The Proof

by Cesar Aira

  ‘Wanna fuck? Say you do.’

  ‘Let go of me,’ said Marcia, frowning. ‘Start by taking your hands off me. The answer is no. It’s still no: why would it change? I want to go home.’

  And yet she had come to a halt. But when she saw Mao’s determined gesture, one she thought was crazy – shaking her head without taking her eyes off Marcia’s (normally when somebody shakes their head to say no, they take their eyes off the other person), she felt an urgent need to carry on walking. She could do this. Taking a few steps back towards the pavement, she paused to collect her thoughts. Alongside the desire to get away came a more powerful urge to talk, because she suddenly was able to, as if Mao’s return to her main aim freed her from a spell.

  ‘It was your fault we couldn’t talk in there. We’re in the same position as before, or worse. I wanted to know something, but I still don’t have any idea about it. It may not be important to you, but what about me?’

  ‘It’s not important to you either.’

  ‘You’re so stubborn! And inconsiderate!’

  ‘We did as you wanted, but in fact there was no need to talk.’

  ‘In that case, there’s nothing more to say. Bye.’

  She set off without looking back at them.

  ‘Love isn’t something to be talked about,’ said Mao.

  ‘There are lots of things that can be talked about. It’s all very complicated.’ Marcia had no idea what she was saying.

  ‘No, it’s very simple. You have to decide on the spot.’

  The other two had also started walking, very quickly as usual. The three of them were heading for the street corner. Mao seemed to be gathering strength for a decisive attack. Marcia decided she was no longer interested. She was fed up with the argument.

  Far more than she admitted, Marcia was most sincerely disappointed that the conversation had got nowhere. Not so much because she had not learnt anything about the world of punks (as she had no idea what information there was, she couldn’t know if they had told her a lot or a little), but because the punk world had not turned out to be a backwards world, the symmetrical, looking-glass image of the real one, with all its values reversed. That would have been the simplest answer, one that would have left her satisfied. Marcia was a bit ashamed to admit this, because it was so childish, but she didn’t want to make things any more difficult for herself. It was a missed opportunity; with it every­thing else was lost, and so she considered the matter closed.

  They had reached the street corner; Mao came to a halt. She peered along Calle Bonorino, which was in darkness, then turned to Marcia.

  ‘Let’s go along here a bit. There’s something I want to tell you.’

  ‘No. There’s nothing more to say.’

  ‘There’s just one more thing, Marcia, but it’s fundamental. Isn’t it unfair to cut me off when I’m finally going to tell you the most important thing of all? Because now I do want to talk to you about love.’

  In spite of everything she had decided a moment earlier, Marcia was curious. She knew she would hear nothing new, but still she felt intrigued. This was the magic spell the punks had cast on her: they made her believe the world could be renewed. The disappointment was secondary. Although she was the one who felt disappointed, Marcia was one of those people who had the habit of disregarding themselves and evaluating the situation without taking themselves into account. So she followed Mao, and Lenin followed her. They didn’t walk far. There was a dark stretch twenty metres further on beyond the lit shop windows of Harding’s. The three of them huddled against the wall. Mao launched straight in, her voice urgent. She had her eyes fixed on Marcia, who in the dim light felt freer to return her gaze with what was for her an unusual intensity.

  ‘Marcia, I’m not going to tell you again that you’re wrong, because you must know that by now. The big mistake is the world of explanations you live in. Love is a way out of that mistake. An escape from that mistake. Why do you reckon I can’t love you? Do you have an inferiority complex, like all fatties? No. And if you think you do, you’re wrong about that too. My love has transformed you. That world of yours is contained within the real world, Marcia. I’m going to take the trouble to explain a few things to you, but don’t forget I’m talking about the real world, not the one of explanations. What’s preventing you from responding to me? Two things: the suddenness and the fact that I’m a girl. I’ve nothing to say about the suddenness; you believe in love at first sight just as I do, and so does the rest of the world. That’s a necessity. We can’t do without that. Now, as to me being a girl and not a boy, a woman and not a man… You’re horrified at us being so brutal, but it hasn’t occurred to you that in the end that’s all there is. In those same explanations you’re always looking for, when it comes down to it, when it’s the very last explanation, what’s left but a naked, horrible clarity? Even men are that brutal, even if they are professors of philosophy, because underneath everything else there’s the length and breadth of their pricks. That and nothing more. That’s the reality. Of course it may take them many years and many miles to realise that; they can exhaust every single word beforehand, but it’s all the same, however long they take, whether it takes them a lifetime to get there, or if they flash their dick at you before you’ve even crossed the street. We women have the wonderful advantage of being able to choose the long or short route. We can turn the world into a stroke of lightning, the blink of an eye. But since we don’t have dicks, we waste our brutality in contemplation. And yet… there is suddenness. An instant when the whole world becomes real, when it undergoes the most radical change: the world becomes world. That’s staring us in the face, Marcia. That’s when all politeness, all conversation has to stop. It’s happiness, and that’s what I’m offering you. You’d be the most stupid cow of all time if you didn’t see that. Just think, there’s so little separating you from your destiny. You only have to say yes.’

