by Cesar Aira
Fundamentally, my mother’s aspirations were laudable enough. If she didn’t express them in a more articulate fashion, it was because she was still dazed by surprise, or plenitude… Before that play began, she had forgotten all about García Lorca… But now he was coming back to her, in the voice of her father, who had been a great zarzuela fan… He was coming back along with a flurry of other memories: the popular opera ‘La del Soto del Parral’, the group ‘Los Gavilanes de España’, even Tito Schipa…
And yet there was something missing. I noticed it myself, not without a vague sense of dread. In spite of her enthusiasm, she was leaving a gap. Everything she was saying or could say related to the outward aspect of the phenomenon: its effect, its prestige, its resonance as a finished object. She wasn’t talking about the source of its meaning, that is, the content of the play. Overwhelmed by that heaven-sent opportunity, she probably hadn’t registered a single word; her consciousness had been too fully occupied by the opportunity itself to take in its constituent elements.
Which were precisely what my father had something to say about. He had been very thoughtful, deep in concentration. Suddenly he said:
‘For a writer to be able to write something like that…’
This gave Mum such a start!
‘What… ?’
It was true: even a genius had to sit down and write his work. Things actually had to be done. All the arguments that my mother was preparing, based on praise and satisfaction, were rendered irrelevant by this attack from an unexpected quarter, related to something that turned out to be more primary and basic.
My father, meanwhile, quite unused to argument of any kind, was becoming more and more absorbed in the search for words to capture his fugitive ideas:
‘… to write something like that, the opposite of the normal feelings everybody has… He’d have to… invent… or write… as if he was seeing life…’ He was using gestures to explain himself: his hands were moving over the table. He put his finger on one point, then another, as if indicating nodes of an imaginary diagram, a circuit.
‘But what are you… ? Have you gone… ?’
‘We see life…’ He made a gesture that meant: ‘from here to out there’. ‘Whereas he…’ Gesture: ‘from there back to here’.
‘What… ? Who… ?’
‘He can’t live… I mean, we can’t see…’
‘Maybe you can’t… !’
‘He’s going against the current… It’s as if…’ And here my father found a way to express what he meant, and his voice grew stronger: ‘It’s all in reverse. That’s what it is. The writer has to live life in reverse.’ He went on gesturing, confidently now, as if he could see his idea with perfect clarity, and only had to make me see it. Because he had turned to me and was speaking like a schoolmaster to a pupil. ‘Everything in life is facing in a certain direction, right? Now imagine it’s all turned around the other way…’
‘Be quiet! Be quiet, will you? Can’t you see the boy doesn’t understand?’
Then it was as if he had just woken up; he stared at her. He said something unpleasant, like ‘Idiot… Fool,’ I don’t know what else, I can’t remember. And that was the end of the story. I wasn’t deprived of much by Mum’s interruption, because it was clear that my father wasn’t going to elaborate. Ever since then I’ve wondered what he meant by ‘life in reverse.’ When I read Yerma as an adult, I was looking for the key, trying unsuccessfully to reconstruct my father’s obscure reasoning.
An anecdote that my mother once told me about her childhood might serve as a model of the strange daily life that History had imposed on us. Any other anecdote would do just as well; some have remained in my memory, others are gone.
The protagonists were two of her younger siblings, a girl and a boy, about seven or eight years old. These two were always fighting, always inventing new reasons to fight, which is not uncommon among siblings. One of the classic themes in this permanent war was command. The boy claimed that the girl was his slave, obliged to do his bidding, without any will of her own. Naturally, as soon as he told her to do something, she would promptly do the opposite, but crafty as he was, he would always come up with some sophistry to affirm that she had in fact obeyed him. For example, he would say, ‘Shut the window’; she would jump up and open it; and he’d come back with: ‘That’s what I like: people who do my bidding.’ ‘Liar! You told me to shut it, and I opened it!’ ‘But you see I really wanted you to open it, because I’m feeling very hot. If I’d told you to open it, you wouldn’t have, would you? But I know you, so I told you to shut it, and I got what I wanted. See how you’re always falling into the trap, little slave?’ And he would laugh, very pleased with himself. She: ‘Liar! Bully! I do what I want!’ He (dealing the death blow): ‘You want proof? The window was shut.’ That was incontrovertible; and she writhed in impotent rage.
That’s how it always played out. He came up with the most ingenious and timely tricks, and in spite of the cruelty behind these machinations, the rest of the family couldn’t help admiring his resourcefulness. ‘It’s a pity he doesn’t use his intelligence for something more worthwhile!’ But they resigned themselves to this behaviour, dismissing it as child’s play, soon to be outgrown.
