César Aira - The Literary Conference

Even though I didn’t trust the hotel maids, with their curiosity and brutality, I left her in the room. I could have carried her in my pocket wherever I went, but I trusted the maids more than my own absentmindedness: I’m always losing things, or leaving them somewhere, anywhere. So, I left her in the room for whole days at a time during my interminable sessions at the pool. Under lock and key, of course. Fortunately, I had no occasion for regret. Upon returning to my room, I’d take her out and place the little cage on my bedside table while I read lying down or napped. In addition to my sense of loyalty, there must have been an element of sentimentality or loneliness: after all, she was company, a reminder of my life at home and in my laboratory, a minuscule Argentinean spark.

To speak of “wasp” or “insect” as I have is an abusive oversimplification; they are words I use, as I do repeatedly in this book, only to make myself understood. To create my “wasp,” I used wasp DNA, that’s true, because I needed certain wasp traits, but I used them only as a “mannequin” (I resort to specialized jargon) for other traits my mission required and that I extracted from my gene catalogue. If I chose the wasp mannequin over that of, say, the dragonfly or the bee, it was because of its greater ability to bond with foreign genes. But the resulting critter had little in common with a wasp: for starters, it was the size of a speck of dust. Under the microscope, she looked more like a golden sea horse with strong mothlike wings shaped like fans, and something between a rhinoceros horn and a crab claw — though articulated — sprouted from her head: this was the cell punch. All of these — and more — exist in zoology. She was a prototype, a unique specimen, a nice little monster that would never be repeated.

As I was saying, I found her dead upon my return from the pool on Wednesday afternoon. Her life had been consummated in less than one week: it began in Argentina and ended in Venezuela, several thousand miles to the north. I contemplated her briefly and felt sad without knowing why. Her cadaver, which had become translucent and acquired a touch of an amber hue, was nothing more than a spot on the floor of her little house that nobody else would ever inhabit because I had built it for her. When earlier I spoke of “cage,” I did so, once again, to simplify things; it was, in fact, a cubicle the size of a thimble made of cellophane, which on a whim I fashioned into the shape of a Swiss chalet, with a pressurized chamber made of lamprey eel genes. I’m such a perfectionist that if there were a gene for furnishings, I would have made her a beautiful trousseau.

Night came. I went down to eat, then killed some time in the bar until eleven o’clock. Uncustomarily, I drank a cup of coffee. I never do so at that time of day, because then I cannot sleep, and I am terrified of insomnia. But that night I would stay up, because I had already devised a plan of action. Moreover, considering that overdetermination I know so well, how it gets set in motion and proliferates as soon as an action begins, I would need one of the coffee implements: the spoon, which I stole. It was a beautiful silver spoon with a clown engraved on the handle.

A short while later, after telling my bar companions that I was going to sleep, I left the hotel. The city was deserted. I went in the opposite direction from downtown; the road climbed steeply until it reached the highway that encircles the city; once past that, I found myself in open country in the foothills of the mountains. I continued walking for several hundred yards, until I could no longer hear the automobiles. The only light was the light of the stars, but they were so bright, so captivating, so close, that I could see everything, far and near: the blunt masses of the rocks, the deep recesses of the valley, the river flowing under the bridges.

The precise spot didn’t matter, and the one I was in was as good as any other, so I reached my hand into my pocket and took out the tiny corpse. At that moment I observed some movement among the dark masses around my feet, which I had assumed were rocks. I looked more carefully and saw that they were all moving with the slowness and regularity of zombies. They were turkey vultures, those black buzzards who spent their days hovering over the valley. Seeing them perched like that for the first time, I thought they looked like small, gloomy hunchbacked chickens. It appears I had happened upon one of their mountainside bedrooms. The walking around I was witnessing may have been due to having woken them up with my intrusion, or perhaps they really were zombies. They seemed the perfect funeral cortege for my wasp’s burial. I set to work.

With my spoon I dug a round hole about two inches wide and almost eight deep, at the bottom of which I carved out a nearly circular burial chamber; there I placed the tiny cellophane Swiss chalet with its eternal resident. I sealed the entrance with a coin and filled the vertical tunnel with dirt that I pressed down with my thumb. I placed a triangular-shaped pebble on top for a gravestone.

I stood up and dedicated a final thought to my wasp. Goodbye little friend! Goodbye. .! We would never see each other again, but I would never forget her. . I would never be able to forget her, even if I wanted to. Because nothing could replace her. Excitement mixed with melancholy. The Mad Scientist (and I, myself, on another level of this story’s meaning) could boast about the unprecedented luxury of having made the entire evolutionary process serve a unique and determined — as well as subsidiary — purpose, almost like going to buy a newspaper. . I needed somebody to get me a cell belonging to Carlos Fuentes, and for that reason, and no other, I created a being within which converged millions of years and many more millions of fine points of selection, adaptation, and evolution. . to carry out a unique service and thereby complete its purpose; a throw-away creature, as if the miracle that is man had been created one afternoon just so he could walk over to the door to look outside and see if it were raining, and once this task had been accomplished, he would be annihilated. Needless to say, the cloning procedure reduced such excessive periods of natural labor to a few days, though they remained, essentially, the same.

The moment has come, I believe, to do another “translation” of the story I am telling in order to make clear my true intentions. My Great Work is secret, clandestine, and encompasses my life in its entirety, even its most insignificant folds and those that seem the most banal. Until now I have concealed my purpose under the accommodating guise of literature. Because I am a writer, this causes no particular concern.

Marginally, this pretense has afforded me certain mundane pleasures, and an acceptable modus vivendi. But my goal — which in my quest for transparency has become my best kept secret — is typical of the comic-book Mad Scientist: to extend my dominion over the entire world.

I am aware that we have here a metaphorical alibi; “dominion” and “world” are words, and the sentence containing them lends itself to intellectual, philosophical, and paradoxical interpretations. . I refuse to fall into that trap. The dominion I’m talking about wants to be extended across reality, the “world” is none other than the objective, shared world. . The only paradox, if there is one, is that language has shaped our expectations so

extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.

The opening of the doors of reality is the infinite prolegomenon to my Great Work. And I have already made reference to one of these “doors” (an inoffensive metaphor): perfection. From there to the pool. My brain: the battlefield.