The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (22 page)

I have a room in the Quinta de Olivos, for use during the frequent crises that
require me to be on call twenty-four hours a day. I hurry to my room and change,
choosing casual clothes to re-create the way I remember dressing in my former life;
then I mess up my hair and put on a pair of glasses, and I’m done! I make my
appearance: “Good evening, my apologies for the delay, I’m César Aira, the father of
the young man who has disappeared.” The crazy woman doesn’t bat an eyelid, which is
proof of her craziness: twenty years of absence mean nothing to her deranged mind.
She scolds me out of the corner of her mouth for not changing my sweater: You have
another one, that one’s all stained . . . people will think I make no effort . . .
you could have put on your other pants, they’re ironed . . . The same as ever! My
whole marriage comes back in waves; a marriage is a sum of little details, and any
one of them can represent all the others.

It’s tricky. In the middle of the explanation I have to find a pretext to slip away,
put on my dinner suit, comb my hair, and attend to the senior officials of the
occupying forces, who need my advice on questions of the utmost urgency: the
internal strife within their high command is threatening to explode this very night,
although it’s actually a coup planned by the command itself (they’re offering me the
chairmanship of the Central Bank). The shootings and slaughter in their ranks will
be hidden from the public.

In an intermediate room (all this is happening very quickly) I become “the writer”
César Aira again, accompanying Liliana . . . And then back into the tuxedo . . .
It’s all entrances and exits, vaudeville style, further complicated by another
mission that I’ve taken on: to inform the Amnesty lawyer about the sham coup, and
transmit a plan that I’ve hatched, with instructions for the resistance so that they
can take advantage of this internal turmoil and mobilize the people just when the
occupying forces are virtually leaderless. It has to be tonight . . . Speed and
secrecy are crucial to the palace coup: they reckon it will all be over in a couple
of hours (they’re using the widely reported visit of the ambassadors of Atlantis as
a cover and this reception as a way of gathering all the conspirators and their
victims without awakening suspicion). It would never occur to them that the
resistance might be in the know and poised to strike like lightning . . . And strike
it will! At least if I can talk to this so-called lawyer, who is, I know, in contact
with the Committee of the Resistance . . . I made sure he was kept busy during my
previous maneuvers, so that he wouldn’t be surprised by the unexpected appearance of
“César Aira.” Now, playing my other role, with my tuxedo and slicked-back hair, I
take him aside . . . and it has to be “really” aside. I’m well aware, more keenly
aware than anyone, that “walls have ears,” especially here, but I also know that
there are many little salons and offices where I can take him to make my disclosure
. . . I supervised the installation of the microphones myself; I know where they are
and how to place myself in a “cone of silence” . . . And yet I’m suddenly seized by
a suspicion that is quite irrational, from the point of view of my current identity
as a technocrat: I have the feeling that we are being listened to . . . as if the
fourth wall were suddenly missing, and there were people sitting in the dark,
intently following everything I say. It’s just the kind of fantasy that would have
occurred to the writer I was, who is returning now. I find it hard to believe, but I
dare not disregard the possibility altogether: there is too much at stake. So I say
to the lawyer: “No, wait a moment, we can’t talk here, come into the office next
door . . .” But when we’re there, it’s the same thing, and if we move again, the
suspicion comes along with us. These useless sets are costing a fortune, and the
cost could only be justified by record-breaking audiences, but this gives rise to a
vicious circle, because the more spectators there are, the stronger my suspicion
that I’m being spied on, and the more imperious my need to move in search of an
elusive privacy . . . Also, the minutes are passing, and the action’s going nowhere
. . . It’s a disaster, the play is collapsing. I don’t know how to solve the
problem: deep down I know it’s too late for solutions now. My mistake was to forget,
in the heat of the action, that this is a play . . . Or rather, not to “forget” but
“never to have known,” because for me, as a character, all this is reality. I should
make it clear that this scene, aborted by my infinite delays and relocations, was
fundamental, because up till now the spectators (whether hypothetical or real—I
can’t tell anymore) had no way of knowing why one actor was playing two such
different roles, and the conversation with the lawyer was supposed to be a major
revelation that would function as an overall explanation of the plot.