  Marcia had twice before noticed something strange she could not define. Now she knew what it was. She understood, or put into words, something she had been aware of for a while, perhaps from the start: that Mao was beautiful. It struck you immediately. She was surprised she had not told herself so before now. She was the most beautiful girl she had ever seen. And more than that. To have a pretty face and harmonious features or an exquisite range of expressions was not that unusual among girls of her age. But Mao was much, much more. She went beyond whatever thoughts could be formulated about beauty: she was like the sun, like light.

  And this wasn’t an effect. It wasn’t the kind of beauty discovered over a short or long time, out of habit or love or both these things together; it wasn’t beauty seen through the lens of subjectivity or time. It was objective. It was real beauty. Marcia was sure of this because beauty had never meant much to her; she didn’t even notice it or take it into account. Among her schoolmates there were several who could boast that they were perfect beauties. Compared to Mao, they were like illusions confronted with the real.

  OK, she told herself, so that was Mao’s ‘secret weapon’, and everything could be explained from that starting point. But at the same time, that wasn’t an explanation. Because how could beauty be a secret?

  ‘And yet,’ Mao was saying, ‘love also allows for one detour, just one: action. Because love, which cannot be explained, does in fact have proofs. Of course, these are not exactly procrastination, because proofs are the only thing love has. And however slow and complicated they may be, they are also instantaneous. These proofs are as valuable as love, not because they are the same or equivalent, but because they open a perspective onto another aspect of life: action.’

  Marcia had paid no more attention to this part of Mao’s speech than to what had come before. Her own reflections were also coming to a close: her thoughts and Mao’s were like two parallel series, and this lent them a certain harmony. After verifying, or discovering, Mao’s beauty, and still affected by an amazement she could not name, Marcia turned to look at Lenin. What had just happ
ened let her see something she had not seen before. In a way, she had not looked them in the face before.

  Lenin was no beauty. Or perhaps she was. She had a long, horsey face, and all her features (eyes, nose, mouth) seemed out of proportion, and haphazard. But in her entirety, she could not be called ugly. She was different. So different she made one think of a kind of beauty that might be appreciated in another civilisation. She was the opposite of Mao. In an exotic, primitive or directly extra-terrestrial court, her face could have been considered a living jewel, the realisation of an ideal. Generations of incestuous monarchs would have been needed to produce her, and this would have led to dynastic struggles, intrigues, kidnappings, knights in strange armour, castles on the top of inaccessible hills… Lenin too had something for Marcia to discover, which became real at that moment: the novelesque. There was also a deep-seated similarity to Mao: they were like the two faces of the same thing. Beauty and silence exploded in the night. Unlike the other transformations she thought she had perceived, which were a turning of the page, this was the transformation of the world into world. It was the height of strangeness, and Marcia did not think she could go any further. She was right about this, because there were no more transformations; or rather, the situation took on the aspect and rhythm of one great transformation that was simultaneously still and dizzying. Marcia congratulated herself for having given them another chance, and even felt a retrospective, hypothetical fear: if she had done as she intended and gone home a few minutes earlier, she would have missed this discovery, which seemed to her fundamental. How often, she thought, from not making one more tiny effort, people lost the opportunity for positive and enriching lessons.

  Mao was looking expectantly at her. Marcia looked back at her and had to shut her eyes (inwardly): she was too beautiful. She was on the verge of asking her to please repeat the question, if there had been a question, but Mao wasn’t expecting a reply. On the contrary, it was as if she herself gave it:

  ‘You’ll have to prove yourself,’ she said.

  Marcia had no idea what she was talking about, but nodded anyway. Then something extraordinary happened: Mao smiled. This was the first and only time she did so, and Marcia, who had absolutely no way of verifying that this was a smile, knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mao had smiled at her.

  In fact this was one of the rarest phenomena in the universe, the ‘serious smile’, which men who are very lucky get to see once or twice in their lifetimes, and women practically never. It made her think, possibly by an association of names, of a photograph of Mao Tse-tung, one of those official photos in a blurred reproduction in a newspaper, where even with the best will in the world not even the keenest eye can decide whether there is or not the hint of a smile on the Chinese leader’s face.

  It was extremely fleeting, no more than an instant, and the punks were already off in search of their enigmatic ‘proof’. Marcia gravitated to them naturally… the gravitational pull of mystery, still lost in the mist of her thoughts, none of which (neither the one about beauty, nor the one about the novelesque, nor about the smile) had assumed a definite shape. They crossed the street without bothering to look whether a car was coming or not; on the far corner the darkness was deeper because it was an abandoned arcade. After a moment’s hesitation when Mao headed towards Rivadavia, she changed her mind and said something to Lenin.

