The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (17 page)

Yes! (Now he was getting excited, poor thing.) Freedom! The immense freedom of flying
over the world, over the various worlds. That was something humans didn’t have! The
rigid blind of instinct came down in infancy, and all they did for the rest of their
lives was automatically obey the dictates of their nature. The ovenbird, on the
other hand, was progressing on the path of infinite possibilities.

But that path was too much like the void. His current state, which felt like
premature old age, an exhaustion caused by the constantly draining struggle simply
to stay alive, proved that freedom was inherently excessive. Freedom really had to
be defined anew, and in that definition he would come off badly. Beings who lived in
strict accordance with an uncontaminated nature, like humans, were free in a
superior sense of the word. Slaves of instinct? Granted, but “instinct” had to be
redefined as well; and if instinct was equivalent to infallibility and happiness,
what greater freedom could there be? All the rest was illusory. They weren’t missing
out on anything.

The humans there on the balcony were nearly finished with their maté because the
water had gone cold, and the leaves had lost their flavor, and they’d had enough . .
. in short: because the magnificent Law that governed all the little causes had so
decreed. The entire universe was manifest among the humble and the meek, and
attended to them like a god, serving and obeying them. Time that destroys and
dominates all things slowed to a standstill in the eternal present of simple
existence. Calm and sensual, strangers to the torments of conscience and doubt,
trusting to the gentle flow of life, mating, reproduction, and even death, they
(unlike him) could truly say, “To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.”
They had no fears . . . And yet they too had “resonances.” When, as now, they
contemplated the pink and violet sky, the pristine countryside, and time frozen in
the delicate whorls of the air, they too were sensitive to metaphysics, poetry,
morality, and aesthetics—more sensitive than he was, because they saw reality
without veils! Had he been tempted to imitate them, as he’d occasionally tried to
do, it would have been futile: another whim of consciousness, another project doomed
to fail, one of the many on which he wasted his energy over and over . . .

Now they were talking. They had been talking the whole time, confidently, calmly,
with their dry little words and whispers. That was another sore point for the
ovenbird. Although it wasn’t an important part of life for him (it is for us humans,
but not for him; which shows that one shouldn’t rush to translate back the other
way: the equivalences, although complete, are not symmetrical), he found it
especially galling. What came out of human throats was effective, simple, and
practical; the ovenbird’s songs and chirps were a dreamlike tangle in which function
and frill, sense and nonsense, truth and beauty were chaotically mixed. Humans
didn’t have problems like that; Nature had made it easy for them: from birth, or
shortly afterward (from the moment, in their first year of life, when the “blind” of
instinct came down), they deposited all meaning in language, and whatever didn’t fit
was considered marginal or insignificant. But for the ovenbird, meaning was
dispersed in a thousand different telepathies, while song was an aesthetic without
precise limits, which could be used for just about anything, or be of no use at all.
He sang for love, or because he had the hiccups, or felt like it, or just because of
the time of day . . . And his song, like everything he did, was subject to the
unpredictable fluctuations of consciousness, to excess freedom or the excessiveness
of freedom itself.

Night was falling over the sacred pampa. The little bird, still and quiet like a curl
of mud in front of his unfinished dwelling, went on wallowing in anxiety and
nostalgia for real life, which he saw as the life of others in an inaccessible
elsewhere. I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear, and even if I have, I might not
have been convincing. The only aim of this piece is to offer some counterevidence,
which I hope will be thought-provoking, although it’s hardly conclusive. The method
itself could be challenged: after all, this was written by a human. But what does
that prove, except that humans are equipped with an instinct that enables them to
write? How else could they do it? Why don’t birds write? Precisely because they have
too much freedom: they could write or not; there’s nothing in them to trigger the
activity in a failsafe way; unlike humans, they don’t have a program that would
allow them to write with perfect automatic facility. The action of writing these
pages is itself written into the genetic endowment handed down to me from the dawn
of time. That’s why I can do it just like that, without hesitations or corrections,
like breathing or sleeping. From the ovenbird’s point of view, there’s a gulf
between this magic facility and the deliberations that make all of his tasks so
laborious.

MAY 8, 1994

The Cart

A CART FROM A SUPERMARKET
in my neighborhood was
rolling along on its own, with no one pushing it. It was a cart just like all the
others, made of thick wire, with four little rubber wheels (the front pair slightly
closer together, which is what gives the vehicle its characteristic shape), and a
bar coated with bright red plastic for steering it around. There was nothing to
distinguish it from the two hundred other carts that belonged to that enormous
supermarket, the biggest and busiest in the neighborhood. Except that the cart I’m
referring to was the only one that moved on its own. It did this with infinite
discretion: in the tumult that reigned on the premises from opening to closing time,
to say nothing of the peak hours, its movement went unnoticed. It was used like all
the other carts, filled with food, drink, and cleaning products, unloaded at the
cash registers, pushed hurriedly from one aisle to the next, and if the shoppers let
it go and saw it roll a fraction of an inch, they assumed that it was being carried
along by momentum.

