The Linden Tree

by Cesar Aira

  I have already mentioned the fireplace in our room. From time to time we used it, not for heating (we were never cold) but for burning things. The chimney drew perfectly; no smoke or odor came into the room, and that must have been why my father bothered to set the fire — for the pleasure of using something that worked well — because he could just as easily have burnt those things (dry leaves, trash, old bits of furniture) on a fire out in the garden, where there was plenty of space. Maybe, though, now that I think of it, he had an unconscious desire to do everything in our space, within the microcosm that was legally ours to inhabit.

  Another symptom of that desire: he kept his ladder under the bed — as if there weren’t twenty-four empty rooms in which he could have stored it — and at least half its length stuck out, so we had to be careful not to trip over it. One Sunday my father took out the ladder and spent a long time removing bagworms from the top of a tree in the garden, the one closest to our door. He pulled them off, threw them down onto the ground, then raked them up into a phenomenal heap.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now we’re going to burn them.”

  He took them inside to the fireplace in a bucket, making a number of trips. When they were all inside, he ordered me, in his curt and nervy way, to finish the job, because he had something else to do.

  “Don’t worry, Dad! I’ll look after it,” I said as I went to get the matches. He left, as if in a great hurry, without even glancing back at me. I heard the bicycle squeaking as he wheeled it along the gallery, and then, in the distance, the front gate opening. Where could he have been going? I returned pensively to the fireplace. Burning a mountain of bagworms might seem a strange and cruel task, but it was the most appropriate mode of destruction for those dry, crackly creatures.

  I too must have had something to do, because I simply struck a match and tossed it onto the heap, then left. I must have been in a tremendous hurry, because I didn’t even stay to see if they caught fire. This explains my show of diligence, my “Don’t worry, Dad”: I was impatient to get rid of him. Mom wasn’t at home. The house remained empty all morning. At midday, I was playing in a vacant lot around the corner when I heard my mother crying out, calling me home for lunch. She had a high, piercing voice, and didn’t hesitate to make the whole neighborhood resound with my name if she needed me, even for the most trivial reason. I could hear her several blocks away. When I got home, my father was waiting for me at the gate. We went in together. I must have suspected that something was wrong, because the first thing I looked at was the fireplace. It was clean and white: not a single bagworm. I thought that they must have cleaned away the ashes and were cross because I hadn’t done it myself. I began to mumble an excuse, but a sixth sense warned me that it would be better to keep quiet. We ate our lunch in silence. The atmosphere was poisonous. I was thinking: “Is it really that bad? Can’t they forgive me?” I went to lie down on my bed.

  Then I saw them. They were all on the ceiling, hanging from the white plaster, way up high, unreachable. They had occupied the whole surface, spreading themselves out, leaving each other the living space dictated by their instinct. But it wasn’t an even spread; there was a denser surge, a kind of Milky Way. It was an amazing, unforgettable spectacle. All over the ceiling . . . like little Chinese lanterns . . . they had escaped and climbed up there in search of altitude.

  I was filled with the most abject terror. Not for one second did I think that my parents might not have seen them. And yet they hadn’t looked at them once, or referred to them in any way . . . I sat up on the bed. Mom was washing the dishes; Dad was still sitting at the table, listening to the radio. Were they pretending? Were they waiting for me to start screaming? I didn’t stay to find out. Luckily I hadn’t taken off my shoes; my bad habit of flopping onto the bed with my shoes on — Mom was always scolding me for it — turned out to be providential. I made a beeline for the door, passing within inches of my father’s back . . . He would only have had to stretch out his arm . . . but he didn’t: it was as if he had disowned me. I opened the door, shut it behind me without turning around to look back, and started running madly down the gallery, toward the street . . . It was as if I would never return. I was leaving them behind like two funereal statues . . . I was fleeing. I felt that I was fleeing toward my own death.

  I was no stranger to the experience of flight: burning my ships, leaving it all behind and plunging into the unknown, starting over from scratch, building from the ground up, beginning a new story . . . It’s true that I had very little to abandon, but children cling to whatever they have all the more tightly because they still haven’t made it entirely theirs; they’re still discovering its secret mechanisms. Yet I was prepared to throw it all away at the first sign of danger.

  So I fled . . . as I always did. But I didn’t go far. I never went far because I never left the neighborhood. No one ever stopped me, or even noticed, probably; I was always within two or three hundred yards of home. I knew that territory by heart, and it was sufficient for me. Its utterly familiar mysteries held my dreamy young soul in thrall. When my mother took me to the town center, I went enthusiastically but then I forgot all about it; impressions made by the rest of the world had no purchase on me.

