by Cesar Aira
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira
•
César Aira
Translated by Katherine Silver
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
I
One day at dawn, Dr. Aira found himself walking down a tree-lined street in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. He suffered from a type of somnambulism, and it wasn’t all that unusual for him to wake up on unknown streets, which he actually knew quite well because all of them were the same. His life was that of a half-distracted, half-attentive walker (half absent, half present) who by means of such alternations created his own continuity, that is to say, his style, or in other words and to close the circle, his life; and so it would be until his life reached its end — when he died. As he was approaching fifty, that endpoint, coming sooner or later, could occur at any moment.
A beautiful Lebanese cedar along the verge of a pretentious little street lifted its proud rounded crown into the pinkish-gray air. He stopped to contemplate it, overwhelmed with admiration and affection. He addressed it in pectore with a short speech that combined eulogy, devotion (a request for protection), and, oddly enough, a few descriptive features; for he had noticed that after a time, devotion tended to become somewhat abstract and automatic. In this case, he noticed that the crown of the tree was both barren and leafy; the sky could be seen through it, yet it had foliage. Standing on his tiptoes to look more closely at the lower branches (he was very nearsighted), he saw that the leaves, which were like small, olive-green feathers, were partially coiled around each other, it was the end of fall, and the trees were struggling to survive.
“I honestly don’t believe that humanity can continue much longer on this path. Our species has reached a point of such dominance on the planet that it no longer has to confront any serious threat, and it seems that all we can do is continue to live, enjoying what we can without having to risk anything. And we keep moving forward in that direction, securing what is already safe. With each advance, or retreat, no matter how gradual, irreversible thresholds are crossed, and who knows which we have already crossed or are crossing at this very moment. Thresholds that could make Nature react, if we understand by Nature, life’s general regulatory mechanism. Maybe this frivolity we’ve achieved has irritated Her; maybe She cannot allow one species, not even our own, to be freed from its most basic needs . . . Of course I am personalizing this quite perversely, reifying and externalizing forces that exist within us, but it doesn’t matter because I understand myself.”
Such things to say to a tree!
“It’s not that I’m prophesying anything, especially not catastrophes and plagues, not even subtle ones, no way! If my reasoning is correct, the corrective mechanisms are at work within our present state of well-being and as a part of it . . . I just don’t know how.”
He had started walking and was already at some distance from the tree. Every now and then he would stop again, and with a look of deep concentration he would stare at some random spot in his surroundings. These were abrupt stops, which lasted about half a minute and did not occur with any discernible regularity. He alone knew what they were in response to, and it was improbable that he would ever tell anybody. They were stops of embarrassment; they coincided with a memory, which emerged out of the folds of his idle digressions, of a blunder. It wasn’t as if he enjoyed these memories, on the contrary; he simply could not prevent them from rising suddenly in his mental tide. And such an appearance was powerful enough to paralyze his legs, make him stand still, and he would have to wait for a fresh impetus to start walking again. Time lifted him out of the shame of the past . . . It had already done so; it had already carried him into the present. Such blunders were cessations of time, where everything coagulated. They were mere memories, stored away in the most impregnable of safe boxes, one no stranger could open.
They were small, ridiculous, and perfectly private disgraces — a moment of awkwardness, a faux pas, which had affected nobody but himself; they had made strong impressions on him, clots of meaning that blocked the flow of events. For some reason, they were irreducible. They resisted translation, such as a transfer to the present. Whenever they appeared, they paralyzed him in the middle of his somnambulistic activities, which is what would bring them out of their labyrinthine lair of the past. The more he walked, the greater the chance that he would catch one, against his will. This turned his endless strolls into trajectories through the bifurcated maze of his youthful past. Perhaps, after all, there was some kind of regularity that drew a pattern through space-time, these cessations creating an empty distance . . . But he would never be able to find a solution to his strange theorem if he couldn’t explain why his steps stopped whenever a memory of this kind made its appearance; standing still and staring at one spot could be explained as an attempt to dissemble, perhaps pretend that this spot interested him so much that he had no choice but to stop. But the cessation in itself, the relationship between the blunder and paralysis, remained obscure, as long as he did not resort to psychological interpretations. Perhaps the key could be found in the very nature of those embarrassing moments, in their essence or common denominator. If that were the case, what was happening was a repetition compulsion in its most purely formal aspect.
Digging deeper into the issue, of course, was the fact that these blunders had occurred. They happen to everybody. They are the inevitable result of sociability, and the only solution is to forget. Truly, the only one, because time doesn’t go backwards, so they cannot be fixed or erased. And because he could not depend on forgetting (he had the memory of an elephant), he had taken recourse in solitude, in almost complete isolation from his fellows, in this way guaranteeing at least the minimization of the effects of his incurable awkwardness, his bewilderment. And his somnambulism, which existed on a different level of his consciousness and his intentionality, should move in the same direction, like an a posteriori redemption, if in fact a somnambulist acted with the elegance of perfect efficiency.
