Ghosts

Ghosts

César Aira

Translated by Chris
Andrews

New Directions Publishing

ON THE MORNING
of the 31st
of December, the Pagaldays visited the apartment they already owned in the
building under construction at 2161 Calle José Bonifacio, along with Bartolo
Sacristán Olmedo, the landscape gardener they had hired to arrange plants on the
two broad balconies, front and rear. They climbed the stairs littered with
rubble to the middle level of the edifice: like the other apartments, the one
they had acquired occupied a whole floor, the fourth. Apart from the Pagaldays
there were only six other owners, all of whom made an appearance on that last
morning of the year to see how the work was coming along. The builders were
conspicuously busy. By eleven, there were people everywhere. It was in fact the
day on which, according to the contracts, the apartments should have been ready
to move into; but, as usual, there had been a delay. Felix Tello, the
construction company’s architect, must have gone up and down fifty times,
allaying the owners’ concerns. Most had come with a tradesman of some kind: a
carpet layer to measure the floors, a carpenter, a tiler, or an interior
decorator. Sacristán Olmedo was talking about the dwarf palms that would be
arranged in rows on the balconies, while the Pagalday children went running
through rooms, which still had no flooring, doors or windows. The air
conditioning units were being installed, ahead of the elevators, which would
have to wait until after the holiday. Meanwhile materials were being hoisted up
through the shafts. Perched on their high heels, the ladies were climbing the
dusty stairs scattered with pieces of rubble; since the banisters had not yet
been fitted, they had to be especially careful. The first basement level was to
be used for garages, with ramps up to the street, which had not yet been covered
with their special anti-slip surface. The second level was for box
rooms and storage space. On top of the seventh floor, a heated swimming pool and
a games room, with a panoramic view over rooftops and streets. And the
caretaker’s apartment, which was no more finished than the rest of the building,
but had been inhabited for some months by Raúl Viñas, the night watchman, and
his family. Viñas was a reliable Chilean builder, although he had turned out to
be a prodigious drinker. The heat was supernatural. Looking down from the top
was dangerous. The glass panels that would enclose the whole terrace were not
yet in place. The visitors kept their children well away from the edges. It’s
true that buildings under construction seem smaller before the windows, doors
and flooring have been put in. Everyone knows that; and yet somehow the opposite
also seemed to be true. Domingo Fresno, the architect in charge of the interiors
on the second floor, was walking anxiously through that capacious labyrinth, as
if across the sands of a desert. Tello had done his job well enough. At least
the building was standing firm on its foundations; it could have melted like an
ice cream in the sun. No one had come to see the first floor. The Kahns, an
older couple with two young daughters, were on the fifth floor with their
decorator, the extraordinary Elida Gramajo, who was calculating aloud, working
out the quantities of fabric required for drapes. Every detail had to be taken
into account. And no detail could be specified without measuring both the space
it would occupy and the surrounding space. Consequently, that big concrete cage
was measured exhaustively, in three dimensions, millimeter by millimeter. A
woman in violet was catching her breath on the stairs between the sixth and
seventh floors. Others didn’t have to make an effort: they floated up and down,
even through the concrete slabs. The owners were not bothered by the delay,
partly because they didn’t have to make the last payment until they took
possession, but also because they actually preferred to have a bit more time to
organize the furnishings and fittings. The measurements were expanding the space
that had been shrunken by illusion; similarly, the duration of the move was
expanding. Besides, there would have been something violent about taking
possession on the last day of the year. On the sixth floor, Dorotea and Josefina
Itúrbide Sansó, two girls aged five and three, were kicking up cement dust with
their little sandaled feet while their parents chatted placidly with Felix
Tello. Tello excused himself to greet the woman in violet and accompanied her up
to the next floor. They met the Kahns coming down from the games room and
introduced themselves. Meanwhile the Pagaldays looked out from their balcony at
the large plane trees growing in the Calle Bonifacio. Although not yet fitted
with security grilles, the balconies with high balustrades were, for the moment,
the safest place for children. It was a morning of high childishness. Everything
belonged to the children. The expansion produced by the measurements and the
feeling of contraction that goes with fear were overlaid by the world of
childhood. The real universe is measured in millimeters, and it is gigantic.
Where children are present, dimensions are always mediated, scaled down. The
decorators were crafting miniatures. Besides, all these powerful people and this
profitable business were operating for the benefit of the children; if not for
them, the parents would have chosen to live in hotels. Horrible and
half-naked, the builders came and went among them. The frontier
between rich and poor, between human beings and beasts, was a line in time; the
space occupied by one group would soon be taken over by the other. In spite of
its symbolism, the 31st was a crude and obvious allusion to this state of
affairs. It was also indisputably true that the poor had a right to be happy
too, and could even exercise that right. The mediation between large and small
sums of money is effected by use and especially the diversity of users;
possession, on the other hand, is as transitory as the gathering that was taking
place that morning on the building site. Fresno was planning to put as many
plants inside as Olmedo was putting outside. In a way, they were all landscape
gardeners. And indeed, for the time being, the whole site was outside. The
building would be finished when it all became an inside. An intimate,
armor-plated little universe. Felix Tello himself would vanish like a
puff of dust blown away by the passing years. The children would grow up here,
for a while at least. The López family, who would occupy the first floor, had
small children; they were in their square patio at the back, where the red
paving stones had already been laid. The owners of the third floor, who arrived
at midday, were the parents of the lady in violet who was going to live up on
the seventh; they arrived with her children. There could hardly have been more
children; each would have a private landscape, one on top of the other. Ms
Gramajo had spent three hours taking notes, writing down figures extracted from
space. Mrs De Itúrbide said she had seen a horrible fat monster like a sumo
wrestler. He was from Santiago del Estero. A tray with buckets on it was rising
up the elevator shaft, hoisted by a little motor. Around one, as the owners were
leaving, there was an impromptu meeting on the first floor, where it was cooler.
From the top floor you could see into the yard of the police station, which was
around the corner, on the Calle Bonorino. An old gentleman, the López’s cabinet
maker, had measured various walls for bookshelves and cupboards. Since the
owners had bought their apartments off a plan, they had all preferred to have
their cupboards specially built. The construction company had suggested a firm
of cabinet makers who were looking after four floors: their workshops would take
orders directly from the decorators. Downstairs, while the parents were talking,
various kids watched the workmen filling a big metal dumpster in the street with
rubble. 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.)