  There were certain details of the neighborhood, important for my games, that I must have been the only one to notice. For example, the angle at which the buildings were cut away at the corners . . . I knew the configuration of every corner by heart, from playing one of the games that I had invented, the one that I called “the corner game,” or, to be more precise, “the little corner game.” The diminutive was a way of expressing the game’s secret, intimate, intraconscious nature, its function as a joke or puzzle for others and a private source of fun for me.

  Having reached this point, I realize that I need to describe the little corner game, or explain it (in a case like this, description is explanation). In fact, I have been meaning to do this for some time, although I’m slightly embarrassed about expanding on something so childish and pointless. Still, if I don’t do it, no one else will, and the knowledge will die with me, and who can say what might turn out to be important for somebody else? My hesitation may also be due to the difficulty of explaining a mechanism at once so precise and so futile.

  As I said, the game was played within the limits of my consciousness, and I played it on my own, although at the expense of others. Opportunities arose by chance, although I did sometimes help to set them up. The basic situation was this: I would be walking along in the street and notice that someone was walking behind me, in the same direction, either on the same sidewalk or the opposite one. The other person could be a grown-up or a child, someone I knew or a stranger, anyone at all, although, in fact, I knew almost all of my victims, more or less. I would keep walking at the same pace until I reached the corner and then I would turn. As soon as I was hidden from view, I would sprint until the moment at which I calculated that the person behind me was about to reach the corner, and then I would resume the pace at which I had been walking originally. So when my victims saw me again, I would be inexplicably far away, and they would ask themselves, “How is that possible?”

  I’m using the term “victim,” but it was obviously a very mild form of victimization. Setting aside the distracted types who didn’t even notice, at most I led people to doubt the testimony of their senses, or shook their confidence in the soundness of their reckonings and predictions. The joke would have been consummated perfectly if my victims had feared that they were losing their minds, or better still, if they had started to panic about a subtle crumbling of the laws of physics, as if on reaching the corner they had stepped into a world with a different spatiotemporal paradigm. I don’t think anyone had such an extreme reaction. It was a harmless enough little game, although the motivation behind it was undeniably cruel. I assumed the role of the “malicious demon” postulated by all the philosophers.

  The game had its tec
hnique, which I took very seriously. For a start, when walking “visibly,” before and after the sprint, it was necessary to maintain a constant pace, as slow as possible without attracting attention: normal, natural. And the sprint had to be as fast as possible. I also had to restrain my urge to start running before I had completely turned the corner and was entirely out of view, which meant that I had to gauge exactly the angle of the cutaway. I had learned from experience that the merest hint of an intention to run, the slightest tensing of muscles, was a giveaway, even from behind and at a distance. I had to do the opposite: relax and imagine that I would go on walking at that leisurely pace for a long way. Naturally, the most difficult thing was calculating the moment at which the other person would reach the corner; this was the calculation that the victim would perform in turn, erroneously. I couldn’t afford to make an error; to be seen running would have been embarrassing, so, in fact, I would slow down a bit before the anticipated moment, just to be sure; I sacrificed a little “trick distance” so as not to run any risk. It’s important to remember that the whole game was played “blind”: the other person was behind me, and at no point did I turn around to look back, because that would have given me away.

  I wonder if this description really makes it clear. The ideal account would be a series of diagrams: schematic maps of the streets and the corner, indicating the trajectories of the moving bodies but also the victim’s lines of sight: broken and dotted lines could be used, respectively, and little crosses with letters (A, B, A′, B′) to mark the positions at various moments in the game. Fundamentally, it was a map game.

  The odd thing is that in spite of my precautions, and even when it all went to plan, everyone detected the trick — that is, they realized that there was a trick, that it wasn’t natural (or supernatural, which is what I wanted to make them believe). And they saw what the trick was. If they were kids, they yelled out straightaway: “You didn’t fool me! You ran! Did you think I wouldn’t work it out?” and so on. If they were grown-ups they kept it to themselves, but sooner or later they would let me know. Certain ladies, mothers of my friends, whom I had thought would be easily fooled, would put me on the spot later on, asking why I had run away from them. That was how adults saw it, in general; they couldn’t grasp the pure fun of a gratuitous practical joke.

  I said before that everything is allegorical. In a way, this little game is an allegory of life. It could serve as a diagram to illustrate the aspirations of young people in small towns. All the fantasies of escape, success, and return conform to the same basic scheme; they all revolve around the transmutation of the inquisitive hometown gaze. That merciless gaze, which turns the town into a prison, is what the young hope to escape from above all, but only to recover it with a vengeance, years later, as a witness to their transformation.

  “Years later . . .” That’s where the trap lay, in that little phrase, essential even to the most dazzling success. Because years later one would be an adult, and the gains in terms of professional success, money, and fame would be matched by the increase in size, and the figure wouldn’t seem so far away. The years would neutralize the career.

