Cesar Aira - Ghosts

In this new, late apparition, their bodies had become three-dimensional, tangible; and what bodies they were, such depth and strength! The dust that covered them had become a splendid decoration; now that it didn’t have to absorb tremendous quantities of sunlight, it allowed the dark golden color of their skin to show through, and accentuated their musculature, the perfection of their surfaces. Here were the bulging pectorals she thought she had seen in normal, living men, the well-proportioned arms, the symmetrically sculpted abdomens, the long smooth legs. And their genital equipment, somewhat curved, but also slightly raised by the sheer force of its own bulk (it’s true she was looking from below), was different from anything she had seen, as if more real, more authentic.

They watched her as they rose, since they were rising and moving forward, toward the fifth floor, at the rear of the building. They looked down at her and smiled an indecipherable smile.

Who’s throwing the party?

We are.

They were no longer laughing as if possessed. They were speaking, with warm voices and words she could understand, in a Spanish without accent, neither Chilean nor Argentinean, like on television. They were speaking to her, and it was like being addressed by television characters. She was even more surprised by the way they seemed to be rational. Her surprise crystallized the feeling that had made her come downstairs; that vague, indefinite worry and alarm were becoming a specific torment, a pain, which was indefinable too, but for different reasons, as if it were impossible for her to touch the most genuine reality, the reality of a promise that eluded her grasp. Not that the ghosts had aroused her desires; that was, of course, impossible; and yet, in another sense, they had. Some desires, while less exact and practical, are no less urgent, or even less sexual. She told herself she shouldn’t have heeded her curiosity, she should have resisted. But it was useless. She would do it again, a thousand times, as long as she lived.

They had disappeared over her head. The last she saw of them were their heels. She had tipped her head so far back that when she reassumed her normal posture she felt dizzy and teetered perilously on the brink, which she had approached again unawares. She turned around and headed for the stairs, intending to go up. In the darkest part of the apartment, at the front, a ghost appeared before her, moving diagonally (which seemed to be the fashion) and upward. It reached the roof before she came near and began to pass through it head first, slowly. So slowly that it seemed to stop halfway through the process (mutations within the movement transferred the velocities to other dimensions). When Patri got there, the bottom half of the ghost’s body was hanging from the concrete ceiling, like some dark, nondescript object. She climbed the stairs and went to the rear of the building again, where she had a feeling they would be gathering in greater numbers. And as it turned out, a large group was waiting for her, or seemed to be, by the edge, but outside, in empty space, bathed in the last light, against a background of intense, end-of-evening air. Within the dark visibility of that air they were waiting for her, specifically for her, because one of them called her by name. What? asked Patri, stopping three yards away.

Don’t you want to come to our party tonight?

If you invite me….

That’s what we’re doing

A silence. Patri was trying to understand what they had said. Finally she asked:

Why me?

She was bound to ask that. They didn’t answer. All things considered, they couldn’t. They left her to work it out for herself. There followed a somewhat longer silence.

So?

I’m thinking it over.

Ah.

There seemed to be something ironic in their attitude. They began to withdraw, without making the slightest movement, like visions affected by a shift in perspective. Nevertheless they withdrew, treating the innocent explorer to a sight that could not have been more extraordinary. As if inadvertently, they were entwined by a kind of luminous helix, enveloping them in invisible yellow. The dust on their skin was barely a hint now, a down. At the sight of those men, Patri could feel her heart contracting…. as if she were truly seeing men for the first time. Stop! cried her soul. Don’t go, ever! She wanted to see them like that for all eternity, even if eternity lasted an instant, especially if it lasted an instant. That was the only eternity she could imagine. Come, eternity, come and be the instant of my life! she exclaimed to herself.

Of course you’ll have to be dead, said one of them.

That doesn’t matter at all, she replied straight away, passionately. Her passion meant something apart from her words, something else, of which she was unaware. But it also meant exactly what she had said.

They seemed to be very still as they watched her. But were they? Perhaps they were traveling at an incredible speed, traversing worlds, and she was in a position from which that movement could not be perceived. That didn’t matter either, she thought. In any case, they slid fluidly down to the next floor, leaving her there looking out into the emptiness, where the big city was, and the streets with their lights coming on.

Since she found that spectacle uninteresting, she turned around and went back to the stairs. But when she reached the landing, she realized that she didn’t know whether to go up or down to find them again. It was as if, having accomplished their mission, they had disappeared. Anyway, there was no point chasing them up and down the stairs. It would just tire her our and make her legs hurt. You had to really watch your step on those bare cement stairs without banisters. She’d already had plenty of exercise for one day. And, with every passing minute, the exercise of going up and down was becoming more dangerous. The first dense shadows, still shot with glimmers of transparency, were occupying the building.

A shudder ran through Patri’s body. Her legs were shaking, but not because of the stairs, or even because of the thickening darkness. She felt dazed. She went down two steps, then sat. There was something she’d been meaning to reflect on, and after sitting for a moment, she was able to give it some serious thought. Except that since she was, as her mother said, “frivolous,” she never thought seriously about anything. And in this case her frivolity was exacerbated by the subject of her would-be serious reflections, which was something quintessentially frivolous: a party.

But in a way parties were serious and important too, she thought. They were a way of suspending life, all the serious business of life, in order to do something unimportant: and wasn’t that an important thing to do? We tend to think of time as taking place within time itself, but what about when it’s outside? It’s the same with life: normal, daily life, which can seem to be the only admissible kind, conceived within the general framework of life itself. And yet there were other possibilities, and one of them was the party: life outside life.

Was it possible to decline an invitation to a party? Patri wondered. Leaving aside the specious argument according to which, if an invitation, like the one she had just received, came from outside life, simply to hear it was to accept, it clearly was possible to decline. People did it every day. But how many such invitations could you expect to receive in a lifetime? As well as the vertical stratification of life into layers or doors through which one could “enter” or “exit,” there was a “horizontal” or temporal axis, which measured the duration of a life. Invitations to a magic party with ghosts were obviously going to be very rare. There might be another chance, but for Patri that was beside the point. She was wondering how many such invitations there could be in eternity. That was a different question. Repetition in eternity was not a matter of probabilities, no matter how large the numbers. In eternity, as distinct from “in life” or “outside life,” this party was an absolutely unique occasion.