César Aira - The Conversations

But then. . are you talking about the real-real actor?

Who else? And what does that mean? Are you saying there is a double “real” and a single “real”?

Don’t start again with your twisted logic. Let’s talk about the movie we both saw, please. There was the actor who played the goatherd, and the actor who played the actor who played the goatherd, right?

Just one moment! Now you’re the one with the twisted logic. What’s with this regressus ad infinitum?

Infinitum my foot! Did you see the movie or didn’t you?

Of course I saw it! I saw more of it than you did!

It doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you missed the whole part about the actor. . But I know you didn’t miss it. You yourself told me about it, about his mansion in Beverly Hills, his dog Bob, the press conference in Paris. .

I was stunned.

But what does that have to do with it?

What do you mean, what does that have to do with it? Did you see it or didn’t you see it?

I saw it. . Yes. . Now that you mention it, I remember seeing it, but I don’t know what that has to do with the movie. So it wasn’t. .?

You thought it was. .?

You thought that I thought. .?

The questions and answers crisscrossed back and forth over the café table at the speed of light, until the questions turned into answers and the answers into questions. In bed, while nervously tossing and turning, I couldn’t manage to make them occur in the correct order. The quid of the question was that I thought that they had inserted scenes from one of those documentaries about the making of the movie — what they call “backstage” scenes — that are so common these days when they show a movie. It seems, however, that these were part of the movie itself. I would not have gotten so confused had I paid closer attention, but one does not pay close attention to such entertainment.

Little by little, then all in one fell swoop, with that majestic slowness the instantaneous tends to have, everything became crystal clear. The basic plot of the movie, the one we had both watched, was of the filming of a movie. The CIA wanted to investigate the supposed production of enriched uranium by the Ukrainian separatists and sent their agents to investigate an area under suspicion, but they did so under the guise of shooting an action and adventure thriller, a coproduction, on location. To make themselves credible, they hired a famous actor, obviously imaginary, though played by a real famous actor. And to perfect appearances, they really did make the movie, though they were not very concerned about its quality or verisimilitude, for it was merely an excuse to carry out their espionage; a few scenes from that nonsensical shoot (whose plot involved Señorita Wild Savage and the Goatherd) were mixed in without much explanation, creating a second level for the audience, independent of the first though not completely, because the characters on the “real” level remained in costume and in character just as they did on the “fictional” level. I had not perceived that there were two levels: I had fused them as best I could, adding patches and sewing lateral and transverse seams, any which way. My friend, on the other hand, more attentive than I on the one hand and more distracted on the other, had correctly discriminated between the two levels, but he was mistaken as to the hierarchy between them: he held that the story of Señorita Wild Savage and the Goatherd was “real,” and that of the Secret Laboratory was “fictitious.” An excusable error, because even after we had cleared this up à deux, we did not manage to decide which of the two levels the dehydrated water belonged to. The most disorienting thing of all was that the entire movie followed the growing awareness of the main actor, an actor they’d hired under false pretenses, telling him he was to play in a real action and adventure movie set in the mountains of Ukraine; little by little, in conjunction with the strange events that took place during the filming, he began to realize that he was involved in espionage and politics, a plot that was not at all fictitious, and he ended up by accepting his role as a real hero.

The only comment I dared make once we’d finished, exhausted from untangling the knots that we ourselves had tied, was that the recourse of a fiction within a fiction should be forbidden. That business of several levels had already been overexploited, and it was beginning to show its true colors as an easy way out, a “whatever.” One might even begin to suspect that in our technological state of globalized civilization, there were no more stories, and to make one — or the remnants of one — work, the stories of the stories had to be told.

But had it not always been like that? Wasn’t reality, to which all stories aspired, the story of stories?

Feeling discouraged, as if we were infecting each other back and forth and that this was all the result of mental fatigue, I shook my head and said that I refused to follow him along that path of subtleties. I refused to defame reality. I reminded him of my motto, taken from the work of Constancio C. Vigil: “Simplify, my son, simplify.” Reality was simple. It did not have levels. That stupid movie might have taken us a bit too far afield, and now it was time for us to return to our point of departure.

To return to our point of departure, in practice, meant to change the subject. And, in fact, we were about to do so when we realized how much time had passed and that it was time to say goodbye. Along with time, our desire to change the subject had also passed. My friend said that on balance he could affirm that he liked the movie. Or, at least — he corrected himself after thinking about it for a moment — after our thorough critique of it, he was now starting to like it.

In the conversation, I partially agreed with him, but at night I had time to do so fully. Above all because there was nothing to agree or disagree about: he hadn’t said that the movie was good, but rather that he had liked it; with taste, one can only concur or not. My own taste had not been so complacent, but with the reflections surrounding my mnemonic exercises, it became more flexible. I was experimenting on myself with the benefits of repetition. It is not that I was comparing that ridiculous movie lacking all substance to our conversations, which were pure substance. But the mechanism was similar. Whatever was improvised and stuttered and stammered, sometimes without proper syntax when we got carried away in the excitement of the discussion, I then polished and smoothed out and varnished during my nocturnal repetition. Out of sheer chance, my friend had had a hint of the aesthetic sensations my secret activity afforded me; this placed him and his taste in the perspective of art and thought once again, that is, a transfiguring perspective.

Hence, anticipating my own remembering, I had no problem telling him that I also liked it, or at least that I did not regret having seen it. It was ingenious, and had given rise to a range of musings. Adventure was never completely squandered. Its explosions released fragments that, as opposed to all the other objects in the universe, did not obey the laws of gravity; instead, they were like miniature universes, expanding in the mental vacuum, and definitely enriching time.

My friend pondered the metaphor, but for his part he thought that they did act in accordance with gravity, even metaphorically: because the movie’s creators arranged things so that all the episodes led back to a central point, and he found this to be its main value. Not only of this movie in particular, but rather of all the ones he’d ever seen. Not that he saw that many; they were a byproduct of his evening fatigue, his need for relaxation after a day of high-level intellectual effort. Merely entertainment, but one against which those same efforts rebounded, and by so doing, were enriched. And even with the small amount of attention he paid those movies, he could not fail to be amazed at the skill with which they tied up all the loose ends, and the threads of the characters’ motives, and made all the divergent subplots coincide. Movies made purely for entertainment were a business; nevertheless, they employed the recourses of serious art, and with the help of some kind of miracle, they turned out well. The most surprising aspect was the enormous number of movies made (that had been made and would continue to be made), and all of them without fail were and would be puzzles. How did they do it?