The Musical Brain: And Other Stories
Read The Musical Brain: And Other Stories Online
Authors: César Aira
Contents
The All That Plows through the Nothing
The Topiary Bears of Parque Arauco
The Criminal and the Cartoonist
THE MUSICAL BRAIN
and other stories
A Brick Wall
AS A KID, IN PRINGLES,
I went to the movies a lot.
Not every day, but I never saw fewer than four or five films a week. Four or six, I
should say, because they were double features; two for the price of one, and
everybody watched both films. On Sundays the whole family went to the afternoon
session that started at five. There were two cinemas to choose from, with different
programs. As I said, they were double bills: a B movie first, and then the main
attraction (the “premiere,” though I don’t know why it was called that because they
were all premieres for us). Sometimes, almost always in fact, I also went to the
matinée session at one o’clock on Sunday, which was a double feature, too, intended
for children, although back then they didn’t make movies specially for children, so
they were westerns, adventure films, that sort of thing (and I got to see some
serials, including, I remember,
Fu Manchu
and
Zorro
). A bit later
on, when I was twelve, I started going in the evenings as well, on Saturdays (the
movies were different) or Fridays (it was the same program as the afternoon session
on Sundays, but since there were two cinemas . . .) or even on weekday nights. And
at some point one of the cinemas started continuous screenings of Argentine films on
Tuesdays, all afternoon. How many movies would I have seen? Calculating like this is
a bit silly, but four a week makes two hundred a year, at least, and if I kept going
that often from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, that makes two thousand
movies. It’s even sillier to take the calculation to its ultimate conclusion: two
thousand movies at an hour and a half each makes three thousand hours, or a hundred
and twenty-five days, that is, four long months of uninterrupted viewing. Four
months. A span like that is more concrete than a bare number, but it has the
disadvantage of suggesting one excruciatingly long film, when in fact there were two
thousand of them, each one unique, spaced out through a long childhood and
adolescence, anxiously awaited, then criticized, compared, retold, and remembered.
Above all remembered: hoarded like the manifold treasure they were. I can testify to
this because those two thousand movies are still alive in me, living a strange life
made up of resurrections and apparitions, like ghost stories.
People have often complimented me on my memory, or been amazed by the detail with
which I remember conversations or events or books (or movies) from forty or fifty
years ago. But the admiration or criticism of others is immaterial, because nobody
else can really know what you remember or how you remember it.
It was precisely for that reason (because if I don’t do it, no one else will), rather
than as a remedy against “the tedium of hotel life,” that I began to write this
account of a curious incident that occurred last night in connection with a movie. I
should point out that I’m in Pringles, in a hotel. It’s the first time I’ve stayed
in a hotel in my hometown. I came back to see my mother, who has had a fall and is
confined to bed, and I’ve found a place on the Avenida because her little apartment
is occupied by companions who are looking after her. Last night, as I was flipping
through TV channels, I came across an old black-and-white English film (the steering
wheels were on the right), which had started but only just (for a seasoned
cinephile, a couple of shots are enough to identify the opening scenes of a film).
There was something familiar about it, and when, after a few seconds, I saw George
Sanders, my suspicions were confirmed: it was
Village of the Damned
, which
I’d seen fifty years earlier, right here in Pringles, two hundred yards from the
hotel where I’m staying, at the Cinema San Martín, which no longer exists. I hadn’t
seen the movie since, but it was very clear in my mind. Coming across it like that,
without warning, was serendipitous. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a film that I
remembered from childhood on television or video. But this time it was special,
maybe because I was seeing it in Pringles.
The movie, as any buff will know (it’s a minor classic), is about a village that is
paralyzed by an unknown force: one day all its inhabitants fall asleep; when they
wake up, the women are pregnant, and nine months later they give birth. Ten years
pass, and the children begin to demonstrate their terrifying powers. They are all
very similar: blond, cold, self-assured. They dress very formally, stick together,
and never mix with the other kids. Their eyes light up like little electric lamps
and give them the power to dominate the will of the man or woman on whom they fix
their gaze. They have no qualms about exercising this domination in the most drastic
manner. A man with a shotgun is watching them; using telepathy, they force him to
put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and blow his brains out.
