Cesar Aira - How I Became A Nun

I thought of Dad, mostly to pass the time and stop me from worrying about other things. I multiplied him by all the other men shut in that prison, those desperate men, expelled from society, who couldn’t hug their children … And there I was on high, hovering over them all … I was the angel … and it came as no surprise. Each successive incident, right from the start, from the moment I tasted the strawberry ice cream, had been leading me to this crowning moment, preparing me to be the angel, the guardian angel of all the criminals, the thieves and murderers …

All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him. Although I thought I loved him before, when he held me in his arms or led me by the hand, now I knew that love was more, much more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover what love really was.

It was a mystical experience, and it lasted many hours. The experience of intimate contact with humanity as a whole, as only a guardian angel can know it. Not even the fact that I didn’t have wings could shake my conviction. On the contrary: wings would have allowed me to get away, up through that square of sky above me.

It was, as I said, a prolonged episode. It lasted all evening and all night. They found me at ten o’clock the next morning. I fantasized about the search provoked by my disappearance, conducted in my absence (knowing how it would end). I could even hear voices calling me; I could hear them coming through the loudspeakers: “César Aira … a boy by the name of César Aira.” But this was not part of the fantasy, the mental reconstruction. I was meant to respond to those voices. And I wanted to, I wanted to say, for example, “Here I am. Help! I don’t know how to get down.” But I couldn’t. Powerless to act, I could only anticipate future events. I imagined a scene in which I was explaining to the governor of the prison what had really happened: “… it was my dad. He grabbed me and hid me somewhere … he was going to use me as a hostage in the breakout he’s planning with his accomplices … “All this was forgivable, even Dad could have forgiven me, considering my innocence, my character, my fears … All the same, to ease my conscience, I tried to improve the story: “But Dad was forced to do it, by the King of the Criminals; he would never have chosen to kidnap his own daughter …” And then, worried that the governor would get the wrong idea, I added a clarification: “But my Dad isn’t the King ….” I had embarked on the complex task of lying. The experienced liar knows that the secret of success is to pretend convincingly not to know certain things. For example the consequences of what one is saying, so that others will seem to discover them first. “Not that Dad ever mentioned the King … it was the others, they were talking about him, afraid, in awe … They were calling Dad your Jamesty … I don’t know why, because my dad’s called Tomás …” The governor was bound to fall for my ploy. He would think: It’s too complicated not to be true. That’s what they always think; it’s the golden rule of fiction. He would believe me completely. Not Dad. Dad knew my tricks; he was my tricks. He would see through them, but he would forgive me, even if it meant another ten years in jail … These were not exactly the reflections of an angel. The sound of the loudspeaker (it was already night, the stars were shining in the sky) swept through the jail, calling me: “Come out of your hiding place, César, your mother is waiting to take you home …” Women’s voices, the social workers … Mom’s voice too … I even thought I heard Dad’s voice — my heart skipped a beat — that beloved voice, which I hadn’t heard for so many months, and then I really did wish I had wings to fly away … But I couldn’t. This was always happening, so often that it literally was the story of my life: hearing a voice, understanding the orders it was giving me, wanting to obey, and not being able to … Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it …

In this case, and maybe in all the others too, I had the marvelous consolation of knowing that I was an angel. This knowledge transformed the situation, turning it into a dream, but a real dream. It was a transformation of reality. The cruel delirium I had suffered as a result of the fever was a transformation too, but the opposite kind. In the real dream, reality took the form of happiness or paradise. The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality.

WINTER CAME, AND MOM began to take in ironing. We spent the interminable evenings inside, listening to the radio, Mom bending over the steaming cloth, me staring at my exercise book, and both of us miles away, our souls meandering in the strangest places. We had adopted an invariable routine. In the morning I went with her to the stores, we had lunch early, she took me to school, came to pick me up at five, and then we stayed in for the rest of the evening. Lured by the radio, we lost ourselves in a labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step.

Everything in this story I am telling is guaranteed by my perfect memory. My memory has stored away each passing instant. And the eternal instants too, the ones that didn’t pass, enclosing the others in their golden capsules. And the instants that were repeated, which of course were the majority.

But my memory merges with the radio. Or rather: I am the radio. Thanks to the faultless perfection of my memory, I am the radio of that winter. Not the receiver, the device, but what came out of it, the broadcast, the continuity, what was being transmitted, even when we switched it off, even when I was asleep or at school. My memory contains it all, but the radio is a memory that contains itself and I am the radio.

Life without the radio was inconceivable for me. What happens, if you decide to define life as radio (which, as an intellectual exercise, is not entirely without merit), is that it automatically produces a sustaining plenitude. It was important for Mom as well, it was company … Remember that the disaster had befallen us immediately after our move to Rosario, where we had neither relatives nor friends. And the circumstances were not ideal for making new friends, so Mom was all alone in the world … She had her daughter, of course, but even though I was everything to her, that wasn’t much. She was a sociable woman who loved to chat … So she got to know people in the end, without having to make a particular effort: storekeepers, neighbors, people she did ironing for. They were all keen to hear the story of her recent misfortune, which she told over and over … She repeated herself a bit, but that was only natural. Society was destined to absorb her life again; that winter was a mere interlude … The radio fulfilled a function. In her case it was instrumental: it gathered her scattered parts, it reassembled her identity as woman and housewife … By contrast I achieved a complete identification with the voices in the ether … I embodied them.

Those evenings, those nights in fact, for it grew dark very early, especially in our room, had an atmosphere of shelter and refuge, which was intensely enjoyable, especially for me, I’m not sure why. They were a kind of paradise, which, like all cut-price paradises, had an infernal side. All the ironing Mom had taken in meant that she couldn’t go out, but she didn’t mind; she was happy in that seeming paradise, contenting herself with appearances, as usual. Her return to society would have to wait. I fastened onto the illusion like a vampire: I lived on the blood of a fantasy paradise.

In this kind of situation, repetition dominates. Each new day is the same as all the others. The radio broadcast was different every day. And yet it was the same. The programs we followed repeated themselves … We wouldn’t have been able to follow them if they hadn’t; we would have lost track. And in the breaks the announcers always read the same advertisements, which I had learned by heart. No surprise there, since memory was, and still is, my forte. I repeated them aloud as they were spoken, one after another. The same with the introductions to the programs and the accompanying music. I shut up when the programs themselves began.