And so it was, except that on one occasion it almost led to disaster. The girl was setting the dining table for the family’s lunch. She was doing it to help her mother, but also because she enjoyed the task. Then her brother turned up, on the lookout for opportunities to stir up trouble as usual: ‘Set the table, I want to eat. Excellent, excellent, that’s what I like to see: obedience.’ This was too crude to hurt, and she barely paid him any attention. Just a disdainful grimace, and she continued with her work as if nothing had happened. She was being very conscientious, carefully placing each item as she had been taught. Her brother stood there watching and predictably had an idea. He sat down in the chair at the end of the table furthest from the kitchen, the father’s place, and adopted a dominant pose, a look of relaxed supremacy, with his little half-closed eyes fixed on her and his head thrown back… This performance was sufficient in itself to spoil her spontaneity: the awareness of being watched made her movements stiffer and more mechanical. He waited a few seconds, just long enough for her to get into the rhythm, and then he began to give orders, after the fact. She would put a plate in its place, and he would say: ‘Put that plate down’; a fork: ‘Now put the fork down’; a glass: ‘Now the glass.’ The girl tried to trick him: she took a plate, went to place it, and as soon as he said, ‘Put that plate down,’ she put it back on the pile and set a knife or a napkin on the table. But he carried on unperturbed, accompanying every movement with implacable counter-orders: ‘No, I changed my mind, better put the knife down first… Actually, what I want is for you to lay the napkin in its place…’ She would put down a glass: ‘Put that glass down’; she would pick it up and take it back to the sideboard: ‘Take that glass and put it on the sideboard… That’s what I like: obedience to the master.’ The poor girl couldn’t win. Even if she set out the crockery and cutlery in a sequence of her own choosing, the orders, in spite of following the acts, created an atmosphere of compulsion that surrounded her completely. Her pauses, her changes of pace and direction, and the thousand tricks that she came up with one after another to elude that fate only reinforced the feeling of being a puppet moved by an inescapable power. He savoured his triumph, playing with her more and more skilfully; he had plenty of time to slip in self-satisfied remarks: ‘The slaves are so good these days… No, that spoon goes on the other side, no, where it was before… Good! So obedient, these little black slaves we brought from the jungle…’ Sprawled in the chair, with his leg over the arm, he accompanied his orders with the languid gestures of an oriental monarch and smoked an imaginary cigarette to complete the image of the potentate. He exaggerated the rather effeminate grace of his movements in order to heighten the triumphant contrast with his sister’s desperate automatism.
‘That fork, there…
No, I changed my mind, on the other side… No, I think I prefer it where it was before… Better leave it till later… No, put it down and we’re done, there, exactly, thank you, my little servant…’
But a different fate awaited that fork. In a state of extreme frustration, the poor puppet ‘slave’ came up with the one place where her ‘master’ would never tell her to put that implement: she threw it at him. Had she thought it over coolly, she would have come to the conclusion that there was no other course of action left open to her. But she didn’t think. She hurled the fork in a blind impulse of fury.
And what happened next made the episode memorable. The fork plunged into the ‘master’s’ cheek with such force that it remained there, horizontal and trembling, with its four prongs lodged in the cheekbone, just below the eye. The children’s mother, who came when she heard the cries, had to push on the boy’s forehead with the heel of one hand and pull on the fork with the other to remove it.
‘Half an inch higher and he’d have lost an eye,’ was the standard reaction, which struck me as banal. It reminded me of that saying about ‘the master’s eye’. I preferred to think about the instant before the impact: the fork flying over the table, spinning through the air, like at the circus… It was a lucky strike, of course. She couldn’t have done it again, not even in a thousand tries (I know – I tried). And with a fork, not a knife! Why didn’t they do it with forks at the circus?
In any case, that time, there was no retrospective order: victory was hers. And yet, to me, this took nothing away from her brother’s earlier victory, which was something I could fully understand and appreciate. At the same time, both of them had failed: the girl, because she had been obliged to abandon the rules of the game; and her brother, because his manipulation of time had come up against the limit of his own body, which stood as an insuperable barrier between the past and the future.
Wasn’t that always the way? With Peronism too? And social legislation? ‘The bonus, all right, make it December.’ ‘Now, paid vacations: a union hotel by the beach… No, in the mountains, that’s better. There, perfect.’ An organised community.
When Peronism became a thing of the past, my mother became a virulent anti-Peronist. I don’t think she was the only one. What middle-class Argentina had seen as an ‘accursed event’ affected people who weren’t middle class by changing their relation to time. It is time that sets the master–slave dialectic in motion, by inverting it (only an inversion can get it going). That must have been where the idea of ‘life in reverse’ came from. With that expression, I think my father was referring to García Lorca’s invention of a barren woman. Why invent a figure like that in life the right way around?
‘Life in reverse’ is not quite the same as ‘the world turned upside down’. That is something more banal, which I was able to observe on numerous occasions. One example from that time, which left a very clear memory, was an incident that occurred in the house of my friend L, from school. We were inseparable for a time. He was an only child too, but for a reason that made all the difference: his father had died, closing off the possibility of siblings. The rest of us had living fathers who, by contrast, represented calm abstention: they didn’t want to have more children; the dead man simply couldn’t. The roles were reversed in this fantasy: the dead man was active (had he been alive, he would have gone on procreating), while the living man was passive. And there was an additional difference: L belonged to the middle class. For me, he dwelt in another world. Being fatherless in itself confers a romantic aura, as if life had dealt the child something unthinkable, which since it cannot be thought cannot happen in reality. He lived with his mother in a modern house around the corner from ours; entering it always made me feel slightly dizzy, although at the time I went there every day. It was the only middle-class house I visited in my childhood, and that’s why it has stayed with me as an exemplar. From my parents’ remarks, and what I can reconstruct now, I know that L and his mother must have been living in fairly straitened circumstances, relying on a modest source of income left by the deceased; but to me they were rich. I didn’t need to examine their expenses; it was clear from the house, but most of all from L himself: his character, his style, his nonchalance, his freedom. In the middle of the house was a big sitting room with an enormous table where we did our homework, in the light that flooded in through the French windows opening onto the patio. That constant, overabundant light is the mark of the house in my memory.