George Sanders, who is the “father” of one of these children, realizes what is going
on; his observations lead him to conclude that there is only one solution: to
eliminate them. Meanwhile, the children make no secret of their intention to take
over the world and annihilate the human race. As they grow, their powers increase.
Soon they will be invulnerable; they almost are already, because they can read
thoughts and anticipate any attack. (There was a similar case in Russia, which the
Soviet authorities dealt with in their own way, killing the evil children along with
the rest of the local population by carpet-bombing the village concerned.)
The protagonist is at home, wondering what to do. Or rather, how to do it. He knows
that any plan he adopts will be present in his mind, which means that it will be
visible to the children as soon as he approaches them. He tells himself that he will
have to put a solid wall between him and them . . . As he says this, he is looking
at the wall of his living room, next to the fireplace, which is covered with fake
bricks. He murmurs: “A brick wall . . .”
At this point the camera follows his gaze and focuses on the brick wall for a moment.
This fixed shot of a brick wall, with the voice off camera saying “A brick wall” was
what fascinated me. In the movies I used to watch back then in Pringles, every
image, every word, every gesture had meaning. A look, a silence, an almost
imperceptible delay revealed betrayal or love or the existence of a secret. A mere
cough could mean that a character would die or come to the brink of death, although
she had seemed perfectly healthy up till then. My friends and I had become experts
in deciphering that perfect economy of signs. It seemed perfect to us anyway, in
contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality.
Everything was a clue, a lead. Movies, whatever their genre, were really all
detective stories. Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the
same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required
in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without
significance. In the movies, however,
everything
was invested with meaning,
forming a compact mass that captivated us. To us, it seemed like a super-reality,
or, rather, reality itself seemed diffuse, disorganized, deprived of that rare,
elegant concision that was the secret of cinema.
So that “brick wall” prefigured the idea that would be used to save the world from
the impending threat. But for the moment no one knew what the idea might be, and it
was impossible to know. The wall wasn’t easy to decode, like an actor’s cough or the
close-up of a sidelong glance. In fact, not even the character knew: for him the
idea was still at the metaphorical stage. In order to carry out an effective attack
on the diabolical children, he had to put a barrier between himself and them that
would be impenetrable to telepathy, and the image that came to mind as a
representation of that barrier was a brick wall. He could have chosen a different
metaphor: “a steel plate,” “a rock,” “the Great Wall of China” . . . His choice must
have been determined by the fact that there was a brick wall right in front of him.
But despite its visible materiality, the wall was still a metaphor. The children
would surely have been able to read thoughts through walls, so a literal wall was
not the solution. He was referring to something else, and that gave the shot a
disturbing negativity, which made it unforgettable.
A brick wall
. . . the expression went on resonating.
I’m not the only admirer of this film, and I certainly didn’t discover it as a cult
classic. Nevertheless, I can claim a certain priority, since I saw it when it
premiered. That was two or three years after it first came out, as was usually the
case in Pringles, but it was still a “premiere” movie, and I was part of the target
audience, who watched it without the distance introduced by cinephilia and
historical perspective. We
were
cinephilia and history, both of which I
would eventually convert into intellectual pursuits.
And there was something more: I was the same age as the children in the film. I
probably tried to make my eyes light up with that electric gleam, to see if I could
read people’s minds. And Pringles was a small town, not as small as the one in the
film, but small enough to suffer a “damnation” of that kind. For example, the
mysterious paralysis of the opening scenes: our town was often empty and silent, as
if everyone had died or left, during the siesta, say, or on a Sunday, or any day,
really, at any time.
Still, I don’t think anyone in the capacity audience at the Cinema San Martín on that
Sunday long ago would have made the connection between the two towns and the two
damnations. Not because there were no intelligent and cultivated individuals among
the inhabitants of Pringles back then, but because of a certain decorous restraint,
prevalent in those bygone days, which kept people well away from meanings and
interpretations. Cinema was an elaborate and gratuitous artistic fantasy, nothing
more. I don’t mean that we were consummate aesthetes; we didn’t need to be.
