by Cesar Aira
As soon as the tiny fat automaton began to sing, the second mechanism kicked in. As my friend had said, there were two simultaneous mechanisms; until now, the gears of the “music box” had activated the device—conventional though very sophisticated. What made this one original was its second set of accompanying movements. The edges of the bedspread hanging over the sides began to move (they looked like fabric but were made of porcelain), and large birds crawled out from under the bed, cranes and storks, very white, moving across the floor and flapping their spread wings; though they were birds, they didn’t take flight but remained fixed on the floor. They kept emerging from under both sides of the bed, ten, twelve, an entire flock, until they covered the bedroom floor, all while the fat singer was belting out his mechanical tango in French. At the end of the song, he retreated without turning around, until he had passed the threshold and the door closed behind him, the birds returned to under the bed, and the old woman to her immobility, all very quickly, in a single instant, surely due to the action of the springs. My friend, laughing, placed his small marvel back into the glass cabinet, while I complimented him on it. The whole show hadn’t lasted more than two minutes, and its speed must have been the reason my mother didn’t understand anything, what the story was about or what that thing even was. I knew that due to her age her perceptions were slower and more labored than ours, and that for her to appreciate something as odd as that toy, I would have had to prepare her and give her more time. I didn’t say this to my friend because it wasn’t worth the trouble: no matter what, Mother would have found the whole business futile and reprehensible. From the moment we entered the house, she had been growing increasingly hostile. There was some understanding between them only when the names (family names) of people in town were mentioned; otherwise, she was very withdrawn. My friend might have thought that his antique toys would amuse her or bring back old memories, but this wasn’t the case. She, who had spent her entire life devoted to reality, could not have been further away from feeling any admiration for such expensive, useless objects. After all, my friend and I were grown-ups, mature men, almost old (my friend already had grandchildren); childishness was an unwholesome intrusion, from my mother’s point of view. The fact that I had remained single, that I’d never held down a decent job, worried her, though she continued to see me, in her own way, as a child, and she clung to the hope that at any moment I would begin to live. I knew that she believed that my friend had been a bad influence on me, that I had seen him as a role model, and that this was the reason for my failure. But he’d never seen himself as a role model. In spite of his oddities, he’d made a life for himself, he had a family, he’d gotten wealthy, whereas I was still waiting. That his childish side had prevailed over me like a condemnation . . . In reality, I think that wasn’t true. He hadn’t really influenced me. Though I must admit, I was drawn to him. That’s why I kept seeing him, or better put, listening to him. Even though he didn’t know how to recount his adventures (he didn’t have any natural talent as a storyteller), these contained elements of fables, which I mentally reconstructed and placed in sequential order. There was something magical in the way the most peculiar characters and events stuck to him. Nothing like that ever happened to me. There was always something fairy tale–like about the things that happened to him, which he didn’t seem to notice; he confused them with reality . . . because they were his reality. His prosaic way of recounting them—without nuances—highlighted how objective the emergence of fable was in his life. In that sense, his house was a self-portrait, his cabinet of curiosities.
All the stories he told us during dinner could have been illustrated with pictures out of storybooks—even those he told in parentheses or as digressions, as when he explained why he couldn’t use the sage he grew in his own garden for the meal. It turned out that an eighty-eight-year-old dwarf had fallen on the planting bed from a great height and had crushed his delicate herbs. Wasn’t that astonishing? Coming from someone with imagination, you would have suspected that it was invented, but he didn’t have any imagination. You could say that he didn’t need any because reality supplied it.
Nevertheless, the incident obeyed an average story’s most humdrum causality. He was always making repairs or improvements on his house—whether out of inherent perfectionism or as an occupational hazard, he simply couldn’t resist the temptation. In this case, he had discovered that the gutter on the kitchen roof wasn’t draining properly, that is, at the speed necessary to cope with end-of-summer downpours, and he decided to increase its slope. He hired a bricklayer from his team to do the job, and since it was a very small job (three bricks), he could make do with “Mr. Phophsene.” This man was actually a former bricklayer, who had worked with my friend on many projects before retiring, which he did when he was already in his eighties. He’d never risen higher than an assistant bricklayer; he was no whiz, maybe even below average, and he was as tall as a dwarf, without being a real dwarf. My friend continued to hire him for small jobs around his house and garden, and he appreciated him for his optimism and honesty. He’d been given his nickname years before by his fellow workers to mock his faith in a remedy he’d been prescribed once in the Hospital, and that he kept taking and recommending to others for years, something like “phosphene,” which in the cheerful ignorance of the town’s bricklayers became “phophsene,” and it stuck. Anyway, after he’d laid the bricks on the roof and was on a ladder plastering the side that was visible (the house had a very high roof), Mr. Phophsene fell and landed on the sage. Amazingly enough, he wasn’t injured. For a few minutes, he was a little stunned, but then he brushed the dust off his clothes and was soon climbing back up the ladder to finish the job. Mother, who’d recently broken a rib after slipping and falling on the sidewalk, expressed her gratitude to Providence, though I knew that inside she was ruing the fact that “the old goat” hadn’t died. My friend finished off the story with general words of praise for Mr. Phophsene’s character. He would wake up in the morning to the sounds of him singing in the garden, and when he asked him where he found so much joy, Mr. Phophsene answered: “Sometimes I wake up feeling bad, my soul sorrowful and my body aching, and I get up, get dressed, and walk to the Cemetery, there and back, and it all goes away, because walking releases endorphins.” Quite a role model, and at his age. The fact that the destination of this therapeutic stroll was the Cemetery had no special meaning: the three long walks near town were to the Cemetery, the Station, and La Virgen (a sanctuary), and all three were about half a mile from downtown. However, the most traditional one was to the Cemetery.
