Cesar Aira - Shantytown

“And you get your students to make these?” asked Maxi, intrigued by the artifact.

“It’s an advanced class. But yes, they have to ‘get it out.’ Otherwise they fail.”

“It must be hard for them,” said Maxi, before adding ironically: “But you’re right to be tough; they need skills to equip them for life.”

His mother just smiled. It was a topic they often debated: the usefulness of what she taught. He was amusing himself with the cut-out, opening and closing the fans.

“It’s pretty. I like it.”

“Can you leave it alone, Maxi? You’re going to wreck it. One little twist and it’s ruined for good. They can’t be fixed, these things.”

He put it down on the table, suspecting (with good reason) that the damage was already done.

“Do you still have to keep practicing? Don’t you know it off by heart?”

“I’m always inventing something new. Sometimes I don’t even know myself what it will turn out to be.”

“You must have folded so many sheets of paper, Mom. It’s amazing you don’t have calluses on your fingers.”

With that, he left. He headed for Rivadavia and crossed it, as usual. The weather was threatening, and people were in a hurry. Two or three times he emerged from his daydreams, thinking that it had begun to rain, but it was a false alarm each time. “If it starts, I’ll go back home when I get to Bonifacio,” he thought, before remembering that he had an appointment or, rather, two. He shook his head, smiling indulgently at himself: “What can you do? Head in the clouds.” But then he saw the hitch. The rain could spoil everything. He shrugged his shoulders.

It didn’t matter! What he had planned was beyond those contingencies. Anyway, he wasn’t afraid of the rain. . or was he? He couldn’t actually remember. He couldn’t remember a time when it had rained. It’s true that he was constantly distracted by one preoccupation or another, but it was still odd that he couldn’t recall a single experience of rain. And yet he knew perfectly well what rain was. “And if I don’t, I’m about to find out,” he thought. He did have some excuse, however: it hadn’t rained in Buenos Aires for months. And when a kind of weather isn’t happening, we tend to forget what it’s like.

In the vacant lots beside the railway he found someone who needed his help. But it was such an unusual day and he was so absorbed in his thoughts that he almost kept on walking. It was a woman, with a two- or three-year-old child; she was looking through the bags of trash and pushing a supermarket trolley. He stopped abruptly when he’d already passed her, and turned around. In general he didn’t offer to help women on their own, for fear that that it might be taken the wrong way. But his fame must have spread among the collectors in the neighborhood, because it seemed that none of them could take it the wrong way now. Fame is always based on some kind of misunderstanding, but misunderstanding is everywhere: nothing is more universal. In any case, the woman was very mannish; her body, draped in an oversize nylon jacket, betrayed no signs of femininity. She was small and nervous, no doubt undernourished, with disheveled hair spilling out from under a woolen cap. Maxi took charge of the vehicle, and she seized the opportunity to speed up her rummaging, almost oblivious to the little girl, who trotted about on her own, until Maxi hoisted her into the trolley.

They headed west for a while until they got to the square, where the woman slipped in through the service entrance of a restaurant after dismissing her “draught horse,” with whom she had exchanged no more than a few indistinct syllables. Perhaps because of the weather, she was in a hurry, on edge, like the two little guys with their super-size cart who were next in line for Maxi’s help, and the family after that, with whom he crossed back over Rivadavia. The little guys specialized in cardboard, and had gathered a huge amount of it. Maxi liked to feel the weight of a really heavy load: it meant money for them, a good day’s trading, although they’d never make a fortune. He loved to feel the transformation of such a light material into a serious weight, as the boxes piled up to form a mass.

What he didn’t know was that, from a certain point on, two pairs of eyes had been watching him. They belonged to two girls: his sister, Vanessa, and her inseparable friend, Jessica, who were half a block behind, not letting him out of their sight. They had planned this operation carefully and decided to go through with it, in spite of the impending storm. They were determined to follow him all the way, and find out just what was going on; and the pursuit was meant to end with a confrontation in which they would lay all their cards on the table. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wait any longer: the time had come to enlist Maxi in the battle against the dark forces that were threatening them.

It was a task that required superhuman patience. The forward movement of their target was painfully slow and subject to all sorts of interruptions. They pretended to be looking in storefronts, or hid in doorways, or even turned around and went for a little walk to the corner and back. They weren’t afraid that Maxi would notice them because he was so vague, and he’d never guess they were on his tail. But they couldn’t lose sight of him or let him get too far away: they’d already seen how erratic his route was, and how he went from one scavenger to another without any warning or anything, just like that.

To pass the time, they chatted. That was nothing new: the substance of their friendship was endless conversation. They wouldn’t have been able to explain how they kept coming up with topics but they never ran out. It was one of the reasons why they always made up after their frequent quarrels: their tongues missed the exercise, and with their other friends, there wasn’t the same continuous flow. In fact, one of the richest topics or sets of topics was what had happened to them during the intervals when they hadn’t been speaking to each other. Which was a reason to multiply those intervals, and now the fights were almost superfluous: all they needed to accumulate material was an instant, the tiniest gap.

On this occasion, there was no shortage of topics. They had been in a flurry putting their plan into action, so there were some really important stories still waiting to be told, and now, with Maxi and his damn scavengers stopping and starting all the time, they had an opportunity to catch up.

“This morning,” said Jessica, “I ran into him at the gym and I realized something. You’re not going to believe this — I didn’t — but your brother hasn’t realized that I’m me. He’s an alien.”

“He doesn’t know that you. .? I don’t understand.”

“He hasn’t realized that the ‘Jessica’ he knows from the gym is the same ‘Jessica’ who’s friends with his sister. For him, they’re, I mean we’re, two different people.”

“No way. That is com- plete- ly. .” Vanessa was left gaping and gazing off into space, with the expression of someone who has just been apprised of an amazing fact and must hurriedly reorganize everything she knows to make a place for it.

Jessica knew exactly how she felt.

“I’ve been trying to work it out all day, and in the end I realized it’s actually not impossible. I don’t go to your place very often, and usually he’s not there, and when he is, he doesn’t pay attention to me. He’s been ignoring his little sister’s friends ever since he was a kid; they’ve become invisible to him. And when I call on the phone and he answers, I’m just a voice: ‘Jessica,’ his sister’s friend. He puts you on and forgets all about it. It’s not like the name’s going to give it away; there are so many Jessicas. For him, the gym must be a world apart, separate from everything else, especially from you.”