Cesar Aira: The Spy

But there is something else, something that challenges all imagination, something I discern by listening in on some conversations while I’m hidden behind doors or curtains: Liliana has gone insane. The logical conclusion would be that her reason could not stand the anguish of having a disappeared son and having to face the situation alone. But I suspect reality is less logical, that she’s been insane for a long time, that she lost her mind suddenly or little by little and imperceptibly ever since I left her. All of which makes me think this is the most obvious manifestation of her dementia, one I can detect from my hiding place: she’s saying she’s accompanied in this petition by her lawyer… and her husband! Could she have remarried? No, because she refers to me by my full name: César Aira, the famous (she exaggerates) writer. She says I’ve stayed behind in the salon speaking with someone and that I’ll be joining her immediately. She’s crazy, hallucinating, poor thing. I instantly make a bold decision: I’II make her illusion real, reassume my old personality and appear at her side before the ambassadors… not only a pious gesture but one with a very practical goal: I know exactly what must be said to move the Atlantis ambassadors to act, to put pressure on the occupation forces so Tomasito will get out. Without my intervention, he doesn’t have a hope. And I can do it properly, because even though I abandoned and repudiated my family, he’s still my son, my blood.

I have a room in the Villa de Olivos that I use when I have to spend the night here during crisis periods (of which there are many) or when my services are needed around the clock. I run to it and change clothes. I choose a casual style that most resembles how I remember my style in my previous life. I tousle my hair, put on glasses, and there we are! I make my entrance: Good evening, excuse my delay, I’m César Aira, the father of the disappeared boy. The mad woman accepts me with naturalness, that’s why she’s mad; 20 years of absence mean nothing to her disturbed mind. But not entirely: taking me aside, she scolds me for not changing my sweater… you’ve got others, this one’s all stained… they’re going to think I’m a slob… you could have put on other trousers, they’re ironed… She doesn’t change! My entire marriage comes back in waves, marriage is a sum of small details, any one of which represents all the others. Things are not so easy. During the exposition, I have to slip away using some pretext, put on my evening clothes, comb my hair, attend to the leaders of the occupation who need me to discuss matters of the greatest urgency: they’re predicting that tonight there will be an explosion of the tensions in the high command. The concrete result will be a coup (they’re offering me the presidency of the central bank); there will be executions and murders among them, which will be hidden from public opinion. In an intermediary room (everything is taking place very quickly) I again become “the writer” César Aira, at Liliana’s side. And later, I once again put on my tuxedo. It’s all entrances and exits much in the vaudeville style, complicated moreover by a mission I set for myself: to tell the lawyer from Amnesty about the coup, together with instructions for a plan I’ve devised so the resistance can take advantage of the internal convulsion and arouse the people at the exact moment when the occupation forces will have no leaders. It must take place tonight. The palace coup will be carried out by relying on speed and silence: they calculate it will be over in a few hours, before dawn (they’ve taken advantage of the highly publicized visit of the Atlantis ambassadors as a façade and this reception to gather together all the conspirators and their victims without arousing suspicion), it would never occur to them that the resistance could find out about it as it was happening and make a lightning strike… and it will! At least it will if I can tell the man who’s supposedly the lawyer, whom I know to be a member of the resistance’s central committee. In my earlier conversations I arranged things to keep him busy so he couldn’t show any surprise at the unexpected appearance of “César Aira.” Now, in my other guise, in evening clothes and with my hair slicked down, I take him aside…it has to be very, very aside. I know very well, better than anyone, that “the walls have ears,” especially here, but I also know there are many small rooms and offices where I can take him to make the revelation — I myself directed the placement of microphones, I know where they are and how to get into the silent zones. Even so, I’m beset by the suspicion — completely irrational for my new technocrat personality — that we’re being heard. I feel as if suddenly the fourth wall were missing, and that there are people sitting in the darkness, paying close attention to everything I might say. It’s the typical kind of fantasy that would have occurred to the writer I was and who’s now returning. I resist the temptation to accept him, but I don’t dare reject him completely; there’s too much at stake. So I say to the lawyer, “No, wait a minute, I can’t talk here, come to the office next door.” But when we’re there, the same thing happens, and if we move again, the suspicion comes along with us. The expense in useless sets is huge; it could only be justified by record-setting audiences, but then a vicious circle is created, because the more spectators there are, the more my suspicion grows that I’m being spied on and the more often I have to move in search of a privacy that continues to flee. And besides, the minutes are passing without any advance in the action. It’s catastrophic, the failure of the play. I don’t know how to fix things; actually, I know that at this point, there’s nothing to be done. My error was that in the enthusiasm of the action I forgot that this was a theatrical performance. More clearly, I didn’t forget , but instead didn’t know , because I can’t know it or have ever known it, since for me, as a character, all this is reality. I should clarify that this scene aborted by my infinite postponements and displacements was fundamental, because until now the audience (I no longer know if they’re hypothetical or real) had no way to know why the same actor was playing two characters who were so different, so the conversation with the lawyer was conceived as a grand revelation, and something like the general explanation of the intrigue. Everything’s falling apart. Nothing important is being lost, because the play is ridiculous, melodramatic, based on facile tricks. Perhaps the very principle of the work wasn’t worthwhile, and the development was defective. While I was a writer, I thought I was a good one, but nothing confirmed such an idea in reality — not success, not my personal satisfaction. Those occasional admirers who were always turning up confirmed nothing. I thought death would be a solution, a severing of the Gordian knot, but ever since my disappearance 20 years ago now, things have gone on the same as before: a few readers, always in universities, writing theses on me, and nothing else. They seem interested and even enthusiastic, but they aren’t an audience. The audience would have made me rich, and I wouldn’t have had to drift off in fantasies. The way things have turned out, the doubts persist, suspense is maintained, and there will be no denouement. Between my life and my death as a writer the same suspicion sets in that paralyzes me and keeps me from speaking in the to-ing and fro-ing between the theater’s virtual and real spaces.

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. Wildly popular in Latin America, he has published more than seventy books of short fictions and essays.