In my family, we always drove to the Cemetery, except once when we walked, like poor people do. It must have been a Sunday my father was away. In general, Pringlesians don’t walk very much, they drive everywhere, that’s why that half mile seemed so long. For about half the way, there were eucalyptus trees lining the paved road, but the final stretch passed through open country, past empty fields. I always thought I’d planted one of those eucalyptus trees, but this could have been a false memory; I know that it’s a vague, confused one. One year, shortly after I’d started school, the students celebrated Arbor Day by planting trees, and they took us to the Cemetery road. As the top student in my class, I got to plant one, and I assume they placed me, maybe with a couple of classmates, in front of a hole that had already been dug, and I stuck in the little tree . . . It’s all blurry, but there’s one detail that is very clear, so clear that I wonder if it was the only thing that really happened and that I invented the rest to fill out the story. They made us learn a poem by heart to recite during the event. The poem was in a book, and I remember a two-line passage from that poem perfectly (more than remember, I can see it, see how high it was on the page):
I plant a seed
in this lil’ole*
There was a little “superscript” asterisk on the last word, which referred to a footnote at the bottom of the page where there was another asterisk and the words: “little hole.” Because of the
meter, and maybe to make it more natural for a child to recite, the author had written the words as they were pronounced colloquially. But because it was a school book and the correct form had to be indicated, they used a footnote. In any case, trees aren’t planted from seeds but rather as “saplings,” or whatever they’re called. Fifty years later, the eucalyptus trees on the road to the Cemetery were enormous and old, and I would never know which, if any, was “mine.”
To return to my friend and the picturesque events of his life: the story of Mr. Phophsene had its equivalent in a display case. It was a tiny automaton, a wall with peeling paint on top of which sat an egg with legs (crossed), little arms, a face (it was all face), and a feathered hat. Its owner wound it up and set it in motion. The drama was enacted to the rhythm of incoherent music: the egg rocked violently then fell, slipping along a rail hidden in the wall: it fell on its head, or rather on its hat, because it was all head, and when it touched the ground, it “broke” into several pieces; it didn’t really break but rather opened, simulating breakage, along zigzagging lines that had been invisible until that moment. At that point discordant notes played, notes of doom. With the last turn of the cog, the egg closed up, a spring made it jump back up onto the wall, and there it sat where it had begun. As opposed to the previous toy, this one acted out the well-known story of Humpty Dumpty. The original had been made by Fabergé for the children of the Czar. My friend’s was a tin replica made in Argentina around 1950 to promote a children’s magazine supposedly run by a very nice journalist egg, our national version of Humpty Dumpty, who was called Pepín Cascarón. The toy’s use as publicity was spelled out in the verses written on the open pages of the miniature tin magazine leaning against the bottom of the wall:
Pepín Cascarón sat on a wall.
Pepín Cascarón had a great fall.
All the kings horses, and all the king’s men,
couldn’t put Pepín Cascarón together again.
Along came an Argentine with special skill,
and fixed up that egg out of simple goodwill.
Pepín again whole, gives girls and boys
this wonderful magazine for all to enjoy.
On the page facing the poem was an illustration that showed Pepín Cascarón at the moment he falls.