  ‘Let’s go!’ she ordered, and strode off in the opposite direction. Marcia had heard them mutter the word Disco, and from the way it was said had understood they were going to the supermarket of that name. And yes, passing the cinema and a small bakery, they went into an arcade at the end of which was the enormous Disco supermarket, all lit up in neon. She had an intuition of what they were planning. As far as proofs of love went it was a classic gesture (a classic even though nobody had done it for her before): to steal something from a supermarket and give it to her. The equivalent of what in olden days would have been the slaying of a dragon. Of course, she had no idea what it would prove, but she was ready to watch. Viewed from this century’s enlightened present, anybody would say that dragons had never existed. But then again, for a medieval peasant, did supermarkets exist? In the same way, the proof that was still some distant possibility laid open the credit of existence. Would they ask her to wait outside? There were two massive glass walls separating the supermarket from the arcade. A lot of people were inside; all the tills were open, and there were long queues snaking between the displays and blocking everything. The main door was almost at the exit of the arcade on to Calle Camacuá. No, they weren’t going to make her wait outside: without a word, Mao stepped aside so that Marcia could go in first. When she entered… Not exactly the moment she entered, but when she looked back and saw what Lenin was doing when she came in… it was like the onset of a dream. And at the same time as if reality was starting.

  From her bag, or possibly from among the metal objects hanging round her neck, Lenin had taken a heavy black iron padlock; she was closing the glass door, slipping the bolt and attaching the padlock. The click it made as it snapped shut made Marcia jump. It was as if the lock had literally shut on her heart. Or better still, as if her heart were the black iron padlock that was slightly rusty but still worked perfectly, too well in fact. Because the move had something irreversible about it (when a padlock closes it’s as if it will never be able to be opened again, as if the key had somehow already been lost). Added to the surprise, this made it a dream come true…

  She was not the only one to have seen this. A short, elderly woman with white hair and a red coat had just reached the door to go out, pushing a piled-high trolley.

  ‘Get back,’ Lenin told her, switch-blade open in her palm.

  A boy in a Disco T-shirt who was helping load bags at the counter, had taken a few steps towards the intruder, but came to a halt when he saw the knife, his face almost comically reflecting his stupefaction. Lenin turned towards him, brandishing the blade:

  ‘Stay still, you arsehole, or I’ll kill you!’ she shouted. And to the old woman, who was rooted to the spot: ‘Get back to the till.’

  She stamped her foot on the ground, then with a swift movement stabbed at a sachet of milk that was on top of the trolley. A jet of white spattered several other women approaching the exit right in the eyes.

  Almost at once, Lenin moved beside Marcia towards the Fruit and Veg section, which gave on to the street. A man in a white apron came out from behind the electronic weighing machine, as if he had taken control of the situation and was determined to put a stop to it. Lenin wasted no time on him. She thrust the knife at him, and when the man raised his arms to snatch it from her or to hit her, she slashed his face at lightning speed. The blade slit his cheek down to the bone, from the gum behind his upper lip, from left cheek to right. His whole top lip was left dangling, with blood spurting up and down. He had begun to shout something, but never finished whatever it was. He raised both hands to his mouth.

  All this had only taken a few seconds, scarcely long enough for anyone to realise what was happening. The women who were choosing fruit and vegetables in this section, from where the rest of the supermarket could not be seen, started to look over, to be alarmed, but Lenin was already trotting through them, knife dripping blood, towards the small counter at the back, where the girl receiving empty bottles stood rooted to the spot. Behind her was a small door which led to the delivery bay for trucks. Marcia, who had stayed near the front door, turned to get a better look at what Lenin was up to. She saw that she was heading for this other exit, to do the same as she had with the first one. This time it must be a metal shutter. She didn’t doubt for a second that Lenin would lock it with another padlock… Marcia simply hoped she had the keys, because otherwise she had no idea how they would get out of there, and in this situation the need to get out was uppermost in her mind; she couldn’t think of anything else. But somehow what would most characterise them, the inevitable, what was most like their way of burning bridges, was for there to be n
o keys, was that they were closing the padlocks forever.

  At that moment, gunshots rang out over her head. Two, three or four of them: impossible to count. They were not all that loud, but the faces of those already alarmed snapped back. Incredibly, as yet, no one was shouting. To Marcia’s left, against the walls giving on to the street and behind the electronic weighing machine, stood a ladder. All this area had a low ceiling. Up above hung a not very large goldfish bowl-cum-office, where obviously a guard was posted who could see every part of the supermarket. There was no closed-circuit TV or anything of the kind; the surveillance was on a primitive level, watchtower-style. Mao must have climbed the ladder while her friend was putting on the show with her knife, and by now must have overpowered the security guard. Overpowered or something worse: Marcia could have sworn he had not been the one to shoot.