The Lime Tree

by Cesar Aira

  The statue itself was a total anticlimax. It seemed old hat, even to me, although I’d never seen a statue in my life. It was a mother nursing a baby, slightly larger than life, on a very vulgar pedestal of red granite. The figure was made of white cement cast in a mould, or so it seemed, mainly because of the classic pose, just like something you would see on a postage stamp. There were quite a lot of people in that part of the Plaza and on the opposite pavement, in front of the church, but no one was paying attention to the statue, and to judge from the tricks that our laughing friends had played, no one had been keeping an eye on it.

  Just at that moment, however, a family stopped to look at the Mother, and our guides were obliged to champ at the bit, although they could barely restrain their impatience. Meanwhile, they managed to indicate what the joke was… It was hard to grasp, not just because laughter kept interrupting them, but also because the joke itself was too ineffable to be communicated in words; it was one of those things that you have to experience to understand (and that, precisely, was why they wanted to try it on us). Apparently, they had climbed onto the pedestal and had pressed on the Mother’s nipple with a finger while saying ‘Koo-koo’ or something along those lines. That was it. There was no need for more, because it was infinitely funny. The laughter… the same laughter that choked them and bent them double when they tried to tell us about it… came surging up automatically, unstoppably… Koo-koo… the funniest thing in the world. ‘You’ll see!’ It was unbelievable; or rather, you had to see it to believe it… Which explained their enthusiasm, the excitement with which they had gone to the corner to wait for us, or anyone they knew, so that they could share this marvel. Like all discoverers, they were bursting with impatience to divulge the new worlds that they had brought to light. They had made their discovery by chance, playing a silly joke, for no reason, but that is how the great discoveries are made.

  In the end the bothersome onlookers moved on. Agile as a monkey, one of our friends jumped up on to the red granite and put his finger exactly on the nipple, saying ‘Koo-koo’… To our immense surprise, nothing happened. He tried again: Koo-koo. Then he tried with the other hand, changed his posture, got a firmer footing, tried again… A powerful magic, perhaps the same one as before, but inverted now, prevented all laughter. Even our smiles were beginning to fade.

  ‘That’s so weird,’ he said, looking at the other boy, who was equally puzzled. ‘You try…’

  He got down, yielding his place. The other boy climbed up but without conviction: something was telling him that it wouldn’t work; and sure enough, when he put his finger on the spot and said ‘Koo-koo’ – nothing; the machine had broken down. It was like a decree of fate, and that was just why they couldn’t accept it; they racked their brains trying to find an explanation.

  ‘How come… I don’t know what’s going on… Just a moment ago… we touched the nipple…’ But there was nothing to be done: even talking about it was no fun any more. The laughter had gone flat. I suggested that we wait a while to see if it would recharge. They didn’t even listen to me. The situation had become vaguely ridiculous; to go on trying would have been to enter into an infinity of disgrace; the statue itself was taking on a depressing tinge.

  We split up. I wanted to go for a walk, to get some sense of what, for me, were virtually new surroundings. It was a spring morning, as I said before, sunny and perfect. Suddenly, having extricated myself from the infernal machine of the Mother, I had plenty to see. The Plaza in Pringles is one of the most outstanding architectural complexes in the country: it’s Salamone’s masterpiece, and he was one of those geniuses whose legacy grows in value with the passage of time and successive generations.

  Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) was schooled in the modernist style. He studied in Córdoba and was an engineer as well as an architect. In 1936, Governor Fresco, a conservative leader with regal schemes and vast financial resources, commissioned Salamone to design and construct public buildings in the province of Buenos Aires, and seems to have given him carte blanche to realise his projects. In less than five years of feverish activity, town halls, abattoirs and cemeteries were built in Pellegrini, Guamini, Tornquist, Laprida, Rauch, Carhué, Vedia, Azul, Balcarce, Saliqueló, Tres Lomas, Saldungaray, Urdampilleta, Puán, Navarro, Cacharí, Chillar, Pirovano and Pringles. The designs are dominated by a blend of art deco and Mussolinian monumentality, but there are traces of other styles as well: Assyrian and Egyptian, futurist and oneiric. In a few cases, the design is not limited to the building but takes in the surrounding landscape or cityscape, and the most fully achieved of these larger projects is the one that Salamone executed in Pringles. The Plaza occupies two blocks; in the large central oval stands the biggest and most beautiful of all Salamone’s town halls. The stylistic motifs of its colossal mass are repeated in the Plaza’s lamps, benches, pergolas and fountains, as well as in its paving stones. The artist also oversaw the tree planting: rare species from the far south were used; according to local legend, they have since become extinct in their places of origin and survive only in Pringles. The elegant lime trees in double rows bordering the sidewalks around the edge of the Plaza were an exception to this exoticism.