To be honest with himself, he had to admit that blunders were not the only issue; the common denominator actually was spread along a rather sinuous path, which turned out to be not so easy to follow. Or perhaps one had to broaden the definition of a blunder: it could also include small infamies, acts of stinginess, accounting errors, cowardice; in other words, anything that feeds retrospective and private shame. And it was not as if he blamed himself (though during those stops a voice inside would shout: “What an idiot! What an idiot!”), for he had admitted they were inevitable at the moment they had occurred. At least he took comfort in their insignificance, for they had never been crimes, nor had there ever been any victims other than his own self-esteem.
In any case, he had promised himself they would never happen again. To achieve this he didn’t need to do anything but remain alert and avoid precipitous behavior, always acting within the rules of honor and a proper upbringing. In his practice as a miracle healer, a blunder could have dire consequences.
In a novel, blunders are set up with great deliberation, with ingenuity and care, which is quite paradoxical, for it turns out to be more natural and spontaneous to write a scene in which everybody behaves properly. Dr. Aira equated every act that was morally, intellectually, or socially wrong with an act of violence,
one that left a scar on the eminently smooth skin of his ideal behavior. He was one of those men who could not conceive of violence. Although he knew this to be absurd, he could not help imagining that were he to find himself in a robbers’ cave, for example, among the most brutal of criminals, he would be able to avoid violence if he behaved reasonably, talking and listening to others’ opinions and expressing his own. Even if the situation was ripe for violence, even if the robbers had caught him spying . . . But how could they have caught him if he himself had not planned his intrusion? And he had sworn he’d never again get himself into an awkward situation like that. It’s true that he could have entered that hypothetical cave by mistake, thinking it was empty and unoccupied; that’s where paying attention came into play — that he should always be awake, never blink. Which was easier said than done, though to achieve it, he had a practice, an ascesis, which he had made his life plan. Even so, a miraculous incident could occur in which he suddenly opened his eyes and found himself in a cave full of stolen goods, and before he had time to react a gang of suspicious-looking subjects entered . . . Of course, he was smack in the middle of the realm of the imaginary, of remote possibilities. Once he was there with them, what would prevent him from establishing a civilized conversation with the robbers, getting them to understand what had happened, the teleporting, the somnambulism . . . ? But in that case the robbers would also be part of the fiction, the theory, and his persuasive success would have no demonstrative value. Real reality was comprised of blood and blows and shouts and the slamming of doors. In the long run, the glaze of courtesy got scratched, if not from the causal line of facts then from another, inevitably, from the line that emerged out of the bifurcation of time.
An enormous dog lying at the entrance to an auto repair shop stood up when it saw him then bared its teeth. He instantaneously broke out in a cold sweat. What an incredible lack of consideration on the part of the owners of these animals, leaving them loose on the sidewalk and responding to any complaint with the familiar, “He’s friendly, he won’t do anything.” They say it with total sincerity, and full conviction, but they haven’t stopped to think that nobody else has any reason to share that conviction, much less so when facing a black mantle the size of a motorbike hurtling toward them . . .
His first encounter with the world of paranormal medicine had been through dogs. When he was a child in the town of Coronel Pringles, Mayor Uthurralt issued an order mercilessly expelling all of them from the city limits, without exception or appeal. Fear alone (it was the era of the terrible polio epidemic) guaranteed compliance, this in spite of the usually strong attachment between pets and their owners. Moreover, the expulsion was temporary, though it ended up lasting three years, and nobody had to really get rid of their pets: all they had to do was find a place for them somewhere in the countryside. In a town that lived off rural activities, everybody had a friend or relative with a plot of land nearby, and that’s where the dogs were sent. The problem was that the only veterinarian in Pringles was separated from his patients, and although he accepted having to travel to treat them (he had no choice if he wanted to keep working), the process was expensive and bothersome. And it made it difficult to neuter male puppies when they reached reproductive age, operations that had become that much more urgent under the present circumstances. Faced with the truly ghastly alternative of handing them over to farm hands, who could carry out the brutal procedure only with a branding iron and without any sterilization, some doled out a lot of money, others shut their eyes, most hesitated . . . It was an opportunity for a local photographer, nicknamed the Madman, to start a business of long-distance, painless neutering, which became all the rage in Pringles during that period. Dr. Aira, at the time a child of eight, heard of this through rumors that had been grossly distorted in the echo chamber of his childhood circle. At that time, such subjects were rarely discussed, especially in a decent middle-class family; his little friends, all from poor families because he lived in a neighborhood of hovels, did not suffer from this disadvantage, but their families’ amazing ignorance and credulity fully compensated for this lack.
The Madman’s method was of exemplary absurdity, for it consisted of a fairly long series of penicillin shots given to the dogs’ owners, shots that neutered the animal in absentia. At least that’s what could be garnered from the stories that were making the rounds. He could never find out anything more, and perhaps there was nothing more. Nor did he ever learn in any reliable way if anyone had actually agreed to submit to this strange treatment. But this information was enough for him to reinvent on his own the possibility of action from a distance, of discontinuous efficiency, one that created a new continuum out of heterogeneous elements, and from then on his entire mental landscape was based on this premise. Soon thereafter the Madman’s method ceased to be used (if it ever had been in reality), this in the wake of a scandal of vast proportions. A headless dog was born on a nearby farm, a cocker spaniel whose body stopped at his neck but who nevertheless survived and even grew to adulthood.
Inevitably, popular imagination connected one thing to the other, and the Madman, perhaps also frightened by the effects of his manipulations, threw in the towel, for the time being. Dr. Aira didn’t know what ever happened to that dog; at some point it must have died, like any other dog. Many people in the town went to see it (it hadn’t been sent away). Apparently, the animal was very lively: hyperactive as well as acephalous. Its nervous system ended in a bulb on top of its neck, and this protuberance, like a Rosetta stone, was covered with markings that represented eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, scribbles it made do with. Under other circumstances the fact that such a monster was viable would have attracted the attention of scientists all around the world; it should have been considered a kind of miracle. But country folks are accustomed to such miracles — paradoxically, they used to be more accustomed to them, back then when they lived in greater isolation, without radio or television or magazines; their entire world was the small world they lived in, and their laws made room for exceptions and extensions, as a totality always does.
If this had happened with a dog, why couldn’t it happen with a man? This possibility, the infinite and infinitely fantastic possibility, established the always so immediate limitations of reason. All that polite reasoning he planned to use with the robbers in the cave showed itself to be just one form, a form contiguous with life’s many violent insanities. Reason is one mode of action, nothing more, and it has no special privileges. The fact that he had extended its reach to cover everything, like a panacea he hoped would make up for the shortcomings of action, was simply a personal quirk, and a very symptomatic one: it showed his true colors and the error in which he lived. Because those eminently reasonable characters he so much admired and whom he modeled himself after (like Mariano Grondona), were considered reasonable only pour la galerie — that’s how they made their living — but they also had a real life in which they were not reasonable, or they were only intermittently and carelessly so, depending on the circumstances, as these things should be. In order for action to be effective, one had to depart from the purely reasonable, which would always be an abstract way of thinking devoid of any truly practical use.
One could depart through realism. Realism was obviously a representation, but precisely for this reason it could become a spontaneous way of being when applied to an entire discourse. Realism was a deviation from the reasonable; a theory pointed to a path that was a straight line, but the realistic man who knew how to li
ve followed one that was roundabout and had twists and turns . . . each one of these detours away from the straight path was by nature and intention Evil. It didn’t matter that it was an attenuated Evil, one without consequences; its essence was still Evil, and it had to be for the detour to be effective and for realism to be created, and for reality to be seen through realism, finally, real reality, so distinct from the pale fantasies of reason . . . Perhaps there, in that eminently benevolent utility, resided Evil’s purpose.
An ambulance siren broke through the quiet morning air of the neighborhood, apparently in a great hurry but also apparently taking a quite roundabout route, coming and going through those small and empty streets as if it couldn’t find its way. The physical phenomenon that makes a siren sound different when it is approaching from when it is departing, even when the distances are equal, is well known. That difference allowed Dr. Aira to reconstruct the intricate route the ambulance was taking. This is what he had been doing for the past few minutes without realizing it, absorbed as he was in other thoughts and memories; now, with the dog hurling itself at him, he became alarmed when he realized that the sound, with all its comings and goings, was drawing a circle that was closing in on him . . . There it was again, that cursed ambulance, which had been pursuing him in dreams and throughout wakeful nights, in fantasy and reality, always driving with its siren blasting along the uncertain edge of two realms! Fortunately, it had never caught up with him. Like in a nightmare that is never consummated but for that very reason is even more nightmarish, at the very last minute, just when it was about to catch him, he would escape through the center of the labyrinth, though he never knew exactly how . . . That was the moment of extreme danger, with terror ripping through the seams of reality, when he would transfer that sense of danger to some other element, as he had just now done with the dog, thereby establishing a continuum and crossing over that bridge, heading in the opposite direction of that fear . . .
