her, my tongue heavy with alcohol. “As usual, I should say. Or did I already say that? Every sentence I utter comes out twice, though that’s why I feel it twice as strongly, wrapped as it is in the deep truth of its meaning and its intention.”

For a moment she seemed not to have heard me, but that was her usual reaction. In that minuscule space between our two bodies, she turned toward me, like the statue of a goddess turning on the altar.

“I dressed up especially in your honor, César. Today is your day.”

“Thank you very much. I am enjoying it. But you are always elegant, it’s a part of you.”

“That’s kind of you to say so. You are good inside and out, César.” My face must have betrayed my puzzlement at the second statement, because I heard her add, “You are young and beautiful.”

The lights were very low, we were practically in the dark. Or rather, the beams and pulses of the colored lights allowed us to see what was going on but not reconstruct it in our minds. This is the astute discovery such night spots have made. Their lighting arrangements reproduce subjectivity thereby nullifying it, a process further assisted by the alcohol and the noise. From the depths of this nullification rose, golden and warm like a houri out of paradise, the beautiful Nelly. I slipped my arm around her waist and kissed her. Her lips had a strange flavor, which made me think of the taste of silk. We were so close, so nearly on top of each other, that every gesture we made required only minimal displacement — almost imperceptible.

“I am no longer young,” I told her. “Haven’t you noticed how much hair I’ve lost since my last visit?”

She looked at my hair and shook her head. I insisted with the obstinacy of a drunk. I told her that my imminent baldness terrified me. And it wasn’t just out of vanity; there was a very concrete reason. I told her that when I was young I shaved my head in a rapture of madness, then had a message tattooed on my scalp, which my hair then covered when it grew back. If I went bald and this inscription were revealed, it would be the end of the scant prestige I had managed to build up as a fragile defensive shield around me.

“Why? What does it say?” she asked, pretending for a moment that she believed me.

“I can only tell you that it is a declaration of belief in the existence of extraterrestrials.”

A violet light that swept fleetingly over her face showed me her serious smile.

That was why, I went on to explain, I spent a fortune on shampoos with capillary nutrients, and why, not trusting commercial products, I had dedicated my life to chemistry.

A while later, changing the subject, I asked about the ring she was wearing on her left hand. It was a fascinating piece of jewelry, shaped like a crown, with a blue stone whose facets seemed to have been set separately. She told me it was her graduation ring, one of the traditions of the university, though hers had a special feature: they had doubled hers in honor of her having earned two simultaneous degrees, as Professor of Literature and Professor of the Teaching of Literature; it was a fairly subtle distinction, but she seemed quite proud of this double achievement.

She left her silky hand between my paws corroded by the nucleic acid I work with. I lifted it to my eyes so I could examine the ring, which was truly a notable piece for its workmanship and clever design. Each time a ball of strobe light rolled over us, the blue stone lit up brilliantly, and through the two tiny chiseled windows I could see the crowd of young people dancing. The thin gold ribbon that twisted around the stone carried an inscription.

“Look,” she said turning the ring around with two fingers from her other hand. “Can you see how the words of the inscription recombine to form other words, spelling out both of my two degrees?”

I couldn’t, of course, due to the lack of light and my befuddlement at that late hour, but I could admire the mechanism. I kissed those fingers.

May God forgive me, but I began to doubt the seriousness of the course of studies at that tropical university. All those exchanges and caresses in that discotheque were part of a larger context through which I was taking a measure of Nelly’s true intelligence. All my seductive moves, both the innocent and the daring, and even the most impassioned and sincere, have in common the same backdrop: my constant evaluation of the intelligence of the woman in question. I can’t help it. Even further in the background must be my adolescent fantasy of having a sex slave, a woman who submits, without any reserve, to the will of my desire. For this, her intelligence must have a very special size and configuration. But intelligence is mysterious. It always gets the better of me, escapes my manipulations — even my literary ones — and remains an insolvable enigma.

I was interested in Nelly for another reason, both more positive and more ineffable. She was Amelina’s best friend, her confidante, she knew everything about her. . Among other things she knew where she was hiding. She was in on the secret, though secretive herself, thereby establishing a continuum of love. The two women weren’t at all alike, they were almost opposites. Once I had compared them, in jest, to the sun and the moon. There in the disco, in my intoxicated state, I had next to me, throbbing and perfect, a reality that touched all other realities and spread through them until it encompassed the entire world. Nelly’s dreamy eyes lost themselves in the night and in me.

At dawn, things emerged from their reality, as if in a drop of water. The most trivial objects, embellished with profound reality, made me quiver almost painfully. A tuft of grass, a paving stone, a scrap of cloth, everything was soft and dense. We were in the Plaza Bolívar, as lush and leafy as a real forest. The sky had turned blue, not a cloud in sight, no stars or airplanes, as if emptied of everything; the sun should have appeared from behind the mountains, but its rays were not yet touching even the highest peak to the west. The light intensified and bodies projected no shadows. The dark and the light floated in layers. The birds didn’t sing, the insects must have been asleep, the trees remained as still as in a painting. And, at my feet, the real kept being born, like a mineral being born atom by atom.