César Aira - The Conversations

By pure chance, Bradley came across the entrance to an ancient and abandoned coal mine. They entered its underground galleries without thinking twice. They used a burning owl feather sprayed with exo-phosphorus to light their way, for it gave off an intense white light. Calm was restored; here, they were safe. It was as if they could pick up their conversation where they had left off, now no longer in the inflatable tent surrounded by espionage equipment but rather in the galleries of an underground coal mine filled with feldspar and old lichen. I liked that touch, because it suggested that in reality conversations are never interrupted, they merely change scenarios, and change subjects, and in order to bring about that change the interlocutors have to risk their lives.

They ended up in a huge cavern, the limits of which they could not even see, and they approached a lake of still water. Along the banks, magnetite dust had formed piles of black foam. A regular “glop glop” in the deep underground silence made them peer out along the surface of the water; there they saw floating medallions made of a viscous substance, which seemed to be breathing. Taking every precaution, they picked one up and examined it in the light of the owl feather. This was the toxic algae, which they had been looking for in vain until that moment and by chance had found where least expected. Excited, having totally forgotten the danger they had just confronted, the scientific consultant analyzed the viscous material, mentally reviewed the bibliography, gasped a “No, it can’t be!” which refused to cross the bounds of rationality, then resigned himself to a perplexed and awed “But it is!” By revealing their secrets, the toxic algae opened up a path until then concealed from science, which gave access to the best kept secrets of the universe, because in reality they were not algae but rather retro-algae, vegetal mutants with nervous systems, which formed a bridge between life and death. He wondered if he was dreaming.

With a little effort on the part of the viewer, I said, the oneiric atmosphere became palpable. I pointed out to my friend and perfected the argument ever so slightly alone in bed, that when one watches movies in the theater, one’s concentration, enhanced by the darkness and the fact itself of going to the theater, takes one into the fiction completely and makes one cease to think of it as fiction. On the contrary, at home, when watching movies on television, one inevitably does not enter it completely. A part of one’s consciousness remains outside, contemplating the game of fiction and reality, and here the emergence of a critical sensibility becomes inevitable. It ceases to be a dream one is dreaming alone and becomes the dream that others are dreaming. It is not so much an issue of finding mistakes in the construction or the logic (that would be too easy) but rather the birth of a certain nostalgia, of partially glimpsed worlds, within reach, but still inaccessible. .

What kinds of worlds? my friend wanted to know.

I didn’t want to tell him that I was thinking about my nocturnal “revisions,” because I kept my little drowsy and solitary theater a secret, and this was not the moment to reveal it (that moment would never come). I squirmed out of it by telling him that I wanted to finish my explanation, and then maybe we could clear things up once and for all and return to a civilized conversation, without retro-algae or exo-phosphorus. .

Or Señorita Wild Savage. .

Ugh! I had forgotten. That, too, and so many other things. So many circles we had to run around in to get to the Rolex!

An entire lifetime, right? my friend said, and when I reached this remark in my memory, and only then, did I remember something else that subtly changed the tone and meaning of our conversation. I just said that I had never told him, nor did I ever plan to, about my habit of recalling at night the conversations we had had in the afternoon. Nor had I told my other friends I met and conversed with, nor anybody else. But I had told each of them, on some occasion brought about by the haphazard nature of conversation, about some of my obsessions or whims or little oddities, because I can say that I am a man without secrets. So, I must have told somebody that ever since I was a little boy, I had dreamed of owning a Rolex. It was completely gratuitous, and I had never taken it seriously, to the point that I had never even considered buying one, or even finding out how much one cost. Moreover, it didn’t fit my personality; and that’s precisely where the idea must have come from: from that vague longing we all have to be somebody else. What I didn’t remember was if I had told this friend in particular. If I had (and in my nocturnal reflection I had no reason to suspect that I had, besides the slight intonation in that “right?” of his), the whole conversation, from the moment I had brought up the movie, began to have a double bottom, and there emerged a new possibility for the interpretation of each remark.

