César Aira: The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

He began to unfold the first screen without knowing where to put it. .

But I don’t think I’ve explained myself well. I’ll try again using other words. The work he was undertaking was nothing less than the identification of all the facts that made up the Universe, the so-called “real” ones in the narrow sense as well as in all the others: imaginary, virtual, possible; as well as groupings of facts, from the simplest pairs to the multitudes; and fragments of facts, that is, a thousand-year-old empire as well as one’s first attempt to drink a beer. Facts had to be considered one by one; when they were grouped together it was to constitute another fact as particular as any one of its individual components and did not exclude the separate consideration of each of these; they were not grouped by genre or species or types or families or anything else. You could not take “a dog wagging his tail” but rather “this” dog wagging his tail at a specific hour and minute of a particular day, month, year, “this” particular instance of tail-wagging.

It was the complete Encyclopedia of everything, not only of the particular (the general was also included as a fact, made particular in order to appear on the list, on the same level as everything else). Nothing less than this would work. Because if the goal was to prevent from taking place an event that the entire order of the Universe threatened to make happen, he had to search through the farthest-flung folds of the Universe for every concomitant fact.

Granted, it would be impossible to compile such an Encyclopedia. This is a typical divine idea. But the originality of Dr. Aira’s idea resided precisely in the passage to the human along the road of imperfection. He was not compiling it because he felt like it, or out of vanity, or emulation, but rather due to an urgent practical necessity: to produce an immediate and tangible result; and to do this, much less than perfection would suffice (at least: could suffice). It wasn’t a question of giving the patient perfect health but rather of extricating him from his death trance.

Even so, it was a titanic task, for the listing of the facts was merely the qualifying round before carrying out the operation itself: the selection of the concomitant facts, those that have to be set aside in order to create a provisional new Universe in which “something else” could happen and not what was supposed to happen. By the way, these exclusions and the resulting formation of a field that would serve as a different universe had an antecedent: nothing less than the Novel itself. In fact, it could be said that to write a novel one must make a list of particulars, then draw a line that leaves only some of them “inside” and all the rest in an absent or virtual state. Which constitutes a kind of exclusion sui generis. There are many things a novel does not say, and this absence makes it possible for action to take place within its restricted universe. Hence, the novel is also an antecedent of Miracles, precisely because the events the novel recounts can happen as a result of what it excludes. Admittedly, here we are not talking about Reality but rather its Representation, but if the novel is good, if it is a work of art and not merely entertainment, it takes on the weight of reality as well. Then the cliché that states that a good novel is a true miracle becomes warranted.

We have divided up the work (first, the identification of all the facts, then the selection of the relevant ones) for the purpose of clarifying the explanation. In practice, it was all done at the same time. So that when Dr. Aira took off, he did so in a block, and his uncertainty included everything.

The foldout screen began to trace its white zigzag through the inextricable confusion of everything.

Yes. . Indeed. . The places it would have to pass through would appear on their own, almost without searching for them. To speak of a “search” was a contradiction in terms; as all places were being dealt with, it was enough to encounter them. In any case, what had to be sought were the paths that led through the overabundance of encounters. And within the action, which had already begun, within the miracle of the action, he was already dodging global cells, and in a matter of seconds he had become extremely busy. The elements came, magnetized by the capricious laws of attraction as well as the rigorous law of laws, and also by the lack or absence of any law. Hence, at the precise moment the screen was initiating its trajectory, the first elements appeared with clear outlines between which the lines of exclusion were drawn: those initial elements were none other than journeys and displacements: comings and goings in airplanes, taxis, shuttles, ships, subways, Ferris wheels, on foot, on skates. . Suddenly, Dr. Aira had a lot to do. The bar of exclusion in the form of panels of an elegant white foldout screen was already dividing up vast portions of the universe. Of all the airplane trips contained in the Universe, about half were left “outside,” this to provide an acceptable margin of error; of course he couldn’t know which were compatible or incompatible with this man’s life, so he unfolded the screen in a zigzag, which anyway happened naturally, in order to increase the probabilities. If just one airplane trip belonging to the Universe in which the patient was dying of cancer remained “inside,” everything would be ruined; but it was better not to think about that; defeatism was a poor counselor, and anyway defeatism, all defeatism, was also an element of the world that had to be sorted into the reconcilable and the irreconcilable; soon it would have its turn.

This first operation was already getting complicated. The screen’s sinuous path was not one-dimensional, because along with the element “airplane trips,” there also arose geographic places that connected these trips, and the various airplanes, the food they served on board, flight schedules, the faces of the stewardesses, the people sitting next to one another, the clouds, the reasons for having boarded the plane, and a thousand others; so the zigzag of the screen was magnified on various levels and in all directions like an enormous pom-pom. Dr. Aira attempted to draw the same zigzag along all its different routes while varying the proportions between the included and the excluded.

He did this because even though it was a question of humanity, and the theory considered the human as it was manifested in the real, he was fashioning a personalized cure. So he had to take into account — even if with broad brushstrokes and divinations — the man’s lifestyle. Already he was operating in “lifestyle” and concomitant elements. He did not have a very clear idea (nobody does) of a millionaire’s daily routine, but he could imagine it and complement his fantasies with common sense. For example, he needed only simple logic to determine that this subject must have traveled little or not at all by bus, in the world where he was dying of cancer as little as in the one he was in the process of creating, where he would be saved. But he knew he shouldn’t rush to conclusions based on that fact, for his employees took buses, as did the friends and families of his employees, as did a waiter in a restaurant who had once served him, and the mother-in-law of that waiter, and people in general, all of whom became part of the system through its near and far-flung ramifications. Here the line of screens also turned into a pom-pom, and it was enough to think about the virtually infinite complications of the bus lines in Buenos Aires through any slice of time, any slice of the map, or through all the slices of all the moments since the invention of buses, to conceive of the number of turns the separator had to take. The screen cut through possibilities like sheet metal through a cube of butter, as if the material were made for it. Those who wanted to take the 86 bus to work tomorrow would have quite a surprise when they discovered that in the new universe the 86 didn’t go down Rivadavia but rather Santa Fe, or that it didn’t exist, or that it was called the 165! But no, nobody would be surprised because the “surprise” and every individual surprise, as well as every work routine (not to mention the names of the streets and the layout of the city map), were also objects to be sorted, and the resulting new universe, however it ended up, would necessarily be coherent. And, of course, public transportation in Buenos Aires would not be the only thing affected, far from it.