The whole thing is falling apart . . . Which is no great loss, because the play is
absurd, farfetched, based on facile devices. Maybe it was a project without merit
from the start, as well as being flawed in its execution. In my previous life I used
to think of myself as a good writer, but neither success nor personal satisfaction
could really count as proof. The isolated admirers who kept popping up didn’t prove
anything; they could have been as mistaken as I was. I used to think death would
provide an answer; I thought it would cut the Gordian knot, but since my
disappearance twenty years ago, nothing has changed: a few readers, always academics
or students, writing theses on my work, and that’s it. I never had a real public. A
public would have made me rich, and then I could have forgotten about literature.
Was I a misunderstood genius or some barely half-talented writer lost in the
ambiguous meanders of the avant-garde? Impossible to say. The suspicion that gags
and paralyzes me in the theater, with its layering of real and virtual spaces, also
suspends the question of my life or death as a writer.

JULY 3, 1995

The Two Men

I WAS THE ONLY PERSON WHO
visited the house where the two men lived
in seclusion; I used to wonder if anyone else knew of their existence. Once, in the
early days, I resorted to a trick I’d learned as a kid, playing at spies: I stuck a
hair to the front door and the frame, and the next day it was still there, unbroken.
I think I did it again, to make sure, but later, as the years went by, those
suspicions came to seem absurd. By then I was sure that the secret was safe, not
because anyone was trying to protect it, but because of indifference, or
incredulity, or the desertion of the surrounding area. I never saw any neighbors; it
was a street of run-down little houses that looked as if they must have been
inhabited by old people, but if that was the case, those people can’t have gone on
living through all the years of my visits. Maybe the houses were empty.

It seemed that the men had always been living there, just the two of them, all on
their own. If they hadn’t been born in the house (which seemed unlikely), they must
have grown up there, behind closed doors, never going out, so as not to reveal their
deformities. Merciful guardians had shielded them from the gazes of the world, so
that they wouldn’t be treated like monsters. They weren’t monsters. Except for their
hands and feet they were just like other men, and even well proportioned: athletic
and strong, with something savage about them, something of the animal perfection
that we like to attribute to savages; but this might have been a result of their
circumstances. I estimated their age at somewhere between thirty and forty: the
prime of life. Their features, gestures, and reactions were vaguely similar, but
this too may have been an illusion created by the very special circumstances that
had brought them together. I never knew if they were related; at first it seemed
almost self-evident that they were brothers, but the simplest reasoning obliged me
to abandon that idea, which persisted nevertheless, the term “brothers” taking on a
broader or more figurative meaning. The more likely scenario was that they were
unrelated, and had been brought together by their corresponding deformities, which
were so strange that they must have been unique to that pair.

One of them had giant feet, the other, giant hands. The proportions were more or less
the same in both cases. The feet of “the one with the feet” and the hands of “the
one with the hands” were as big as the rest of their bodies, or even slightly
bigger. The hands of the one with giant feet were, like the rest of him, normal in
size. The “one with the hands” had normal feet. The oversize extremities were truly
amazing: huge masses of flesh, bone, muscle, and nails, almost always resting on the
floor. They didn’t quite have the standard form: as well as being gigantic, they
were swollen, and somewhat misshapen; perhaps the forms of feet and hands are
gradually determined by use, and these were never used, or hardly ever.

That was all: the hands of one, the feet of the other. The two men couldn’t have been
more different, and yet, in a way, they were the same. It must have been because of
the opposition, or a kind of asymmetrical symmetry, as if putting them together
would have made a man with giant hands and feet, or as if they had resulted from the
division of a man like that . . . But putting them together the other way would have
produced a perfectly normal man. You had to assemble and disassemble their images
mentally, because there was something inherently illusory or inconceivable about
those men, something that made it impossible to believe your eyes when faced with
what, believe it or not, was real. It must have been their complementary opposition
that made them seem alike.

