César Aira - Dinner

Then he walked us outside and offered to drive us home. I preferred to walk (we lived very close), and Mother said the same thing; the chilly night air had revived her. She placed her hand on his front door and caressed it, saying, “My door, my beloved door.” Her tone spoke less of nostalgia than reproach, of feelings long coveted and repeated whenever she had the chance. The very tall double doors, were truly magnificent, a masterpiece of old-fashioned woodworking, carved with serpents and flowers that flowed in symmetrical patterns and opened out into wide, harmonious waves that swept around the bronze handles. They had been the front doors of the house where my mother had spent her childhood. About ten years before, that house, which had changed ownership several times and ended up as government offices, was demolished, and my friend, who was in the real estate business, kept the doors and installed them in his house. My mother hadn’t forgiven him, though in reality she should have thanked him because otherwise the doors would have been lost, and she forgave him even less for having painted them black and the flowers in bright colors, a monstrosity, according to her, a lack of respect for this valuable relic.

It was just a little past eleven when we got home. The whole way there, Mother was complaining about how late it was, about the dinner, about everything, and especially about my friend’s extravagances. Where did he get the money to buy all that junk? How could he live surrounded by all that fantasy, those totally useless party games? And they must have been expensive, or did people give them to him? She kept returning to the economic aspect, aghast, offended, as if my friend were buying his toys with her money. I told her as much. Everybody did whatever they wanted with their own money, didn’t they? Anyway, he was a wealthy man. This was hard for me to say; I’d recently been avoiding any mention of finances, for my own had become such a disaster; I was dead broke, they’d repossessed my house and my car, I’d taken refuge in my mother’s apartment and was living off her retirement income (if you can call that living). She immediately responded with something that surprised me. What are you talking about, wealthy? As a church mouse! He was ruined! He didn’t have a penny to his name, he’d lost everything, the only thing he had left was that house, and on top of that, it was full of all that horrendous garbage. I didn’t give her words much credence, or rather, none: ever since my own debacle she’d been saying the same things about everybody, even the town’s most notoriously prosperous merchants and its most affluent small farmers. According to her, collective ruin had descended upon the Pringlesians. She said it for me, out of a blind maternal instinct that didn’t retreat even in the face of the absurd — or a lie — and she’d even ended up believing it herself. If her intention was to console, she was failing. I could see that she had reached the state of wanting her lies to be true, of wishing for others’ misfortune, and this was making her bitter. And in addition to telling me, she told anybody and everybody else, giving herself the reputation of a slanderer or a bird of ill omen; people started avoiding her, and I had to take on, along with my personal failure, the guilt of having spoiled the last years of her life (because the social life of the town was her entire life).

So I tried to set her straight. But the specifics she started telling me made me doubt that she was wrong. I told her that my friend had his construction company, that he had a lot of work… She refuted me with absolute certainty: No, not in your dreams. He never worked, they were under water, construction was at a standstill. Moreover, the company didn’t even belong to him anymore; his partner had cheated him and left him out in the cold. She backed up her statements with names and more names, the names of those who’d hired him and hadn’t paid him, the names of his creditors, the names of those who’d bought the few properties he’d still had and that he’d had to sell in order to pay off his debts. The names made the story believable though their effect on me was to provoke more admiration than conviction. I was impressed that my mother always had the names right on the tip of her tongue; it’s true, she had a lot of practice, because all her conversations (and presumably all her thoughts) revolved around the people of the town. I didn’t even know the name of my friend’s business partner. The names of the families of Pringles were familiar, I’d heard all of them before, thousands of times before, but for some reason I’d always refused to associate them with the people I saw on the street. Never having made those associations as a child, I never did thereafter. As the years passed, I became daunted by the amount of work it would take to learn them, especially when I saw everybody else’s virtuosity. It couldn’t, however, be that difficult. I had to admit that obstinacy played a part in my refusal. But it wasn’t that serious. One could still live and interact with others, though in the long run others would eventually notice my shortcoming. I didn’t operate with a shorthand list of names and a web of family relations and neighborhoods. I needed supplemental explanations, and my interlocutors — if they didn’t write me off as mentally deficient — might think that it was out of disdain, or indifference, or an unjustifiable feeling of superiority. Perhaps that’s why I’d done so poorly in business. Someone who didn’t know the name of the neighbor he saw every day couldn’t possibly be trusted.

Mother and my friend had spent the whole dinner spouting names. Based on this rapport, I assumed she had enjoyed the evening, but apparently that was not the case. She was in a bad mood when she got home, in the elevator she kept sighing impatiently, and when we entered the apartment she went straight to the bathroom to take her sleeping pill. Before going to bed she had time to complain one more time about how late it was and what a terrible time she’d had. I plopped into an armchair and turned on the TV. She walked past me one last time carrying a glass of water on her way from the kitchen, said good night, and closed the door to her room.

“Don’t go to bed too late.”

“It’s early. And tomorrow is Sunday.”

My own words depressed me. Not only because Sundays were depressing but because every day had turned into Sunday for me. Unemployment, the awareness of failure, the anachronistic relationship between a sixty-year-old man and his mother, my long-since confirmed bachelorhood, all of it had enveloped me in the typical melancholy of dead days. Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o’clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.

Television had become my only real occupation. And I didn’t even like it. When I was young it didn’t exist (in Pringles), and when I lived alone I didn’t have a TV, so I never got into the habit and never learned to like it. But ever since I’d moved into my mother’s apartment, it was all I’d had.

Whenever I was alone, I channel surfed. I always did the same thing, and from what I understood, so did many others, and systematically; for many, “watching television” was the same as channel surfing. That’s what it was for me. I never got into movies, maybe because I always tuned into them when they’d already started and so I didn’t understand the plot, and anyway I never liked movies or novels. The news channels weren’t any better, because I was also never interested in the crime stories currently in the limelight, and much less in wars and natural disasters. And it was the same with everything else. There were seventy channels, and I would often surf through all of them, one after the other, then go back and surf through them again, until I got tired (my finger pressing the button would fall asleep), and then I’d leave it anywhere I happened to be. After a while, out of despondency or plain boredom I’d summon up enough energy to change it again. Since I spent whole afternoons in front of the TV, I couldn’t fail to notice, at some point, how futile and irrational this activity was. Mother would urge me to go out and take a walk, and I often intended to, but my indolence would always win out. I remembered what my friend had recounted earlier that evening, about the short old man who would walk to the Cemetery in the mornings. That in itself could have motivated me: not the example of a healthy and active almost ninety-year-old (even though he was a good example), but rather the curiosity of running into him. He said he did it only when he woke up depressed or in pain, that is, he didn’t do it every day. But I would have to do it every day if I didn’t want to miss him when he did it. Of course, the possibility of watching an old man take a walk wasn’t very compelling, but I was slightly intrigued by the chance of finding out if the story was true, and I was used to making do with very little. The stories my friend told always had, as I said, the feeling of fables; to confirm one in reality might be exciting. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else’s.