  It’s incredible how important, and how insistently present, biological time is in small towns of the kind that are said to be “frozen in time,” which do indeed have a chronology of their own. It’s something people think about, the object of constant calculations, never far from consciousness. It provides a link between children and adults. Even the most respectable and well-intentioned adults are always using the theme of age to communicate with children. On one occasion, I remember, the reasonable man who had been holding forth in the accountant’s office about the education of the young raised the subject with me. He asked how old I was; I told him. Let’s suppose I was eight.

  “Eight? You’ve had your eighth birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re nine.” I must have looked puzzled, because he went on to explain: “You’ve completed eight years and you’ve started your ninth. But if you don’t go into details, and nobody’s asking you to, you have a perfect right to say, ‘I’m nine.’ You’ve already celebrated your eighth birthday, so the eight years are done already, and now you ‘are’ nine.” He gave me a conspiratorial wink; maybe he was secretly anxious to ensure that I’d followed his reasoning. I wouldn’t have disappointed him, because I was quick on the uptake, and this question of age was something that mattered to me as a small-town kid. Even so, he repeated himself to make sure that I had grasped his meaning. It was important to him; and no doubt he was systematically spreading this bright idea like the Good News in all his conversations with the local kids.

  It didn’t have much of an impact on me, because I had begun to lose sight of the future; increasingly, my life was limited to the present, in the form of my immediate surroundings. I could hang out in the street all day while remaining within the circular range of my mother’s voice: I think I was always hoping, or fearing, that she would call me to announce some urgent news, some portentous revelation. That expectation created an inviolable present from which I didn’t even dream of trying to escape. I had become very sensitive to the inherent fragility of the family unit. I wanted to “be present” when things happened, not so much because I was curious or a busybody, and certainly not because I thought that my presence could avoid a catastrophe, but because I had convinced myself that unless I saw it with my own eyes, no one would be able to give me a proper account of what had happened. I suspect that I was also vaguely afraid of running into my father’s “other family” in the unfamiliar parts of town, a prospect that filled me with horror, I don’t know why.

  The next step, which I duly took, was to turn back to the past. Not as nostalgia or history, but in a constructive, optimistic spirit. The project was born, predictably, on the day of my first excursion beyond the limits of the neighborhood, or the first that left a memory, an experience that I can recount. This happened when I was ten or eleven. It was a Sunday morning, the morning of a Sunday in spring. There was to be a ceremony on the Plaza, on the other side of town, beyond the center, to inaugurate the Monument to the Mother, and our teacher had suggested that we attend. There was some powerful incentive; I think she had told us that we would have to write an essay about it on Monday. My mother approved of the idea and dressed me in my best clothes. I set off with two boys who lived across the street, also in their Sunday best. Many people were heading in the same direction, to go to mass as well as the inauguration: the church faced onto the Plaza, and on Sunday morning there were three masses, at seven, nine, and eleven. My friends, including those two boys, went to mass, but I didn’t, of course. The ceremony on the Plaza was to take place between two masses. The occasion was momentous because this was to be the first statue in Pringles. Although the town was a hundred years old, it didn’t have a single statue. Until then, no one had felt the lack . . . A few years earlier, a monument had been inaugurated but it was abstract. The Monolith, as it was known for want of a better name, was a kind of squat obelisk (it would have been about nine feet tall), made of bricks and plaster. It was at the intersection of Boulevard 25th of May and Boulevard 13. In Pringles, the streets had names and numbers: they all had numbers, but only the ones in the center had names as well. Those central streets were always referred to by their names; their numbers remained hidden, reserved for mapmaking purposes; and where the names gave out, toward the edge of the town, the streets were known by their numbers, while waiting to be baptized. In this case the two intersecting streets were of different status, but the one that had a name had the name of a number, or a date, to be precise. The Monolith had been donated to the town by the Rotary Club; it was very simple and geometrical, but it bore the strange symbols of a secret society. Even so, no one would have called it a statue, so the Mother had no precedent: no one could dispute her inaugural condition.

  When we were about fifty yards from the Plaza, two boys from school rushed up to greet us. Appar
ently they had been waiting on the corner for some time, anxiously looking out for anyone they knew, and they had been too impatient to stay put and let us cover that last stretch on our own. They came running as fast as they could and started trying to tell us something while they were still a ways off . . . but they were prevented from speaking by uncontrollable bursts of laughter; they were choking, unable to finish a word. We smiled uncomfortably; we wanted to share their joy but we didn’t understand. Meanwhile we kept walking toward the Plaza and gradually we realized that the cause of the laughter was the statue, which was right there, very close to the corner. They dragged us toward it, still in a frenzy of hilarity, “cracking up,” tantalizing us by gasping, “You’ll see,” between guffaws.

  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 mold, 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 sidewalk 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.