The Proof

by Cesar Aira

  As the severed head traced an arc through the air in which all the brutal light and darkness of the fire was vividly etched, a second trolley behind the backs of the spectators was despatched in the opposite direction to the first. A fresh blast set off a third fire against the back wall of the store, where the thoughtful shelves of wine were kept. It became impossible to breathe, as the fire’s intense heat was filled with acrid smells. Everything edible or drinkable in the supermarket was added to the concoction. The household cleaning department adjacent to the soft drinks area had also caught fire. The containers of solvents, waxes, polishes and ammonia went up with a choking stench. The trapped crowds tried to get away, trampling on each other, showing no solidarity, each one desperate to save themself. Whole displays began to give way on top of people. And the woman’s head was still in mid-air, not because it had come to a standstill in a miraculous postmortem levitation, but because only a very short space of time had elapsed.

  In the darkness of the flames, in the crystal of smoke and blood, the scene was multiplied in a thousand images, and each of these thousand in a thousand more… realms of weightless, rootless gold. It was as if at last there was a kind of understanding of what was going on. There is an old proverb which says: If God does not exist, everything is permitted. But the fact is that everything is never permitted, because there are laws of verisimilitude that survive the Creator. Even so, the second part of the proverb can function, that is, become reality, hypothetically at least, giving rise to a second proverb on the same lines as the original: If everything is permitted… This new proverb does not have a second part. Indeed, if everything is permitted… then what? This question was projected onto the thousand confused contours of the panic in the supermarket, and found some sort of reply. If everything is permitted… everything is transformed. It is true that transformation is also a question; on this occasion however, it became a momentary, shifting affirmation; it did not matter that it was still an interrogative, it was also an answer. The incident had illuminated, even if in the shadows, the amazing potential for transformation latent in all things. A woman, for example, a local housewife who had gone to buy food for supper, was melting on the spot in full view of her neighbours, who paid no attention to her. The fire had caught the viscose of her padded coat, and she had turned into a monster, but a dancing monster, lending her a voluptuousness she had never possessed when she was alive. Her limbs were elongated – one hand at the end of a three-metre long arm was crawling across the floor, a leg twisted and twisted endlessly on itself like a cobra… And she was singing, without opening her mouth, in a voice that would have left Maria Callas sounding flatulent and fuzzy, while at the same time the song was enriched by inhuman laughter, panting and prancing… she became animal, but all animals at once, an animal spectacle, with the bars of her cage sticking out like spines from every fold of her body, an animal jungle weighed down with orchids. A torrential rainbow spread over her: red, blue, snow white, green, dark gloomy green… She became vegetable, a stone, a stone colliding, the sea, an octopus automaton… she murmured, acted (Rebecca, an unforgettable woman), declaiming her lines while also a mime artist, a planet, a crackling sweet wrapper, an active and passive expression in Japanese… and at the same time she was no more than a gaze, a tiny insistence. Because the same thing could happen to anyone, and in fact did so; she was only one instance among hundreds, a picture at an exhibition.

  Mao was still busy and either because she had been so diligent or because the time had arrived, she was coming to the end of the tills. The bag she was holding in her left hand was stuffed with money. How much time had elapsed? Five minutes in total since they had burst into the supermarket? And so much had happened! They were all waiting for the police or the firemen, but knew this was merely an atavistic habit, because there was nothing to wait for. What they felt was the opposite of someone coming to help: the general atmosphere was a centrifugal force, the Big Bang, the birth of the universe. It was as if everything known were dispersing at the speed of light, to create in the far distance, in the blackness of the universe, new civilisations based on other premises.

  It was a beginning, but also the end. Because Mao, her job done, leapt down from the first till, and Lenin joined her. Together, the two of them threw themselves at the corner of the window giving onto the street with the untouchable force of love. The glass shattered and they vanished cleanly through the hole… two boundless dark shapes swallowed up by the immensity of the world outside… and at the very moment they disappeared, a third shadow joined them… Three stars whirling in the vast rotation of the night… the Three Marias that all the children of the southern hemisphere peer up at, spellbound, uncomprehending… and were lost on the streets of Flores.

  27th May 1989

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