The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (11 page)

As it happened, this provided an encore of a kind never witnessed before or since.
Two thousand pairs of eyes saw a large head appear from the niche, a head without
eyes, nose, or mouth, but crowned with curly blond hair, then two chubby arms ending
in claws, and a pair of opulent pink breasts with eyes where the nipples should have
been. The creature kept coming out, horizontally, up near the high roof, like a
gargoyle . . . until, with convulsive shudders, she freed her wings, first one, then
the other—enormous iridescent membranes that made a sound like cardboard when
they flapped—and was airborne. The rear part of her body was a bloated sac
covered with black fur. At first, she seemed to be falling into the orchestra pit,
but then she stabilized herself at medium altitude with a series of rapid wing-beats
and began to fly around erratically.

Terror broke loose. A fire would not have caused as much panic as that flying mutant:
there was no telling what she might do. The aisles were jammed, the exits blocked;
people were jumping over the seats; mothers were looking for their children,
husbands for their wives, and everyone was screaming. Frightened by the commotion,
the dwarf flapped around aimlessly; she, too, was looking for a way out. When she
lost altitude, the screaming in the stalls intensified, and when she climbed again,
the loudest cries came from the boxes, where spectators were trapped by the choked
stairways. In desperation, some people climbed onto the stage, which the actors had
already deserted. Some refugees from the front boxes also climbed down and crossed
the semicircle of footlights. Noticing this, other members of the audience, who had
been shoving their way down the aisles, but could see that it would be impossible to
get through that chaotic human mass, turned, ran frantically back and leaped onto
the stage. It was like breaking a taboo: invading the space of fiction, which is
precisely what they had paid not to do; but the instinct for survival prevailed.

As for the winged dwarf, the giant dragonfly, after crossing the theater’s airspace
several times with her terrifying flap-flap, picking up speed, and repeatedly
bumping into the ceiling and the walls, she too plunged toward the mouth of the
stage, which was, after all, the most reasonable thing to do. She was swallowed by
Leonor Rinaldi’s bourgeois stage set, and all the drop scenes came tumbling
down.

The audience finally fled the theater, but naturally no one wanted to go home. Calle
Stegmann was seething with an agitated crowd. Diners came out of the hotel’s
restaurant, some with their napkins tucked into their collars, many still holding
forks. The news had spread all around town; an unofficial messenger had taken it to
the big top and arrived just as the show was ending, so the circus audience
transferred itself en masse. When the police arrived, with sirens blaring, they had
trouble making their way through the crowd, like the ambulance from the hospital,
and the firefighters, who came on their own initiative.

Pouring out through the lobby, the crazed horde had thoughtlessly trampled the globe
of blood. When the owner of the circus came to collect the bodies of the dwarfs, he
was given two wrinkled silhouettes, which the clowns identified, handing them
around. There hadn’t been time for the clowns, or any of the other circus
performers, to change out of their costumes. Riders, trapeze artists, and fakirs
rubbed shoulders with actors from Leonor Rinaldi’s company, and with Tomás Simari
and la Rinaldi herself, and all mingling with the mingled audiences, not to mention
curious onlookers, neighbors, and assorted night owls. There had never been anything
like this, not even at carnival time.

The first search of the theater, conducted by the police with pistols drawn, and led
by Cereseto (only he knew all the ins and outs), proved fruitless. The creature had
disappeared again, wings and all. There was a rumor that she had found a way out and
flown off. The hypothesis should have provided some relief, but people were
disappointed. By now everyone was in the mood for a show, hanging out for more.
Hopes were revived by an unexpected event: from the imposing mass of the theater
countless bats and doves came flying out in all directions. Because doves
don’t usually fly at night, they gave this exodus a fantastic twist. Those little
creatures had obviously sensed a monstrous presence and cleared out
helter-skelter.

There was a moment of suspense, then a shout, a pointing hand. Every head rocked
back, and all eyes converged on the pseudo-Gothic crenellations of the theater’s
facade. There, crouched between two turrets, was the monster, with her wings
outstretched and her body seized by a tremor that was visible even at a distance.
The fire truck’s powerful spotlight lit her up. Down in the street, two of the
clowns, with their motley costumes and painted smiles, climbed up on car hoods and
waved the flattened bodies of the dwarfs over their heads, like banners.

