by AIRA, CESAR
According to a well-conceived and well-executed constructivism, seeing half a painting should make it possible to know what the other half contained. And reading half a novel or poem, the same thing. Or half a symphony. Or half a movie, right? Though speaking of “halves” could lead one to think of bilateral symmetry, which is not what this was about. It could be any fragment, even a dinosaur’s worn-out vertebra.
But, haven’t we then fallen into the conventional and the predictable?
Yes, maybe so. But this was about a special kind of predictability, for it obeyed a convention created for that particular work, one that did not serve any other. At the end of the day, art was a convention, and if pushed, everything was a convention. Art was creation, and the first thing it created was its own convention.
My thoughts were fleeting, and I revisited them under less pressure while I was reconstructing this step in the conversation, in my conversations, to be more precise. Didn’t I re-
establish the continuum of what was naturally fragmentary and interrupted? Because a conversation, no matter how civilized and articulate it may be, is always made up of leaps and digressions, and steps backward, and, “I didn’t understand you,” and, “I understood you all too well.” The memory that organizes and completes them is a chance excrescence, which exists as it did for me: secretly, almost shamefully. Although it probably isn’t all chance, judging from the fact that memory is full of conversations.
Could a conversation be completed by deducing the recently born conventions after hearing only half of it? One would have to consider a conversation a work of art, which was not far from what I thought. But which half? Because it could be a temporal half, for example, the first hour, or the second, if it lasted two hours. Or the half that belongs to the responses of only one of the interlocutors. In this case it would be the kind of reconstruction — so common — that one performs when one hears someone talking on the telephone.
My friend responded to all of this with a sleepy expression on his face, his eyes half closed, staring off into space. He must have been carrying out a general review of our digressions, and the conclusion he reached is that we hadn’t made any progress. We continued in the same “tic” or the same “toc” of the Rolex.
No, that wasn’t quite it. I wanted to retract my former skepticism, because in reality I had proven something, almost without meaning to, or “without meaning to mean to”: I had proven, through the positive absurd, that fiction was fiction. To ride on a dehydrated goat through the star-studded sky, wasn’t that fiction? Who could ask for anything more? Through simple deduction, the actor who played the goatherd . . . Wasn’t that crystal clear? In a certain way, we had reached the point where words die.
This reference to silence seemed to arouse my friend, exactly as when one has been hearing a constant noise for so long that one ceases to notice it, then when it stops, the contrast becomes deafening. He looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me, or on the contrary, as if he suddenly recognized somebody he had thought was a stranger. The expression on his face was so peculiar that when I tried to mentally reproduce it in my memory, I almost failed to find the representational resources to make it credible. What he said when he emerged from his state of perplexity was so amazing (to me) that I became electrified, and I moved into the present. My memory accompanied me into the present, like a written play that is being performed.
But then . . . are you talking about the real-real actor?
Who else? And what does that mean? Are you saying there is a double “real” and a single “real”?
Don’t start again with your twisted logic. Let’s talk about the movie we both saw, please. There was the actor who played the goatherd, and the actor who played the actor who played the goatherd, right?
Just one moment! Now you’re the one with the twisted logic. What’s with this regressus ad infinitum?
Infinitum my foot! Did you see the movie or didn’t you?
Of course I saw it! I saw more of it than you did!
It doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you missed the whole part about the actor . . . But I know you didn’t miss it. You yourself told me about it, about his mansion in Beverly Hills, his dog Bob, the press conference in Paris . . .
I was stunned.
But what does that have to do with it?
What do you mean, what does that have to do with it? Did you see it or didn’t you see it?
I saw it . . . Yes . . . Now that you mention it, I remember seeing it, but I don’t know what that has to do with the movie. So it wasn’t . . . ?
You thought it was . . . ?
You thought that I thought . . . ?
