The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (19 page)

“Wait! Maybe we’re misunderstanding each other, or I’m the one who doesn’t
understand. Didn’t you say the comic predicted every detail of your life as an
outlaw, and this was when I was in primary school and hadn’t even dreamed of
becoming a cartoonist? So what are you accusing me of?”

“Of denouncing me, what do you think?”

“But how could I, if it was all denounced already, a priori?”

“That’s how you’re going to die, ‘a priori.’”

Music again, exactly as before: the same deep, resonant notes, very far apart, making
up a superhuman melody.

“Hold on, explain. If I’m going to die”—it was the first time he’d acknowledged
this, but no doubt just as a way to buy time—“at least I want to know why.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

The comic book was quivering; the criminal was still holding it in front of the
cartoonist’s face, although he’d clearly made his point. The rectangle of paper was
yellowish, almost brown with age, but it stood out clearly in the steadily deepening
dimness. The scene took on a posthumous, terminal air. The cartoonist felt this, and
his heart, which had been clenched all along, contracted further still, becoming an
iron ball. He was unable to stifle a sob:

“It was you, you and the comic . . . not me . . . It was the comic and you . . .”

“
But nobody knew
.”

The oral underlining of these words added an unrelated, subterranean tom-tom beat to
the musical notes that had been playing since the last quotation marks.

Although his brain was clouded by anxiety, the cartoonist realized the utter
irrefutability of the sentence he had just heard. He felt defeated and overwhelmed
by the defeat, and yet he knew that irrefutability had been the norm, not the
exception, throughout the dialogue. So there was still some hope, like a faraway
light: maybe there would be another irrefutable argument, on his side. But then the
criminal would produce another one in turn . . . There would be no end to it. Only a
difference of speed in coming up with these arguments could tell in favor of one or
the other, and he had the impression that his killer was quicker. It wasn’t just an
impression, either; clearly the killer was always the first to come up with an
irrefutable argument. There was a reason for this: his wits had been sharpened by a
lifetime of dodging the long arm of the law, while the cartoonist, perpetually bent
over his drawing board, in the peace and quiet of his studio, had not undergone that
training. In the comics he drew there were conflicts and miraculous last-minute
escapes, but they were subject to corrections and revisions; sometimes it took him
weeks to come up with a reply or work out an ending.

On this occasion, with the knife blade at his throat, he felt he’d never be able to
find a reply, even in an eternity of searching. And to tell the truth (his truth,
anyway), every second he spent in that forced, uncomfortable position felt like an
eternity. Which must have been why he came out with the answer immediately:

“I didn’t know either! How could I have known? You said it yourself: ‘no one’
knew.”

The quotation marks, indicated orally, put a stop to the deep musical notes that had
been playing since the last set; but the tom-tom beats continued, on their own now.

“Now everyone knows, thanks to you, you dirty snitch.”

It was useless. There was no point talking. The irrefutable and the indisputable
would go on intervening. Although it wasn’t exactly the case that talking was
pointless. There was always a point to talk, because it was the only way to know
what was happening. But it was pointless to
go on
talking, because by the time you knew what was happening, time had spun around,
turned back on itself, applying its obverse to its reverse, and the contact between
past and future events had created a mass of irresolvable paradoxes.

So there was a silence, punctuated by the monotonous tom-tom. And the silence
confirmed the immobility of the characters. Which wasn’t absolute: they had not been
petrified or frozen in a still image. Little tremors ran through their bodies; there
were imperceptible changes of position, which didn’t alter the overall postures:
weight was shifted from one leg to the other, shoulders moved forward or back a
fraction of an inch, eyes blinked, breath went in and out between slightly parted
lips, occasionally moistened by a tongue. The criminal’s right hand went on holding
the knife, with the blade pressed against the cartoonist’s throat, while his
outstretched left hand held the old comic book in front of his victim’s face. No one
else would have been able to hold up his arms for so long, but living like a hunted
animal had given him the strength it took. Each arm performed its function: the
knife arm made the threat serious; the comic arm explained it and gave it meaning.
One without the other would not have been enough to create the scene, which was a
product of their coordination. As for the cartoonist, he kept still for obvious
reasons, neck tense and stretched, eyes on the comic.

At a certain point, the light stopped fading, it too froze, in an ambiguous dimness.
It had not changed markedly from the beginning of the scene to what appeared to be
its end. The effect might have been psychological, the natural illusion of darkening
produced by our habitual experience of dusk. But who’s to say that this episode was
taking place in the evening? The source of that ambiguous light could have been the
morning sun, its radiance dimmed by clouds, or filtered through shutters or venetian
blinds, or it could just as well have been the moon, a full moon in a clear midnight
sky . . . And the lighting could also have resulted from a combination or succession
of various hours of the day, or all of them. (Artificial light sources were out of
the question, because of the blackout affecting the city.)

