The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (12 page)

Some children discovered her by chance and took her home. They put her in a plastic
container and adopted her as a pet. They made holes in the lid with a pin so she
could breathe. They called her Snailie, and every now and then they said: I wonder
what Snailie’s doing? They went to see. They guessed or invented her states of mind,
the desires, dreams, and adventures that made up her minimalist life enclosed in
transparent plastic. They fed her with moistened blades of grass, celery, and
polenta.

And then one day, when they went to look, she was gone. She had turned back into a
drop of oil paint from the
Mona Lisa
and escaped through one of the holes,
repeating an ancestral pattern. It was proof that life in this world is not all of
one kind; there are many varieties, each functioning according to its own logic, and
evolution is not enough to unify them.

Other children, who lived in the city and were playing in the living room of a
sixth-floor apartment, saw a wandering drop that had flown onto their balcony and
couldn’t find its way out again. The balcony had those wire-mesh guards that parents
put up when they have small children.

“Daddy! Daddy! A little bird with a moustache!”

In that little space full of potted ferns and geraniums, the drop flew around as if
afraid, back and forth, doing figure eights, loop-the-loops, and spirals, unable to
escape. The children in the apartment, on the other side of the glass, were no less
agitated. They sensed that the divine fly would not stay, and even though they lived
in the fleeting instants of their attention, as children do, they were overawed by
the eternity of the flight. They would have liked to keep the drop as a pet. They
would have made a little paper house with doors and windows, an igloo, and a tiny
bicycle for him to ride.

But suddenly he was gone.

“He escaped! Daddy! Mummy! He escaped! He was round! He was
so
cute!”

No one believed them, of course.

Meanwhile, in Norway, a drop was heading for the icy north in search of the
nightingale of the snows. She ventured into a vast endless day in pursuit of a
dubious legend. Dawns of never-ending pink were reflected in a crystalline lake, on
the floor of which a Minute Candle in a diving suit burned without consuming itself.
Indolent eagles with horses’ heads glided over an endless grid of cold. The drop
traveled in a Sherman tank, which crunched through the frost, leaving broad tracks.
The natives were terrified. All Norway shook in fear before the advance of the
Armored Drop. How far would she go? According to the local legends, which had never
been contested, if the nightingale sang, the candle at the bottom of the lake would
go out, and the inspiration of the artists would be extinguished along with that
flame. In return, they would receive the scent of eternal melancholy.

Inevitably, war broke out. The tank multiplied and became a thousand tanks, each in a
glass hexagon, advancing over transparencies of ice. It was a war entirely made up
of mirages and phantasmagoria. The Snow multiplied too. She was a fat, white
princess, the daughter of King Pole, and rivalry for her hand led to hostilities
among the Scandinavian powers. Her lineage was especially illustrious. But when the
Snow Princesses began to proliferate, perspectives in those icy wastes were thrown
into confusion. General Panzer Drop Kick commanded the operation, enclosed in an
engraved dropper. The battles were an incredible spectacle: millions of soldiers on
bicycles plowing up the polar ice cap, the eagles growing visibly, and, always there
in the background, the silver nightingale in its tabernacle of atoms. And all
because of a drop!

Then a crack in the glass of the dropper allowed it to fill with mist. When, on the
orders of the Norwegian Prime Minister, the mist was extracted with a pump, it
turned out that the drop was no longer inside. It reappeared at the bottom of the
lake, suspended over the tip of the candle’s flame. The heat softened and deformed
it, brightened its colors and made it give off a strange smell of old flowers.

On the wide grasslands of China, a drop set up a news agency. Village life, with its
immutable cycles of yin and yang, was unsettled by the din of the transmissions. The
DropToday agency bought a basketball team and the inaugural match (both for the team
and for the luxurious stadium built in the wilds of outer Mongolia) was against an
NBA all-star selection. The North Americans were keen to conquer the Yellow Empire’s
massive sports market, and the visit was managed by the State Department. The Pope
promised to attend the event. The team was made up of China’s tallest and strongest
men, and Mr. Drop, who had been appointed coach, adopted a novel procedure for the
training sessions. Or not so novel, in fact, because it had already been used by the
ancient Romans, and was still being used by Hawaiian surfers. It consisted of
practicing with a very heavy sphere of bronze instead of a normal ball. In this way
the athletes developed powerful reflexes that would enable them to handle the ball
like a dream when it came to a real match. The first day they used a twenty-kilo
bronze ball, the second day it was twenty-five kilos, and on the third day it was
thirty. The Chinese giants buckled under the weight of that hefty projectile. Drop
went to the next level: he made them train on a court that was six miles long and
two miles wide. Its dimensions were proportioned to the weight of the bronze ball.
Drop was very adept at calculating proportions, and he didn’t need to use graph
paper. He applied the same skill to news stories, enlarging them while maintaining
their proportions. This was the reason for the success of his agency; he pioneered
the “Chinese news” technique and made it popular around the world.

It goes without saying that this aggravated exercise drew big drops of sweat from the
athletes. It was inhuman, heaving that ball around and racing constantly from one
hoop to the other. Heedless of the cost, Drop had hired a consultant: Gravity, who’d
come to China to await the arrival of the Pope, with whom he was to be united in
marriage. It was the story of the century. The newspaper headlines had quoted
Gravity, the Universal Playboy, taking leave of the Holy Father after their first
night of love: “
SEE YOU ON THE BALTIC!
” That northern sea was to be
enclosed by a wall of red marble, which was under construction; one of its wings
would join up with the Great Wall, making a thunderous crash.

Drop went so far as to get the five giant team members out of bed the night before
the match and whisk them away in secret for a last training session by moonlight.
They traveled by truck to the outer reaches of Mongolia. They stopped in a silvery
desert, got out and looked around. A hoop reared on the horizon, a hundred and
twenty feet high. Facing it, on the opposite horizon, was another hoop, the pole
half hidden by the curvature of the earth. A motorcycle that had been following them
roared to a halt. They stared at the rider, who dismounted and removed his helmet.
It was Gravity. The Chinese giants, who had seen him only on television, gaped in
amazement. This is what happens with media celebrities: it’s hard to accept that
they really exist. Mr. Drop floated over to the motorbike, and together they undid
the straps that were holding a large chest in place behind the seat. The Vatican’s
coat of arms was carved into the lid. Inside the chest was a golden seal’s head,
which weighed fifty kilos. This was what they were to use for the last training
session, pushing their strength to the limit, and receiving the head’s famous powers
in return.

“Long passes,” ordered Drop. They began. The crushing weight of the seal’s head bent
them double. Catching it, they staggered backward; their veins swelled and they
grimaced in pain. Drop shouted himself hoarse, demanding more speed, more precision.
And to Gravity, who was beside him, looking on worriedly, he said, “A few drops of
height are no match for savagery.” The players’ falling sweat echoed throughout
Mongolia.

With the movement and the handling, the seal’s head warmed up. The gold began to
shine; the fat in the seal’s brain melted, running between the players' fingers,
making the large projectile slippery, all the more difficult to catch and throw.

In the end, the group rose up, forming a kind of cone whose apex was the seal’s head,
exuding fat, shinier than the moon, with the five basketball players underneath,
stretched like phylacteries. They took off, into the black, starless sky. Gravity
was irresistibly drawn up in their wake, and the motorcycle followed him. Drop
watched them shrink as they climbed, until they disappeared. The only thought that
occurred to him was that the wedding would have to be put off again.

Later he was criticized for his extravagant and inappropriate training methods. He
even wondered himself, for a moment, if he hadn’t gone too far.

But for him it was a point of honor to maintain a superior indifference. The game of
realism, by its very nature, neutralized everything. Even invention, to which the
scattered drops had devoted themselves with a passion, had a retroactive effect on
realism. It might have been said that in each of its avatars, invention was writing
itself with a drop of ink and an obsessive attention to plausibility. Each drop was
self-contained, thanks to the delicate balance of its surface tension. There was no
context, just pure irradiation.

The drop had neither doors nor windows. History had countless generative tips. A
certain drop, virginal and vaginal in equal parts, had, by a miracle of naptime
surgery, undergone gender reassignment and adopted the name Aureole. Initially his
name had been Dr. Aureole. Due to a suspension, Aureole was left hanging in the air
. . .

The suspension gave rise to a sublime romanticism: Aureole, in a nightgown, on the
balcony of her little castle, overlooking a dark garden alive with the sounds of
insects and fountains, lost in her reverie, her spidery weaving. The castle was in
flames, but the fire was suspended too. The drop was in another dimension. It could
only have happened to her: another display of indifference, made plausible by the
devices of realism.

Suddenly, on a third level of the story, three cloaked figures dropped from the eaves
and the drainpipes, landing all at once on the balcony. Torn from her reverie,
Aureole began to spin, squealing in distress. She tried various falling movements to
escape from the gloved hands of her attackers, but it was as if she were floating on
mercury. All she succeeded in doing was to make them tear her nightgown and mess up
her hair. Working as a team, the three figures thrust her, terrified and tearful,
into a box, which closed with a resonant clack. The crowd that had gathered around
the castle to watch the fire saw nothing of this maneuver, and the firemen busy
extending their ladders like pirates boarding a ship saw even less. The kidnappers
took advantage of the confusion to escape with their captive; a car was waiting for
them on the other side of the moat. They traveled through the hills for a long time,
and before the moon rose they came to the gardens of an abandoned country house.
They entered the house through the back door and shut the prisoner in the cellar.

Only then did they relax and take off their hoods. They were a trio of dangerous
criminals: Shower, Hose, and Faucet. For many years they had been plotting to kidnap
a drop. Chubby, hoarse, chrome-plated, they danced about on the table like Maenads,
making metallic noises, drank a bottle of cognac, and called Gravity on the
telephone to demand a ransom.

Ring . . . ring . . . ring . . .

The sound of the little bell reverberated throughout the mountains. The echo carried
it from peak to peak, creating a kind of succession.

The documents relating to the case were published by Drop Press. Pocket museums had
become a possibility, thanks to technical progress in photography and printing. Here
a flashback to an earlier part of the story is needed to complete the “picture.” The
Mona Lisa
is, as it happens, the emblem of the mechanical reproduction
of the work of art (whether by photography, printing, or digital media). The merits
of this splendid portrait are not to be denied, but it’s important to recall some of
the historical events that propelled it to the position of supremacy it occupies
today. There are other portraits of women by Leonardo that could perfectly well have
stolen the limelight. There’s the portrait of Cecilia Galleriani, the
Lady with
an Ermine
, which more than a few critics have praised as the most beautiful
ever painted, the most perfect. Or the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, that childlike
woman with her severe, round face. Neither is lacking in the mystery that stimulates
the imagination . . . What, then, explains the incomparable popularity of the
Mona Lisa
? It so happened that throughout the nineteenth century, as
tourism began to develop and the books that would establish the canon of Western art
were being written, the
Mona Lisa
was on display in the Louvre for everyone
to see, while Cecilia and Ginevra were languishing in obscure collections in Krakow
and Lichtenstein.

The theft of the
Mona Lisa
in 1911 put the picture on the front pages of the
newspapers, just when photography and printing were making it possible to reproduce
works of art on a massive scale. The news story had natural flow-on effects, and the
Mona Lisa
, reproduced ad infinitum, became an indestructible icon.

But there was something more, another new development in civilization, which
contributed to the process: the invention of the global news story. Just when
journalism had reached its industrial maturity, two events occurred within a few
months of each other that justified that maturity and brought it to fruition: the
theft of the
Mona Lisa
and the wreck of the
Titanic
. Both events
instituted a myth. Because these stories were the first of their kind, they were the
biggest and the most productive. All the rest were condemned to operate within a
system of substitutions. It was pure poetic justice that one of the
Mona
Lisa
’s runaway drops should set up a news agency, and precisely in China,
humanity’s great neural puzzle.