Although the inhabitants of Pringles had never seen a mutant of this kind, they were
mainly country folk, familiar with the principles of procreation. However odd the
forms that nature’s children take, the basic mechanisms of life are common to them
all. So it was soon obvious to the crowd that the dwarf was about to “lay.” All the
signs pointed to a reproductive process: the sexual encounter, the period of
seclusion to allow for the metamorphosis, the crimes, the enormous abdominal sac,
the choice of an inaccessible place, and now the hunched posture, the air of
concentration and the trembling. What no one could predict was whether she would lay
one egg or two, or several, or millions. The last hypothesis seemed the most likely,
because her closest morphological affinities were with the insect world. But when
the furry silk of the sac began to split, what appeared was a single, white, pointed
egg, the size of a watermelon. An enormous “Oohh . . .” of wonder ran through the
multitude. Perhaps because every gaze was fixed on the slow extrusion of that
fantastic pearl, the surprise was all the greater when another figure appeared
beside the winged dwarf: slowly it entered the circle of light, becoming entirely
visible only when the egg had fully emerged and was balanced upright on that
vertiginous cornice. It was Sarita Subercaseaux, with her big beehive hairdo, her
pink, abundantly powdered face, her blue dress, and her little wedge-heeled shoes.
How had she got up there? What was she trying to do? She was just inches from the
creature who, having now finished her labor, turned her eyeless face to look, as it
were, at Sarita. They were the same size, and both had the same aura of supernatural
determination. A confrontation seemed inevitable, perhaps even a fight. The whole
town held its breath. But something quite different happened. Shaking herself, as if
waking from a dream, the creature stretched her wings as far as they would go, and,
with a single flap, lifted herself a few yards into the air. With a wing-beat she
turned, with another she began to pick up speed, and then she was flying, like a
pterodactyl, toward the stars, which were shining like mad diamonds for the
occasion. She disappeared among the constellations, and that was that. Only then did
the gazes of the crowd return to the roof of the theater.

Sarita Subercaseaux was unperturbed by the departure of the mutant. Now she was alone
with the egg. Moving very slowly, she raised one arm. She was holding something in
her hand. An ax. Contradictory cries rose from the crowd.
No! Don’t! Yes! Break
it!
Opinion was, of course, divided. No one wanted to subject our quiet
town on the pampas to the unforeseeable consequences of a monstrous birth, and there
was something precious about the mere fragility of an egg. On the other hand, it
seemed a pity to forego the possibilities offered by that unrepeatable occasion.

But when the movement of Sarita’s arm brought the ax clearly into view, it turned out
to be not an ax but a book. And her intention was not to break the egg but to
balance the book on top of it, delicately. In the legendary history of Pringles, the
curious figure thus produced has come to symbolize the founding of the Municipal
Library.

JULY 26, 2004

A Thousand Drops

ONE DAY THE MONA LISA
disappeared from the Louvre, provoking a
public outcry, a national scandal, and a media frenzy. It wasn’t the first time:
almost a hundred years earlier, in 1911, a young Italian immigrant, Vincenzo
Peruggia, who had free access to the building because he was working there as a
painter and decorator, walked out with the masterpiece under his workman’s apron. He
kept it hidden for two years in his garret, and in 1913 took it to Florence, with
the intention of selling it to the Uffizi gallery, justifying the robbery as a
patriotic act, the restitution of a national treasure. The police were waiting for
him, and the
Mona Lisa
returned to the Louvre, while the thief, who by this
stage was going by the name of Leonardo Peruggia, went to jail for a few years (he
died in 1947).

This time it was worse, because what disappeared was the painting, literally: the
thin layer of oil paint that constituted the famous masterpiece. The board
underneath was still there, and so was the frame, but the board was blank, as if it
had never been painted. They took it to a laboratory and subjected it to all sorts
of tests: there was no evidence that it had been scraped or treated with acid or any
other chemical; it was intact. The paint had evaporated. The only signs of force
were a number of tiny, perfectly circular holes, a millimeter in diameter, in the
reinforced glass case that separated the portrait from its viewers. These little
holes were also examined, although there was nothing to examine; no traces of any
substance were found, and no one could understand what kind of instrument could have
been used to make them. This gave rise to journalistic speculation about
extraterrestrials: some gelatinous creature, perhaps, that had applied a sucker
equipped with perforating cilia, etc. The public is so gullible! So irrational. The
real explanation was perfectly simple: the layer of paint had reverted to the state
of live drops, and the droplets had set off to travel the world. After five
centuries in a masterpiece, they were so full of energy that no sheet of glass,
however well reinforced, was going to stop them. Nor could walls or mountains or
seas or distances. The drops of color could go wherever they liked; they were
endowed with superpowers. If the investigators had counted the little holes in the
glass, they would have discovered how many there were: a thousand. But no one could
be bothered to undertake that simple task; they were all too busy coming up with
far-fetched and contradictory theories.

The drops scattered themselves over the five continents, eager for adventures,
action, and experience. For a while, at the start, they stayed on the edges of
daylight and toured the planet several times in the same direction, fanning out,
moving at a range of speeds, some in the subtle grays of dawn, others in the
passionate pinks of evening, many in the bustling mornings of the great cities or
the drowsy siestas of the countryside, in the spring meadows or the autumn woods, in
the polar ice fields or the burning deserts, or riding a little bee in a garden.
Until one of them, by chance, discovered the depths of the night, and was followed
by another, and another, and from then on there were no limits to their voyages and
discoveries. When the urge to keep moving petered out, they were able to settle
wherever they liked and display their inexhaustible creative ingenuity.

