The Linden Tree

by Cesar Aira

  Just at that moment, however, a family stopped to look at the Mother, and our guides were obliged to champ at the bit, although they could barely restrain their impatience. Meanwhile, they managed to indicate what the joke was . . . It was hard to grasp, not just because laughter kept interrupting them, but also because the joke itself was too ineffable to be communicated in words; it was one of those things that you have to experience to understand (and that, precisely, was why they wanted to try it on us). Apparently, they had climbed onto the pedestal and had pressed on the Mother’s nipple with a finger while saying, “Koo-koo,” or along those lines. That was it. There was no need for more, because it was infinitely funny. The laughter . . . the same laughter that choked them and bent them double when they tried to tell us about it . . . came surging up automatically, unstoppably . . . “Koo-koo” . . . the funniest thing in the world. “You’ll see!” It was unbelievable; or rather, you had to see it to believe it . . . Which explained their enthusiasm, the excitement with which they had gone to the corner to wait for us, or anyone they knew, so that they could share this marvel. Like all discoverers, they were bursting with impatience to divulge the new worlds that they had brought to light. They had made their discovery by chance, playing a silly joke, for no reason, but that is how the great discoveries are made.

  In the end the bothersome onlookers moved on. Agile as a monkey, one of our friends jumped up onto the red granite and put his finger exactly on the nipple, saying, “Koo-koo” . . . To our immense surprise, nothing happened. He tried again: “Koo-koo.” Then he tried with the other hand, changed his posture, got a firmer footing, tried again . . . A powerful magic, perhaps the same one as before, but inverted now, prevented all laughter. Even our smiles were beginning to fade.

  “That’s so weird,” he said, looking at the other boy, who was equally puzzled. “You try . . .”

  He got down, yielding his place. The other boy climbed up but without conviction: something was telling him that it wouldn’t work; and sure enough, when he put his finger on the spot and said, “Koo-koo” — nothing; the machine had broken down. It was like a decree of fate, and that was just why they couldn’t accept it; they racked their brains trying to find an explanation.

  “How come . . . I don’t know what’s going on . . . Just a moment ago . . . we touched the nipple . . .” But there was nothing to be done: even talking about it was no fun anymore. The laughter had gone flat. I suggested that we wait a while to see if it would recharge. They didn’t even listen to me. The situation had become vaguely ridiculous; to go on trying would have been to enter into an infinity of disgrace; the statue itself was taking on a depressing tinge.

  We split up. I wanted to go for a walk, to get some sense of what, for me, were virtually new surroundings. It was a spring morning, as I said before, sunny and perfect. Suddenly, having extricated myself from the infernal machine of the Mother, I had plenty to see. The Plaza in Pringles is one of the most outstanding architectural complexes in the country: it’s Salamone’s masterpiece, and he was one of those geniuses whose legacy grows in value with the passage of time and successive generations.

  Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) was schooled in the modernist style. He studied in Córdoba and was an engineer as well as an architect. In 1936, Governor Fresco, a conservative leader with regal schemes and vast financial resources, commissioned Salamone to design and construct public buildings in the province of Buenos Aires, and seems to have given him carte blanche to realize his projects. In less than five years of feverish activity, city halls, abattoirs, and cemeteries were built in Pellegrini, Guaminí, Tornquist, Laprida, Rauch, Carhué, Vedia, Azul, Balcarce, Salliqueló, Tres Lomas, Saldungaray, Urdampilleta, Puán, Navarro, Cacharí, Chillar, Pirovano, and Pringles. The designs are dominated by a blend of art deco and Mussolinian monumentality, but there are traces of other styles as well: Assyrian and Egyptian, futurist and oneiric. In a few cases, the design is not limited to the building but takes in the surrounding landscape or cityscape, and the most fully achieved of these larger projects is the one that Salamone executed in Pringles. The Plaza occupies two blocks; in the large, central oval stands the biggest and most beautiful of all Salamone’s town halls. The stylistic motifs of its colossal mass are repeated in the Plaza’s lamps, benches, pergolas, and fountains, as well as in the paving on the sidewalks. The artist also oversaw the tree planting: rare species from the far south were used; according to local legend, they have since become extinct in their places of origin and survive only in Pringles. The elegant linden trees in double rows bordering the sidewalks around the edge of the Plaza were an exception to this exoticism.

  Scholars have pointed out that Salamone’s highly coherent design, with its far-reaching formal correspondences, which create a kind of continuous spatial story, and the make-believe inventiveness of its style, foreshadowed the development of theme parks, the first and most famous of which would appear in California many years later. So you can imagine my astonished awe as I rediscovered this wonder on that Sunday morning. Slim, red carp circulated in the fountains, suspended in invisible water. I stared at them for a long time, and when I looked up at the square tower of the town hall, I felt that so much beauty was impossible to bear.

