César Aira: The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

An ambulance siren broke through the quiet morning air of the neighborhood, apparently in a great hurry but also apparently taking a quite roundabout route, coming and going through those small and empty streets as if it couldn’t find its way. The physical phenomenon that makes a siren sound different when it is approaching from when it is departing, even when the distances are equal, is well known. That difference allowed Dr. Aira to reconstruct the intricate route the ambulance was taking. This is what he had been doing for the past few minutes without realizing it, absorbed as he was in other thoughts and memories; now, with the dog hurling itself at him, he became alarmed when he realized that the sound, with all its comings and goings, was drawing a circle that was closing in on him. . There it was again, that cursed ambulance, which had been pursuing him in dreams and throughout wakeful nights, in fantasy and reality, always driving with its siren blasting along the uncertain edge of two realms! Fortunately, it had never caught up with him. Like in a nightmare that is never consummated but for that very reason is even more nightmarish, at the very last minute, just when it was about to catch him, he would escape through the center of the labyrinth, though he never knew exactly how. . That was the moment of extreme danger, with terror ripping through the seams of reality, when he would transfer that sense of danger to some other element, as he had just now done with the dog, thereby establishing a continuum and crossing over that bridge, heading in the opposite direction of that fear. .

The siren’s sudden escalation to ultrasound, combined with a screech of brakes just inches away, shook him out of his daydream. The scene plunged into a present where there was no room for thinking. That’s why he needed a few seconds to realize that the ambulance had found him and that he didn’t know what to do. The unthinkable had finally occurred. The dog, caught in the middle of its leap by harmonies only it could hear, did a somersault in the air, then began racing around in circles.

He turned, gathering up his scattered dissembling reflexes, and adopted a casual expression, one of almost indifferent curiosity. Two young doctors were getting out of the ambulance and starting to walk toward him (in any case, they were only a step away) with a decisive air, while the driver, an enormous black man in a nurse’s uniform, got out of the side door and started walking around the vehicle. He froze, pale and with his mouth dry.

“Dr. Aira?” said one of the doctors, as if he were confirming rather than asking.

He nodded briefly. There was no point in denying it. He still couldn’t believe that the ambulance, after such a long time, after so many twists and turns, had actually reached him. But there it was, materialized and white, so real as to be almost unbearable. And it had lifted him out (the doctor’s words had proved it) of that urban anonymity where one watches ambulances drive by. .

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time; you can’t imagine how hard you’ve made it for us.”

“At your house,” the other said, “they told us you had gone out for a walk, and we went out to find you. .”

The driver joined the group and interrupted, jokingly:

“No chance in hell we would have imagined you’d walk straight down this street!”

The others chuckled with complicity, eager to get to the point; all three had spoken at once, and therein ended the introductory chat.

“I am Dr. Ferreyra, pleased to meet you,” said one of the doctors, holding out his hand, which Dr. Aira took mechanically. “We have a desperate case, and they have requested your intervention.”

“Come, let’s continue our conversation in the ‘living room’ so we don’t waste any more time.”

And in a split second, and with worrying ease, they were inside the ambulance, the huge black man was behind the wheel, and they took off like lightning — the siren wailing, trees and houses slipping past like screen shots, all accompanied by the dog’s furious barking. . Dr. Aira’s attention collapsed with the excess. The two young doctors were talking constantly, taking turns or overlapping, their eyes flashing, their handsome, youthful faces bathed in an invisible sweat. He heard them (too well) but didn’t register what they were saying, which didn’t worry him at the moment as he was certain that they were simply reciting the script they’d memorized, which they would be able to repeat as many times as necessary; perhaps they were already repeating it. The first thing he asked himself, once he was able to think again, was why he had agreed to get into this vehicle. He justified it by saying that it had been the simplest thing to do, the one that created the fewest problems. Now all he had to do was get out and return home; they were not going to get too carried away with this masquerade, because then it would turn into a kidnapping, and they would get into trouble with the police. His only concern now (and it didn’t present an insurmountable obstacle) was to refuse their requests and suggestions, refuse everything.

Whenever an unexpected incident disrupted his plans, he would become completely bewildered; as this happened to him fairly frequently, he had invented a remedy and had assembled a small recuperation kit, which he always carried in his pocket. The theory behind this solution was that he needed to restore the use of his senses, one by one, and the certainty that once he’d recovered his awareness of his senses, his ideas would fall into place on their own. The kit consisted of: an ampoule of French perfume, whose rubber top had a dipper immersed in the liquid, which he could remove and rub under his nostrils; a small silver bell the size of a thimble with a wooden handle; a little doll shaped like a bear, made of rabbit fur with a velvet cap he could rub his fingertips against; a quartz die with phosphorescent-colored dots, twenty-one of them, along with some other colors; and a piece of mint candy. It was so practical that he could make use of the entire kit in a few seconds. He carried it in a little tin box in his jacket pocket. But he had to use it secretly, which was impossible on this occasion, so he left it in his pocket. Moreover, he didn’t need to recover any particular level of lucidity to do so, quite the contrary. He knew he had a tendency to think too much, and he could even fall into his own traps.

They were the ones setting the trap. All he had to do was get out of it. The trap consisted of making him think until he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t a trap.

“Forgive me, I still haven’t introduced myself,” the other doctor said. “I am Dr. Bianchi.”

They shook hands, without having to stretch out their arms because they were sitting so close to each other on the folding benches in the back of the ambulance.

This was his indication that they were willing to begin repeating the explanations, now with the advantage of pretending they were just filling in details that had been left unclear or ambiguous. And the fact was, in what followed Dr. Aira managed to catch the word “Piñero,” which he had been expecting without realizing it. All the persecution he and his art were subjected to was instigated by the sinister Dr. Actyn, chief of medicine at Piñero Hospital. All the attacks and the ambushes came from there, and led to there, to the old hospital in the Lower Flores District of Buenos Aires.

Okay, so what was it about this time? And what was it going to be about? He knew it by heart: a terminal patient, the failure of conventional treatments, the family’s anguish. . The thematic spectrum was so limited. . Always the same! All the old miseries, even more depressing when taken out of their framework of absolute truth, of all or nothing. . Because a doctor, as opposed to a patient, could always try again, even when it wasn’t fictional, as it surely was here. The possibility that it was a lie contaminated the very truth it was based on: the plausible itself.