One ended up in Japan, where he set up a factory to make scented candles. They were
called Minute Candles, and they smelled of Moon. Protected by strict patents and
favored by the night, they were a huge success. Vast dance venues began to use
Minute Candles, and so did temples, mountains, woods, and the whole realms of
various shoguns. They were sold in boxes of six, twelve, twenty-four, and a thousand
(everyone bought the boxes of a thousand). The multiplication of their little pink
flames created a shadowless half-light in which near and far, before and after were
abolished. Not even the longest winter nights, it transpired, could hold so much
intimacy. Drop San, rich as Croesus, had two geisha wives, who lugged around bundles
of swords and performed dancing duels to entertain their husband. Absorbed in the
study of ballistics, Drop San paid them less and less attention, and finally forgot
all about them. Their reactions revealed a stark difference between the two girls,
so similar in other ways that everyone got them mixed up. One remained faithful, and
loved Drop San even more than when he had been attentive to her; the other looked
elsewhere for the love she could no longer find at home. One was “forever,” the
other “while it lasts,” and when she felt it had already lasted long enough she
said, That’s it, and took up with a photographer. Mr. Photo San was always traveling
to Korea for business. One day, when he was away, the Drop family picnicked in the
rain, with a big stripy umbrella, various boxes of Minute Candles, and a basket of
shrimps. They drank tea, ate, admired the silhouettes of the trees against the
violet sky, and then amused themselves with a curious toy: a foldable cardboard
tennis court the size of a chessboard, on which four frogs dressed in white played a
match of mixed doubles with little raffia racquets. The frogs were real, and neither
alive nor dead. They were activated by electrodes, which was rather inconvenient. In
addition, since neither Mr. Drop nor his wives knew the rules of tennis, the match
was somewhat chaotic. But events took a tragic turn when one of the frogs, subjected
to an excessive voltage, jumped onto Drop San’s shoulder, put his head in the
magnate’s ear and uttered a single word:
cuckold
. One disadvantage of
having two wives is that in cases of adultery you have to work out which is the
culprit. In the frenzy that overcame Drop San, there was no stopping to think: he
was going to kill them both. He jumped on the one who was closest and strangled her.
As bad luck would have it, she was the faithful wife; the unfaithful one got away,
mounted on the frogs’ little tennis ball, believing it would take her to Korea (in
fact it went to Osaka). The cuckolded avenger was left looking at the dead body. His
status as a supernatural traveling drop exempted him from the consequences that any
conventional criminal would have had to face. Or so he believed, in any case. But in
fact no being in the universe is immune to bad luck. A suave and tuneful music
opened slowly over the picnic, like a second umbrella. The candles were, it’s true,
Debussy-scented.

In Oklahoma, far from the land of chrysanthemums, a drop confronted Turpentine in
one-on-one combat. Turpentine was a skinny little blond guy, who looked very much
like Kant, fashionably well dressed, but not in a showy way. The only showy thing
about him was his quiff, which rose without gel (an aid he disdained), by dint of
sheer sculptural skill, to the great height of half an inch. This may seem a meager
achievement, but only to those who are unaware that Turpentine was an inch tall, or
an inch and a half, with the quiff. Among the whirls of dust whipped up by the
prairie winds, Joe Peter Drop shouted: “It’s him or me!” One of the two had to die.
Deep in his oil-painterly soul, it pained him to destroy so fine a creature as
Turpentine—an exquisite living trinket in a world of barbarity—but it
had to be done. The world is big and there’s room for us all—if anyone knows
that it’s a wandering drop—but there are situations in which incompatibility
becomes acute. Not that it’s such a great tragedy. Death for some means that others
can live, while life for some, the simple, plain life we’re living—that
routine, boring, meaningless life—gradually brings about the death of some
brilliant, storybook other. And perhaps repentance gave some meaning to that drift.
Turpentine, trusting to his elegance, which up until that day had invariably ensured
his triumph, rushed at his adversary with a little cactus pistol, emptying the
magazine. Joe Pete Drop had a perfectly spherical nose; in fact it was a rubber
ball, which absorbed the nine bullets. The counterattack was a dream that enveloped
Turpentine in a Precambrian pastoral, and when his friends from the bridge club came
looking they couldn’t find him. He was never seen again. Joe Pete Drop went on
running his plant for extracting cactus pink, which he exported to Korea in a
gelatin solution, to be used as a photographic developer. He was wealthy, fulfilled,
and married, but from time to time Turpentine’s ghost visited him in the form of a
sad little tune. He dealt with this by telling himself that all music was sad and
that the general weariness he’d been feeling was natural; but in his franker
moments, he admitted that by killing Turpentine he’d also killed the elegance he
once had, and that elegance is a form of energy.

