by Cesar Aira
All my friends lived in miserable, cramped little houses. We had plenty of space, but with the proud dignity of the poor we scorned it and went on living within the same four walls. We didn’t even use more of the gallery than the part directly in front of our room. I was forbidden to go into the other rooms, although most of them had no door and were visited only by rats. Not that I was all that tempted. Sometimes, when my parents were out, the neighborhood kids would come and explore, but that was very rare. I was also forbidden to play in the garden, or even to stray from the paths that led to the latrine and the pump (we didn’t have running water either), and I internalized this prohibition so thoroughly that there were corners where I never set foot.
Nonetheless, the building had an effect on me, definitively shaping my imagination. Ever since then, my thought has taken the form of a palace. To get to sleep at night, I mentally visited all those empty rooms . . . Or not all of them, because I didn’t know how many there were; I never went to the trouble of counting them. I lost myself in that labyrinth whose center was sleep. It might not seem like much to model an imagination on, and with it the course of a whole life. But apart from the fact that small causes have been known to produce large effects, the cause is not so small in this case, because the circumstances dissolved the contradiction between Palace and Room, and launched a mechanism for dissolving all contradictions.
I never knew (and since I never knew that I didn’t know, I didn’t ask) why we lived in that room and not in one of the others. There were so many, and they were all the same . . . Although, of course, they weren’t really the same; each had its own location, and that made an irreducible difference. The only distinguishing feature of our room, except for the obvious fact that it had been kept in a state that was fit for human habitation, was a fireplace. A big, marble fireplace. None of the other rooms had one. Who knows what forgotten function that room may have originally fulfilled. One day, in the course of my reading I came across the expression “the Winter Palace,” which set me dreaming; I thought I could alter it to reflect my personal experience. I would make it “the Winter Room in the Palace of the Seasons.”
Once, in the midst of the ceaseless chatter that my mother kept up to calm my father’s nerves, she said that when they had first come to live there, as newlyweds, they had used the fireplace for cooking, over a wood fire, as in the Middle Ages. This excited me; it appealed to my childish belief in the superiority of olden times. I would have liked to see it. I asked her to make a meal that way, just one; but she didn’t humor me. She said that when I grew up I could ignore progress and return to the Middle Ages as often as I liked. Apparently that phase of their life had been very brief; as soon as my father received his first pay packet as council electrician, he bought his wife an enormous Volcán kerosene stove, which we still had. It had stayed in the place where the delivery men had put it, against one of the internal walls, right in the middle. The room was square, and each wall had a central marker of some kind: on the gallery side, the door; opposite that, on the street side, the window; the Volcán stove on one internal wall; and on the other, the old fireplace. That symmetry delighted me; I kept finding new meanings in it. The floor was wooden, made of narrow boards, and sounded hollow. The biggest piece of furniture was the double bed, against the internal wall beside the fireplace, on the door side. On the window side, my bed and a big closet. In front of my bed, beside the stove, a very tall and spacious wardrobe with three mirrors. Finally, the table and chairs, in the corner on the door side. This arrangement never changed.
It was our little world, our refuge and our secret. Or at least in retrospect it seems there must have been a secret, to justify the arrangement, if only as a mnemonic device. The strange thing is, there wasn’t, and yet I remember it all perfectly. We weren’t cramped. I was out in the street all day, Dad too, because of his work, and Mom was a real “door lady”: she would take a chair out onto the sidewalk, and sit there knitting all afternoon. She used to say that she had started doing it when I began to walk, to keep an eye on me, and then it became a habit. People passing by must have thought, “What a big house that lady has,” not realizing that the real house was hidden in the heart of the house they could see, as a seed lies hidden within a forest.
Inside the room, there was another outside: the radio. We kept it on the table, sitting on a stand, and it was always on if there was anyone at home. We listened to music, news, comedy programs, and quizzes. Mom followed the soap operas, and so did I, the ones about gauchos, written by Chiappe. For Mom it was proof of my filial and familial devotion that I would always interrupt my games and adventures to sit down with her and listen to Juan Carlos Chiappe’s radio plays. She mentioned this proudly to the ladies in the neighborhood. But I didn’t do it out of loyalty; I did it for pleasure.
It was also via the radio that politics entered our home. I would have led a less tortured life if that subject had been kept out, as it should have been, for many reasons, the chief of which is that it led to disillusion. It has often been said, with good reason, that Peronism was not a genuinely popular phenomenon: it came from above, and the people received it as a gift; they went on receiving it until receiving became second nature, and then they began to receive the opposite. This interpretation might seem to be a purely intellectual construction, because in fact the masses felt that they were in control and acted accordingly. And what matters are the facts (“the only truth is reality”); how they came about is secondary. And yet the facts themselves end up justifying the interpretation, because anti-Peronism eventually came from the same direction as Peronism, that is, from above. And when the dream of being able to forge one’s destiny evaporated, the result was disillusion, and shame at having been so naive.
