by Cesar Aira
Occasionally the men who came to the office were somewhat more enlightened and reasonable. They were the exceptions. Instead of launching into crazy monologues, they provided an opportunity to hear some truth, and although what they said gave me none of the pleasure that I got from fiction, it was their point of view that I adopted, albeit reluctantly. It was as if, in spite of my inclinations and tastes, I was destined to belong to that other world, the arid world of reason. On one occasion, such a man, who was strangely well informed about my family and its peculiarities, began to explain what life held in store for the children of the town. ‘Nobody wants to be a worker any more,’ he said. ‘Nobody wants to work!’ agreed his interlocutors enthusiastically, assenting to one of those pessimistic generalisations that are never all that general, because they always fail to include the person who proffers them. But this man had a more precise idea to convey; he wasn’t just indulging in cut-rate demagogy. ‘No one wants to get their hands dirty practising a trade. I don’t know if it’s because they’re ashamed of manual work, or if they’re just being over-optimistic, but parents aren’t doing their children any favours by sending them to study at those secretarial academies like the one Velásquez runs, instead of teaching them their own trades. They think that if their son goes to work in a coat and tie he’ll be more important than the guy in overalls, but in fact he’ll end up as a two-bit office worker without a future.’ The others, who had always been too busy talking to get around to thinking, grumpily agreed. The man turned to me, and to my surprise (showing that he really did know more than he’d been letting on) said:
‘You’re Lime Tree’s son, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘A case in point. An electrician: he could easily teach his son the trade. With the demand there is for electricians, and it’s only going to increase. But no, these people’s idea of progress is to put their son behind a desk, so he can moulder for the rest of his life on a miserable salary.’
Et cetera. His diagnosis was diabolically accurate. Which is not to say that he was right to criticise ‘these people’ for their naive desire to climb the social ladder that seemed to be at their disposal. After all, only the ‘other’ people could reason like this, people like him: the ones who had kicked Perón out and started the cruel march of History. And yet what he was saying was true. All the boys I knew, without exception, once they finished primary school, went to the Velásquez Academy, and then entered the world of business and bureaucracy. It was a dream, a hope, an evolutionary goal.
With his penetrating comments and criticism, this man was placing himself on a superior level. From there, he could offer an accurate diagnosis, but he couldn’t understand. On the level where things were happening, it all looked different. There, the Velásquez Academy was the reasonable option, answering real needs. The full course of studies was barely two years long, and as soon as the student graduated, at the age of fourteen, he or she was ready to enter the labour market, which seemed to have an insatiable need for young accounting clerks.
The irrational option, on the other hand (from the point of view of the people actually involved), was the very prestigious National College. There it would take no less than five years to attain the secondary education certificate, which was absolutely useless when it came to finding a job; the only thing it was good for was entry to a university, and the universities were in Buenos Aires and La Plata, far away and inaccessible. So unless you were rich, to send your child to the National College was absurdly aspirational, or simply a waste of time.
The worst thing, according to the neighbourhood commentators, was that the college adhered to the official syllabus, determined by esoteric objectives so remote from practical needs that they became a source of jokes. For example, one of the subjects studied in the first year (which is as far as the investigations had gone) was Botany. And what possible use could Botany be to the offspring of a humble family whose first and most urgent concerns would be to help his parents financially, to carve out a future, and arm himself effectively for the struggle to survive. Botany, imagine! In the neighbourhood, the discipline came in for savage attacks, perhaps because of its sonorous name. There must have been, and surely were, more useless subjects, but Botany was the paradigmatic example.
I lied knowingly when I said that there were no exceptions to the ‘Velásquez project’. There was one; it was flagrant and notorious, and, for a season, it brought the word Botany back onto everyone’s lips. This was a boy who lived on my block, the only son (naturally) of the poorest family in the neighbourhood. They weren’t just poor: the father didn’t work; he spent all day smoking in the doorway. No one knew how they survived; relatives must have been helping them out. The mother was a thin Indian lady dressed in black, always shut up in the kitchen. The boy was three years older than me, so he was finishing sixth grade when I was about to go into fourth. And then, to the infinite surprise of the whole neighbourhood, they sent him to the College! It was so ridiculous it beggared imagination. And yet, in a way, it was predictable.
This boy – I’ll call him M – was involved in an episode that I remember well. One day, one afternoon, my mother and I went out, heading for the centre of town, I can’t remember why. The centre was exactly five blocks away, but we never went there, so this was a momentous excursion. We set off, and M, who was hanging around in the street, tagged along. This was during his time at the College – a short time, incidentally, two or three months, no more, because his parents had an attack of sanity: they changed their minds and sent him to the Velásquez Academy, a decision that was announced in the neighbourhood with a good deal of vindictive smirking. The three of us set off walking very happily down the middle of the street. M was a pleasant, talkative, uninhibited boy. My mother had dressed up for an ‘outing’, and that was why we were walking in the middle of the street: her formal attire included shoes with towering stiletto heels. Unused to wearing them, she was tottering along as if on stilts, and the smooth tarmac of the road was much safer for her than the stones and weeds of the unpaved footpath.
