Cesar Aira: The Spy

Fused with me, there is an actor. I can’t separate him from myself, except through negatives: I don’t know what he wants, and I don’t know what he can do. I don’t even know what he’s thinking. He’s a statue of fear, an automaton of apprehension; he’s identical to me in every fiber. The author has written him into the play thematically, which produces the doppelgänger. The idea has been used so much it’s worn out: the actor who plays two characters who turn out to be doubles or twins. With the limitations inherent to the theater, the two characters, if one actor’s going to play both, must develop in different spaces. There is always a door between them, an entrance or an exit, a mistake or a change of decor. The mechanics of staging dislocate the spaces, but to the degree to which they create the fiction, they also create a continuity between them, where the horror of meeting the double face-to-face takes place. It’s possible to go a bit further, in the direction of Grand Guignol, and bring about the meeting by means of makeup, costume, lights, and taking advantage of the actors’s distance from the audience. (One important restriction: this applies to modern theater, because ancient theater worked the opposite way, using masks.) Movies, on the other hand — thanks to montage — can do it perfectly. Television, though it possesses montage, cannot use it because two elements intervene, time and the gaze of the spectator, the latter of which is too close and, as it were, sees thoughts. In theater, when we don’t want to resort to doubtful tricks (or when we actually don’t have twin actors), we have to thematize the thematization of the double in such a way that the two identical characters are revealed at the end to be only one. All the preceding seems very confused to me, and I should say it in some other way (not by providing examples but, again, by thematizing) if I want to make myself understood. Sooner or later you get to a point where it’s vitally important to be understood correctly. The hidden can’t sustain itself without that transparency upon which it becomes visible. The hidden: those are the secrets. I have secrets, just as everyone has them. I don’t know if mine are more serious than others, but I take all kinds of precautions so they don’t come out. It’s natural that your affairs seem important to you: the ego is a natural amplifier. If we’re dealing with a character caught right in the middle of the representation of the play to which he belongs, in the very center of the plot, the amplification reaches deafening levels. The vertigo of the action impedes any distancing. Well then, if my most protected secret is what I did in the past, perhaps the secret will come out on its own, in the facts, since according to healthy logic the result of what happened should be the current state of things. But anyone who tries to unmask me with the classical “by their acts shall ye know them” will be left empty handed because what I want to hide is exactly that in my case the process was just the reverse: the acts remained in the past, and no one would be able to deduce what they are by contemplating the flower open in the present. We can attribute that curious aberration to the nature of my original action, which consisted in a separation, in a “distancing” with respect to my very self. I thought I was seriously ill (I won’t go into details), and I committed the infamy of abandoning my wife and small children. The years went by, I changed personality, I lived. I achieved the dream of living. When I was young, I knew nothing about life, and later it was the same; I never knew what it was. The most I managed to know was that life existed, and love, and adventure: that there was something beyond books. And since I was always an optimist and always had faith in my intelligence, I came to the alarming conclusion that I too could learn what life was and how to live it. I’m not looking for excuses, but at least I can explain myself. My problem was to have been too ambitious. I wanted everything, that is, two things: intelligence and life. Everyone else just leapt into life without a second thought, as soon as the opportunity turned up. Brutal, mistaken, criminal… but because of their simple decision to live, they provoked the transmutation of their vices and ended up happy, while I wanted to consume intelligence and reach happiness from the other side. Well… I’m not blaming anyone.

In sum, before it was too late, in despair, I broke with my past. When the curtain goes up, I’m the double of the man I was, I’m my own twin, my identical other. Twenty years have passed, and I’m still in the same spot (I can’t fool myself, even by being another, my own other). I’ve learned computer science, and the same intellectual brilliance I exercised in literature I now use in politics and betrayal, and now it turns out I’m a double agent, infiltrated both in the high command of the forces occupying Argentina and in the secret coordination of the resistance. The action takes place in the palatial salons of the Villa de Olivos, at around midnight during a reception in honor of the ambassadors from Atlantis. I’m wearing evening clothes, extremely elegant, cold, competent, hypocritical as always. The most astonishing thing is that I haven’t aged; the mirrors show me the image of the man I was at age 30, but I know that old age is just a step away, behind a door. I always thought that my youthful air (which when I was 30 already caught people’s eye) is a symptom of my lack of life. It’s nothing more than a suspended sentence, but until when does the suspension last? The biological process follows its implacable course, but if after a change of name, personality, and profession the suspension continues, I don’t really know what I should do.

I’m a leading man, the supreme human flower open in the present, in the theater of the world. “By my acts” no one would be able to know me, because I’ve left my acts in another life. But low and behold, the acts return, and in the most unexpected way. They’re returning tonight, at this very moment, so punctual that it seems quite incredible: but that’s the law of the theater of the world. If a man lives happily and tranquilly with his family for decades, and one day a psychopath gets into the house and takes everyone prisoner, rapes them, kills them, on which day will the movie that tells their story be set? On the previous day?

The staff reports an extra guest, for me the most surprising: my wife Liliana (I should have said my ex-wife, the wife of the man I was). Of course, she has no idea I’m here, that I’m a gray eminence in the high command; everyone thinks I’m dead, disappeared; as for me, during these past 20 years, I’ve heard nothing about her. That’s how radical my break with the past was. She could have been dead and buried, but she isn’t: she’s alive and here… I saw her by chance, from a distance, in the golden salon; she didn’t see me. I sent my secretary to check, and meanwhile I strolled into other salons in this labyrinthine palace. I didn’t need excuses to do so, because during the “real time” of the reception, the closed door meetings take place. The situation is incendiary; imminent changes are foreseen; there is a considerable charge of nervousness in the air.

Liliana came to the reception to have an audience with the ambassadors from Atlantis; she won’t have another chance because they will be in this country for barely a few hours. They’re here to sign a bridge credit agreement and will leave at midnight: from the party, they’ll go directly to the airport in limousines whose motors are already running. Liliana’s intention is to ask to have her son returned to her alive. He was arrested — I only found out just now. Her son is also mine, Tomasito, my first born, whom I stopped seeing when he was a baby, when I left home, and whom I’d forgotten. A simple calculation tells me he must be 22 years old. Hmm… So he entered the opposition, joined the resistance, and was captured. If he got involved in politics, and in that way, it was certainly because of his mother’s influence. Now I’m remembering Liliana’s hatred for Menem, Neustadt, Cavallo, and Zulemita… I can also explain how she was able to enter the villa tonight: the leaders of the resistance, of which I’m a member, must have given her the invitation: I myself had a couple sent to them as I always do for official affairs, just in case they want to infiltrate someone to plant a bomb or kidnap someone. But knowing her, I know that she couldn’t come alone: she’s so incapable when it comes to taking action that not even being in the process of fighting for her son’s life could she have done without help. Exactly — I discover she’s accompanied by a lawyer from Amnesty, who is also (only I know this) a prominent member of the resistance’s central committee.