Cesar Aira: How I Became A Nun

We followed three soap operas. One was about the life of Jesus Christ, or rather the childhood of the God made flesh; it was aimed at children and sponsored by a brand of malt drink, which I had never tasted in spite of the identically repeated panegyrics (with me doubling the speaker’s words) celebrating its nutritional and growth-promoting virtues. Jesus and his pals were a likeable gang; there was a black boy, a fat boy, a stammerer and a little giant. The Messiah was the gang leader, and in each episode he performed a mini-miracle, as if he was in training for later life. He wasn’t infallible yet and used to get into all sorts of trouble in his efforts to help the poor and the wayward of Nazareth; but things always worked out and, at the end, the deep, resonant voice of God the Father pronounced the moral, if there was one, or some words of wise advice. Those boys became my best friends. I loved their adventures and pranks so much that my imagination worked at top speed, coming up with variations and alternative outcomes; but in the end I always found the scriptwriters’ solutions more satisfying. For me it was a kind of reality. A reality that couldn’t be seen, only heard, that existed as voices and sounds. It was up to me to provide the images. But within this reality there came a moment — my favorite — when the Father spoke, and at that point everyone, not just me, had to provide an image. God was the radio within the radio.

The second soap opera was historical too, but secular and Argentinean. Entitled Tell me, Grandma, it was invariably introduced by a sort of prologue, in which the venerable Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson was questioned by her grandchildren, each time about a different event in national history to which she had been an eye witness. One day it would be the first English invasion, another day the second, or some episode during one or the other, or the May revolution, a party during the Viceroyalty or the tyranny of Rosas, an incident in the life of Belgrano or San Martín … I loved the way time was haphazard, the lottery of the years. I knew nothing about history, of course, but the preliminary dialogues and the old lady’s adorably hesitant voice made me imagine it as a broad expanse of time, a spread from which to choose … And Grandma’s memory seemed to be tenuous, hanging from a thread about to snap … but once she got going, her shaky voice faded, making way for the actors of the past … This substitution was my favorite part: the voice hesitating among memories and the mist dissolving to reveal the ultra-real clarity of the scene as it had happened …

Tell me, Grandma was not really aimed at children or at adults, and yet it was meant for both. It bridged the gap, reminding adults of what they had learned at school and acquainting children with things they would remember when they learned about them. Doña Mariquita and her grandchildren were as one: she was the eternal little girl … Her failing, aged memory was in fact prodigious: scenes remote in time came to life not as the past usually does, in the form of mute images, but images endowed with sound, every inflection intact, down to the faintest sigh or the sound of chair legs scraping on a sitting-room floor as a viceregal official dead seventy years before stood up suddenly to greet a lady who had lain in her grave for more than half as long, and with whom he was, naturally, in love.

The third soap opera, which started at eight (they were all half an hour long) was definitely for adults. It was about love and featured all the stars of the day. In a sense, this serial connected with reality itself, while the others skirted around it. One proof of this — I saw it as a proof in any case — was the complication of the story. The reality that I knew, my reality, wasn’t complicated. On the contrary, it was simplicity itself. It was too simple. I can’t summarize the Lux serial as I did with the other two. It didn’t have an underlying mechanism; it was pure, free-floating complication. There was a given that guaranteed its perpetual complication: everyone was in love. There were no secondary characters playing supporting roles. Love was the theme of the serial and everyone was in love. They were like molecules with love valencies reaching out into space, into the sonorous ether, and every one of those little yearning arms found a hold. The tangle was so dense, it created a new simplicity: the simplicity of compactness. Space was no longer empty, porous and intangible; it had become a solid rock of love. By contrast, my life was so simple it hardly existed. Deprived as I was, the message I seemed to be receiving from the “radio drama of the stars” was that growing up was a preparation for love, and that only the multitudinous night sky could make a totality, or at least something, out of nothing.

As well as the soap operas, we listened to all sorts of programs: news, quizzes, comedy and, of course, music. Nicola Paone held me spellbound. But I made no distinctions: every piece of music was my favorite, at least while I was listening to it. I even liked tangos, which children usually find boring. The wonderful thing about music for me was the force with which it took control of the present and banished everything else. No matter what melody I was listening to, it seemed the most beautiful in the world, the best, the only one. It was the instant raised to its highest power. The fascination of the present, a kind of hypnotism (yet another!). Again and again I put it to the test: I tried to think of other pieces of music, other rhythms, I tried to compare and remember, but I couldn’t; I was flooded by the musical present, captive in a golden jail.

Speaking of music, one day, on Radio Belgrano, in between programs, a singer performed for the first and last time, while Mom and I listened with the utmost attention and not a little perplexity. On this occasion, I think, Mom’s attention was equal to mine. No one has ever sung less tunefully than that woman, not even for a joke. No one else with such a bad sense of pitch would have made it to the end of a measure; this woman sang five whole songs, boleros or romantic ballads, to the accompaniment of a piano. Maybe it was a joke, I don’t know. But it all seemed very serious; the presenter introduced her in a formal manner, and read out the tide of each successive song in a lugubrious voice. It was mysterious. Afterwards, they went on with the normal programs, without any kind of comment. Maybe she was a relative of the radio station’s owner; maybe she paid for the airtime to treat herself, or to keep a promise. Who knows? Most people would be ashamed to sing like that on their own, under the shower. And she sang on the radio. Maybe she was deaf or otherwise handicapped, and it was a great achievement (but they had neglected to explain this to the listeners). Maybe she could sing well, but she got nervous, though it’s hard to believe: it was too bad for that. She couldn’t have sung worse if she’d tried. Every note was out of tune, not only the hard ones. It was almost atonal … It’s inexplicable. It is the inexplicable. The mass media provide an ultimate refuge for the truly inexplicable.

Anyway, the inexplicable presence of that singer in some deep recess of my memory, some deep recess of the radio and the universe, is the strangest thing in this book. The strangest thing that has happened to me. The only thing I can’t account for. Not that my aim is to explain the tissue of deeply strange events that is my life, but in this case I suspect that an explanation exists, really exists, somewhere in Argentina, in the mind of one of her children, one of her nephews or nieces, or an eye witness … Or the mind of the Tone Deaf Singer herself … perhaps she is still alive, and remembers, and if she is reading this … My number is in the telephone book. My answering machine is always on, but I’m here beside the phone. All you have to do is make yourself known … Not by name, of course, your name wouldn’t mean anything to me. Sing. Just a few notes will do, a phrase, however short, from any of those songs, and I will certainly recognize you.