Cesar Aira - Shantytown

“Sir, all the time! When you get up in the morning, when you take a nap in the afternoon. .”

She couldn’t say anything more because of the lump in her throat. Maxi, who thought she was speaking metaphorically, reassured her with his best smile. He didn’t know what to say. She murmured something and walked off.

Maxi headed for home, exhausted, asleep on his feet. He had too much to think about, and it was all getting mixed up. Halfway back, he began to regret not having asked her more questions, some of which were blindingly obvious. For example, where she lived. Or her name. Although, of course, if he did know her from somewhere, those questions would have been tactless. But he might have asked about the garment she was carrying. . Could there be dry-cleaners in the heart of the shantytown? What if his wildest hunches turned out to be true? It didn’t really matter: his questions could wait until the next time he saw her.

Suddenly he stopped as if a bolt of lightning had struck him on the head. Now he remembered where he knew her from! He couldn’t believe it. . but it was her. . The memory had been triggered by thinking about her last words: “When you get up in the morning. . ” He’d seen her, he saw her every day, in the mirror that hung on the wall in front of his bed. A little black figure making meaningless gestures, who turned to face him from time to time. He could only see her from his bed, from a certain angle, and he had always supposed that it was some kind of flaw in the glass of the mirror, which happened to resemble a human silhouette an inch high. But no! It was her! The last person he would have expected to meet in reality. And he wasn’t dreaming. He’d spoken to her, he’d touched her. . no, he hadn’t actually touched her. But it wasn’t a dream. She had come out of the mirror to warn him. She wanted to protect him. .

Even if she was a magical being, she had given a very intense impression of reality. As well as being a mirror fairy, she was a flesh-and-blood girl: poor, not very pretty, and probably a servant (yes: she had mentioned her “employers”). He resolved to do something for her if he could. He’d show her there were still some good people. He wasn’t sure what, but he’d think of something. He wouldn’t rush; he’d let the situation itself indicate the action required. It wouldn’t be like what he did for the collectors; it would be carefully considered, not improvised. That was the only way to return the favor. In fact, he already had an idea.

The idea had taken a very vague form in his mind, and in accordance with his determination not to improvise, he gave it time to mature. Meanwhile months went by. Winter passed. This was one of the happiest periods of Maxi’s life, though he couldn’t have said why. Perhaps because he felt that he had no obligations or plans, just a vague hope, within which something — he didn’t know what — was slowly ripening.

Sometimes, when he woke up in the morning, he saw the little woman in black moving in the mirror facing his bed. Now that they had met and spoken, it was a delight to see her; she lit up his day. He thought he could make out the features of her face, a millimeter across at the most, and when she turned toward him, he waved. Dreamily, he even thought he could see her smiling at him with a “serious smile,” although, on such a tiny scale, it was difficult to tell. Then during the day, when he remembered, he went to the mirror to look, but couldn’t find her, even when he put his nose to the glass. “She’s working now,” he thought, “or she’s gone home to the shantytown.” Where could she be? What could she be doing? However long he peered, all he could see was his own face: the face of an overgrown child, with its clear, empty eyes. He hadn’t seen her since that night, except there in the mirror.

One morning he woke up much earlier than usual. It was still dark. Light from the street lamps shone in through the window, and he heard the voices of the policemen changing shifts. All of a sudden he was completely awake and he had a strange feeling. He wondered if he’d been dreaming. That would have been unprecedented: he never dreamed, or always forgot his dreams completely. This time, in any case, he remembered nothing. He looked at the mirror but, of course, she wasn’t there. It was too early; his friend was an effect of the daylight.

Then he decided to make the best of this brutally early start: he’d finally beat the hobo and catch him sleeping. Over the previous months, they had continued to run their motionless race: Maxi had never arrived early enough to see the boy asleep, and they still hadn’t spoken or exchanged any kind of greeting. All they did was look at each other as Maxi went past. The winter had been very cold, and Maxi wondered anxiously how the poor boy could sleep out in the open like that. He tried to see how he’d managed, discreetly surveying the relics of the night. There were lots of newspapers; he must have wrapped himself in them; they were supposed to be good insulation. But even so. .! Maxi never saw any blankets, and the boy was always wearing the same clothes. Luckily it hadn’t rained.

At the onset of the cold weather, Maxi had resolved to stop and talk with the hobo one morning, on some pretext or other, or just like that. All he had to do was say, “Hi! I keep seeing you here. Don’t you have a home? I’ve got some old clothes that might fit you. Shall I bring them tomorrow?” That was the idea: to give him clothes, woolen socks, for example. Later, he could do something else, maybe help him find a place to live. It was all a matter of breaking the ice, but Maxi kept putting it off, perhaps because he was shy, or afraid of offending or frightening the boy, who knows? In the end, he decided that he’d do it when he saw the boy asleep and not before. Now he realized that the challenge had been futile, like a race against the infinite, because the boy would have been woken by the cold in the small hours of the morning; he can’t have been getting much sleep at all. And however early Maxi woke, he always stayed in bed to watch the animated figurine in the mirror. It was her fault that he never arrived in time.

But now the mirror was empty, and it was still dark outside. He leaped out of bed. Some association of ideas, favored by the unfamiliar hour, made him wonder if he’d been dreaming and, perhaps, still was. But the breakfast he bolted down was no dream, nor were the gym gear and the towel that he threw into his bag. He was already in the elevator, then down in the street. He started walking toward the freeway, in a hurry, very focused. But having reached the corner and waited for a car to pass, he was struck by a curious fact: however early you go out, you always see people who are out already. Besides, it wasn’t as early as he’d thought. It was a trick of the light: the clouds that had filled the sky were casting their dark-gray shadows over the world.

Just after crossing the street he ran into his young friend from the mirror, who rushing along, all dressed in black as usual, with her eyes half closed and an enigmatic expression on her face. Maxi froze in surprise and opened his arms:

“Hi!”

“Sir, hello. .”

It was her! Or was it? Yes, it was; who else could it be? Out of context, he didn’t recognize her. She had no distinctive features. And what was her context, anyway? The mirror? That was too unreal, and it made her look tiny, like a fly. The shantytown? But he’d only seen her there the once, and that was months ago, at night. Whatever the case, she had stopped in front of him because he was blocking her way.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he said. His vision was at its weakest in that night-like day. “It’s not you,” he hastened to explain, “it’s my eyes.”