Cesar Aira - Shantytown

So he went into the gym and headed for the dressing room, but as he was walking past the little curved bar, something behind it caught his eye. It was Saturno, lying on the floor. Maxi dropped his bag and kneeled beside him, unsure what to do. The recumbent body was not quite still, indicating that Saturno was, at least, alive. “Don’t move him,” Maxi thought, remembering instructions that he had once heard; but he also remembered that those instructions applied to people injured in accidents, which didn’t seem to be the case here. Anyhow, he had to call an ambulance.

Looking more closely, he realized that the movement he had noticed was concentrated in Saturno’s lips: he must have been trying to speak. His eyes were closed. Maxi bent down but still couldn’t hear anything. Maybe the movements were twitches or spasms. Even so, he wanted to be sure, so he bent further down, turned his head and put his ear to the mouth of the fallen man. Then he did hear something: a few words or phrases that seemed very clear and distinct, but so faint that only someone with auditory superpowers could have understood them. It was like what happens when you have the impression that a switched-off radio is still transmitting, but even if you put your ear right into the speaker, you can’t hear a thing. Luckily, the gym was absolutely quiet, otherwise Maxi’s experiment would have failed straight away. He concentrated as hard as he could. Finally he recognized or thought he recognized a word:

“. . Maxi. .”

He recoiled and looked at Saturno in amazement. The barman’s face was still inert, except for the twitching of his lips. Maxi lowered his ear again, and resumed his concentration.

“. . don’t be scared, it’s nothing. It’s my heart again. Sit me up.”

“What?” He had meant to whisper, but it came out as a shout because he couldn’t control his thundering voice.

“Are you deaf or just pretending? Sit me up, I said.”

Maxi was so stunned he couldn’t react. A dialogue was possible, it seemed, but it was a dialogue with a dead man, whose voice was separated from his body. This impression was reinforced by the nature of Saturno’s command, because Maxi had always heard the verb “to sit” used intransitively, referring to a position that you adopt for yourself — “I sit,” “you sit,” “he sits” — and this “sit me up” sounded like an impossible cross between the first and second persons. In spite of which, he understood. But in order to understand he had to imagine the person who had spoken as dead and yet react as if he were alive. This reminded him of something that often happened at home. When his parents were watching TV chat shows with showbiz personalities, and some old actor came on, they would always say: I thought he was dead! Me too! I could have sworn he died ages ago! And even though the actor would be talking about his current work and projects for the future, they kept seeing him as a dead man, at once historical and forgotten, a ghost from their childhood or further back still, from the age of silent cinema or the traveling theaters of the nineteenth century. Maxi had no idea who these actors were, but he would get caught up in the parental reminiscing, and in the end they came to seem familiar.

He kept his ear to Saturno’s mouth. Not because he wasn’t convinced, but because he’d begun to enjoy it. But if he had to sit him up, that was what he had to do. The logical solution would have been to sit him on the floor and prop his back against the fridge; as well as being easy to do, it would have left him in a comfortable position. But Maxi didn’t think of that. Instead, he lifted Saturno up and sat him on the high stool behind the bar. His legs dangled, and since the stool had no back, Maxi had to keep hold of him. The barman’s body felt as heavy as a mass of solid lead. Maxi took Saturno’s hands and placed them on the bar, like a pianist’s hands on a keyboard.

“Shall I call an ambulance?”

He put his ear to Saturno’s mouth again. It was more awkward now.

“No, leave me like this. I’ll be right in a minute.”

Maxi tried letting him go, to see if he was stable. He had to shift him a few inches so that his center of gravity was in line with the middle of the stool, but then he stayed put. His eyes were still closed.

“I’ll get changed and come straight back,” Maxi said.

He picked up his bag and headed for the dressing room, but before going through the door, he turned to take a last look at Saturno. The bartender was still there, in exactly the same position, with his eyes closed. He looked very fragile, perched on that high stool, and was liable, Maxi had to admit, to fall at any moment. Saturno was a middle-aged man. Not old — he wouldn’t have been sixty — but jaded, worn down by a routine job and a pessimistic character. His life had not been happy. Starved of love, his heart was rebelling against its owner.

There are so many people like that! thought Maxi. Life feeds on life, it has no choice. Life stokes its furnace with life, but not with life in general; it burns the unique and particular life of the individual, and when there’s nothing left to feed to the flames, the fire goes out. And yet. . no one is alone in this. There are others, many, many others, each living his life or hers, and on it goes. The little voice that he had heard, so distant or rather. . so tiny — a miniature voice, a dollhouse voice, to be studied under a microscope — that little voice was conveying a message from another dimension. An echo, miniaturized by distance, but a distance that was neither spatial nor temporal. And yet that miniature interval could make all the difference in the world, as when a minute’s delay prevents an encounter that might have changed the course of a life. . In fact, thought Maxi, a marginal shift with respect to the time or the space of others — a minute, a second, a inch — could mean that you end up living in a different reality, where any kind of magic might be possible.

When he walked into the dressing room he was always a little surprised to see the floor still wet from being mopped, but this morning there was something far more surprising than water on the floor: the semi-naked body of a young woman, lying as if she’d been suddenly struck down. She was bathed in the light shining in through the sliding doors that opened onto the balcony, which the sheen of the wet tiles intensified. The warmth of her body had evaporated some of the floor’s moisture, creating a kind of vaporous aureole around her.

It was such a surprise that Maxi stopped dead with his head tilted slightly forward. He forgot about the swinging door, which he had shoved open, so when it came swinging back, and his hand wasn’t there to stop it, the wood struck him on the forehead with a resonant clunk that echoed all through the gym. Maxi staggered backward, recoiling from the blow, and for a moment his vision went blank. When the world reappeared, the door was shut in front of him. He opened it again, keeping hold of it this time, and slipped inside. What he had seen before was still there, exactly the same. He approached the girl, rubbing his forehead, where a bump had started to form.

When he was standing over her, Maxi realized who she was: Jessica, one of the morning regulars, and one of the earliest starters, though not as early as him. It was strange that he hadn’t recognized her before, since he saw her every day. But when it comes to recognizing people, he thought, it all depends on context, and he had always seen Jessica in her leotard, working out on one of the machines, chatting and laughing: nothing like this lifeless figure, and yet it was her.

The first thing that occurred to Maxi was that she had slipped on the wet floor. Except that there were no footprints; it was almost as if the floor had been mopped around her. He turned around and saw that his own footprints were clearly visible.