by Cesar Aira
The farmers were always lying; and when they didn’t lie, they exaggerated. They lied about themselves, and exaggerated about everyone else. One of their favorite pretexts for exaggeration was the extension of the electrical grid into rural areas. They were always telling stories about going back to their candlelit farmhouses at night and seeing, far off in the pitch-black country darkness, some recently electrified ranch house. The Asteinza place, the Iturrioz place, the Domínguez place . . . Each time it was somewhere new, a dazzling sun in the middle of the night: houses, sheds, gardens, even the stockyards . . . “Unbelievable! So beautiful! That’s progress!” If you could believe what they said, the woodlands were festooned with lights; the eucalyptuses had become Christmas trees.
There was a typewriter in the office. Since I spent many hours there alone, I was naturally tempted to give it a try. And I yielded repeatedly to that temptation. At first I did it in secret, then one day the accountant caught me at it and didn’t tell me off, so I went on doing it when he was there. I spent whole afternoons at the typewriter. I don’t know what I wrote: whatever. Once I asked the accountant: “Should you leave a space after a comma?” He thought about it. Then he bent over my shoulder to look, saw my comma, and noticed something else:
“Look! You don’t put a comma before and — never.”
That wasn’t what I’d asked, although he did have a point because I had put a comma before and. I hated it when things got mixed up; even at that age I had an organized mind, and I liked to keep everything clear and under control. This sequence of a comma and the word and was accidental. I tried to show that I was grateful for the tip, but returned to my initial question. He nodded and said he wasn’t sure; he’d never really focused on that detail. But there was a way to check. On a shelf, among the dossiers, he had an encyclopedia of accounting in three volumes. I remember those volumes well, because they were the first books I ever held; and although I often handled and even read them (without understanding a thing), I too had overlooked that detail, which the practice of writing had just brought to my notice.
He opened one of the volumes and looked . . . It was a random page from a volume chosen at random (each had about a thousand pages); he adjusted his gaze to the spatial relations of the written universe, and finally focused . . .
“Well, how about that? Here’s a comma right before and . . .”
Perhaps it was the only case in which the writers of the encyclopedia had departed from the rule, and he had chanced upon it. (In the previous sentence I have put a comma before and, correctly I believe, which goes to show that this “rule” is pretty shaky.)
That’s as much as I remember. But the rest is easy enough to reconstruct: we must have come to the conclusion that a space should be left after a comma, as after any other punctuation mark.
My friend Osvaldo Lamborghini once told me that he too, when learning to type as a boy, had discovered the space that follows punctuation marks. It seems to be something that you have to discover: it’s not taught at school, nor is it spontaneously perceived in the act of reading. For Osvaldo, it was decisive. Telling me about it, decades later, he was still moved by the memory, and he fixed me with those dark, oriental eyes of his, gazing through the cigarette smoke, to make sure that I had understood: that space, so subtle and refined, had won his undying loyalty. It showed him that writing, as well as having a communicative function, could also convey an elegance, and that, he realized, was where his destiny lay. He was always very sensitive to such things. A mutual friend used to say, “Osvaldo doesn’t have a style so much as a way of punctuating.” Which is why, ten years after his death, I wrote a little novel about the comma, in homage to him.
I have strayed from my theme, but not too far. One never really strays beyond the possibility of return. On one occasion, the big window right across the front of the accountant’s office was covered with a kind of white paint, which was used back then to stop people looking into stores and businesses. I seem to remember that this substance was known as “liquid chalk.” How odd. I don’t know why it fell out of use, but then I’m not really sure why it was necessary either, or why it had been used on that particular occasion. Although I do remember clearly what it was like. It was applied with a brush to the inside surface of the glass, covering it with a perfectly smooth, white film. And you could write perfect letters on the chalked window with a fingertip; indeed the owners of the stores exploited this possibility to leave messages for their clients, such as: “Reopening soon,” or “Under new ownership,” or any other practical information that justified the infantile pleasure of writing on such an inviting surface. For children, the temptation was irresistible. Kids from the neighborhood used to visit when I was “on duty,” and naturally we couldn’t resist: we ended up covering the window with inscriptions. But there’s a trick to that writing: for it to be legible from outside, you have to write in reverse, back to front. The only way to do it is to use capitals, thinking carefully before you draw each letter, with a kind of double vision or ad hoc mental adjustment, and even so, you’re bound to end up with an R or an S the wrong way around. When the inscriptions consisted of more than one word, I noticed the importance of the space, which like so many other things took on real significance when considered in reverse. Later I discovered that in the early days of writing, in Greco-Roman antiquity, the space between letters didn’t exist. And it strikes me now, on reflection, that the invention of the space may have been as fundamentally important as the invention of zero in mathematics, and that the two may have been closely related.
