The Linden Tree

by Cesar Aira

  The Linden Tree

  Also by César Aira from New Directions

  * * *

  Conversations

  Dinner

  Ema, the Captive

  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

  Ghosts

  The Hare

  How I Became a Nun

  The Literary Conference

  The Little Buddhist Monk and The Proof

  The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

  The Musical Brain

  The Seamstress and the Wind

  Shantytown

  Varamo

  THE LINDEN TREE

  The linden is a small, elegant tree with a slender trunk, seemingly blessed with eternal youth. On the Plaza in Pringles, as well as ten thousand normal linden trees, there was also, by some strange quirk of Nature, one that had grown to an enormous size: it looked ancient, with its twisted trunk and impenetrable crown, and it was bigger than twenty of the others put together. I nicknamed it the Monster Linden Tree. I regarded it with a certain awe, or respect at least, but also with affection, because like all trees it was harmless. No one had seen such a big linden tree anywhere else, and we thought of it as a monument to the singularity of our town. It was an aberration, but superb, with all the exotic majesty of the unique and the unrepeatable.

  My father, who suffered from chronic insomnia, would go to the Plaza with a bag at the beginning of summer to collect the linden’s little flowers, which he then dried and used to make a tea that he drank at night, after dinner. The linden’s calming properties are universally acknowledged, but I’m not sure that they reside in the flowers, which grow in little bunches and are yellow in color, barely distinct from the green of the leaves. I seem to remember that the flowers close to form a fruit, which is like a little Gothic capsule. Or maybe it’s the other way around: the capsule comes first and opens into a flower . . . Memory might be playing tricks on me . . . It would be easy to clear this up, because linden trees haven’t changed, and here in Flores, where I live, there are plenty that I could inspect. I haven’t (which shows how totally unscientific I am), but it doesn’t matter. I can’t remember if my father used the flowers or the leaves or the little capsules; no doubt he did it in his own special way, as he did everything else. Perhaps he had discovered how to extract the maximum benefit from the linden’s well-known calming properties; if so, I have reason to regret my distraction and poor memory, because whatever the recipe or method was, it died with him.

  It might also be that the natural processes of flowering and fruiting had undergone some transformation in that unique specimen that grew on the Plaza in Pringles: the Monster Linden Tree. That was the tree from which my father took his harvest; he considered it lucky. No other substance in the universe, he claimed, not even the powerful sedatives used to commit suicide, could have sent him to sleep like that linden blossom tea. If its powers were due to a genetic mutation of the Monster Linden Tree, my efforts to remember his method are pointless, because there would be no way to source the key ingredient.

  Writing this now, I realize that all these years I too have believed implicitly in the effectiveness of the beverage, but not because of any solid evidence: it might have worked like a placebo on my father’s system because of his belief (which I have inherited); or perhaps it didn’t work at all. Nothing is more controversial than the action of psychotropic substances, whether natural or synthetic.

  There is no way for me to verify the special calming properties of the Monster Linden Tree because it no longer exists; it was cut down in an irrational act of political hatred, the final act of a legendary local drama whose central figure was the Peronist Boy. One night, the boy took refuge at the top of the tree, and a band of furious fanatics who were pursuing him hacked at its trunk with axes . . . The boy, who was my age, so I can fully identify with him, became a symbol, for family reasons. “The Peronist Boy”: how absurd! Children can’t be identified politically; they don’t belong to the left or the right. He wouldn’t have understood what he was representing. The symbol had infected him like a fateful virus. But it’s true that childhood, as reflection or analogy, can stand for anything. And Perón himself promoted the idea that the evolution of society would necessarily produce Peronist children: there was a biology of Peronism.

  The strangest thing was that the band pursuing him was a commando unit of the Peronist Resistance, led by Ciancio, the mattress maker. A complex series of misunderstandings had led them to misread the (positive or negative) “coefficient” of the symbolism conveyed by the boy. This suggests the complexity of our political quarrels, which later simplification has tried to reduce to black and white.

  That cruel midnight, the sound of the axe-blows went on and on, like a terrifying tom-tom . . . I said that I was the same age as the boy, and nothing could prove it better than this: the only book that I had as a child, or the only one I remember, was Sambo, a lovely little volume whose pages, instead of being rectangular like those of other books were cut into the shape of a tree (what wouldn’t I give to have it now!). The Peronist Boy must have had that book too, or he must have seen it, because it was very popular at the time, I don’t know why. Sambo, the little black boy, hid from the tigers in the top of a tree, and the tigers came and circled around the base until they melted into butter, as I remember. The Peronist Boy translated the fable into reality, although in its symbolic way the story remained an animal fable. After all, weren’t the anti-Peronists called gorillas? And gorillas build their nests in trees, don’t they?

  Axe-blows, and midnight’s dome over the Plaza, with its dark ecliptics tracing interplanetary routes to all the nameless horrors of life, to all the figures that would one day come to be art. To other worlds, worlds in reverse, where Peronists and anti-Peronists changed places.