Apart from the men, the studio was lifeless. It would have been futile to look for a
fly buzzing, or an ant crossing the floor, or a piece of paper stirring in a breeze,
or a drop falling from a faucet, or a speck of dust dancing in the air. It was as if
even the electrons had frozen in their orbits. Everything that had the capacity to
move was concentrated in the two standing figures intertwined at the center. They
really were at the geometrical center of that square room, and the empty space
around them made it all the more obvious; the drawing board and the ergonomic stool
had been knocked over in the struggle and fallen apart. The four walls, equidistant
from the human figures, were entirely covered with shelves, and these were
chock-full with comic books, of which only the slender spines were visible, pressed
up against one another from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling.

How had two such different beings come to be present in the same place at the same
time?

Given the stillness of their deadlock, it would have been possible to cut them out
(in three dimensions, of course), breaking their potentially violent embrace, and
place the separate figures in other scenes: the criminal slitting or about to slit
the throat of one of his many victims, a defenseless woman, for example; the
cartoonist horrified to see that a bad printing job had spoiled a work that he had
spent months bringing to perfection. No changes or adjustments would have been
necessary: the same posture and gestures, the same facial expression, could work in
any number of different situations, and work so well that nobody would ever know.

Eventually, the top halves of both figures, from the waist up, began to lean forward
simultaneously. The relative positions of the arms and heads remained the same,
although the faces took on a gray luminosity. The leaning slowed to the point where
it was imperceptible to the eye; but after a certain lapse of time it was clear that
their faces were now a little closer to the floor. It was as if they were leaning
down to look for something at their feet, both at the same time. But it was also as
if they were suffering from material fatigue, and the hinges or joints in their
waists were loosening.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2009

The Infinite

AS A KID I PLAYED
some extremely strange games. They sound made up
when I explain them, and I did, in fact, make them up myself, but many years ago,
when I was still in the process of becoming the self that I am today. I made them
up, or else my friends at the time did: it comes to the same thing because those
kids contributed to the accumulation that resulted in me. The reason I’ve set out to
describe the games and give a written account of them is that people have told me on
more than one occasion that they really should be recorded, so that if I die
tomorrow, the ideas won’t be lost forever. I’m not so sure of their uniqueness.
Children are always coming up with the craziest things, but the repertoire is not
infinite. Relying on my intuition and the law of probabilities, I’d be prepared to
bet that the same or similar ideas have occurred to other children, at some point,
somewhere. If that is the case, and a copy of this publication falls into the hands
of a reader who was one of those children, these descriptions will serve as a
reminder, and perhaps a resurrection, of a forgotten past. It will, I think, be
necessary to go into some fairly complicated details, and this may lead to excessive
technicality, but I’m undertaking this task in the hope of discovering what my
childhood had in common with other distant, unknown childhoods, and since the shared
element is bound to be something small, a fine point, and I don’t know which small
thing it is, which detail in particular, I have no choice but to set them all out.
There’s also a more practical reason, which relates to comprehensibility: even the
most insignificant details are important for the complete explanation of mechanisms
that might, at first glance, seem absurd. One has to work through the list of
senseless oddities so as not to miss the one that has the magic power to make sense
of everything.

I will begin with a mathematical or pseudomathematical game for two players, which
consisted simply of naming a bigger number than the one just named by your opponent.
If one player said “four” the other had to say “five” (or more: he could also say “a
thousand”) in order to stay ahead, and so it went. Basically, that was the essence
of the game; as you can see, it was extremely simple. Obviously, given the ordered
sequence of numbers, to win you had to avoid the mistake of naming a number smaller
than the one that had just been named . . . But it’s also obvious that victory by
default would be accidental in such a game and would not affect its essence. The
winner was, essentially, the one who came up with a number so big that the other
player couldn’t find a bigger one. We respected this principle: we never made
mistakes, and if one of us had slipped up, the other would have been more than
prepared to ignore it and keep going. So it’s hard to imagine how the game could
ever have played itself out fully. There seems to be a contradiction in the
fundamental idea. But I think all the difficulty springs from adopting an adult
perspective, trying to understand the theory of the game and reconstruct a session
of play. For us it wasn’t hard to understand; on the contrary, it was almost too
easy (that’s why we complicated it a bit). The difficulties, which in any case we
found amusing and absorbing, were on another level, as I will try to show. The game
itself seemed perfectly natural to us.