The questions and answers crisscrossed back and forth over the café table at the speed of light, until the questions turned into answers and the answers into questions. In bed, while nervously tossing and turning, I couldn’t manage to make them occur in the correct order. The quid of the question was that I thought that they had inserted scenes from one of those documentaries about the making of the movie — what they call “backstage” scenes — that are so common these days when they show a movie. It seems, however, that these were part of the movie itself. I would not have gotten so confused had I paid closer attention, but one does not pay close attention to such entertainment.
Little by little, then all in one fell swoop, with that majestic slowness the instantaneous tends to have, everything became crystal clear. The basic plot of the movie, the one we had both watched, was of the filming of a movie. The CIA wanted to investigate the supposed production of enriched uranium by the Ukrainian separatists and sent their agents to investigate an area under suspicion, but they did so under the guise of shooting an action and adventure thriller, a coproduction, on location. To make themselves credible, they hired a famous actor, obviously imaginary, though played by a real famous actor. And to perfect appearances, they really did make the movie, though they were not very concerned about its quality or verisimilitude, for it was merely an excuse to carry out their espionage; a few scenes from that nonsensical shoot (whose plot involved Señorita Wild Savage and the Goatherd) were mixed in without much explanation, creating a second level for the audience, independent of the first though not completely, because the characters on the “real” level remained in costume and in character just as they did on the “fictional” level. I had not perceived that there were two levels: I had fused them as best I could, adding patches and sewing lateral and transverse seams, any which way. My friend, on the other hand, more attentive than I on the one hand and more distracted on the other, had correctly discriminated between the two levels, but he was mistaken as to the hierarchy between them: he held that the story of Señorita Wild Savage and the Goatherd was “real,” and that of the Secret Laboratory was “fictitious.” An excusable error, because even after we had cleared this up à deux, we did not manage to decide which of the two levels the dehydrated water belonged to. The most disorienting thing of all was that the entire movie followed the growing awareness of the main actor, an actor they’d hired under false pretenses, telling him he was to play in a real action and adventure movie set in the mountains of Ukraine; little by little, in conjunction with the strange events that took place during the filming, he began to realize that he was involved in espionage and politics, a plot that was not at all fictitious, and he ended up by accepting his role as a real hero.
The only comment I dared make once we’d finished, exhausted from untangling the knots that we ourselves had tied, was that the recourse of a fiction within a fiction should be forbidden. That business of several levels had already been overexploited, and it was beginning to show its true colors as an easy way out, a “whatever.” One might even begin to suspect that in our technological state of globalized civilization, there were no more stories, and to make one — or the remnants of one — work, the stories of the stories had to be told.
But had it not always been like that? Wasn’t reality, to which all stories aspired, the story
of stories?
Feeling discouraged, as if we were infecting each other back and forth and that this was all the result of mental fatigue, I shook my head and said that I refused to follow him along that path of subtleties. I refused to defame reality. I reminded him of my motto, taken from the work of Constancio C. Vigil: “Simplify, my son, simplify.” Reality was simple. It did not have levels. That stupid movie might have taken us a bit too far afield, and now it was time for us to return to our point of departure.
To return to our point of departure, in practice, meant to change the subject. And, in fact, we were about to do so when we realized how much time had passed and that it was time to say goodbye. Along with time, our desire to change the subject had also passed. My friend said that on balance he could affirm that he liked the movie. Or, at least — he corrected himself after thinking about it for a moment — after our thorough critique of it, he was now starting to like it.
In the conversation, I partially agreed with him, but at night I had time to do so fully. Above all because there was nothing to agree or disagree about: he hadn’t said that the movie was good, but rather that he had liked it; with taste, one can only concur or not. My own taste had not been so complacent, but with the reflections surrounding my mnemonic exercises, it became more flexible. I was experimenting on myself with the benefits of repetition. It is not that I was comparing that ridiculous movie lacking all substance to our conversations, which were pure substance. But the mechanism was similar. Whatever was improvised and stuttered and stammered, sometimes without proper syntax when we got carried away in the excitement of the discussion, I then polished and smoothed out and varnished during my nocturnal repetition. Out of sheer chance, my friend had had a hint of the aesthetic sensations my secret activity afforded me; this placed him and his taste in the perspective of art and thought once again, that is, a transfiguring perspective.