My father fell silent, both outwardly and inwardly. This was because he had nothing to say. He internalized the accursed dialectic of History, which penetrated every cell of his cold, dead tongue, and he developed a nervous condition. From then on, he never had enough peace of mind to concern himself with the real life of the nation, which matched or exceeded his own hysteria. Those were years of instability, difficult and chaotic, with frequent changes of government, military rumblings, and interventions. The radio brought us the news. My mother provided the commentary, becoming more voluble as time went by. She had no grasp of politics; she couldn’t understand what was going on, and yet she was confident, skeptical, and dogmatic all at once, no doubt emboldened by my father’s silence. He must have realized how absurd her comments were and seen how they sprang from astonishing ignorance and childlike arbitrariness, but he kept quiet. And, as the saying goes, silence gives consent.
At some stage, I remember, before an election, the radio kept repeating a slogan: “You choose the government.” My mother would snicker sarcastically and reply: “. . . and Rattenbach chucks them out.”
It wouldn’t have been so bad (for me, sole witness to this strange war without combatants) if she had confined herself to this embittered cynicism, these occasional ironies. But she began to develop a serious case of visceral anti-Peronism; her “gorilla” rants became defamatory and truly delirious. This wasn’t an ideological development so much as a natural consequence of the decision to talk: talking requires some kind of content. She began to give speeches at mealtimes. She got carried away and couldn’t stop. She indoctrinated me. I’d rather not reproduce her words. We all have this sort of confused and paralyzing political background, all of us in Argentina at least. In any case, it didn’t last long. The ranting was too absurd to continue, and maybe its function was to provide impetus for the next phase, or to give it structure.
When the subject of politics fell away, speech itself remained. My mother must have discovered that if she spoke, her husband kept quiet, whether she spoke of politics or something else. Being quiet soothed his nerves, or at least tempered their most alarming manifestations. She resorted to her childhood memories, becoming an inexhaustible source of tales,
vignettes, scenes, and portraits. In the end I found out about everything. Although she spoke cheerfully of her youth, without airing resentment and even employing a humorous tone, it was one long horror story. She had grown up in the country, the eldest of ten children, who had fallen to her care because of the monstrous indifference of her mother, who was, she said, an example of that exceptional and almost inconceivable figure: the woman devoid of maternal instinct. But the burden that this deficiency had laid on her tender, girlish shoulders compensated for the misfortune of her appearance: her siblings loved her like a mother, rather than regarding her as a goggle-eyed, dwarflike aberration. Her father had died young, and naturally she idealized him.
He died the year she married; I don’t know whether it was before or after the wedding, but in that year: forty-eight. That was when her evocations of the past came to an end: she was silent about all that had happened since. She never spoke of her wedding, perhaps because she presumed that we knew all about it (but I didn’t, and would have been extremely interested to find out). This tact compensated, or overcompensated, for her genuine obsession with marriage in general. Insofar as she saw other people’s marriages as eternally given, and was prevented from discussing her own by a powerful taboo, the subject could only be treated, in conversation and thought, via its negation, that is, spinsterhood. She had studied and categorized all the local spinsters; she invented prospects for them, chose “candidates,” dreamed up solutions . . . But she took infinite pleasure in the failure of these plans, which she saw as a foregone conclusion, and in that she was not mistaken, because all the genuine spinsters I heard about persisted in their condition. It’s true that in her enthusiasm, my mother would sometimes get carried away and apply her favorite label to a girl of twenty (usually a teacher or an office worker), who then promptly went and got married. But she didn’t linger over those exceptions: her “regular cast” remained unchanged. Not a day went by without her attending to them. It might seem that she was, unwittingly and unwillingly, acknowledging the social mobility that Peronism had introduced into Argentinian life, because spinsters are a specifically middle-class phenomenon, and their appearance in our proletarian milieu could be interpreted as a sign of upward movement. My mother said as much herself, on occasion: “Those black women always get married, no matter how ugly they are.” And yet the fascination was not incompatible with her “gorilla” attitude, because the spinsters, by virtue of the long period required to constitute them as such, predated Peronism and were still there when it came to an end; the ten years of the regime had not been enough to produce them, and that revealed the illusoriness of its aspirations to social change.
There was an image that appeared in the space between my mother and me, and there it has remained although its origin was almost divinatory; I deduced it from something she mumbled, from an expression or a look. Such minglings of the imagination can occur between mother and son. It was the image of the fiancées: “the dream of the fiancées . . .” That’s how it has stayed with me, captured by that formula. My mother, who was usually so practical, so prosaic and ironic, had once waxed lyrical in describing the bridal gown of a wealthy young woman, the daughter of a rancher, whose wedding she had attended in her youth: a “dream,” a diaphanous white dream of satin, lace, and tulle . . . That must have been where the expression came from, but it also corresponded to an objective truth, because all the young girls back then were dreaming of their weddings and their gowns. For them, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be decked out like a princess. It was so absurd . . . Yet it was real, it happened; to deny it would have been to deny the evidence of the senses. And the dream took place outside history, unaffected by the vicissitudes of politics and society, as if kept safe in the impregnable casket of a virgin’s soul.
My mother had glimpsed something beyond the dream, and somehow I insinuated myself into her gaze . . . She had seen the town, Pringles, that is, her whole world, inhabited by fiancées, with their diaphanous white dresses of dream tulle . . . All the women were fiancées, all the female inhabitants of that planet, and there were no men, or they weren’t part of the vision; the women were all young and beautiful, all “picture perfect,” floating in their own personal time (because each would be married “when the time was ripe,” when her day came, a day that was unique and exclusively hers, prepared with meticulous attention to detail); there they were in the streets of the town, on its sidewalks, in its patios and houses, seen from above in a bird’s-eye view but also through the marveling eyes of a child . . . This beautiful utopia was my mother’s triumph over time. I complemented it with a fantasy of my own, which strengthened my identification with her. It began with my perverse desire to try on her spectacles, to see the world as she did. I had often asked her if I could, and she had never let me. Since she never took them off, not even to sleep, I hadn’t been able to satisfy this whim, but children are stubborn once they get something like this into their heads. I imagined stealing her glasses when she was asleep, plucking them away with a precise movement and running off . . . I was always running off, in my fantasies and in reality . . . I would put them on when I got out into the street, and then I would see it, if only for an instant (because my mother would be hot on my heels, already rushing out in her nightgown to reclaim her spectacles), that “beautiful utopia,” the world of the fiancées . . .
About my father’s earlier life, I never discovered anything, and I didn’t dare to ask. Somehow he had managed to create the impression, among the three of us, that the slightest movement of his thoughts in the direction of the past would trigger an irreversible nervous breakdown. Like those drive mechanisms with a fixed pinion that simply cannot operate in reverse. This must have left its mark on me, because once, many years later, when someone was explaining how the gears of a car worked, I asked, “And what would happen if you were driving in fourth, at a hundred miles an hour, and you put the car into reverse?” This was not a facetious question; I was genuinely curious. Historical circumstances and family responsibilities had clearly oriented my father toward the future; for him, time ran in one direction only. It’s logical that he had nothing to say, because the future is made of action, not words.
Only once did he break his silence in a significant way. It was a winter night; I can’t remember if it was before or after dinner. There was a radio play on. For my mother this was something serious and cultural, so she had demanded silence; but since she did all the talking, she had to demand it of herself. After a few minutes, I was fed up; I couldn’t understand a thing, no doubt because I wasn’t trying. I expressed my boredom with snorts and grumbles, which provoked some shushes and a stern glare. I was prone to rebellious outbursts, and had very definite ideas about what was and wasn’t fun. Finally, pronouncing my customary, pedantic formula — “I shall retire to my lodgings” — I got up from the table, went and flopped on my bed, and defiantly opened an issue of Rico Tipo. I was forbidden to read that magazine — one of many bought by a truck driver who lived nearby, and lent to me by his mother — because of the lewd cartoons, so I usually kept it hidden. But on this occasion I displayed it in a deliberate and noisy way, like a hostile declaration, which I was prepared to back up with arguments: if they were going to force me to listen to some dreary and incomprehensible load of garbage, their prohibitions no longer applied, and I was allowed to do anything to save myself from death by boredom. But the argument I was looking for failed to eventuate, because they didn’t look at me or even remember that I was there. I was soon absorbed in the magazine, and my bad mood dissolved; I forgot about them and the radio. I must have read intently for an hour or more; suddenly, the play that they had been listening to was over.
There was a silence. (At some point I must have gone back to the table, because I was involved in the conversation that followed.) Then Mom began to talk again . . . but without really launching into a speech: it hadn’t crossed her mind that someone else might want to comment first, she was so sure
of holding the floor. She was mumbling, still warming up:
“Wonderful! A genius! What talent! García Lorca! . . . Yerma! He was in Argentina! Margarita Xirgu! . . . He was killed in the war!”
That was the way she always talked, without syntax, even when a story carried her away. All the more so in this case, because she had nothing to say. But she could always say something. And her preliminary exclamations conveyed the basic message: what she and her husband had just listened to was real culture, high culture, nothing to do with the Peronists. In fact, that program had unmasked them. The Peronists just had to listen to that play and they would be crushed. It was as if she had said all this, in as many words. She meant it too, and more, much more. She was full of words. It was as if she wanted to take possession of García Lorca’s famous play and broadcast it again, herself, for her own benefit . . . But she was in no hurry. Half the work was already done. The mere existence of García Lorca was, in itself, a total disaster for Peronism, because he predated the regime, and had outlived it, as that night’s program had demonstrated . . . He was tangible proof of the trans-Peronist endurance of decent, cultured people, who hadn’t been swallowed by the masses . . .