My mother was very short, almost a dwarf. Or rather, she had the stature of a dwarf, along with other physical characteristics that were as unusual and conspicuous as those of dwarfism, but different. For example, her head was strikingly small (or perhaps it was in proportion to her body, but since she was so short, the ‘normal’ thing would have been a dwarf’s big head). It was covered with a grey down instead of hair, which never grew long enough to be combed or brushed (luckily it was too fine to bristle). The most arresting thing about her, though, were the glasses: small and round, and so exceptionally thick that they looked for all the world like marbles. They had been made for her when she was four years old, and she had been wearing them ever since. In spite of her shortness, and her rather grotesque appearance, she had an air of authority and stateliness that imposed respect. Everyone called her madam, which was unusual, because we called the other mothers in the neighbourhood by their first names, or even their nicknames.
Anyway, as we reached the corner, a car swerved to overtake us, and since another car was audible in the distance, Mum reconsidered and came to the conclusion that we could stay on the tarmac without having to walk right in the middle of the street.
She said: ‘We’re going to walk nearer the kerb; we don’t want some bumbling driver to run us over.’
M looked at her in astonishment, and asked at the top of his voice (that was how he always spoke): ‘Bumbling? What does that mean?’
‘Don’t you know what bumbling means? Clumsy.’
M burst into happy, exuberant laughter: ‘No! That can’t be right! It’s not a real word; you just made it up!’
My mother smiled, very pleased with herself. M’s suspicion was not unreasonable; it was just the kind of thing she liked to do: inventing mysterious words, concocting enigmas, playing jokes. On this occasion, she merely clicked her tongue, delighted with the mystification.
M insisted: ‘It’s not a
real word! It’s not in the dictionary!’
I was stunned by this. ‘It’s not in the dictionary.’ It would be hard to convey the impact of that sentence. First, I should point out that all the aspersions cast on the College had gradually turned it into a myth, something vague and obscure, and therefore irresistibly attractive. Botany itself, although (or perhaps because) I didn’t know what it was, had become mythical in my mind. All that useless knowledge, which being useless had no limits and could cover or duplicate the whole world, or rather the worlds (both visible and invisible), was a vortex, a magnet. But M’s sentence transported me to a higher level. ‘It’s not in the dictionary’ implied that M knew how many and which words were in the dictionary. Knew them all, since he was convinced that one in particular wasn’t there. A random word, taken from a lady’s lexical flourish in the course of a casual conversation, and he could instantly place it in the gap, the void, left by the totality of existing words. I had never opened a dictionary (the only book that I had handled was the Encyclopedia of Accounting), but I knew what it was. A dictionary contained all the words, and with all the words, in various combinations, all the other books were made. M was the only boy I knew who had gone to the College. The conclusion of the syllogism was that at the college they learned the dictionary. I felt at once affirmed and released. What would have been an almost sadistic punishment for any normally constituted boy (studying the dictionary), was what I had been born to do. Encyclopedism and combinatorics were my domain, and it was a domain that went on growing, like a dawn.
The well-founded suspicion that my friend was wrong on this occasion did not in any way affect the thrilling certitude that I felt: the mistake was an accident; it could be corrected. M, like the rest of my friends, could never resist a crude joke, and he may well have supposed that my mother was trying to crack one, in her lame way, by using the invented word ‘bumbling’ to mean ‘bumping into somebody’s bum’. (Here I should add, to be fair, that M is now a wealthy rancher, a millionaire. And not because he studied at the College, where he only spent a few months, but thanks to the accounting skills that he learned at the Velásquez Academy.)
I too was destined for the College. This had been decided long before, by my mother. The decision was firm, as if decreed by fate, like everything that she controlled. My mother announced it with the haughty, classist confidence that was part and parcel of her irrationality. When the family had sacrificed itself for five exhausting years, and I finally had my certificate, which university would I attend? The odd thing was that my father, although himself quite capable of reasoning, silently supported her. Perhaps it was a form of suicide, some kind of suicide pact between them…
It has been said that every marriage is a suicide pact. It might be true, in a metaphorical and poetic sense, but adjustments would have to be made for the historical circumstances in each particular case. To understand a single metaphor you sometimes have to go back through the causes, and the causes of the causes. In the case of my parents, the pact could only have been figurative, so great was the difference between their psychological styles. There was no common level where they could meet to agree on objectives and conditions. They were living in separate worlds, different dimensions, which were mutually irreducible or even inconceivable. But it would be a mistake to presume that this is what made me so strange, because it’s something that every child has to go through. Which sounds like an exaggeration: if it were really true, someone might object, we would all be condemned to schizophrenia, and society would be threatened with imminent self-dissolution. I could stand firm in the face of that objection. I could say: Yes, so what? But no, it’s not like that, I admit. Instead of dissolution, there is History. The tearing apart is worked out over time. But here is where I dig in my heels: it doesn’t work out well; there is no happy ending. Didn’t Ortega y Gasset say, with all the authority of a philosopher and a Spaniard, that ‘humanity is divided into idiots and monsters,’ presuming that there was no third possibility? The best we can hope for is to become monsters, although it means renouncing happiness.