Hence, anticipating my own remembering, I had no problem telling him that I also liked it, or at least that I did not regret having seen it. It was ingenious, and had given rise to a range of musings. Adventure was never completely squandered. Its explosions released fragments that, as opposed to all the other objects in the universe, did not obey the laws of gravity; instead, they were like miniature universes, expanding in the mental vacuum, and definitely enriching time.
My friend pondered the metaphor, but for his part he thought that they did act in accordance with gravity, even metaphorically: because the movie’s creators arranged things so that all the episodes led back to a central point, and he found this to be its main value. Not only of this movie in particular, but rather of all the ones he’d ever seen. Not that he saw that many; they were a byproduct of his evening fatigue, his need for relaxation after a day of high-level intellectual effort. Merely entertainment, but one against which those same efforts rebounded, and by so doing, were enriched. And even with the small amount of attention he paid those movies, he could not fail to be amazed at the skill with which they tied up all the loose ends, and the threads of the characters’ motives, and made all the divergent subplots coincide. Movies made purely for entertainment were a business; nevertheless, they employed the recourses of serious art, and with the help of some kind of miracle, they turned out well. The most surprising aspect was the enormous number of movies made (that had been made and would continue to be made), and all of them without fail were and would be puzzles. How did they do it?
I was more prepared to explain how Kant had written his three Critiques than how an adventure movie was made. Even so, I had one idea. I had read somewhere that there was never only one screenwriter who developed the script for a movie, but rather a group, and a large group at that. This was understandable, due to the huge capital investments involved. The studios could not depend on the inspiration or talent of a single individual, because that would be like betting everything on a single card, and North American businessmen prefer to play it safe. In the first place, of course, because the creativity of a single person necessarily tips things too far toward the personal and the idiosyncratic, necessarily limiting the target audience. But the principle motivation is practical: to tightly pack in the attractions by filling the dead times that inevitably exist in a story told by a single person. Refined after decades of practice, the assembling of those groups of screenwriters follows a well-thought-out division of labor: one specializes in jokes, another in romance, another in science, another in politics; there is an expert in verisimilitude, one in police procedural, one in psychology, and so on. From the artistic point of view, the method has its advantages and its disadvantages. Personal unity of the imagination is lost, and one runs the risk of reducing the flights of fantasy to a normative level of consensus and conformity. A superior, transpersonal unity, however, can be achieved. After all, the solitary mind is also subject to multiplicities that create consensus around unconscious conventions and conformity, and it is very possible that a real multiplicity could liberate energies that would otherwise remain dormant.
We need to be sensitive to these arguments because to a certain extent they could be applied to us. What is attractive about conversations is right there: in the other being truly an other, and in his thoughts being unfathomable to his interlocutor. When I go over conversations at night, alone, I turn into the artist or the philosopher who works his material at his will, like the director of a movie who does what he wants to or can do with the script. I, like all of them, have to face the superior unity of collective creation. However, the simile of movies is not quite right because I do not work with cameras and actors and stage sets but rather only with thoughts, and thoughts are made only of words.
Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.
February 2, 2006
Copyright © 2007 by César Aira
Translation copyright © 2014 by Katherine Silver
Originally published in Spanish as Las conversaciones (2007) by Beatriz Viterbo Editorial, Argentina; published in conjunction with the Literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (NDP1294) in 2014
Design by Erik Rieselbach
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Aira, César, 1949-
[Conversaciones. English]
Conversations / by Cesar Aira ; translated by Katherine Silver.
pages cm
“First published in Spanish as Las conversaciones.”
I. Silver, Katherine, translator. II. Title.
PQ7798.1.I7C6613 2014
863'.64—dc23 2014003892
ISBN 978-0-8112-2111-5 (e-book)
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
ALSO BY CÉSAR AIRA FROM NEW DIRECTIONS
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Ghosts
The Hare
How I Became a Nun
The Literary Conference
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira
The Seamstress and the Wind
Shantytown
Varamo
perbook)