They dominated the space they occupied, invincibly. They filled it right up, as far
as perception was concerned, at least . . . I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The
way they were was simple enough and yet I always felt that I still hadn’t quite
understood. Physically, they had plenty of room to move; after all, apart from the
hands and feet, they were the size of ordinary men. The house in which they lived
wasn’t big, but nor was it especially small. It looked as if it had been uninhabited
for many years before they came. In a way, it still seemed empty: the few pieces of
furniture had been pushed into the corners, and stood there unused, covered with
dust. The power sockets were encrusted with saltpeter and rust, and the wires were
exposed. There were abandoned spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling, hanging down
in shreds. I didn’t know if the house belonged to the men, if one of them had
inherited it, or if they were squatters. That was just one of the many things I
never found out. It surprises me how little I knew about a situation that was such
an important part of my life. It’s true that I didn’t have anyone to ask. All I
could do was speculate, invent a story on the basis of what I could see; but I
didn’t even invent much: an irresistible lethargy came over me as soon as I tried to
think about it, a visceral aversion that may have resulted from the intuition that
my brain was in danger. It was as if the vision they afforded, always the same yet
always changing, was somehow meant to remain wordless.

They occupied what seemed to be the biggest room; I don’t know if it really was
because I never explored the whole house. It was the biggest of the rooms I went
into when I visited, and strangely it wasn’t the front room, which in that house
(built back to front, apparently) was a little living room with a door straight onto
the street, but a room right at the back, which must have been a bedroom. That back
room had a window that looked onto a patio, but whether the patio was big or small,
I really can’t say, because I never went over to look, and even if I had, it
wouldn’t have been much use because the glass was frosted. I assumed there was a
patio there because of the light coming in. I don’t know if the electricity was
connected. I never went to the house at night. My “visiting time” was midafternoon,
and if I made two visits, the other one was just before midday.

I saw them against the background of that window, which filtered the light and,
depending on the weather and the season, made them opaque or radiant, contrasting
with their silhouettes or suffusing their bodies with a glow that seemed to emanate
from within. The faded ochre of the walls gave that light an artificial, yellowish
tinge that was slightly disturbing.

They were naked. At first, I think, it seemed natural to me. After all, how could you
put on trousers if your feet had a girth of two yards? How could you get hands the
size of sheep through the sleeves of a shirt? But thinking it over, I realized that
explanation didn’t stand up. The one whose feet prevented him from wearing trousers
could still have put on a shirt, a jacket, or a tunic. And the other one, whose
hands couldn’t fit through any kind of sleeve, could perfectly well have worn
trousers, even socks and shoes, had he wished, and covered his upper body with
something like a poncho or a toga. The only thing they couldn’t have done was dress
in the same way; but they could have worn clothes, if they’d wanted to. Why didn’t
they? Was it that they didn’t want to draw attention to the difference between them?
Or were they renouncing human ways? They didn’t need clothes for warmth. Oddly, in a
house that must have gone for decades without repairs or maintenance, the room was
well insulated. There was a series of very cold winters, but even then the house was
always peculiarly warm, as if heated (although I never saw any kind of heater, and
in fact I’m sure there wasn’t one). I always saw them in that room, as I said, but
that doesn’t mean they were always there. What I know for sure is that it’s where
they received my visits or waited for them, like actors before a performance. They
probably spent the greater part of their time in that room, and if they happened to
be somewhere else when I arrived, they rushed back as soon as they heard me come in
through the front door. I say this because, very occasionally, only one of them was
there when I entered the room, and the other appeared just a few seconds later.

Maybe they generated that puzzling, constant warmth themselves . . . why not? It
might have come from their bodies, or from the huge hands and feet. No one had
studied those unprecedented malformations; who could say what powers and properties
they might have possessed?

Leaving aside the men’s feet and hands, their preference for nudism could be
explained by the movement of their bodies, which would have been sufficient to keep
the surroundings warm. The one with the enormous feet moved his torso and arms,
shook himself, quivered, raised his hands to the sky in a gesture somewhere between
supplication and stretching, clasped his head, turned it, tilted it forward, bowed
down, bent himself double, and waved his arms in all directions as if he were
multiplying them, with the fingers wiggling around like worms. The other man, with
his gigantic hands resting on the floor on either side of him, thrashed his legs and
feet about, tapping, stamping, pedaling. Meanwhile, the enormous extremities were
not entirely still; with movements of submarine slowness, they accompanied the
nervous jittering of the other body parts, like whales among schools of fish.