I should attempt a description of the point where the heterogeneous dimensions came together, the magical, inconceivable place where things destined never to meet entered into contact. The house, the neighbourhood, the town… I’ll begin with the house where we lived. It was the ruins of an old inn, which in the glory days of Pringles must have served as a kind of hotel. Back then, it seems, buildings were amply proportioned, and constructed solidly enough to withstand decades of neglect and abuse. This one traced a majestic L, facing onto intersecting streets. In the corner, and along one of the streets, there were big sitting rooms, kitchens, store rooms, and what must have been the staff quarters. The entrance, which was very grand, was on that side, and where the building came to an end there was a gateway, once used by carriages and cars. The guest rooms, about ten of them, were all in a row on the other side, with barred windows onto the street, and doors opening onto a gallery with iron columns. A garden with old trees took up the rest of the property, which covered half a block. We occupied one of the guest rooms, just one. The rest of the building was empty and dilapidated. Mouldings, scrolls and false columns abounded. On the corner, over the majestic front door that opened onto the main sitting room, there was still a stucco coat of arms. The establishment was probably designed for rural clients who might not have felt at home in the other hotels that must have already existed in the centre of Pringles. Because of its peripheral location, five hundred yards out, it was almost in the country; and with its vast grounds (the whole block originally), it would have been better suited to the accommodation of carriages and horses than the more centrally located alternatives. With the growth of the town, in the second and third decades of the century, the need for such an inn vanished; it closed down, and its shell remained there, embedded in the neighbourhood. Its owners had been French, part of a large community in the region. A significant fact revealed the building’s antiquity: there was not, and there had never been, a single bathroom. There was a latrine at the bottom of the garden, built in the same palatial style as the rest.
As I said, the three of us were the only inhabitants of that enormous building. But we occupied only one of its rooms, which was our whole home: kitchen, dining room, living room and bedroom all in one. I didn’t find it poor or uncomfortable; I had always lived like that, and all the families that I knew, that is, the families of my friends in the neighbourhood, made do with similar spaces, all of them smaller than ours. It’s important to remember that these were all one-child families, so the conditions were not wretched, as they would have been with eight children or ten, or an indefinite and constantly growing number. Our set-up was really a kind of adaptation. Far from finding it unfortunate, I considered this use of a single space to be the simplest and most reasonable system. Anything else would have seemed extravagant, as it would seem to a child today to have different dining rooms for soup and dessert, or a bedroom for the siesta and another for the night. Despite their more varied experience, my parents must have felt as I did, because it never occurred to them to colonise one of the many empty rooms all around us.
Even so, this limitation might have been overdetermined by the conditions, or rather the history, of the lease. I never learned how my parents ended up in that building or why they were the only ones who did. But it wasn’t hard to work out. At some point during the Peronist decade rents were frozen, which was a boon to tenants, given the subsequent rates of inflation. And the Revolución Libertadora, which changed so many other things, could not change that. There was no incentive for the owners of that old ruin, descendants of the French migrants who had built it, to put in new tenants. We must have been an experiment, and it didn’t turn out well. Also, the building was the object of difficult probate proceedings. Once a year, they hung a red flag at the corner and put up a sign announcing the judicial sale. When the day came, an auctioneer turned up, and a little ceremony was organised on the pavement: it was ve
ry brief and always the same. An audience of regulars gathered, all of them men; my father never missed it, nor did I. The owners came too; I don’t know how they were related – brothers or cousins or brothers-in-law – in any case, they hated each other with a passion. The two parties never communicated and kept their distance. The auctioneer gave a little speech that he had prepared in advance: the measurements of the property, indoor area, party walls, etc. Then he would announce the reserve price, lift his hammer, wait a few seconds in silence, or murmuring something, and close the proceedings. Precisely at that moment, the owners would walk off in opposite directions without saying a word, looking serious and sad. Using the bonnet of a car as a desk, a notary who had come with the auctioneer would fill out a form, sign it, and ask two witnesses, usually neighbours, to sign as well.
Thanks to my father’s explanations, I finally came to understand the meaning of this curious negative ceremony, which was repeated every year throughout my childhood. I have already mentioned that no women attended. My mother didn’t come with us, but there was something deliberate and defiant about her absence. During the days that followed the auction, she would be irritable, combative and grumpy, although she was normally as cheerful and carefree as a songbird. My father tried over and again to explain the meaning of what had taken place, but she didn’t understand, and his volatile impatience ended up setting off furious arguments. Her bewilderment seemed quite irrational to me, because in the end even I had come to grasp the workings of that performance (just describing them used up all my father’s meagre store of calm). The magistrate in charge of the probate proceedings would order that the property be auctioned. But for the auction to be carried out, there had to be a buyer. If no one bid, all the related cases had to be reopened, in turn, until this one came up again. It was that simple. Why couldn’t my mother accept it? Why did she have to complicate things with irrelevant questions, complaints and sniping? This was the only situation in which she departed from the policy of hosing down her explosive husband.