Before getting down to details, however, some clarifications are necessary. First:
age. We would have been ten and eleven years old (or eleven and twelve: Omar was a
year older than me; we were at primary school but in the final grades). Which is to
say that we were no longer little children learning how to count, fascinated and
amazed by the miracle of arithmetic. Not at all. Also, back then, thirty-five years
ago, learning was no game: it was straight down to business; not a minute was
wasted. Even in our semirural school (School Number 2 in Coronel Pringles: it still
exists), the academic level was remarkably high; these days it would seem too much
to ask. And all the children, though most of them came from farms and had illiterate
parents, kept up with the pace, no two ways about it. The “hump” was sixth grade,
and many stopped there, but if you were in that class you marched with the rest, and
it was no dawdle.

The characters: Omar and myself. I never played this game with other people. I can’t
remember if I ever tried, but if I did, it didn’t work. It was the kind of game that
has to find its players, and does so only by a modest miracle. It had found the two
of us, and we had adapted so well to its intricate, crystalline recesses that we had
become a part of it, and it a part of us, and everyone else was necessarily
excluded. Not so much because we would have had to explain the rules, or allow for
idiosyncrasies (it was a mathematical game), but because the two of us had already
played so much—all afternoon, hundreds of times—and we couldn’t start over;
other players could, but not Omar and I.

Omar Berruet was not my oldest friend; his family had moved to the neighborhood a
couple of years earlier, from Greater Buenos Aires (Berazategui), but his parents
were from Pringles. His mother and mine had been childhood friends; one of his
father’s sisters lived around the corner and had two sons, the Moraña boys, whom I’d
known for much longer; the older one was in my grade all through primary school. The
Berruets rented the house next door to ours. Omar was an only child, a year older
than me, so we weren’t in the same class at school, but being neighbors we got to be
friends. We’d spend the whole day together. He was tall and thin with straight blond
hair, pale-skinned and lymphatic, unlike me in every way: the attraction of
opposites brought us together. I suspect that I tended to boss him around and
subject him to my erratic and fanciful moods.

He was happy to go along with my whims, but he also had a hidden strength that a
number of painful experiences taught me to respect. Omar wasn’t lacking in
intelligence, but when it came to demonstrating it, he was, again, my opposite:
while I was all boasting, noise, and display, he responded quietly, with irony and
realism. (This is as good a place as any to mention that he stayed in Pringles,
became a bank teller, and had eight children, one of whom died.)

And finally, the scene. Back then, the town of Coronel Pringles was more or less like
it is today, but a bit smaller, not so built up, with more dirt roads. Calle Alvear,
where we lived, was the last paved road; another hundred yards and there were vacant
lots (whole empty blocks), farmhouses, the country. On our block there were five
houses, all on the same side: Uruñuela’s place on the corner, the house where my
aunts Alicia and María lived, our place, Gonzalo Barba’s house (he was my dad’s
nephew and business partner), and the Berruets. On the other corner: my dad’s
business Aira & Barba, with its yard and offices. The houses rented by Gonzalo
and the Berruets belonged to Padelli, and their backyards adjoined his place, which
was just around the corner. On the other side of the street, behind a long wall, was
the land belonging to the corner houses, Astutti’s on the left and Perrier’s on the
right. The most interesting things in those wild tracts were, in Astutti’s yard, a
supermodern mobile home that the owner’s brother (I think) was building or cobbling
together (this hobby outlasted my childhood), and in Perrier’s yard, a tree, which
was in fact a pair of twin trees, with intertwined branches, a gigantic conifer, the
biggest tree in Pringles, as high as a ten-story building and perfectly conical in
shape.

Nothing ever happened in the street: a car went by every half hour. We had vast
amounts of free time: we went to school in the mornings, and the afternoons lasted
entire lifetimes. We didn’t have extracurricular activities the way kids do today;
there was no television; the doors of our houses stood open. To play the number game
we climbed into the cabin of the little red truck that belonged to Omar’s father and
was almost always parked just outside the front door . . .

Right. Now, the game.

Who came up with it? It must have been one of us. I can’t imagine us taking it from
somewhere else, ready-made. Thinking back, I’ve always seen the game as a blend of
invention and practice. Or rather, I see the practice of it as permanent invention,
without any kind of prior idea. And if I try to work out which of us was behind it,
I have to conclude that I was the inventor. There’s something about the thrust of
it, a kind of fantasy or exuberance, something elusive but utterly typical of me as
I was at that age. Omar was at the opposite extreme. But, strangely, those
vertiginous tunnels could be entered from the opposite extreme as well.

There were no rules. Although we spent our lives inventing rules for all our games,
as kids always do, this game had none, perhaps because we realized that they were
inadequate, bound to fall short, or just too easy to make up.