They can’t always have been so agitated; perhaps what I saw was exceptional, or a
show they put on specially for me, but if so there was nothing systematic about it,
because there were days when I would find them languid, or rigid like statues,
sometimes not even blinking, seemingly void of life. Maybe they were alternating, or
competing with each other, or playing. I really had no way of knowing what their
routine might be: I couldn’t extrapolate from my limited observations or speculate
on the psychology of individuals so radically unique. There was never any real
communication between myself and them, in spite of all those years of daily contact.
But not because they couldn’t speak. As for me, I’d say I’m fairly talkative, when
I’m with people I know and trust, which is how I felt about them in the end, or
maybe even from the start, although there was always an unbridgeable gap. The reason
we didn’t talk was that we had nothing to say. The difference that separated them
from me was somehow too extreme. No, not too extreme. I take that back. In the end,
it was just a question of sizes, a purely quantitative difference, if you like. But
it had been applied improperly, differentially, to parts instead of the whole. I
understood perfectly well that with hands like that, or feet, in the case of the
other man, they couldn’t manage their lives like everybody else. If life was a
puzzle in which each piece had to fit into its place to recompose the landscape,
what could you do with a piece a thousand times bigger than all the rest? That was
what condemned me to silence. Only someone who could provide an answer to the
question, a solution to the problem, would have been able to speak to them. And I
had no answer, no solution. For a reason I never fully understood, I’d convinced
myself that I was the last person who’d be able to come up with a solution, perhaps
the only person who couldn’t.

This lack of communication was also due to the brevity of my visits. “House calls”
was how I thought of them, remembering a colloquial expression for the popping in
and out that leaves no time for relaxed conversation, the dutiful visits typically
paid by the young to the old, or the healthy to the ill, or the busy and successful
to the idle and lonely . . . But I was not a doctor, nor was I especially young or
healthy, much less successful. Visiting the men had consumed my youth. I had
withered. I wasn’t much younger than they were; a little, perhaps, but they had a
supernatural self-possession, an indefinable vigor, that rendered age irrelevant. I
said that they gave an impression of strength and health, in spite of their
complementary deformities. I had always been fairly healthy, but anxious too, in a
vague sort of way, about illness and death. Of course I had normal-size hands and
feet, and could get dressed and go out into the street, and live a normal life with
my family, and take the men their food. Sometimes I’d think: I have the hands of
one, and the feet of the other. What if it had been the other way around? What a
nightmare! Together, with their well-formed limbs, they made up a normal man, and
with the malformed ones, a complete invalid. As they were, they could only nourish
my infinite perplexity.

I never stayed long, because I wasn’t paying social calls: I was there to help and
meet a need; I was their only point of contact with the outside world. But
basically, the visits were brief because I didn’t want my family to find out.
Although that reason didn’t always apply. There were times when I was alone at home
and could have spent hours or whole afternoons with the men. Maybe the habit of not
lingering (or not finding a reason to linger) had already been established. Of
course I didn’t keep a record of how much time I spent in the house, and for a fair
while before and after the visits, I was too tense to look at my watch, so I
couldn’t work it out, but I estimate that on average it would have been three, four,
or five minutes; maybe more, or less, I don’t know. I was aware that it wasn’t long,
and a kind of automatic politeness or tact, which was entirely out of place in the
circumstances, made me worry that I might offend them by giving the impression that
I was running away from a disgusting sight.

There’s a simpler and more concrete explanation for the brevity of my visits: in the
room where they received me, as opposed to the rooms I passed through on the way,
there was no furniture. That bare room had the air of a cage at the zoo, or an
exhibition space, and accentuated the impression of inhumanity. As with the
clothing, one might have thought at first that the physical peculiarities of the two
men ruled out furniture; but, again, thinking it over sufficed to reveal that there
was no fundamental impossibility. Chairs, armchairs, carpets, sideboards, pictures,
tables . . . why not? Perhaps it would have been necessary to take certain
precautions when moving around, but that was all. And if they could have worn
clothes and had furniture, why did they prefer to remain naked in an empty space?
This didn’t puzzle me at the time. All through those years I simply accepted that
things were as they were. That numbing of curiosity was psychologically justifiable:
given the prodigious monstrosity of one man’s hands and the other man’s feet,
details of clothing and furniture receded into the background. That enormous mystery
(enormity itself) repelled any kind of explanation, while its gravitational force
attracted and swallowed up everything else.