by Cesar Aira
One concept was repeated more often than the others: “vegetative state.” In fact, the organism had already passed into the realm of brainlessness, after which all that remained was to continue to exist, no longer act, only react to the environment; at this point it could absorb only the effect of the medicine, without any further possibility of assimilating it in order to transform its effects. Of course, the phrase could be erased from the tape, but if it was uttered in the ambulance it was in order to provoke a certain response. Actyn must have been aware of his conversations with trees (how did he find out, the rascal?) and was attacking on that flank.
He was reminded of an episode in an old gothic novel: a monk with apostatizing tendencies demanded a miracle in order to remain in the monastery, an impossible condition for he was sure there would be no miracle. His interlocutor told him that if it was necessary, God would produce a miracle to keep him in the fold, and he told him to suggest one. They were sitting in the monastery garden, at the foot of a majestic tree . . . The monk, somewhat at random, said he wanted “this tree to dry up.” Needless to say, the next morning the tree was desiccated (the monks, true infernal Actynes, used a lethal chemical). Dr. Aira, that impenitent flaneur, would have asked to “dry up all the trees in Buenos Aires,” the entire forest of strange crisscrossing lines he got lost in on a daily basis. And the miracle could occur! Or directly did occur . . . After all, they were at the end of autumn.
He startled.
“Hey!”
Where were they? Where were they taking him? Had they gone mad? Would desperation have led Actyn to seriously consider violence? José Bonifacio Street kept going, on and on, always in a straight line . . . Everybody thought the streets of Buenos Aires actually continued beyond the city limits, into the countryside, there turning into the streets of faraway towns, then again continuing into the countryside . . . Past the small windows, which he looked through out of the corner of his eye so as not to take his eyes off the two little doctors, he glimpsed an infinite expanse, which must have been the Pampa. If it was, something had happened, something far beyond a joke. Nothing could be more realistic or more normal than a straight line, but following it one could also move into the marvelous. He had a miniature vision inside his head: the ambulance driving through an infinite and empty desert, and the dog running alongside the wheel, barking . . . Finally he spoke, interrupting some elaborate nonsensical explanation in mid sentence — and they stopped talking, because this is what they wanted: for him to talk.
“The answer is no.”
“No what, doctor?”
“I’m not going to do anything for this man, or for anybody else. I never have and you know that very well.”
“But your gift, Dr. Aira . . . The Miracle Cures . . . ”
“No cures or curates, and no monks, either. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What do you mean, you have no idea? So why are you famous? Why do all the terminal cases beg for you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never . . . ”
“Is it an invention of the media? Why did we spend half the morning looking for you, wasting time we could have spent performing brain surgery? You’re not going to tell us we’ve been duped.”
“I’ve got nothing to do with it. I want to get out.”
They suddenly changed tactics. The screens all turned red and began to emit blood-curdling beeps (surely they had secretly pushed some button). They threw themselves over the stretcher, shouting:
“A systemic collapse! He’s failing! There’s nothing to be done!”
In spite of their pessimism, they worked like the devil, shouting at each other, even swearing, all in an attack of hysteria. They applied electric paddles to the poor man, who was turning blue, seizing, writhing. The odor of strange chemical substances made it impossible to breathe. At the same time, the huge nurse stepped on the gas, as if he’d also been infected, and shouted incoherent orders over the siren’s loudspeakers. Even the dog was going nuts. In the midst of this indescribable chaos, Ferreyra turned to him and shouted:
“Dr. Aira, this is our last chance. Do something! Save a life!”
“No, no . . . I have never . . . ”
“Do something! We’re losing him!”
He was groping behind him for the door handle. He had decided to throw himself out the door, if necessary while still in motion. Again they changed tactics. Suddenly, all the screens went blank, and everybody calmed down, as if by magic.
“We’ll take you home, don’t worry. The patient has died.”
“You’re going to have to sign a form . . . ”
“No.”
“ . . . to explain the use of the ambulance.”
“I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
“Okay, good-bye.”
They had stopped. They opened the door. As he was getting out, the dead man said:
“Jackass.”
He could have sworn it was Actyn’s voice, which he’d only ever heard on television. He stepped onto the sidewalk and looked around. The dog had disappeared, and the ambulance had already taken off, accelerating loudly. It was only at that moment that he felt a wave of adrenaline washing over his insides. This lag, like jet lag, had rendered him ineffectual, for the chance to beat the hell out of those charlatans had already passed. The same thing always happened to him: his indignation, which was torturous, came afterwards when he was alone, when he couldn’t fight with anybody but himself. Always the same concatenation between time and blunders. A civilized person like him couldn’t lament not having engaged in a knock-down-drag-out, but there remained a question about whether he was a Real Man or a scurrying rat. He was two blocks away from his house. He looked at the trees, the large banana trees along José Bonifacio Street, and it occurred to him that they were machines designed to crush the world until the atoms were released. That’s how he felt, and this was the natural effect of theater. Who said that lies lead to the truth, that fiction flows into reality? Theater’s misfortune was this definitive and irreversible dissolution. That was also its gravity, above and beyond the iridescent lightness of fiction.
At least he’d come out of it unscathed. His morning adventure was over. Once again, Dr. Aira had escaped from the clutches of his relentless archenemy and could continue (but for how much longer?) his program of Miracle Cures.
II
That winter, freed from the material necessities of life through a stroke of good fortune (he’d received a sum of money that had allowed him to take ten months off from his income-producing activities), Dr. Aira dedicated himself fully to the writing and publication of his works. His worry-free state could only be temporary because once the money ran out he would have to again find ways to get more; but for once in his life he wanted to give himself the chance to be fully absorbed in his intellectual work, like some kind of monk or wise man detached from the practical aspects of existence. If he didn’t do it now, at fifty, he never would.
One effect of his age was that he had lately begun to appreciate in all its magnitude the responsibility incumbent upon him as a creator of symbolic material (and who isn’t creating this, in one way or another, all the time?). Because this material was virtually eternal: it traveled through time and shaped future thoughts. And not only thoughts but also everything that would be born from them. The future itself, the block of the future, was nothing more than what was enclosed in and exemplified by these forms that emerged from the present.
&n
bsp; Of course, the transformations the forms undergo during their voyage through time render their destinations fairly unpredictable. Work done in one field can end up exerting an influence on another, on any other, even the most distant and unrelated one. Hence, his efforts in the field of medicine could create, centuries later, new styles in fields as different from his own as astrophysics, sports, or fashion. But what importance does this have? The true cultivator of worlds sows his seeds in change itself, in the maelstrom. Be that as it may, the idea enveloped him in a daydream — innate to him, in fact — in which everything was transformed into everything else, through beautiful transitions like works of art.
Paradoxically, the opportunity that presented itself to him — because of the fact that it was an opportunity, particularly an opportunity to think, to elaborate his thoughts without stopping for practical considerations — brought with it an urgency for practical action, an urgency to make something. That’s what it was all about, because the other, theory, is what he had been doing his whole life, without the tyranny of necessity loosening its grip even for the few months he needed to transform theory into tangible objects. He was in the position of a poet who had written ten thousand poems and now had to seriously consider publishing them.
Things. Tangible things that could be held in a hand, placed in a drawer. The world was always praising “young people who make things,” and for good reason. Because ninety-nine percent of the value of things, of their intrinsic beauty, is derived from time. A comb is useful only for combing your hair (and not even this if you’re bald), but a two-hundred-year-old comb is sold as a precious object in an antique store, and a two-thousand-year-old comb is exhibited in a museum and is priceless. That’s why it’s worthwhile to make things in one’s youth, because these are the only things we have the possibility of seeing made more beautiful by the patina of time, if we live to an old age. Those we make later remain for future generations, and we miss out on them. Dr. Aira had missed the chance, and he bitterly lamented this fact. But to make things now, at fifty, might bring back some inkling of youth; perhaps it would place time on his side.
The first thing was to begin publishing his installments of the Miracle Cures. First of all, obviously, he had to write them . . . But at the same time he didn’t need to write them because throughout the last few years he had filled an unbelievable number of notebooks with elaborations on his ideas; he had written so much that to write any more, on the same subject, was utterly impossible, even if he’d wanted to. Or better said, it was possible, very possible; it was what he had been doing year after year, in the constant “changing of ideas” that were his ideas. Continuing to write or continuing to think, which were the same, was equivalent to continuing to transform his ideas. That had been happening to him from the beginning, ever since his first idea. He had no other choice if he wanted to progress, for the subject was always the same: Cure through Miracles. His lack of dogmatism combined with his absolute conviction gave his mental elaboration on the subject a plasticity that held it in perpetual flux, which gave him an immeasurable relative advantage over the other miracle healers; on the other hand, it had prevented him from ever concretizing anything.
A related problem, which he had worked on laboriously, was his principled refusal to use examples. The established discourse in the genre was based on the exposition of “cases,” clinical cases, surprising cases, exceptional cases . . . But since all cases were exceptional, even the most typical ones, any text written within that system was condemned to being merely a digression. It was assumed that one could end up with an exhaustive illustration of an idea through the strength of examples. But for the idea to have any value, other examples would have to be able to illustrate it, so how could one achieve anything exhaustive? Even worse, the method of using examples in itself imposed a hierarchy between the particular and the general, a situation that could not stand more wholly in opposition to the very essence of his system of cures.
In spite of this, he had to think of a form of exposition that would be attractive to the general public, and the tradition of using examples was too deeply rooted to avoid altogether. After mulling the issue over and over he had come up with a compromise solution: to put into effect a do-it-yourself-examples mechanism the reader would be in charge of. He would confine himself to one example, only one “case,” with which he would open the first installment (or rather number zero) and to which all the arguments would refer, thereby inverting the malevolent order of the general and the particular.
This passe-partout example had given him many headaches. Not its invention, which was easy, perhaps too easy, but rather the conviction that he would need to employ it. In order to avoid that ease, he stuck with the first one that popped into his head, and in the long run he had to admit that he had done the right thing. It was not a case in the strict sense of the word but rather a little fable, inspired by a pair of stretchy woolen gloves that were sold as “magic gloves”; he had a pair, which he wore when he went on strolls in the winter; their “magic” consisted of both of them being exactly the same, so either could be worn on the right or the left hand indistinguishably. In turn, all the pairs of gloves were the same, all one size, and they fit all hands, from a little girl’s to a truck driver’s; their adaptability, just like their trick of bilateral symmetry, was due to the elasticity of their knit, and therein lay all the magic. What he imagined was the existence of a unique pair of truly “magic gloves,” made out of thick red leather with angora fur lining — hence very thick — that would have the property of giving the hands that wore them (but only while they were wearing them) the sublime piano-playing virtuosity of an Arrau or an Argerich . . . but they would be useless because one obviously cannot play the piano wearing gloves, and less so with such uncomfortable polar gloves. Hence, their miraculous charm would never coincide with any proof, and the underlying theory would be left untouched. Only by dint of useless miracles could one prevent a theory from degenerating into a dogma.
Choosing the “installment” format was a result of this kind of reasoning. He had come to it by retreating from more radical formats; for months he had played around with the idea of creating an album of collectible figurines, the figurines of the Miracle Cures, which would be sold in kiosks in sealed envelopes . . . But the operational aspect created too many complications, and there were even some impracticalities on the conceptual side. So he rejected the idea of the album, as he had rejected many other possibilities that were as daring or more so. From these grand escalations of fantasies he would return to “degree zero”: the book. And he would take off again from there, because the format of the book, with its classic simplicity that nobody respected more than he, limited him excessively. All that to-ing and fro-ing had converged at a point in the middle, which was the collectible installment, published weekly. The frequency would dictate his work rhythm, and the advantage of this over a book was that he would not have to finish the entire oeuvre before beginning to publish; that last part was the most important, because he had not considered a definite end to his labors; he saw it, instead, as an open oeuvre, which could incorporate into a fixed format the changes in his ideas, perspective, and even moods.
His fantasies of being an avant-garde editor turned out not to be futile, as many of the ideas arising from them were incorporated into the format he finally chose; and the “installment” plan was very hospitable to all of them, an additional reason to opt for it.
Illustrations were one of those fe
atures he wanted to incorporate. The idea came from some plans he had discarded, such as the figurines (and others), but it was also a natural for installments. When has anybody ever seen installments without illustrations? Once he’d heard of a dictionary that had been published in installments, but besides this seeming too absurd to be true, a dictionary was ideal for illustrations, it carried them within, virtually, for a dictionary is a systematic catalogue of examples.
Needless to say, he himself would make them. He would never even dream of asking an artist to collaborate, so great was his horror of relinquishing absolute control over any aspect of his work. He was reasonably skilled at drawing, which he practiced every day; however, they always turned out abstract. Only by accident did his drawings ever represent anything. Nevertheless, he could, like anybody else, draw a comprehensible diagram, though he only did so when he was planning to fabricate something. Recently he had filled a notebook with plans and models for fantasy garments, some in color.
These garments, which in reality had nothing to do with the Miracle Cures, as they were imaginative and highly elaborate items of clothing conjured up with the exuberance of fantasy, nevertheless constituted an important part of the project. In order to explain how he made them (because he had also had to invent this explanation, ex post facto), he had to start with the value of a text, any text, and by extension, of the one he might write about the Miracle Cures. Reflecting on the roots of value, he reached the conclusion that it was necessary to include an autobiographical component. This should never be missing, and not out of narcissism but rather because it was the only mechanism that would allow the writing to endure; and he wanted, oh, how he wanted! for his writing to withstand time, this also not out of intellectual narcissism but because with time his installments would take on the value of antiques, a value in and of itself, independent of the uncertain values of truth or intelligence or style.