  Since then, whenever I put my ear to the pillow, I hear those tom-tom blows in the darkness; not that I could actually hear the axe at the time, except in the stories that my mother told me about the events of that night. I now know that what I have been hearing all these years is the pulsing of my blood, but it makes no difference; the pulses still symbolize that threat . . . So I have to change position and lie on my back, which is uncomfortable and keeps me awake. This is the cause of my cruel insomnia, which leaves me feeling that life is unbearable.

  Although these events have been adorned, deformed, and enveloped in the prestige of legend, they really happened. It’s hard to believe — they seem made up — and yet they happened, and I was there, not at the top of the tree, but there in those days, in that town, in that world, which is now so far away. My whole life has taken on the unreal color of that fable; since then I have never been able to find a footing in reality.

  Books, art, travel, love, all the hackneyed wonders of the universe have served as multicolored distractions from that legend and everything that floated in the dark sea over the Monster Linden Tree. I have used them to sublimate my lack of a real life . . . and have even come to think of myself as privileged. But the disappearance of that giant therapeutic tree from the symbolic system has had its effects. The nervous disposition that I have inherited is a torment: there is a vibration at the center of my being and when it reaches my skin (as it does constantly, because it never goes away, not even for a minute), the anxiety that it provokes is larger than thought itself . . . and I feel that I can’t go on living . . . I think about death, which, given my nature, is the last thing I should be thinking about. Inevitably, I have sought relief in alcohol and drugs, especially alcohol, which breaks over me like a wave of despair . . . Getting out of bed in the small hours, unable to withstand the anxiety a moment longer, wandering around the dark apartment until I conf
irm once again, as every night, that there is no getting away from it. Death is no solution because my corpse would get up too . . . What can I do? It’s beyond my control, I can’t help it . . .

  There must be some active principle in linden blossom tea if my father went on drinking it, religiously, every night for all those years. And he clearly needed it, for he was the most excitable of men. Behind his back, my mother used to call him “Live Wire,” or “Boilinmilk,” the name of a character in a funny cartoon strip. Because as well as being excitable, he was extremely quick-tempered, always about to fly off the handle, a powder keg. All it took was a word, an expression, and he would be shouting like a furious madman. Much less than that, in fact, could make him lose control. He had magically refined the causes: the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan could bring on one of his attacks in Pringles. He was perpetually wound up, wired: eyes flashing, lips trembling, hair bristling, the veins almost popping out of his neck, limbs in constant agitation, his torso continually swiveling this way and that, as if he were inhabited by an animal on the lookout for enemies. My father’s enemies were imaginary, or rather his enemy was the world; or, to resort to a commonplace, he was his own worst enemy.

  I don’t know how intentional this was, but I notice that a couple of metaphors from a branch of applied physics (electricity) found their way into the previous paragraph. They are apt, not because of my descriptive powers or my (deficient) literary skill, but because of an incidental fact: my father was an electrician by trade. Sometimes it happens that way: an “electric” man is an electrician. It happens especially in small towns, where everyone knows everyone else, and these “real jokes” become a conversation topic and constitute a kind of traditional lore, handed down from generation to generation. I remember at some point feeling proud to have a famous father; I think it was the only time there seemed to be anything positive about his terrible nerves, which made daily life such a minefield. Later on, I would change my mind and come to hate those small-town reputations, when I discovered their unpleasant tendency to encourage embellishment: gossips can’t resist adding to them, giving the victim a reputation for something else, and something else again, for no other reason than to pass the time and exercise their malevolence. It’s a well-known mechanism and by no means limited to small towns: reputations grow, and since they need to be fed with new material, invention becomes inevitable.

  But my father had a certain right to notoriety, prior to the electric-electrician coincidence. History is crucial here, so I should give some dates to make myself clear. I was born in 1949, at the climax of the Peronist regime. My parents weren’t very young; I wasn’t one of those automatic children of the proletariat, born out of biological necessity as soon as their progenitors emerge from childhood themselves. In my case, there was family planning, as indicated by the fact that I was an only child. All my friends in the neighborhood were only children too: we were the generation — produced, precisely, by the Peronist social laws — with which the idea of ascending to the middle class lodged itself in proletarian minds. The first step in this project was to keep reproduction within the bounds of affordability. There was, however, a limit to this rationalism, namely that everyone wanted a boy; so that if the first child had turned out to be a girl, they would have been prepared to shoulder the burden and try again. I’m using the conditional because this didn’t actually happen: they all had a boy first off and then stopped. There was something magical about Peronism, something like wish fulfillment. Psychic predisposition might also have played a role: they say that something similar happens when there’s a war; and maybe back then, in Peronist eternity, the deep layers of the popular mind could already intuit the wars to come.

