César Aira - The Conversations

He could illustrate it with an everyday situation, like choosing a barber. For a man even moderately interested in looking good — in other words, everybody — the choice of someone to cut one’s hair was a great minor problem that was generally made haphazardly, and with unsatisfactory results, because of one’s ignorance of the mysteries of the guild. A guide for the perplexed might be based on the answer to the following question: Who cut the hair of barbers? Even the most skilled barber might have difficulty cutting his own hair, and though not completely impossible, barbers were sworn enemies of the “do-it-yourself-cut”; and surely they would want to have the best cut possible in order to make a good impression on their own clients. And since barbers knew the rubric, and knew their colleagues, they would choose the best one available in a given city or neighborhood. Not the most expensive or the most famous, as would someone ignorant of the field, but really the best one, even if he worked out of a filthy hovel and created masterpieces on the heads of truck drivers and pensioners. So, all you had to do was find out where any barber whatsoever had his hair cut and that would be the first clue.

Next, Bradley continued, a clue had to be followed; it was not a point of arrival but rather one of departure. Logic dictated that this second barber would have his hair cut by a third, and the third by a fourth, and the chain would keep getting longer because the optimal in human resources was always one step away.

To start this chain one had to begin with any barber, preferably a humble neighborhood barber, not too young (he wouldn’t yet know enough) or too old (he would have lost interest in his own hair). One could strike up a relationship with him, become his customer, engage him in conversation, and at an opportune moment ask him, casually, where he went to have his hair cut. It was the only reasonable and viable method, but according to Bradley, we had to reject it out of hand, for many reasons. But if we rejected the only reasonable and viable method, what was left? Vigilance, follow-up. All we had to do was think about it for a minute to see the insurmountable practical difficulties. Who would spend months working to obtain such a trivial piece of information? We would have to pay a private detective, who would need assistants, perhaps also pay bribes, and, moreover, take certain precautions because a spy might be subject to legal reprisals for violations of privacy. And the result, laborious and expensive, would be merely the first link; it would all have to be started over with a second, then a third, a fourth. .

One had to admit, however, that it was possible. The two of them, with all their experience, and with the experience of having survived, were living proof. That ordinary man who combed through the urban labyrinth to find the Grail of scissors was the image of the destiny they had chosen, or that had chosen them. The fleeting nature of information leaped from head to head, and resignation to imperfection was merely another maneuver in the search for perfection. How ascetic

espionage was!

This simile, like any well-wrought allegory, allowed for further expansion. That chain, which would lead through its series of human links to the best of all possible barbers, could be cut (precisely, be cut!) before it had gotten very far if one of the barbers in the chain was bald and had no need for the services of a colleague. Or, by mere accident, for example, if barber number X found a colleague who created true disasters on the heads of his clients, but who could cut his, and only his, hair perfectly because of the particular shape of his head or the nature of his curls. (Though in this case, the chain would not need to be cut, because that defective barber who by accident got it right would also need to find a barber to cut his own hair.) Or, it could be cut if two barbers simply cut each others’ hair, whereby the chain would end in a little circle, a “ringlet,” to use the terminology of the profession. (The circle could also be large, and by carrying things to their ultimate consequences, could “link up” all the barbers in the world.) They had — Bradley reminded his friend, who nodded with a sad smile — lived through all these possibilities, and those “cuts” had left their marks on them, like scars on their brains.

In spite of my best intentions to move along quickly and sum things up so I could get to my point as soon as possible, I took my time in this detailed account of their conversation, and when I reconstructed ours at night, I went over it again, word by word. It was my favorite moment in the movie, the one that vindicated it, even if the producers had included it merely as filler, or to create a moment of calm to contrast with the vertigo of the action that for them and the mass audience justified the movie. The logic Bradley brandished, though ingenious, was really quite off the wall. But I liked that there had been a conversation, an exercise in intelligence between friends, which was similar to ours. The whisky was a good detail. It placed things in a different dimension, which is where things should be.

Quickly, slowly — what did these words mean in this context? Events happened at the velocity reality dictated they should happen. It was only in the telling that they could be sped up or stopped altogether, and there were probably people who transformed their lives into stories in order to be able to change speeds. But thought moved forward at a static pace, always doubling back upon itself to stop better, or rather to find better reasons to stop. Those of us who had made the voluptuousness of thought the raison d’être of our lives, like my friend and I, watched the velocities from the outside, as a spectacle. That’s why we could enjoy, even for a moment, the cheap spectacle of a movie on television. In a certain way one could say that at the peak of prejudice against popular culture, one ceased to have prejudices and no longer cared about anything.

Bradley and his old friend did not enjoy the calm of their conversation for very long. For them, too, the rush of fiction came to interrupt the syllogisms of reality. A noise coming from the nylon tubes warned them that they were being attacked by electric weapons. In fact, the young agents who were sleeping were awoken one after the other with hundred-thousand volt charges in their blood and died with their hair standing on end. The two of them organized an emergency rescue mission, which could not save those who were already dead. They connected a portable converter made of optical fibers, booted up the software, and when they turned on the siren (the maneuver took only a few seconds), all the loose electricity in the atmosphere discharged in the generation of inoffensive images. The tents exploded in a cloud of transparencies, but they managed to escape. They ducked and rolled into the darkness, and when they stood up, they took off running desperately through the mountainous terrain. They were chased by gigantic bearded Cossacks shooting streams of liquid fire at them from their sleds. The scientific consultant, who was panting like an overweight Labrador retriever, took the time to tell his friend that the Cossacks’ ammunition was made of exo-phosphorus, the latest hurrah in incendiary fuel, which burned only on the outside, not on the inside, but this made it no less destructive, quite the contrary.

They received unexpected help from the mountain owls, huge phantom-like creatures who, frightened by the noise made by the sled, took off in flight and intercepted the exo-phosphorus. As the fire wasn’t interested in their internal organs, they kept flying, though lower down (the flames must have weighed them down). They were so bright that they blinded the Ukrainian ogres, who crashed into trees, giving the fugitives an added advantage.