  Scholars have pointed out that Salamone’s highly coherent design, with its far-reaching formal correspondences, which create a kind of continuous spatial story, and the make-believe inventiveness of its style, foreshadowed the development of theme parks, the first and most famous of which would appear in California many years later. So you can imagine my astonished awe as I rediscovered this wonder on that Sunday morning. Slim red carp circulated in the fountains, suspended in invisible water. I stared at them for a long time, and when I looked up at the square tower of the town hall, I felt that so much beauty was impossible to bear.

  I began to remember… I had been there before. Of course I had… I used to go there often; it was my favourite outing. But so long ago… When you’re a child, you measure time differently. What is a distant memory for a child of ten? There is no room in such a small life for the great expanses of nostalgia, so I could only think of it as having occurred in another life. But in my mind the concept of ‘another life’ was subject to a powerful taboo because of its hidden meanings, so I made it ‘the same’ life, my one and only life, which acquired strange dimensions, stretching away into the unknown… That was how I began to value the possibilities of the past: it was an inviolable strongbox where all my secrets were safe, a virtual cave where I could pile up endless treasures and keep them there at my disposal, simply waiting to be fetched. In a climax of empowerment, I felt that even the monster Amnesia, with its utterly unpredictable form, could fit into that elastic container. And to serve as Ariadne’s thread or the trail of breadcrumbs, to stop me getting lost, there was Style: Style was the very substance of the Plaza.

  I was beginning to recognise my surroundings, and reconstruct the circumstances that had taken me there in another time.

  I had been very young: three, or four… It was before I started school. My father would bring me on his bicycle, balanced on the crossbar, between his arms. A simple calculation revealed that this must have been during his time as council electrician, when he was in charge of the street lighting. Which meant that he would have been too busy for such outings with his son (still a new toy) except on Sundays, and specifically on Sunday mornings, because in the evenings he would have had to switch on the lights: there were no days off for them. Those earlier visits, then, had taken place on the same day of the week, at the same time of day. This repetition accentuated the Plaza’s eternal character; and it seemed highly significant that I had returned, for the first time, just when the Monument to the Mother was being inaugurated, since this was the first interference with the site’s artistic unity, although it was discreet: the statue was in a corner, hidden by a beautiful blue spruce…

  And why had my father gone there on Sunday mornings? One thing opened out into another (that’s the beauty of memory). By answering that ques
tion, I could specify the time more precisely: the Sundays that I was remembering had been in spring. Memory was bringing me infinitesimally closer to the present… My father came to collect the lime tree’s little flowers, those starry yellow clusters with which we used to fill a bag. I set off on one of the paths, with its borders of blue and white paving stones arranged in a zigzag pattern, and felt that I could see myself, years before, in exactly the same place, trotting along behind my father, tottering on my chubby little legs, holding the bag, eager to help, as always… He wasn’t a tall man but he could reach the lower branches without needing the ladder, which he didn’t bring on those excursions. The limes were small, almost miniature trees – I had since grown tall enough to reach the leaves myself – but on those first visits they must have seemed enormous.