When it rained, the drop called Euphoria accelerated; she became a brain drop. When
all the others fell, she rose. Gravity watched her thoughtfully, wondering, How
could she be of use to me? What benefit could I extract from her? Euphoria flew
through the clouds shouting, “I am a drop of Extreme Unction!” Water and oil never
mix. All their weddings are followed by divorce.

When it rained on the Pope, the Great Bachelor, Gravity deigned to lower the ladder
and let his retarded little sister, Mysticism, come down to earth.

One drop, hitching rides with the rain, infiltrated the Vatican, the Holy Vat and
Can, and tried to go farther and enter the Calendar of Pluvial Feast Days. He had an
affair with the Pope, a passionate romance that couldn’t last. The Pope offered to
name him Primate of Turkey, so he could prepare the forthcoming tour; it would be
the first time a pope had visited the Anatolian tablelands. They planned it all
carefully, but it was really just an excuse to get rid of the drop; the Pope was
tired of him. After anal coitus, man is sad.

Once the drop reached Ankara, he opened a school and convinced the Cooperative
Association to set up a pencil factory to finance the purchase of teaching
materials. In his correspondence with the Eucharistic Synod he hinted at the
possibility of a coup d’état. It was set to take place on the thirteenth of June,
the day on which Gravity celebrated the anniversary of his symbolic Pact with the
Pope. Each year he threw a party and invited the raindrops. Not all of them. He
didn’t have enough glasses: just a delegate from each shower. Every twelfth of June
there were elections to determine the delegates. The votes were cast in the tears of
a young girl, Rosa Edmunda González.

In Turkey, the Pope’s decision to name a drop as Primate had caused perplexity and
not a little suspicion. There was a rumor going around that the drop had lived for a
whole year in the Pope’s colon, and the new Primate’s shape and size made the story
credible. One thing led to another, and the drop decided to canonize himself without
waiting for the papal visit. In the minutes before his ascension, he dictated a memo
setting out how the pencils were to be sold: there would be boxes of six for poor
children, boxes of twelve for the middle class, and of twenty-four for the rich.
Plus specially produced boxes of a thousand, for the children of heads of state. At
some point, the pencils in the boxes of six turned into burning Minute Candles, to
the terror and distress of the children. The child who suffered most was Rosa
Edmunda González, whose mother, a humble hairdresser, had made a great sacrifice to
purchase one of the smallest boxes.

Shortly afterward, a Japanese delinquent named Photo San published compromising
photographs, developed in pink: spherical cubist photos that showed the Pope kissing
Drop.

Irresponsible and inhuman, the drop, made up of a thousand drops of the most
beautiful colors, was everywhere. It’s the End of Art! announced the eternal
alarmists, claiming that in the future the only thing left to do would be to shut
oneself in a garret, cut photos from magazines by the light of a Minute Candle, and
make collages. But the pieces would never fit back together. There would never be a
Mona Lisa
again, because once the drops had tasted the salt of liberty,
they would never return to the Louvre. And even if, by some supremely improbable
coincidence, they did return, how likely was it that each one would go back in
through the right hole?

In the city of Bogotá, there was a black dog wandering around in the streets, a great
big beast made of black vanilla pods. He scavenged in the trash, slept in the sun,
and sheltered from the rain in doorways. His size made him threatening and no one
came near him, but he was gentle. Every stray is looking for a master, and the black
dog found his in a drop that had come to visit that cold and rainy capital. They
became friends. They obeyed each other; neither gave orders. It was a master-slave
relation without a master or a slave, a marriage more than a friendship. They bought
a little car, and last thing on a Friday evening they would set off for their cabin
on the Lake of the Scented Candle. Their petit-bourgeois habits brought the End of
Art down to the level of the Weekend.

One drop ended up in the luxuriant vegetation of a tropical land, among emerald
leaves covered with dew, and mallows, fennel, and chard. The dew balls with which
the drop played billiards had hearts of ice and hair of sun. And in that drop,
evolution was stirring: she grew two pairs of rubber antennae; the top ones were
long, the bottom ones short, and they were all retractable. She moved over the
leaves, ate a green cell, digested it at the speed of light, and expelled a black
dot, a suspension point. She turned gray, became almost transparent, and took on an
elongated form, with something like a head (and antennae) at one end, a pointed tail
at the other, and a hump in between. The excess nutrients that she had not
metabolized for the purposes of movement were secreted from the hump as a hard,
yellowish layer, forming a hollow spiral, which she began to use as a shelter,
retreating into it to sleep.