I noticed that my mother, who appreciated this toy even less than the previous one, was impatient to leave, so I pointed to the gallery door that led into the living room, and we turned in that direction. But my friend guided us through the living room toward the large dark dining room (we’d eaten in a more intimate one, at the other end of the house) and turned on a lamp in the corner, shaped like a large duck and made of translucent white plastic; its glow, very dim, did not manage to penetrate the cavernous depths of the room, but there was enough light to see that this dining room was never used. It was much too full of furniture and objects. The wood paneling was dark, and it was lined, all the way around the perimeter, with display cabinets, coat stands, bookcases, paintings, statues. A large sideboard occupied most of the lateral wall; we saw ourselves reflected in its mirror as small figures lost among the furniture. We had to walk all the way around the table, which was very large and piled high with boxes and antique optical instruments and machines. Hanging from the walls, high up, were puppets on strings. The dining room was huge, and the numerous objects filling it were very small. The collections my friend had amassed throughout his life tended naturally toward the miniature, even though there were almost no miniatures per se. Toys, automatons, dolls, puppets, dioramas, puzzles, kaleidoscopes: everything tended toward reproduction, and the reproduction tended toward a diminution of scale. However, at that stage of the evening, there was a turn toward gigantism. With a complicit smile, my friend opened a small door and invited me to take a look inside. What I saw looked more like an illustration from a children’s book than anything else I’d seen so far. This door opened onto a tiny room, surely meant to service the dining room; it was entirely filled with one doll, which barely fit (the first thing I wondered was how they’d managed to get it in there). It was enormous; standing, it must have been thirteen-feet tall. It was sitting on the ground with its head touching the ceiling, leaning against the wall, its legs bent, and its knees touching the opposite wall. It looked like a seven-year-old blond girl wearing an enormous chiffon dress with red tulle, her eyes wide open in her large head. My mother peaked in between us and then immediately withdrew, her face expressing disgust bordering on terror. Just moments before, I’d followed her gaze, which kept returning, uneasily, to an atlas on the table. It was a Larousse atlas from the nineteenth century. I thought that finally she’d found something that would interest her; she was keen on maps and atlases, and she had more than one at home to consult when she did crossword puzzles. I leaned over the table and opened it in the middle, with considerable difficulty. But she refused to look at it up close; on the contrary, she turned away, mumbling: “But why is it so big?” It really was; it must have been more than three-feet high and two-and-a-half-feet wide, and since the paper the maps were printed on was so thin, it was quite awkward to turn the pages. I felt a current of frightened bewilderment emanating from my mother, and in a way I understood her, and even shared it. The atlas’s inordinate size was a little scary. My friend, busy looking for something, hadn’t seen or heard our brief exchange when his search led him to the small door, he remembered the gigantic doll that he wanted to show us, opened the door, and called us over.
Afterwards, he resumed his search until he found a digital camera that he wanted to use to take some pictures so we’d have souvenirs of the evening. For Mother, it was just one more torture, but she must have thought, now definitely confused, that it was a procedure we were obliged to undergo in order to be able to leave. It lasted a while because my friend, who hadn’t mastered the use of the camera, took the shots over and over, wanting to try different focuses. As he got more and more excited, he wanted us to try on some masks, of which he had an endless supply. His childish side came out with every flash of the camera. The climax came when he took out a rubber elephant mask that fit over the entire head like a space suit; it was almost the size of a real elephant’s head, and amazingly realistic. He put it on, then I put it on, and many photos were taken.
Then he walked us outside and offered to drive us home. I preferred to walk (we lived very close), and Mother said the same thing; the chilly night air had revived her. She placed her hand on his front door and caressed it, saying, “My door, my beloved door.” Her tone spoke less of nostalgia than reproach, of feelings long coveted and repeated whenever she had the chance. The very tall double doors, were truly magnificent, a masterpiece of old-fashioned woodworking, carved with serpents and flowers that flowed in symmetrical patterns and opened out into wide, harmonious waves that swept around the bronze handles. They had been the front doors of the house where my mother had spent her childhood. About ten years before, that house, which had changed ownership several times and ended up as government offices, was demolished, and my friend, who was in the real estate business, kept the doors and installed them in his house. My mother hadn’t forgiven him, though in reality she should have thanked him because otherwise the doors would have been lost, and she forgave him even less for having painted them black and the flowers in bright colors, a monstrosity, according to her, a lack of respect for this valuable relic.
II
It was just a little past eleven when we got home. The whole way there, Mother was complaining about how late it was, about the dinner, about everything, and especially about my friend’s extravagances. Where did he get the money to buy all that junk? How could he live surrounded by all that fantasy, those totally useless party games? And they must have been expensive, or did people give them to him? She kept returning to the economic aspect, aghast, offended, as if my friend were buying his toys with her money. I told her as much. Everybody did whatever they wanted with their own money, didn’t they? Anyway, he was a wealthy man. This was ha
rd for me to say; I’d recently been avoiding any mention of finances, for my own had become such a disaster; I was dead broke, they’d repossessed my house and my car, I’d taken refuge in my mother’s apartment and was living off her retirement income (if you can call that living). She immediately responded with something that surprised me. What are you talking about, wealthy? As a church mouse! He was ruined! He didn’t have a penny to his name, he’d lost everything, the only thing he had left was that house, and on top of that, it was full of all that horrendous garbage. I didn’t give her words much credence, or rather, none: ever since my own debacle she’d been saying the same things about everybody, even the town’s most notoriously prosperous merchants and its most affluent small farmers. According to her, collective ruin had descended upon the Pringlesians. She said it for me, out of a blind maternal instinct that didn’t retreat even in the face of the absurd—or a lie—and she’d even ended up believing it herself. If her intention was to console, she was failing. I could see that she had reached the state of wanting her lies to be true, of wishing for others’ misfortune, and this was making her bitter. And in addition to telling me, she told anybody and everybody else, giving herself the reputation of a slanderer or a bird of ill omen; people started avoiding her, and I had to take on, along with my personal failure, the guilt of having spoiled the last years of her life (because the social life of the town was her entire life).