  At the time, my father must have seemed enormous too, a giant. But a good giant: I followed him around, seeking his protection. Although his nerves were always on edge, I didn’t feel threatened by his angry outbursts, perhaps because they weren’t directed at me. We were still in our father-and-first-child ‘honeymoon’. Perhaps he had not yet dismissed the idea of having other children. Peronism was still in flux, still protean: it hadn’t yet settled into a definitive form. And I can’t deny that he was in an unusual position. He’d had the courage to marry – for love – a woman who wasn’t normal. And not only that, he had dared to procreate, to assume ‘the charge’ of a child. Anything could have emerged from my mother’s womb: a monster, for example. Waiting through her pregnancy must have been a torment for him; maybe that was what ruined his nerves. I turned out to be normal, but risking it a second time, playing the genetic lottery again, with such risky numbers, would have renewed his fears. It was a difficult decision. Also, given my tender age at the time when he was bringing me to the Plaza, my normality would still have been subject to confirmation. Babies, by their very nature, are in a sense little monsters; I might have turned out to be a dwarf or to have needed spectacles… Perhaps that was why he took me out on the bike and kept me by his side whenever he wasn’t working: to observe me. I was human plasma, unpredictable and protean, like Peronism. Then the years went by, and I grew up normally, and the Revolución Libertadora put an end to the possibility of giving me a brother or a sister.

  All that seemed so far away, so different… What had happened? How could we have changed so much, if everything was still the same? It all seemed too much the same, in fact. I felt nostalgic for time itself, which the Plaza’s spatial stories made as unattainable as the sky. I was no longer the small child who had gone with his father to collect lime blossom, and yet I still was. Something seemed to be within my grasp, and with the right kind of effort, I felt that I might be able to reach out and take hold of it, like a ripe fruit… so I set out to recover that old self.

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  Current & Upcoming Books

  01

  Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole

  translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

  02

  Clemens Meyer, All the Lights

  translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire

  03

  Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

  04

  Iosi Havilio, Open Door

  translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler

  05

  Oleg Zaionchkovsky, Happiness is Possible

  translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

  06

  Carlos Gamerro, The Islands

  translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett

  07

  Christoph Simon, Zbinden’s Progress

  translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin

  08

  Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

  09

  Deborah Levy, Black Vodka: ten stories

  10

  Oleg Pavlov, Captain of the Steppe

  translated from the Russian by Ian Appleby

  11

  Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs are Blue

  translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry & Stefan Tobler

  12

  Juan Pablo Villalobos, Quesadillas

  translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

  13

  Iosi Havilio, Paradises

  translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler

  14

  Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative

  15

  Benjamin Lytal, A Map of Tulsa

  16

  Ivan Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket

  17

  Elvira Dones, Sworn Virgin

  translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford

  18

  Oleg Pavlov, The Matiushin Case

  translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

  19

  Paulo Scott, Nowhere People

  translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

  20

  Deborah Levy, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell

  21

  Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns

  translated from the Spanish by Jethro Soutar

  22

  SJ Naudé, The Alphabet of Birds

  translated from the Afrikaans by the author

  23

  Niyati Keni, Esperanza Street

  24

  Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World

  translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

  25

  Carlos Gamerro, The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

  translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett

  26

  Anne Cuneo, Tregian’s Ground

  translated from the French by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie

  27

  Angela Readman, Don’t Try This at Home

  28

  Ivan Vladislavić, 101 Detectives

  29

  Oleg Pavlov, Requiem for a Soldier

  translated from the Russian by Anna Gunin

  30

  Haroldo Conti, Southeaster

  translated from the Spanish by Jon Lindsay Miles

  31

  Ivan Vladislavić, The Folly

  32

  Susana Moreira Marques, Now and at the Hour of Our Death

  translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches

  33 />
  Lina Wolff, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

  translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry

  34

  Anakana Schofield, Martin John

  35

  Joanna Walsh, Vertigo

  36

  Wolfgang Bauer, Crossing the Sea

  translated from the German by Sarah Pybus

  with photographs by Stanislav Krupař

  37

  Various, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets:

  Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare

  38

  Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies

  translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

  39

  César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind

  translated from the Spanish by Rosalie Knecht

  40

  Juan Pablo Villalobos, I’ll Sell You a Dog

  translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

  41

  Enrique Vila-Matas, Vampire in Love

  translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

  42

  Emmanuelle Pagano, Trysting

  translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis

  43

  Arno Geiger, The Old King in His Exile

  translated from the German by Stefan Tobler

  44

  Michelle Tea, Black Wave

  45

  César Aira, The Little Buddhist Monk

  translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

  46

  César Aira, The Proof

  translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

  47

  Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

  48

  Yuri Herrera, Kingdom Cons

  translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

  49

  Fleur Jaeggy, I am the Brother of XX

  translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff