Cesar Aira - Ghosts

They were wheeling their barrows up a sloping plank that was blocking the sidewalk; women coming back from the supermarket on the corner with their trolleys full of provisions for the New Year’s Eve feast had to go onto the road, a manoeuvre they accomplished reluctantly. Domingo Fresno was talking with a bearded young architect, an acquaintance of his, who would be doing the interiors on the seventh floor. The moment for swinging into action was, they felt, dizzyingly imminent: although the building seemed utterly incomplete and provisional, with so much rubble and empty space, any day now it could be finished. Elida Gramajo, who had already left, was thinking the same thing. Less mindful of what lay ahead, the owners were thinking something else. But if anyone should have been imagining the disappearance of the builders, seeing them vanish into thin air, without a trace, like bubbles bursting soundlessly, it was them. The electricians stopped working at one on the dot, and left. Tello spoke for a moment with the foreman, then they went to look at the plans, which kept them busy for a good quarter of an hour. Putting in the wiring wouldn’t take long at all; the power points and all the rest could be finished off in an afternoon. The parents of the lady in violet climbed up with the children to see the games room on top and the swimming pool, which was already lined with little sky-blue tiles. An extremely thin, badly dressed woman was hanging washing on a line, in what would be the patio of the caretaker’s apartment. It was Elisa Vicuña, the night watchman’s wife. The visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course. On the fourth floor, the Pagaldays were leafing through the contents of a large oblong portfolio, listening to Sacristán Olmedo’s explanations. The children wanted to express their opinions too. Generally, though, what the children wanted was to look out from the balconies: wherever they came from, the difference in height was exciting. Even if they were moving from one third floor to another, there was a difference. What you could see from that height was different. The children were coming up with strange and sometimes illogical ideas about where they were. They resumed their races through the rooms, over the bare cement floors. Light penetrated to the farthest corner. It was as if they were in partitioned fields, raised to a certain height. After exchanging congratulations and best wishes for the year to come with a family that was about to leave, Felix Tello expressed his justifiable confidence that “they would be happy in their new home.”

The owners of the apartments had their own idea of happiness; they imagined it wrapped in a delay, a certain developmental slowness, which was already making them happy. In short, they didn’t believe that things were going to proceed as planned, that is, quickly. They preferred to think of the gentle slope of events; that was how it had been since they paid the deposit and signed the settlement a year earlier. Why should they adopt a different attitude now, just because the year was coming to an end? True, they knew there would be a change, but at the last moment, beyond all the moments in between. It wouldn’t be today, or tomorrow, or any day that could be determined in advance. Like the spectrum of perception, the spectrum of happening is divided by a threshold. That threshold is just where it is, and nowhere else. They were focusing on the year, not the end of the year. Needless to say, they were right, in spite of everything and everyone, even in spite of right and wrong.

The union of the year and the moment was like the ownership of the building. Each owner possessed a floor, a garage and a box room, but nothing else: that was all they could sell. And yet at the same time they owned the whole building. That’s how a condominium works.

Standing still on the dumpster’s higher side, in the street, was a builder, a young man named Juan José Martínez, with an empty bucket in his hand. He had been distracted by something that had happened on the corner. There was nothing special about the corner or about him. An ordinary sort of guy, who wouldn’t normally merit a second glance. Various people looked at him, but only because of where he was standing, perched up there, motionless, looking toward the corner, holding that position for the sheer, childlike pleasure of balancing all on his own in a high place (he was very young). The only unusual thing about him was that stillness, which is rare to see in a person at work, even for a brief spell. It was like stopping movement itself, but without really stopping it, because even in those instants of immobility he was earning wages. Similarly, a statue sculpted by a great master, still as it is, goes on increasing in value. It was a confirmation of the absurd lightness of everything. The people distracted by the sight of him, as he was by the sight of something a certain distance away, knew that future moments of daydreaming would be nourished by the poetic argument they were absorbing, an argument about eternity, about the beyond where promises are set.

The worst thing is the way they lie, Felix Tello was saying, but to judge from the broad smile on his face, he wasn’t worried in the least. The architect’s words met with a most attentive reception. Such attentiveness is not unusual when the lies of a third party are at issue. Tello was referring to the builders and by extension to the proletariat in general. They lie and lie and lie. Even when they’re telling the truth. Enthusiastic up-and-down jerking of heads, to signal assent. Felix Tello was a professional from a middle-class background. From a certain point on in his career, he had associated almost exclusively with two opposite fringes of society: the extraordinarily rich people who bought parts of his sophisticated buildings, and the extremely poor workers who built them. He had discovered that the two classes were alike in many ways, and especially in their complete lack of tact where money was concerned. In that respect the correspondence was exact. The very poor and the very rich regard it as natural to extract the maximum benefit from the person they happen to be dealing with. The middle-class principle, natural to him, of leaving a margin, a ghostly “buffer” of courtesy, between the asking price and the maximum that could be obtained, was foreign to them. Utterly foreign. It didn’t even cross their minds. Having associated with both groups for so long, and being both intelligent and adaptable (if that is not a pleonasm), he had learned how to mediate with a fair degree of efficiency. He took advantage of the perfect trap that the rich and the poor had set for each other. Once he had secured the means to sustain a respectably comfortable way of life, all he wanted was to live in peace. The only thing that surprised him, when they confronted each other with their home truths, wearing those stupid expressions, was the sincere perplexity on both sides. It was like the episode in his favorite novel, L’Assommoir , in which the heroine, Gervaise, stops paying back the money she owes to the Goujets: “From next month on, I’m not paying you another cent,” and soon she even starts charging them for the work she does. What a rude surprise for the bourgeois reader! How could this good, honest, hardworking woman refuse to pay a debt? So what? Why should she pay, just because of some moral obligation? But what about manners? No, manners didn’t even come into it, in her situation; she was poor and had an alcoholic husband, and all the rest. That Zola, the man was a genius! (But with this expression, which Tello formulated silently, clasping his hands and lifting his eyes skyward, as if to say “Even I couldn’t have come up with that,” he unwittingly confessed that he was fifty thousand times more bourgeois than those who were scandalized by the behavior of the pretty laundress with the limp.)

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