I remember this banal episode of naughtiness because it was the only time the accountant got really cross with me, and even threatened to banish me from his office. In general, he was very tolerant, partly because of his character, partly because I was well behaved, and partly too no doubt because I was useful, and he must have felt guilty about exploiting me without any kind of recompense. On this occasion, though, he bawled me out: “Did you think I wouldn’t notice? . . . Writing all this without permission is bad enough . . . But prohibited words!” That was when I began to realize what it was about. It wasn’t simply the fact that we had written on the glass and spoiled its whiteness, but the specific words that we had put there; not the form, but the content. I hadn’t really thought about that. Absorbed by the challenge of writing backwards, I hadn’t stopped to consider the meanings, and now I understood: caught up in the excitement, the rush and the recklessness of the crime, we could have written all kinds of horrors. It wasn’t myself I was worried about — even my reflexes were sensible and repressed — but my friends, who were little savages. “They’ve written FUCK for sure,” I thought, and hung my head. The accountant fumed a bit longer and then forgot about it. And that was the end of the incident.
But the epilogue was still to come, a few hours later that afternoon (one of those interminable summer afternoons in Pringles). I was on my own in the office, waiting for the accountant to return; it was after his normal closing time. I was sitting on the high bench with my elbows resting on the counter and my fists pressed into my cheeks. My mind was a blank. I had succumbed to the vague, unmotivated melancholy of childhood, accentuated by the time of day and no doubt also by the fact that I was facing a window painted white, like a wall. Without being able to see the sky, I could sense that it was turning a phosphorescent pink. That’s what happens in the last hour of those glorious summer evenings in Pringles: the air is illuminated; its corpuscles shimmer. And then a word appeared, in fat, pink letters on the dark wood of the counter, right in front of me, just where it would have been if I had written it: PERÓN. Hallucinatory, spellbinding, and real as could be, although it seemed impossible. I recoiled, blinking wildly. It was still there, written with a paintbrush dipped in light. Eventually I looked up and saw that the light on the counter was projected through one of the scribbles in the painting on the window. That was the prohibited word the accountant had been talking about. I was
so inattentive I never would have noticed it among all the doodles and inscriptions covering the lower half of the whited glass. The sky had to reveal it to me, like a new MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. A further source of amazement was awaiting me when the surprise receded and I recovered my powers of reason: the word was projected the right way around and not in reverse.
There is a game called “little mirrors” . . . I’ve just discovered this here in Rosario, where I have come to spend a few days, while continuing to record these memories (because I keep writing wherever I am and whatever else is happening). The name is apt: I knew the game, but not the name, and now, for me, the two will always go together. I knew the game as a boy, and it was a girl who named it for me just now, which has set me wondering about the continuity of childhood. I would be the first to agree that nothing is eternal, but I have to admit that there is a kind of thought that runs underneath History, though no one can say who passes it on. Children don’t have instruments for transmitting thought from one generation to another, so they must keep reinventing it. In this case the continuity spans half a century and the distance from Pringles to Rosario; it reaches back to another world, another time . . . Present circumstances are providing ample opportunity to observe and investigate this phenomenon, since the real purpose of my trip (the excuse was a conference on the Rhetoric of the Essay) was to meet and catch up with a number of children. It so happens that among my friends in Rosario, who are all fanatical literary theorists, having children has come into fashion. The days spent here have been most instructive. Last night I went to dinner at Adriana’s place; she was the first to reproduce, when I was just getting to know the group. My first trip to Rosario coincided with the birth of her daughter Cecilia, whose growth I followed up to the age of three or four but no farther. So last night was a surprise. When I went up onto the terrace of their house on Calle España, a great big girl, almost as tall as me, was tracing vertiginous circles on roller skates. She came over to give me a kiss, with a radiant smile. “Cecilia! You’re so tall! And so pretty!” I wasn’t just being polite. That tall (almost towering) ten-year-old girl, flushed from the exercise, with her bright eyes, was literally glowing. She was off again straight away to continue her loops in the moonlight, striking sparks from the red tiles, and she would have gone on all night if her father hadn’t yelled at her. Later, during the meal, Cecilia mentioned the “little mirrors.” They are ways of turning an insult around to return it to the sender. But the one she mentioned was very basic: “For you and all your family.” I seized the opportunity to enrich it: “In Pringles, we used to say it with a rhyme, Cecilia: ‘For your relatives in all the zoos, and especially for you.’ It sounds better that way, and it’s more effective.” She wasn’t convinced. With a child’s implacable logic, she judged the rhyme to be defective: “Shouldn’t you say ‘yous’?” I was about to tell her that it was the other way around: you should say “zoo,” because working-class children in Pringles used to drop the s; but I kept quiet, because I felt that my intellectual hosts here in Rosario might not appreciate that clarification. I remembered other “little mirrors,” but kept them to myself because they were not suitable for polite company. There was a very concise and definitive one that was used to answer the traditional “your mother” insults: “Filthy swine! Yours, not mine!” The proverbial brevity of the comeback encapsulates something true. A woman, whatever the insult says about her, has her children one after another, and the turn of that little phrase neatly renders the impossibility of one and the same woman having given birth to both adversaries. Of course a woman can have many children over the years, but I should remind the reader that we were all only children, and each of us had only one mother.
There was another “little mirror” that was much more direct. In fact it was a counter-mirror. It was used when the insult was: “Your mother’s twat.” The “mirror” went: “You mean your sister’s, I saw you kissed hers.” And then the first kid could come back with the definitive retort: “When it came to sisters, my parents passed, so I’m gonna have to make do with your ass.” Indeed, none of us had sisters, which is why for many years I assumed that those rhymes were specific to Pringles.
Of the conversations that I heard in the accountant’s office, it was the monologues that I found most inspiring. And oddly (or maybe it’s not so odd, given my taciturn nature), this preference for monologue over dialogue has continued. I think it is related to my morbid fascination with madness, particularly the madness that is latent in normality, one step away from the most secure and comforting daily routine, as opposed to the sort that is confined to mental asylums. In monologues people “give themselves away.” But there was something more: as I listened I could follow the slow and magnificent growth of imaginary constructions, in which language, spinning freely in a void, eventually opened onto something beyond words.
Back then, people had so much time, they would tolerate the craziest monologues. I can’t have been the only one who listened to them with pleasure. The tenant farmers who visited the office were always sounding off. The accountant could hold his own too; in fact, he was the worst. And he repeated himself with his various interlocutors. No one else was privy to the repetition, and this I found inexpressibly satisfying. I noted the variations, the expansions, the refinements, and later, on my own, I went over the stories again, adding and varying and polishing even more. One of his (and my) favorites was about a tramp’s “accounts.” These, of course, were tax returns, which the accountant had attended to in his professional capacity. The tramp in question, a staple character, was one of those vagabonds from the fringes of Buenos Aires who were numerous at the time. The story was that he had once gone to complain to the Revenue Service inspectors. Like all Argentinian citizens, he was supposed to pay taxes. There were plenty who didn’t, of course, but the charm of this story lay in the fact that the tramp had no need to lie, because he conducted his life entirely outside the system of monetary exchange. This is where the accountant launched into his expansions, becoming a keeper of narrative accounts, a recounter (and there, incidentally, he was on firmer ground, because in the field of financial account-keeping, he was self-taught and had no formal qualifications at all). He would switch back and forth between the roles of the increasingly perplexed tax inspectors and the tramp, who had an answer for everything. “House or apartment?” “No.” “Ah, so you rent?” “No, I sleep under the bridge.” “Dependants?” “Just me.” “Clothing?” “I make do with my old threads.” “And what if they wear out or tear?” “People give me stuff. No, actually, I use old sacks.” And so it went. “Food?” This was the most colorful category. His favorite seasonal dish: watercress from the river. What he represented, fundamentally, was the utopic state of nature, but the story didn’t make me long for the past, because I sensed how anachronistic this character was, and although I planned to be like him one day (what little boy could resist that dream?), I wanted to do it in the modern world where taxes are paid and people are part of big, efficient social machines.
Dimly aware that modernity was threatening my father, I thought of it as an individual journey into the future: you would wake up in the morning to discover that a hundred years had passed and everything was different. A certain imaginative refinement led me to scorn spaceships and skyscrapers covered with glass. The change would be a matter of style: something invisible yet decisive. For example, a man from the time before the invention of zero, who has magically traveled to the time after, walking down the street and looking around . . . Or the same thing, but with the space between written words. Or, and this is more subtle, a man from the time in which the word “Perón” was prohibited, transported to a time in which that prohibition has been lifted. In writing this account, I am performing something like that leap in time: not between styles, because my style hasn’t changed since I was a child, but between effects of style. Except that I’m doing it in reverse, from the future to the past; and yet by virtue of writing and the transp
arency of style the reverse becomes the right side, that is, the reverse of the reverse.
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 anymore,” he said. “Nobody wants to work!” agreed his interlocutors enthusiastically, assenting to one of those pessimistic generalizations 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 practicing a trade. I don’t know if it’s because they’re ashamed of manual work, or if they’re just being overoptimistic, but parents aren’t doing their children any favors 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:
