The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (6 page)

That Sunday, at ten o’clock:

“Ding-a-ling-a-ling.”

A housemaid in uniform opened the door. It was an
enormous old palatial mansion in the Recoleta neighborhood. They ushered him
into a sitting room to one side, where he found the brothers and a woman in a
wheelchair, who was introduced as the mother. From the entryway, Dr. Aira had
caught a glimpse of dimly lit rooms, elegantly furnished, the walls covered with
paintings. This was the first time he’d entered such a distinguished house, and
he would have loved to explore it to his heart’s content, without rushing. But
this was not the time. Or maybe it was? While he was exchanging banal greetings,
he thought that in reality nobody was preventing him from doing just that, from
wandering calmly through all those rooms. Because none of them knew what his
method was; by definition they didn’t know what to expect, such as him telling
them that he needed everyone, including the servants, to leave the house so he
could remain alone with the patient for one or two hours. They would think he
was going to use some kind of invasive and potentially dangerous radiation; and
they would be in a hurry to leave, dragging the old woman out in her wheelchair;
and all of them would climb into their Mercedes Benzes and wait at one of the
brothers’ houses. Why would they care, anyway? And he would have the house all
to himself for that interval, as if he owned it; the possibility of slipping
some valuable object into his pocket occurred to him, but he dismissed it as a
too-sordid anticlimax.

Be that as it may, the interior of the house
suggested an answer to an enigma that only now, upon intuiting its solution, he
could formulate. What did his contemporaries do when he knew nothing about them?
What did the great writers and artists whom he admired do during the often long
periods of time when they were not presenting a book or making a movie or
setting up an exhibit? Because of the amount of time he spent with books, he had
grown accustomed to thinking of the great figures as dead, for the simple reason
that for the most part they were: in order for their works or their fame to have
reached him, some time had to have passed, and even more for him to have decided
to study them; and this delay, more often than not, was more than enough for a
human life to complete its cycle. That’s why he would feel a little shock
whenever he found out that this or that famous person was alive, simply living,
without doing the things he was famous for doing. This created a kind of blank
in which the nature of fame negated itself. He never understood because, truth
be told, he’d never really stopped to think about it, but now he saw it all very
clearly: what they did was live, though not just live, which would have been a
platitude, but rather enjoy life, practice “the art of living” in houses like
this one, or not as luxurious but in any case endowed with the comforts
necessary to enjoy oneself and spend one’s time without any concerns. Thanks to
the link between reason and imagination, he felt at that moment that he could do
the same from then on.

He had just sat down when he had to stand up again,
because the other brothers had come in to tell him that the patient was awake
and expecting him. They didn’t sit down, so he didn’t again, either. They told
him that they’d given him his injections early so that he would be lucid at ten
o’clock. They didn’t know if it was necessary, but the patient himself had
requested it.

“Perfect,” said Dr. Aira, just to say something and
without giving an explanation such as they must have been expecting.

In the blink of an eye, he didn’t know exactly how, they
were climbing the stairs to the bedroom. The moment of truth was
approaching.

The truth was, he hadn’t finished deciding what to do. He
had spent the last two days considering his options with the same uncertainty
he’d had for the last few decades, ever since that day in his far-distant youth
when he had intuited the Cures. The idea had remained more or less intact since
then, not counting the natural alternation between doubt and enthusiasm
characteristic of a genuinely original concept. It had been the center of his
life, the pivot around which his readings, meditations, and quite varied
interests had turned. Of course, in order to keep it in this central position he
had had to endow it with a plasticity that resisted any definition. It had
always been right in front of his nose, like the proverbial carrot hanging in
front of a donkey, indicating the direction of his prolonged flight forward. He
owed his life to it, the life he had, after all, lived, and for this he was
grateful. He could not complain about it just because it refused to give him a
practical set of instructions at a decisive moment. He didn’t want to seem
ungrateful, like those infamous scroungers who spend twenty years taking money
from a generous friend, and when finally the friend can’t or doesn’t want to do
as they ask, they condemn him without appeal.

Moreover — as he had been repeating to himself
throughout that atypical weekend — something would occur to him. It’s not that
he trusted his ability as an improviser; on the contrary, he had serious reasons
to distrust it. But he knew that for better or for worse he’d manage, because
one always does. It’s enough for time to pass, and it inevitably will. It wasn’t
strictly a question of “improvising” but rather of finding in the teeming
treasure of a lifetime of reflections the one gesture that would do the trick.
It was less an improvisation than an instantaneous mnemonic. Evaluating the
results was another issue. There would be time for that, too. After all, if it
was a failure, it would be the first, and the last.

The door to the bedroom. They opened it; they motioned for
him to go in. He entered . . . And it was as if he had entered a different
world, incomparably more vivid and more real, a world of pure and compressed
action where there was no room for thought, and where, nevertheless, thought was
destined to triumph in the end.

The first thing that struck him was the lighting, which
was very white and very strong; it seemed excessive, though perhaps this was due
to its contrast with the gloomy semidarkness in the rest of the house. Even so,
it was the last thing one would expect in a sickroom, unless it was an operating
room. He immediately turned to look at the bed and the man lying in it, which
barely gave him a chance to register along the outer edges of his attention
certain elements that contributed to the creation of a high-tech environment and
explained the lighting.

The man in the bed warranted Dr. Aira’s most intense
interest. Never before had he seen someone so close to death. He was so close
that he had already shed all his attributes and had become purely human. By the
same token, this shedding had removed him from the human. His first impression
was that it was too late. If there was even the remotest possibility of bringing
him back to life, it would have to be via one of his qualities. And it looked as
if he hadn’t a single one left; perhaps, in the spiritual process of preparing
himself for death, he had undergone a “cleansing” that had been set in motion by
the illness. But this was not the case. Despite everything he and the cancer had
done, one of his attributes remained: wealth. He may have cut all his ties to
life, but he remained the owner of this house, and of his lands and factories.
And that would suffice, for money had the marvelous property of including
everything else. He should definitely start there.

Just thinking about it was enough to re-orient him in
reality. He looked around. The room was large, and many people were there, all
of them strangers, except for the patient’s brothers. They were all looking at
him, but as nobody showed any intention of introducing themselves, he merely
greeted them with a nod and turned his attention to the room and the
furnishings. There were chairs, armchairs, tables, bookshelves, and a lot of
electronic equipment. It took him a moment to notice — even though they stood
out more than anything else — two supermodern television cameras each on top of
a tripod, one on either side of the bed and each with its respective cameraman:
two young men wearing wireless earphones. The spotlights and large microphones
with black felt heads placed at strategic spots apparently belonged to the same
set-up, as did the echo-reducing panels and a technician sitting in front of a
sound board next to the wall. He wondered, intrigued, if this was a custom he
had never heard of, to record the final days of important people. That wasn’t
it, he found out right away, because one of the brothers, as if reading his
mind, said:

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to film you while you work,”
and without giving him time to respond, he rushed to explain. “It’s to cover
ourselves to the stockholders, just in case.”

Dr. Aira mumbled something, and looking down at the
ground, he noticed that there were no cables, which was quite fortunate because
otherwise he would surely have tripped on them.

With a discreet signal from the brother who had just
spoken, the two cameramen looked through their viewers and switched on the
little red lights on their equipment. As if a lever in his body had been
released, Dr. Aira stopped feeling natural. From that moment on, what was
happening on the surface no longer coincided with the episodes of his psyche,
which, now liberated from expressive restrictions, took on their own velocity.
In a way, the exterior world could be deemed void: the nurses, the relatives who
took their seats as if expecting to listen to a concert, and a small group of
teenagers who looked at him with vague disapproval. What did he care! Relieved
of naturalness, he felt as if anything was allowed.

He walked over to the bed. The man was lying on his back,
his head and upper back propped against large pillows and with an orthopedic
brace around his neck. His arms were stretched out on top of a sky-blue sheet,
which was folded down over his heart. He was not wearing a watch. A thick gold
wedding band was on the ring finger of his right hand.

His features were frozen into a somewhat ill-tempered,
irritable grimace. He had not a single hair on his head. He was staring back at
him, but his pupils were not moving. Dr. Aira tried to read those eyes that were
locked on his, and the only thing that occurred to him was the melodramatic idea
that they had the texture of death. Death is always nearby, and its shapes and
colors inhabit all drawings of the world, in full view but also hidden, all too
visible, acting like a narcotic on one’s attention. One sees only what one wants
to see. As if disappearance formed part of appearance. Sometimes one needs a
word (the word “death”) to make volumes and perspectives stand out. On this
occasion the word had been spoken, and Dr. Aira understood that only through it
did he have any chance of success. The only course of action was to take the man
for dead, the activities of his life spent; not only could he consider it over,
along with all the treatments and spiritual remedies, but he should, then begin
from the other side. There was no other way to begin.

An idea was dawning on him, and its phases were cascading
toward him. In reality, nobody was rushing him, but he had been thrust upon
time. He wondered if he’d have enough space. When he turned his eyes away from
the patient’s, where they’d been glued, he felt as if he’d lost some of his
strength. Even so, out of inertia, he kept figuring things out. To his right, on
the wall facing the street, was a large French door covered with a thick,
dark-red velvet curtain. He went over to it and pulled on the cord, which opened
the panels sideways. There was a balcony. He didn’t go out (he was afraid they’d
think he was going to jump), but he glanced up. Right in front, between two tall
building, he could see a strip of star-studded sky. He returned to the bed,
leaving the door open. In the room the cold night air began to be felt, but
nobody objected. He looked back into the patient’s eyes to recharge his
batteries. He needed all his strength for what he was planning to attempt.

It was an old idea, which had remained latent in the
depths of his mind all the years he had devoted to the Miracle Cures. He had
never kept files with a strict chronology, and his papers had gotten mixed up
again and again, a thousand times (his ideas were annotations on his ideas), so
he couldn’t be absolutely certain, but he had the impression that it had been
his first idea, the original Miracle Cure. In that case, and in accordance with
the law of Decreasing Output, it was his best. It was based on the following, if
somewhat simplified, reasoning:

A miracle, in the event that one occurred, should mobilize
all possible worlds, for there could not be a rupture in the chain of events in
reality without the establishment of another chain, and with it a different
totality. As long as the operation dealt with alternative worlds, however, it
would be an impractical fantasy. As far as facts were concerned, there was only
one world, and that was where the insurmountable veto against miracles arose.
And the truth is, there were no miracles, as anybody with a little common sense
could ascertain. Someone like Dr. Aira, who didn’t even believe in God, could
not entertain the least shadow of a doubt in that regard. Just because there had
not yet been any miracles, however, didn’t mean they couldn’t happen;
superstition, ignorance, gullibility all led one to think that miracles could
happen just like that, naturally. On the other hand, it was possible to produce
one, create one as an artifact, or better yet, as a work of art. For this, one
only needed to introduce the dimension of human time, which was not difficult
because time participated, by its very heft, in all human activities, and even
more so in those activities that entailed almost superhuman efforts and
difficulties. In practical, everyday terms, time is constantly producing a
mutation of the world. After one minute, even a hundredth of a second, the world
is already different, though not different in the catalogue of possible worlds
but rather a different possible-real one, which is the same, because it has the
same degree of reality. And “the same” is equivalent to “the only.” It was
within this transformational One, otherwise known as “the real,” that Dr. Aira’s
idea for the production of miracles functioned.