The wonder was only perceptible at night, when the frenzy gave way to an uncanny
calm, but there was no one to admire it. Very occasionally, the shelf-stackers
starting work at dawn would be surprised to find the cart astray down at the back,
next to the deep-freeze cabinets, or between the dark shelves of wine. They
naturally assumed that it had been left there by mistake the previous night. In such
a large and labyrinthine establishment, oversights like that were only to be
expected. If the cart was moving when they found it, and if they noticed the
movement, which was as inconspicuous as the sweep of a watch’s minute hand, they
presumed that it must have been the result of a slope in the floor or a draft of
air.

In fact, the cart had spent the whole night going around and around, up and down the
aisles, slow and quiet as a star, without ever hesitating or coming to a stop. It
did the rounds of its domain, mysterious, inexplicable, its miraculous essence
concealed by the banal appearance of a shopping cart like any other. The employees
and the customers were too busy to detect this secret phenomenon, which made no
difference, after all, to anyone or anything. I was the only one to notice it, I
think. Actually, I’m sure: attention is scarce among human beings, and a great deal
of it was required in this case. I didn’t tell anyone, because it was too much like
the sort of fantasies I’m always coming up with, which have earned me a reputation
for craziness. Over many years of shopping there, I learned to recognize my special
cart by a little mark on the red bar; except that I didn’t have to see the mark,
because even from a distance something told me that it was the one. A wave of joy
and confidence swept through me each time I identified it. I thought of it as a kind
of friend, a friendly object, perhaps because in this case the inertness of a thing
had been leavened with that minimal tremor of life that is the starting point for
all fantasies. Perhaps, in a corner of my subconscious, I was grateful to it for
being different from all the other carts in the civilized world, and for having
revealed that difference to me and no one else.

I liked to imagine it in the solitude and silence of midnight, rolling very slowly
through the dimness, like a little boat full of holes setting off in search of
adventure, knowledge, and (why not?) love. But what could it find in that array of
dairy products, vegetables, noodles, soft drinks, and canned peas, which was all it
knew of the world? Nevertheless, it didn’t lose hope, but resumed its navigations,
or never interrupted them, like someone who knows that his efforts are futile but
keeps trying all the same. Someone who keeps trying because he has pinned his hopes
on the transformation of everyday banality into dream and portent. I think I
identified with it, and that identification, I think, was how I discovered it in the
first place. Paradoxically, for a writer who feels so distant and different from his
colleagues, I felt close to that shopping cart. Even our respective techniques were
similar: progressing by imperceptible increments, which add up to make a long
journey; not looking too far ahead; urban themes.

Given all this, you can imagine my surprise when I heard it speak or, to be more
precise, when I heard what it said. Its declaration was the last thing I was
expecting to hear. Its words went through me like a spear of ice and forced me to
reconsider the whole situation, beginning with the sympathy I felt for the cart,
then the sympathy I felt for myself, and more generally my sympathy for miracles. I
wasn’t surprised by the fact of it speaking; I had been expecting that. Perhaps I
felt that our relationship had matured to the point where linguistic signs were
appropriate. I knew that the moment had come for it to say something to me (for
example that it admired me and loved me and was on my side). I bent down next to it,
pretending to tie my shoelaces, so that I could put my ear to the wire mesh on its
side, and then I was able to hear its voice, a whisper from the underside of the
world, and yet the words were perfectly clear and distinct:

“I am Evil.”