  I began to remember . . . I had been there before. Of course I had . . . I used to go there often; it was my favorite outing. But so long ago . . . When you’re a child, you measure time differently. What is a distant memory for a child of ten? There is no room in such a small life for the great expanses of nostalgia, so I could only think of it as having occurred in another life. But in my mind the concept of “another life” was subject to a powerful taboo because of its hidden meanings, so I made it “the same” life, my one and only life, which acquired strange dimensions, stretching away into the unknown . . . That was how I began to value the possibilities of the past: it was an inviolable strongbox where all my secrets were safe, a virtual cave where I could pile up endless treasures and keep them there at my disposal, simply waiting to be fetched. In a climax of empowerment, I felt that even the monster Amnesia, with its utterly unpredictable form, could fit into that elastic container. And to serve as Ariadne’s thread or the trail of bread crumbs, to stop me getting lost, there was Style: Style was the very substance of the Plaza.

  I was beginning to recognize my surroundings, and reconstruct the circumstances that had taken me there in another time.

  I had been very young: three, or four . . . It was before I started school. My father would bring me on his bicycle, balanced on the crossbar, between his arms. A simple calculation revealed that this must have been during his time as council electrician, when he was in charge of the street lighting. Which meant that he would have been too busy for such outings with his son (still a new toy) except on Sundays, and specifically on Sunday mornings, because in the evenings he would have had to switch on the lights: there were no days off for them. Those earlier visits, then, had taken place on the same day of the week, at the same time of day. This repetition accentuated the Plaza’s eternal character; and it seemed highly significant that I had returned, for the first time, just when the Monument to the Mother was being inaugurated, since this was the first interference with the site’s artistic unity, although it was discreet: the statue was in a corner, hidden by a beautiful blue spruce . . .

  And why had my father gone there on Sunday mornings? One thing opened out into another (that’s the beauty of memory). By answering that question, I could specify the time more precisely: the Sundays that I was remembering had been in spring. Memory was bringing me infinitesimally closer to the present . . . My father came to collect the linden tree’s little flowers, those starry yellow clusters with which we used to fill a bag. I set off on one of the sidewalks, with its borders of blue and white paving stones arranged in a zigzag pattern, and felt that I could see myself, years before, in exactly the same place, trotting along behind my father, tottering on my chubby little leg
s, holding the bag, eager to help, as always . . . He wasn’t a tall man but he could reach the lower branches without needing the ladder, which he didn’t bring on those excursions. The lindens were small, almost miniature trees — I had since grown tall enough to reach the leaves myself — but on those first visits they must have seemed enormous.

  At the time, my father must have seemed enormous too, a giant. But a good giant: I followed him around, seeking his protection. Although his nerves were always on edge, I didn’t feel threatened by his angry outbursts, perhaps because they weren’t directed at me. We were still in our father-and-first-child “honeymoon.” Perhaps he had not yet dismissed the idea of having other children. Peronism was still in flux, still protean: it hadn’t yet settled into a definitive form. And I can’t deny that he was in an unusual position. He’d had the courage to marry — for love — a woman who wasn’t normal. And not only that, he had dared to procreate, to assume “the charge” of a child. Anything could have emerged from my mother’s womb: a monster, for example. Waiting through her pregnancy must have been a torment for him; maybe that was what ruined his nerves. I turned out to be normal, but risking it a second time, playing the genetic lottery again, with such risky numbers, would have renewed his fears. It was a difficult decision. Also, given my tender age at the time when he was bringing me to the Plaza, my normality would still have been subject to confirmation. Babies, by their very nature, are in a sense little monsters; I might have turned out to be a dwarf or to have needed spectacles . . . Perhaps that was why he took me out on the bike and kept me by his side whenever he wasn’t working: to observe me. I was human plasma, unpredictable and protean, like Peronism. Then the years went by, and I grew up normally, and the Revolución Libertadora put an end to the possibility of giving me a brother or a sister.

  All that seemed so far away, so different . . . What had happened? How could we have changed so much, if everything was still the same? It all seemed too much the same, in fact. I felt nostalgic for time itself, which the Plaza’s spatial stories made as unattainable as the sky. I was no longer the small child who had gone with his father to collect linden blossoms, and yet I still was. Something seemed to be within my grasp, and with the right kind of effort, I felt that I might be able to reach out and take hold of it, like a ripe fruit . . . So I set out to recover that old self.

  Copyright © 2003 by César Aira

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Chris Andrews

  Originally published by Beatriz Viterbo Editora, Argentina, as El tilo in 2003; published in conjunction with the Literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1404) in 2018

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Aira, César, 1949– author. | Andrews, Chris, 1962– translator.

  Title: The linden tree / César Aira ; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.

  Other titles: Tilo. English

  Description: First American paperback edition. | New York, N.Y. : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2018. | “A New Directions Paperbook Original.” | “Originally published in Argentina as El tilo by Beatriz Viterbo Editora” — Verso title page.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017028331 | ISBN 9780811219082 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Authors—Fiction. | Reminiscing—Fiction. | Childhood and youth—Fiction. | Autobiographical memory—Fiction. | Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ7798.1.I7 T5513 2018 | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028331

  eISBN: 9780811227469

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

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