  When I say, “They all had a boy . . . ,” I’m exaggerating, of course. That was what I saw around me, but my experience was very limited. With time, I began to realize that there were girls as well, although I had failed to notice them in the bewilderment of early childhood, with its anxious choosing of friends, its initiatory games and adventures. Then a curious fact made them all the more conspicuous: there was never just one girl, or a girl with brothers; there were always three of them, three little sisters one after the other. This was because the couples whose firstborn child had been a girl tried again, and when they had a second girl, they took another chance . . . But they stopped after three, because it would have been crazy to go on . . . And that was how the poor neighborhoods of Pringles came to have their curious demography: a large majority of families with one boy, and a few families here and there with three girls. There were no cases of mixed offspring. There was something magical about Peronism, but it was an implacable magic. Or perhaps Nature activated some mysterious safeguard, intervening in History to protect the species.

  My father was a staunch Peronist from way back, right from the start, I suppose. And for him, as for so many Argentinians of modest means, it paid off: in his case, not just via the labor laws, the social benefits, and the hope of betterment that spread throughout society, but individually too, because his loyalty was rewarded with a lucrative council job. During the ten years of the regime, he was in charge of the electrical systems for the lighting of the streets and public buildings. A role of great responsibility, as you can imagine; it’s really quite amazing that it could have been fulfilled by one man, even though Pringles was (and remains) a small town. I should point out that my father wasn’t responsible for the supply of electricity to the community: the Electricity Plant, also called (I don’t know why) the Electricity Cooperative, took care of that. As I reconstruct the situation now, I presume that the bulk of his work — apart from odd trips to the courthouse or the post office or the library to change a bulb or fluorescent tube or to fix a short circuit — consisted in looking after the street lighting. The town was about fifteen blocks by fifteen, and there was a lamp hanging exactly at the center of each intersection. There was also the long boulevard that led to the station, and the path to the cemetery. And the Plaza, of course. It was no small task for just one man, without any helpers. I was too young in 1955, when my father stopped doing that job, to remember how he organized his time, but I bet he had it all worked out and got it done with time to spare. Life was simpler back then, and electrical systems were rudimentary, straight from the textbook, with the causes and effects on display.

  The earliest memory that I have of my father is of him riding the bicycle that he used for getting all around town, even to its farthest limits, carrying a very long ladder on his shoulder. I don’t think this scene would have stuck in my mind without its most salient feature: the ladder. It was a wooden ladder, at least four yards long (I don’t want to exaggerate), and balancing such a cumbersome piece of equipment while riding a bike must have required a certain skill, or at least regular practice. If my father ever fell off, or had an accident, he didn’t mention it at home.

  I discovered all this much later, actually, after the demise of Peronism, when my family, along with so many others, had fallen back to its fated place. I found out almost by guesswork, starting from those dubious memories of early childhood. Are they memories or inventions? You can never really know. I had to guess, because at home we never spoke of the past. The Revolución Libertadora brought down an impenetrable curtain, woven from threads of the shameful dream of becoming middle class, a dream that turned out, on waking, to be as indecent as a sexual fantasy. Also, it would have been awkward to talk about that past because the word “Perón” had been prohibited by decree, and the prohibition was respected even in the privacy of the home. My parents never spoke that word again. No one did, and I wonder how I even knew that it existed. Naturally I had often heard it during the first six years of my life, and its subsequent elimination (I didn’t speak it either, not even mentally) gave it a special place. The elimination was so complete that I distinctly remember the first time I heard it, many years later, when I was finishing primary school: a girl from my class said, “Perón . . .” I felt
as if an abyss had opened and was swallowing up my whole life. It’s inexplicable, although there must be some explanation. Of course it was possible to go on talking without using that word; its absence was not an obstacle to communication in daily life, because it wasn’t the name of something that we might have needed to mention: it was a proper name, belonging to just one thing in the universe.

  Although this elimination took place in every home in the country, in mine it had a precedent that made it more logical, or perhaps overdetermined it. This was something that happened before the Revolución Libertadora, so for me it is even farther back in the mists of early childhood. When I began to find out about it, much later on, it came as a surprise, and I couldn’t retrieve any memory to confirm the events in question. It turned out that in his youth my father had been a fervent Catholic. More than that, actually: he was fanatical, daily mass and daily communion, a true believer, a soldier in the legions of Our Lady . . . but after the events of 1954, when Perón broke with the clergy, never, not once in the rest of his days, did my father set foot in a church again. Strange as it may seem, in the conflict of loyalties between Christianity and Peronism, the second won out. If churches had been burned in Pringles as they were in Buenos Aires, he would have been there with a torch. Nine out of ten people would condemn this as retrospective hypocrisy, but I think I understand it, insofar as something so deeply strange can be understood. You have to bear in mind that in Argentina, as opposed to other Latin American countries, Catholicism never took root in the working class. It was always the prerogative of “respectable” people and fundamentally, I would say, of the highest strata of society: the agnostic middle class participated in the rituals out of respect for the patricians, or out of snobbery, to distinguish themselves from the dark and decidedly atheist masses. Which meant that my father’s devout faith had been a complete anomaly and could only have been sincere. But he was a Peronist first: he had to choose and he chose Peronism. And the fact that he chose, rather than seeking a compromise or turning a blind eye, is irrefutable proof of his sincerity.