MARCH 17, 2004

Poverty

I'M POORER THAN THE POOR,
and I’ve been poor for longer. An
eternity of deprivation stretches out in my resentful fantasy, which is not confined
to measuring the duration of the ill. It also gauges the magnitude of the
catastrophe. There’s so much I could have, if only I had the means! So many things,
experiences, and comforts! Listing them, putting them in order, and calculating
their potential contributions to my pleasure leaves me feeling exhausted and
entitled to their possession, if only as a reward for that obsessive labor. But my
real experience is taking me further and further away from the well-being that money
could provide, while sharpening my appreciation of its advantages. I don’t have to
fantasize about this; I just have to look around me. I live among people who keep
getting richer year by year. I haven’t kept up with the poor friends I used to have,
and to be frank I don’t want to. We have nothing in common: no tastes, habits, or
interests. Soccer bores me stiff. The people I can have a conversation with are
sophisticates with money to spare, but of course the idea of sharing it with me
never occurs to them. Why would they do that? In their frivolous innocence, they
consider me a great writer, a figure from literary history living in the present.
But in fact I’m destitute. I watch them orbiting in spheres that are more and more
inaccessible to me, and my resentment grows. I become bitter and depressed; I
accentuate my eccentricity—it’s an understandable defense mechanism, and a way of
hiding the truth. I’m ashamed of my leaky shoes, my unvarying and inadequate
wardrobe, the scruffiness and poor personal hygiene that are symptoms of a repressed
desperation. I hole up in my apartment, and I can’t invite anyone over: the
furniture’s too rickety, there are too many damp patches on the walls, and our
supplies of cheap noodles are too strictly rationed. From the window I see my
neighbors in Barrio Rivadavia (a shantytown) and remark that they’re not as poor as
I am, because they always have something to spare, while I don’t have enough of
anything. I observe their feasts and drinking bouts, their Sundays in the sun; even
when they go out towing their rickshaws to rummage through the trash, they’re richer
than I am because they find things. Meanwhile, I exhaust myself performing the most
abject tasks, engaging in the most humiliating middle-class begging, barely earning
enough to feed my children, who have to make heroic efforts to endure the inevitable
comparisons with the lives of their friends, and justifiably regard me as a failure.
How long is it since I bought a book or a record, or went to the cinema? My computer
is obsolete; by some miracle it still works, but I can’t even dream of upgrading.
All around me people are buying, spending, adapting, changing, progressing. Crisis
or no crisis, my country is subject to periodic rashes of consumerism that end up
affecting everyone. Everyone except me. How can I buy anything, even a pencil, when
my pockets are empty? I don’t even have a credit card. I’ve had to become a tax
evader because I just don’t have the means to pay. And when all my friends and
acquaintances get tired of amassing new things and rewarding experiences, and go
away for vacations on tropical beaches or cultural visits to beautiful cities, I’m
left behind in my sty, chewing over my resentment. Only a miracle could produce a
windfall and light up my squalid existence, but it’s already miraculous that I’ve
managed to get what I need to survive, and you can’t really ask for two miracles.

Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t it have turned out differently, if, in
the end, it would have made no difference to the universal scheme of things? Why did
I have to be the object of your fierce persecution, Poverty, demanding and vexatious
goddess—or, rather, witch—that you are? Why me? For some mysterious reason you
noticed me back in Pringles, when I was a kid; maybe you were drawn to my pretty
eyes, which you afflicted with myopia, adding physical to economic misery, making me
neurotic as well as a pariah. Our close association dates back to those early days.
My little house, echoing with scarcity, was yours as well. That was where I got to
know you, listening to my parents’ endless arguments over money, in which I
discovered language and a model for life. And if I went out, you accompanied me, you
took me by the hand and pointed out the boxes of colored pencils that my school
friends had, their rustling pads of tracing paper, the ice creams they ate, the
Mexican magazines they bought . . . Where did they get the money? Why didn’t I have
any? You never told me.

The truly remarkable thing is that when I left town you came with me, as if you
couldn’t bear my absence. My mother resigned herself to the separation, but not you.
You came to Buenos Aires; you clung to me and settled in my lodgings, and all my
ploys for eluding your relentless company failed. If I went to work, you accompanied
me on the bus; if I lost my job, you stayed at home watching me read one sad volume
after another. When I got married, you were the only wedding present I could offer
my wife. You were the only fairy who bent over my children’s cradles. You were the
sinister Christmas tree, my psychic roulette, the confidante to whom I poured out
the all-too-obvious contents of my heart. Tossing and turning in bed, tortured by
insomnia, I hatched all manner of escape plans, shriveling my brain. You always let
me choose my course of action freely, but at the last minute you’d come along too.
It was like one of those obsessive cartoons: I could cross oceans and continents,
and believe that I’d escaped from your persecution, for a while at least . . . but
then I’d find you in my room, calm as could be, busy with some mean little scheme.
It was automatic. I ended up becoming the most sedentary of men. And the metaphoric
forms of flight—new jobs, resolutions, self-hypnosis—were, predictably, even
less effective: when the literal doesn’t work, metaphors are worse than useless.

Enough! I’ve done my time. Not even a murderer gets a forty-six-year sentence, and
I’ve never broken the law; on the contrary, I’m so well meaning and inoffensive, I
sometimes feel I’m a saint. Can’t you leave me in peace? Don’t I deserve a break, at
least? I know it’s my fault, but it still seems unfair. I want to be left alone, to
fend for myself, if I’m still up to it; I want to be subject to the laws of chance,
like other men, and know that there’s a possibility, however slim, that luck might
smile on me. I’m fed up with your relentless presence, Poverty. Your homeopathy has
made me sick; I wish I could have you eradicated . . . If there was any chance you
might listen, I’d threaten to kill myself, but that wouldn’t be any use either . .
.

At this point in my soliloquy, the figure of Poverty appeared before me: gaunt,
stiff, ragged, and—in her way—magnificent. My words must have had some effect,
because her falsely submissive air had been replaced by a look of genuine fury: eyes
aflame, fists clenched, lips opening and closing violently.

“Fool! Featherbrain! Moron! All these years I’ve kept quiet, putting up with your
complaints, your immature whining, your maladjustment, your ingratitude for all the
gifts I’ve showered on you since you were born, but I can’t stand it anymore! Now
you’re going to listen to me, though it probably won’t do you any good, because some
people never learn.

“Who told you that my company was a disadvantage? The fact that you believed it just
because that’s what everyone says goes to show how incurably frivolous you are. And
that’s exactly the vice that I’ve been striving to save you from, with a
perseverance that I now see was wasted. After all this time, do I have to spell out
what I’ve done for you? I don’t know where to start, because I gave you everything
you have. And more than that: I gave you the framework to accommodate it all. I gave
you the energy you’d never have been able to muster by yourself. Without me you’d
have given up almost straightaway, devoid of ideas and the brainpower to come up
with them. I put variation and color into what would have been a monotonous routine.
I gave you the joy of always being able to hope for better times. If you’d possessed
something, what would you have hoped for? (Except the loss of it, knowing you.) As
it was, you were always expecting things to improve. Fearful and timid as you are,
and always would have been, however much you’d had, you would have lived in constant
fear of thieves and swindlers, who would always have been too clever for you. I gave
you a reason to go on living, the only one you had. Do you think you’d have written
a word if I hadn’t been there all the time, peeking over your shoulder at your
notebooks? Why else would you have written anything? And if you had, it would have
been worse than what you’ve produced. Much worse! But I have to explain that too,
don’t I?

“Even with your limited intelligence, you must have noticed that the rich are
different. And this is why: the rich man substitutes money for the making of things.
Instead of buying wood and making a table, he buys a table ready-made. There’s a
progression: if he’s not so rich, he buys the table and paints it himself; if he’s
richer, he buys it painted. If he’s not rich at all, he doesn’t even buy the wood;
he goes to the forest and cuts down a tree, et cetera. Poverty (yours truly)
provides a certain amount of process. The rich man gets everything ready-made,
including goods and services. Which means that he loses reality, because reality is
a process. Worse still: the availability of ready-made things waiting to be used
comes to seem natural, and he begins to expect it in the world of thought as well.
That’s why the rich use ready-made ideas, copied opinions, tastes invented by
others. They delegate the process. Even where their feelings are concerned, which is
what makes them so stereotypical and superficial: the caricatures by which they’re
generally represented are actually far too complex and flattering. Would you have
wanted to be like that? Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Without me, your
books would have lacked the one modest virtue that no one can deny them: realism. I
gave you that, and you have the nerve to hold it against me!

“And how! With your first thought in the morning, you revile me; with your last
thought when you go to bed as well. And in between it’s nothing but protests,
complaints, and whining. I’m aware that with the advance of technology and
consumerism, the world is adopting the system of the rich, which will be generalized
eventually. That must be what makes you feel marginal and old-fashioned, as if I
were a burden holding you back in a past of pre-industrial labor. Maybe that’s why
you resent me, but it’s the source of all your originality, and given your
maladaptation, without originality, you’re nothing.

“Anyhow, I’m not going to go on justifying your existence. I’m sick of being your
bête noire; I’m fed up with your insults and rudeness. I can’t stand you anymore.
I’m moving out! If that’s what you really wanted, you’ve got it: you won’t see me
again. I’m going to Arturito Carrera’s place, where I know I’ll get the appreciation
I deserve.”

And with that, she got up and headed for the door, offended, rigid with indignation.
It was true! She was going! One more step and she’d be outside. Panic swelled in my
chest, unbearable as a heart attack. Speeches always convince me, this one
especially, because in a way it had sprung from my own heart and mind (that’s how
allegorical figures operate). I leaped up from my armchair and shouted:

“No! Don’t go, Poverty! Forget everything I said, I beg you, and what I’ll say in the
future, too, because I know what I’m like; I won’t be able to stop complaining. But
I don’t really want you to leave. After all, I’m used to you now. It would almost be
like my wife leaving me. I couldn’t bear the humiliation. I wasn’t born to be an
orphan. Stay with me, and I’ll get by. Don’t listen to what I say. I’m rude, I know,
and I don’t deserve you, but please, please, don’t go.”

She stood perfectly still with her hand on the doorknob for a moment of unbearable
suspense, and then she turned very slowly. There was a serious smile on her lips,
and I knew that she had forgiven me. She walked toward me with ceremonious steps,
like a bride approaching the altar.

And Poverty has lived with me ever since. Not for one day has she left my home.

ROSARIO, NOVEMBER 29, 1995