Cesar Aira - Ghosts

She asked Ernesto what game they had been playing. We were pretending that the people who came this morning were our parents. She sighed in disapproval. Appalling! That must have been the older two children; they were always coming up with ideas like that, the little devils.

The third floor was the same, yet different; it wrapped the three of them in a fresh layer of silence. They say that silence increases with height, but Patri, who lived at altitude most of the time, wasn’t so sure about that. Anyway, if it was true, and if there was a gradual increase, the difference between one floor and the next should have been perceptible, at least for someone with a sensitive enough ear, a musician, for example, listening in reverse, as it were. As she went from the fourth to the fifth floor, she felt the silence thicken, but that didn’t prove anything, because the data of reality, as she had observed in the past, were produced by chance, or rather by an inextricable accumulation of chances. Also, since it’s well known that sounds rise (which must be because “they’re lighter than air,” as the saying goes, or a lighter kind of air), you should hear more noise as you go up; it should be quiet on the ground. True, sounds fade progressively as they rise, because height is a kind of distance. But under normal circumstances, human beings are at or near ground level. If a man were placed at a great height, and he looked down, somewhere near halfway he would see two corresponding limits, floating like magnetized Cartesian divers: the limit of the sound as it passed into imperceptibility, and that of his own hearing range. But those divers…. men floating in the air…. she knew what that was about. And speaking of noise (and magnetism too, come to think of it), the most clamorous and disturbing noises she had heard in her months on the site had been made by cats. The neighborhood was populated by strays. Their survival and proliferation were favored by the gardens of the Theological University, the car bodies that the police left permanently parked all along in front of the station, the square a hundred yards away, the convent school’s enormous park (the size of a whole block) with its luxuriant foliage, and, above all, the empty buildings, each with its clientele of old witches who came twice a day to put out milk and hamburger steak. The way the cats howled was beyond belief. At first she had thought they were children gone crazy. But that wouldn’t have been so bad. The inhumanity of the cats’ screams gave them something extra. And their speed, because those sounds were produced in the course of races and escapes, as opposed to the karateka’s shout, which issues from a still body. (Patri had taken karate lessons in Chile, on the advice of her stepfather. For various reasons, including her innate distaste for perfection, she had neglected to sit the exam which would have given her a blue belt. Even though blue was her favorite color.) The astonishing activity of the cats, obscene as it was, reminded her of the ghosts, who manifested themselves as the opposite of obscenity, as a kind of innocence.

In fact, they were manifesting themselves at that very moment. They were emerging from the light, from transparency: they were opaque, definitely opaque, but because of the whiteness of the cement dust, they were hard to distinguish from the light. Where could their covering have come from? It was true that everything was dusty on the building site, but the strange thing about the ghosts was how evenly covered they were with that white dust, every square inch of them. And there was quite a lot to cover because they were tall like Argentineans, and solidly built, even chubby. Although well proportioned in general, some of them, the majority in fact, had big bellies. Even their lips were powdered; even the soles of their feet! Only at odd moments, from certain points of view, could you see the foreskin at the tips of their penises parting to reveal a tiny circle of bright red, moist skin. It was the only touch of color on their bodies. Even birds fluttering around in ashes don’t achieve such a uniform result. Patri traversed the air through which they had flowed, unworried by the thought of her breath mixing with theirs. She was walking on the ground. What a destiny: unwittingly, unwillingly thrust into the midst of a nudist colony.

Tired and annoyed, she paid them no attention. She was sleepy too; since she was barely out of childhood herself, she still needed quite a lot of sleep. She felt she had wasted time, but, on the other hand, it was time that was good for nothing except being wasted. That was in the nature of siesta-time. The mysterious men were watching her from a certain distance, but she couldn’t really be bothered returning their gaze. The laughter, at least, had dissipated. There was something aloof and severe about those insubstantial gangs. They were simply there.

Elisa was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. What about the others? was the first thing she asked. Ernesto started to explain, but Patri shrugged her shoulders. I couldn’t catch them, she said. They got away. Mother and daughter were silently resigned. Elisa took the children inside. It’s so hot! said the boy, yielding to the truth. She put them in the bedroom, where their father was snoring. She didn’t even wash their feet; in a few seconds they were perfectly quiet. In the dining room, Patri saw the bags left out, and remembered that there was shopping to do. When Elisa came out of the bedroom, she offered to go and do it, with a list. No, said her mother, I have to do it myself this time, because I still haven’t worked out exactly what I’m going to buy; it’ll depend what’s there. No one made a fuss about meals in that family, as long as they were nutritious and tasty. On the way, Elisa added, I’ll look for the other two and take them along. That was a good idea. But then she said: Since they’re not going to sleep, I’ll take them for ice cream. Patri frowned as if to say: Well that’s a great way to punish them for misbehaving. She didn’t get any ice cream, even though she loved it. You lie down too, said her mother. I guess that’s what I’ll be doing, she replied. Elisa put on her shoes and picked up the bags. Back in a bit. See you, said Patri.

Off she went. Patri removed the crochet rug with which she covered the sofa that was her bed. She pushed the chairs up against the table. She took off her dress and got under the sheet. It was uncomfortable, because of the heat, but it was the prudent thing to do, because that room was the entrance to the little apartment, and anyone could have come along. It was boiling hot. The silence had deepened and was almost complete, with a just a vague echo of cackling, which made her even sleepier. She shut her eyes straight away. And fell asleep.

She dreamed of the building on top of which she was sleeping, not as it would be later on, not seeing it finished and inhabited, but as it was now, that is, under construction. It was a calm vision, devoid of troubling portents or inventions, almost a verification of the facts. But there is always a difference between dreams and reality, which becomes clearer as the superficial contrast diminishes. The difference in this case was reflected in the architecture, which is, in itself, a reciprocal mirroring of what has already been built and what will be built eventually. The all-important bridge between the two reflections was provided by a third term: the unbuilt.

The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all — which technological advances have exacerbated if anything — isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.