César Aira: The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

But before all that, and as if obscured under a leaf storm of circumstantial and psychological motives, his acceptance had a much more concrete cause: it was the first time he had been asked. Like so many other phenomena in our era dominated by media fiction, his fame had preceded him. His own myth surrounded him, and the myth’s mechanism had continually delayed him from going into action, until there came a point when doing so had become inconceivable. These wealthy barbarians had to come along with their ignorance of the subtle mechanism of the esoteric for the unthinkable to occur. In fact, Dr. Aira could have gotten out of it by telling them that there had been a mistake, a misunderstanding; he was a theoretician, one could almost say a “writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of metaphor. . At the same time, however, it was not a metaphor; it was real, and its truth resided in this reality. This would be his first and perhaps last chance to prove it.

They wanted to know when he could begin the procedure. They felt a certain urgency due to the very nature of the problem: there was no time to lose. They managed to include in their proposal a discreet query about the nature of his method, of which they obviously had not the slightest idea (this was obvious, above all, because nobody did).

Swept into the vortex of the blind impulse that had led him to accept the job, Dr. Aira said he needed a little time to prepare.

“Let’s see. . Today is. . I don’t know what day it is.”

“Friday.”

“Very good. I’ll do it on Sunday night. The day after tomorrow. Does that work for you?”

“Of course. We are at your disposal.” A pause. They looked quite intrigued. “And then what?”

“Then nothing. It is only one session. I figure it should last one hour, more or less.”

They exchanged glances. They all decided at once not to ask any more questions. What for? One of them wrote the address down on a piece of paper, then they stood up — serious, circumspect.

“We’ll expect you then.”

“At ten.”

“Perfect. Any instructions?”

“No. See you on Sunday.”

They began to shake hands. As could be expected, they had left the question of compensation for this already marginal moment.

“Needless to say. . your fee. . ”

Dr. Aira, categorical:

“I don’t charge. Not a cent.”

As awkward as his gestures, his facial expressions, and his tone of voice usually were, in this case, and only in this case, he had struck just the right note.

There couldn’t possibly be a question of money, not for anybody there! And yet, that’s all this was about. Money had been left out, but only because there was so much of it. In spite of this being the first time he’d ever dealt with such affluent people, Dr. Aira had responded with the almost instinctive confidence that only long habit can provide, as if he had done nothing his whole life but prepare himself for this moment. It must have been in his genes. In fact, someone as poor as he was couldn’t charge people as rich as they were for his services. One simply places oneself in their hands, places the rest of one’s life and one’s children’s lives in their hands. After all, billions of dollars were involved. As it was a question of life or death, it was as if the entire family fortune had been translated into wads of bills and stuffed into a briefcase. The amount was so colossal, and what he could charge, or want, or even dream of, was such a minuscule fraction of it, that the two quantities were almost incongruent. No matter how hard he tried not to think about the issue (he’d have time later, once he’d gone out the office door), he couldn’t help making a quick calculation related to the installments. It was a calculation he made totally “in the air,” in the pure relativity of fantasy, because he had still not asked for a single estimate from a printer; he had planned to do so in a few days, but this now prevented him, or better said, it gave him a good excuse to keep postponing it. Be that as it may, publishing was very cheap, and compared with the business they conducted here, the cost was marginal and insignificant. That’s how he liked to think of it: as if the financial aspect could simply be canceled. This gave real meaning to his publishing business. He realized, in that momentary fantasy, that he could seriously consider things he had been placing in the “fantasy” category, like hard covers made of cardboard wrapped in paper with a satin finish, and full-color illustrations. The leap from the large to the small, from the fortune of these magnates to his trivial dealings with some neighborhood print shop, was so enormous that through it everything became possible: all luxuries, such as folding pages, vegetable inks, transparencies inserted between the pages, engravings. . And it’s not as if he’d abstained from thinking about these options: one could almost say he had done nothing but. But he had done so as an impractical fantasy, even when he deigned to consider the most practical details. Now, suddenly, reality was intervening, and it was as if he should retrieve each and every dream, and every feature of every passage in every dream, and rethink them. He couldn’t wait to be back in his house in Flores, open his file of notes on the installments, reread them one by one, because surely they would all appear marvelously new in the light of reality. He took a taxi so he could get there more quickly. For once he allowed himself the luxury of not responding to the taxi driver’s crude attempts to engage him in conversation; he had too much to think about. Of course he still didn’t have the money, and he had even rejected it outright. And what if these people, with the insensitivity so typical of millionaires, had taken him literally? It was highly probable, the most probable thing in the world. But it wouldn’t do him any good to worry about it now.

That Sunday, at ten o’clock:

“Ding-a-ling-a-ling.”

A housemaid in uniform opened the door. It was an enormous old palatial mansion in the Recoleta neighborhood. They ushered him into a sitting room to one side, where he found the brothers and a woman in a wheelchair, who was introduced as the mother. From the entryway, Dr. Aira had caught a glimpse of dimly lit rooms, elegantly furnished, the walls covered with paintings. This was the first time he’d entered such a distinguished house, and he would have loved to explore it to his heart’s content, without rushing. But this was not the time. Or maybe it was? While he was exchanging banal greetings, he thought that in reality nobody was preventing him from doing just that, from wandering calmly through all those rooms. Because none of them knew what his method was; by definition they didn’t know what to expect, such as him telling them that he needed everyone, including the servants, to leave the house so he could remain alone with the patient for one or two hours. They would think he was going to use some kind of invasive and potentially dangerous radiation; and they would be in a hurry to leave, dragging the old woman out in her wheelchair; and all of them would climb into their Mercedes Benzes and wait at one of the brothers’ houses. Why would they care, anyway? And he would have the house all to himself for that interval, as if he owned it; the possibility of slipping some valuable object into his pocket occurred to him, but he dismissed it as a too-sordid anticlimax.

Be that as it may, the interior of the house suggested an answer to an enigma that only now, upon intuiting its solution, he could formulate. What did his contemporaries do when he knew nothing about them? What did the great writers and artists whom he admired do during the often long periods of time when they were not presenting a book or making a movie or setting up an exhibit? Because of the amount of time he spent with books, he had grown accustomed to thinking of the great figures as dead, for the simple reason that for the most part they were: in order for their works or their fame to have reached him, some time had to have passed, and even more for him to have decided to study them; and this delay, more often than not, was more than enough for a human life to complete its cycle. That’s why he would feel a little shock whenever he found out that this or that famous person was alive, simply living, without doing the things he was famous for doing. This created a kind of blank in which the nature of fame negated itself. He never understood because, truth be told, he’d never really stopped to think about it, but now he saw it all very clearly: what they did was live, though not just live, which would have been a platitude, but rather enjoy life, practice “the art of living” in houses like this one, or not as luxurious but in any case endowed with the comforts necessary to enjoy oneself and spend one’s time without any concerns. Thanks to the link between reason and imagination, he felt at that moment that he could do the same from then on.