The priority that I mentioned owes less to these chance coincidences than to the fact
that between my first and second viewings of the film, I accompanied its
transformation from commercial product for a general public (that is, for the
public, period) to cult object for an enlightened elite. And it was accompaniment in
the fullest sense of the word: I was personally converted from public to elite. My
life and
Village of the Damned
have followed the same path of subtle
transformation, changing without having changed.
I suppose the same thing happened with the rest of the two thousand movies I saw in
those years: the good and the bad, the forgotten and the rediscovered. It must have
happened even with the classics, the great films that make it into Top Ten lists.
They all crossed over from directness to indirectness, or withdrew to a distance,
which is logical and inevitable, given the passing of time. Hitchcock’s
North by
Northwest
, which I also saw at the Cinema San Martín in, I’m guessing, 1960
or ’61 (the film dates from 1959), is a case in point. In Argentina it was called
Intriga internacional
, or
International Intrigue
, and I
probably didn’t find out what it was called in English until twenty years later,
when I began to read books about Hitchcock and think about his work in the light of
my intellectual concerns. Perhaps because the original title is abstract, or because
of the way the translation resonates for me, I still think of it as
International Intrigue
, though I know it’s rather absurd; the
translations of film titles were often ridiculously inappropriate in those days, and
they’ve since become a source of jokes.
Few other films, none perhaps, made such an impression on Miguel and me. Miguel López
was my best friend in early childhood, and as it turns out—another
coincidence, though not a happy one—he died yesterday. They announced it on
the local radio, and I heard only because I was in Pringles, otherwise it would have
taken me months or years to find out, if I ever did. No one would have thought to
tell me: we hadn’t seen each other for decades; there weren’t many people left who
remembered that we’d been childhood friends; and here in town it’s generally assumed
that the locals have already heard and outsiders wouldn’t care.
And yet, up till the age of eleven or twelve, we were inseparable. He was my first
friend, almost like the big brother I never had. He was two years older than me, an
only child, and lived across the road. Since we used to play in the street, or in
the vacant lots between the houses, I’m guessing that our adventures began as soon
as I could exercise a minimal autonomy, at the age of three or four. From a very
early age, we became serious movie fans. So did all the other kids we knew,
inevitably: the movies were our major source of entertainment, the big outing, the
luxury at our disposal. But Miguel and I took it further: we played at cinema,
“acting out” whole movies, reinventing them, using them as material for the creation
of games. I was the brains, naturally, but Miguel followed me and egged me on,
demanding more brains: being a physical, histrionic sort of boy, he needed a script.
I greedily consumed the inspiration that each new movie gave me.
International
Intrigue
was a great inspiration, and more than that. I’d almost go so far
as to say that we made something out of that film that encompassed our whole
childhood, or what was left of it.
I couldn’t say just what it was about
International Intrigue
that made such
an impression. Our enthusiasm was pure and simple, without a trace of snobbery or
prejudice: we didn’t even know who Hitchcock was (or maybe we did, but it made no
difference), and it can’t have been just because the film was about spies and
adventure, because we saw films like that every Sunday. Any hypothesis I hazard now
is bound to be contaminated by everything I’ve read about Hitchcock and the ideas
I’ve had about his work. Recently someone was asking about my tastes and
preferences, and when he came to cinema and my favorite director, he anticipated my
response: Hitchcock? I said yes. It wasn’t hard to guess. (I’m one of those people
who can’t imagine anyone having a favorite director
other
than Hitchcock.)
I said I’d be more impressed by his perspicacity if he guessed (or deduced) my
favorite Hitchcock film. He thought for a moment and then confidently proposed
North by Northwest
. This left me wondering what kind of visible
affinity there might be between
North by Northwest
and me. It’s a famously
empty film, a virtuosic exercise in emptying the spy film and the thriller of all
conventional contents. Thanks to the bungling of hopelessly incompetent bad guys, an
innocent man finds himself caught up in a conspiracy without an object, and as the
action unfolds, all he does is stay alive, without understanding what’s going on.
The form that encloses this emptiness could not be more perfect, because it’s
nothing more than form, in other words, it doesn’t have to share its quality with
any content.