L’s mother was called Elena, and she spent much of her time at her mother’s place, in a faraway part of town. She had two unmarried sisters; perhaps her tragedy had put them off getting married. She was tall, full-bodied, and blonde going prematurely grey. If she was at home, it was because one of the friends with whom she sometimes played canasta had come to visit. Among these ladies was Miss Marta Coco, the music teacher from my school: fat, energetic, friendly, a smoker. I found her fascinating and scary. Luckily she paid me no attention; I don’t think she ever spoke to me. She probably didn’t even notice my existence. I now know that Miss Marta Coco was a lesbian; back then, she was a lady like any other. She was single, and lived with her mother and a disabled brother.
Once, L and I were sitting at the table doing our homework, and his mother and her friend Marta came and sat down at the other end, carrying what looked like big account books and boxes… They had brought out their stamp albums. Not theirs, actually, but the albums of their dear departed: Elena’s husband and Marta’s father. The cult of the dead required them to preserve and enlarge those collections, which had been so important to the deceased. As I was able to infer from their lively chatter, the purpose of this meeting was to look through the albums of Argentinian stamps and swap doubles. They went about it systematically. Both had the Yvert et Tellier catalogues (which Marta complemented with Petrovich’s catalogue of local stamps), and they manipulated them skilfully. They were concentrating on certain series, laying them out on the table like a game of dominoes or a puzzle, taking stamps from the boxes where they kept the doubles, referring continually to the open albums or the catalogues in order to resolve questions of order, date, value, print quality… Suddenly I realised that they were looking at the 1952 series showing Evita full face and in profile, which is very hard to complete because of all the variants: there are forty basic stamps, but for each value there’s one printed on local paper and one on imported paper, and the ones on imported paper are either offset printed or photogravure, with an inscription or without (that is, with or without the words EVA PERÓN); there are imperforate pairs, and double prints, and in the brown fifty-cent stamp, a rare error: some were printed on the gum side. There was also the second anniversary stamp, from 1954, with the same design, in three versions. Deep in concentration, with cries of satisfaction when they filled a gap, and of puzzlement when the colours or the perforations didn’t match, Elena and Marta relished the pleasures of completion. All collectors strive to complete their collections, no matter what they collect, and in this striving they are aided by History, which carves the Universe into discrete series. In this case, after the Revolución Libertadora, there was no possibility of the series beginning again. People used to tell the eminently poetic story of a letter delayed in the post, which reached its addressee years later (long after 1955) with the Evita stamp, like starlight reaching the earth long after the extinction of the star. Finally, Marta pronounced a sentence that summed up their endeavour and gave it meaning: ‘It’s all we can do for her, poor thing.’ Their dear departed had bequeathed them the task of completing the collections, but at the same time, Evita, who had died too, was imposing a task of her own. The sentence made an impression on me, and I rushed off to repeat it to my mother, word for word. ‘Filthy Peronists’ was her reaction. This was an instance of the world turned upside down: the Peronist middle class. But since the world encompasses everything, there is also a place in it for life in reverse, as in the case of the dead father.
My friend L seemed to be living proof
of the legend in which each boy was his mother’s son and each girl her father’s daughter… This wasn’t really a legend; I think it was my personal interpretation. What people said was that sons resembled their mothers while daughters resembled their fathers. I took this in a literal and exclusive way: since we were all boys, fathers in general became redundant. That must be where I got the idea that my father was a bigamist; he had no choice, if he wanted to fulfil his reproductive function. And whatever the neighbourhood witches said, it didn’t contradict his devotion to the Virgin, because it was She who epitomised solitary motherhood of the Son. To fit with the story, the man of the house had to make himself scarce and become a stranger. Maybe my father was referring to this curious condemnation when he spoke of ‘life in reverse.’ Or not. Maybe he was thinking of the path that he had to follow back through time to find me, the son lost in the mother. But I’m rambling. All my life I’ve been trying to understand that simple, lapidary formula: ‘life in reverse’. I’ve explained it in a thousand ways, and none of them entirely convinces me.
‘Life in reverse’ also makes me think of those little creatures that live (or sleep) suspended from the branches of trees. It’s an inhuman existence (maybe that’s what my father was talking about: inhumanity), but only, of course, when considered from a human point of view. Animals are different from us; they have a different history, biology and chemistry. To speak of their ‘customs’ is already a human projection.