Now that I think of it, there was a rule, but it was transient and could be revoked
at our convenience. We applied it once and forgot it the next time, but for some
reason it has remained in my memory, and it must have remained in the game as well.
It was pretty inoffensive: all it did was specify that the biggest possible number,
the upper limit, would be eight. Not the number eight itself, but any number
containing eight: eight tenths, eight hundred thousand, eight billion. It was really
an extra accelerator (as if we needed one!) to take the game to another level.

It’s not that there were levels in the game, or series within the series, or if there
were such things, we didn’t bother with them. But there were differences in speed,
alternations between “step by step” and “leap,” and we could take them to extremes
that are not to be found among the mobile, spatiotemporal sculptures of physical
reality. These differences were always rushes, even our lapses into the hyperslow.
But it never got out of control; even the all-encompassing acceleration was a kind
of slowness. Which meant that within the game’s austere monomania, we could use
speed to keep changing the subject of the conversation (since subjects are
speeds).

“Three.”

“A hundred.”

“A hundred and one.”

“A hundred and one point zero one.”

“Eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

“Four million.”

“Four million and one.”

“Four million and two.”

“Four million and three.”

“Four million and four.”

“Four million and four point four four four.”

“Four million and four point four four.”

“Four million and four point four.”

“Four million and four point three.”

“Four million and four point one.”

“Half a trillion.”

We never bothered to find out what a trillion was (or a quadrillion, a quintillion, a
sextillion, although we used the terms). Whatever it was, we stuck with it.

“Half a trillion and one.”

“A trillion.”

“Eight trillions.”

“Eight trillions and eight.”

We did the same with “billion,” although in that case we knew that it meant a
thousand millions. So if a million was “one,” a billion was a thousand of those
“ones.” But we never went as far as counting how many zeros it contained and using
that to calculate (there should be nine, I think). It would have been tedious, a
drag, no fun. And we were playing a game. We were impatient, like all kids, and we
had invented a game ideally suited to impatience: the leaping game. Although we
spent hours and whole afternoons sitting still in the cabin of the little red truck
that belonged to Omar’s dad, we were exercising our impatience. Otherwise, it would
have been a sort of numerological craftwork, and I would describe our game as art,
not craft.

We didn’t even know if a billion was bigger than a trillion. What did it matter? It
was better not to know. We both hid our ignorance, and never put each other to the
test. And in spite of this, the game remained very easy to play.

We were attracted by big numbers, inevitably: it followed from the nature of the
game. They were the gravitational force accelerating our fall. But at the same time
we held them in contempt, as indicated by the fact that we didn’t bother to find out
exactly how big they were. Numbers were one thing and big numbers were another: with
numbers we were in the domain of intuition (eight could be eight things or eight
points; the same with eighty, or even eight hundred million); but when it came to
really big numbers we were thinking blind; the game became purely verbal, a matter
of combining words, not numbers.

“A billion.”

“A trillion billions.”

“Half a billion trillion billions.”

“A billion billion trillion billion trillions.”

It’s true that numbers reappeared on the far side of these accumulations.

“A billion billions.”

“A billion billions and six.”

“Six billion billions and six point zero zero zero zero zero zero six.”

These were luxuries, embellishments that we allowed ourselves, as if to stave off a
boredom that we didn’t feel and couldn’t have felt, but could nevertheless imagine.
On the other hand, we both agreed not to accept things like “six billion six
billions”: that wasn’t a number but a multiplication. We had more than enough to do
with numbers pure and simple. Why make life complicated?

I don’t know how long this game lasted. Months, years. It never bored us, never
ceased to surprise and stimulate us. It was one of the high points of our childhood,
and when we finally stopped, it wasn’t because we’d exhausted the game, or tired of
it, but because we had grown up and gone our separate ways. I should add that we
didn’t play it all the time, and it wasn’t our only game. Not at all. We had dozens
of different games, some more extravagant and fantastic than others. I have resolved
to describe them one by one, and this is the one I happened to begin with, but I
wouldn’t want the rather artificial way in which I’ve isolated the number game to
give a false impression. We weren’t a pair of obsessives permanently shut up in the
cabin of an old truck spouting numbers. A new fantasy would excite us and we could
forget about the numbers for weeks at a time. Then we’d start over, exactly like
before . . . On reflection, the way I’ve presented the game in isolation is not so
artificial after all, because various features did set it apart: its immutable
simplicity, its naturalness, its secrecy. I think we kept it secret, but not for any
special reason, not because it
was
a secret: just
because we forgot to tell anyone, or the opportunity never arose.