It was a little too obvious for me to start speculating about where this old, never explored fantasy had come from; we all have fantasies, old and new, and that little luxury item was probably, at some moment in my childhood, a good vehicle for my imagination. Whatever the case, I glanced at it quickly and from afar (at the fantasy, at the always deferred work of analyzing myself and trying to understand my life), and with this distraction in addition to the previous reflections, I got behind as far as the movie was concerned. What I mean is: in the real conversation, in the café, I had kept talking about the movie; the entire parenthesis took place in the nocturnal reconstruction. And it really should have been a parenthesis, there was nothing preventing it from being a parenthesis, but, whether because of contamination by movies in general and by particular movies that keep playing while one is distracted and thinking about something else or going to the bathroom, the truth is that it was as if the conversation had continued, and I had been left behind. So, to catch up I had to sum things up and take a leap forward, violating my standard of rigorous step-by-step memory.

The goatherd was unable to fall asleep and went outside. He took a walk under the great Moon of Ukraine, then began to follow a strange stream of water flowing off the rocks. His goats must have also been suffering from insomnia because they had gotten out of their pen and were now floating in the night air, as light as kites, white and phosphorescent. They were easy to make out, and for a moment he tried to follow them as they drifted about, but they dispersed, so he continued to follow the stream of water uphill, which brought him to the separatists’ secret laboratory. He managed to infiltrate it, taking advantage of the lapse in vigilance occasioned by the departure of the squadron of Cossacks on motorized sleds. He snuck through the enormous and ultramodern installation dug into the mountainside, where hundreds of technicians worked in overalls or radiation suits with hoods and visors. He overpowered one and put on his suit, which allowed him to reach the command room, where the reactor was controlled; there, he merely pressed a button, any button. Alarms went off, loudspeakers crackled with orders to evacuate, people ran helter-skelter, and he did the same. Since he didn’t know where he was going, he went the wrong way and was sucked into a particle accelerator of dehydrating water, which carried him into the unknown depths of the earth, from which he emerged, mounted on an atom of phenomenal size, accompanied by Bradley and the professor and encircled by swirling electrons. The three fell into the hands of the enemy. From the diamond plasma screen, Larionov greeted them ironically and with the classic, “We meet again, gentlemen.” In the midst of the general catastrophe, the security guards led the three prisoners to Larionov’s office: dark boiserie, an enormous library with bronze ladders that ran on tracks, leather armchairs, all in an English Edwardian style that was in sharp contrast to the aerodynamic high technology of the rest of the complex. Hanging on the walls in the niches of his library: masterpieces. Bradley walked up to one and contemplated it with a knowing look: “The stolen Gauguin.” They sat down. The host poured out two shots for the older men, then turned to the young goatherd and said derisively, “What would you like? A glass of goat milk?” The visitors’ attention, and with it, the camera, was drawn to a bibelot on a desk. It was the head of a clown, which was constantly making faces. “Do you like my toy?” Larionov asked. He poked the clown’s nose, producing a cascade of comic expressions. He explained that it was made of liquid pig-iron. It wouldn’t be long before the world found out what he was capable of. But his bravado had no depth of conviction, nor could it. The laboratory was collapsing around him, the sirens were blaring, the Cossacks of his personal guard, who were standing at the door of his office, were exchanging worried looks. Bradley, who was watching them out of the corner of his eye while remaining engaged in a natural dialogue with the villain, took advantage of a blast (the explosion of some cauldron) to attack them, taking a machine gun from one and shooting the others; at the same time, the goatherd threw his glass of goat milk at Larionov, preventing him from pulling his gun out of his desk drawer. The fight intensified as the walls fell down around them — the thousands of books turning into projectiles — and the roof was violently blown off. Larionov, who had ended up in hand-to-hand combat with the professor, slipped out of his grasp and climbed one of the bronze ladders; above the roof, a helicopter was waiting for him; he climbed into the pilot’s seat and started the engine. With a sinister laugh, he began to rise, but the goatherd had run after him and managed to grab onto one of the helicopter’s landing skids. The laboratory was sinking inexorably, and on the plateau left behind stood the only survivors, Bradley and the professor, watching anxiously as the helicopter rose with the goatherd dangling from it. But he did not dangle there for long, for by sheer dint of strength, he hoisted himself into the cabin and came to blows with Larionov. The spectacle, visible from the top of the mountain, was quite odd: silhouetted against the black star-studded sky floated a constellation of phosphorescent goats and a parliament of burning owls. One of the owls touched one of the blades of the helicopter and broke it. The helicopter exploded, but not before the goatherd had jumped. His freefall was interrupted by one of the floating goats, which he mounted and rode away on, carried by the wind, toward the horizon, or perhaps to the Moon.