by Cesar Aira
Part II
The Conference
I
IN ORDER TO MAKE myself understood, the following will need to be very clear and very detailed, even at the expense of literary elegance. Though not too profuse with details, for such an accretion can obfuscate the comprehension of the whole; moreover, and as I previously stated, I must monitor the length. In part due to the requisites of clarity (poetic fog horrifies me), and in part to my natural preference for an orderly exposition of the material, I deem it most appropriate to begin at the beginning. Not, however, at the beginning of this story but rather at the beginning of the previous one, the beginning that made it possible for there to be a story at all. Which in turn requires me to switch levels and begin with the Fable that provides the tale’s logic. I will then have to do a “translation,” which, if carried out in full, would take more pages than I have assigned as the maximum number for this book; thus I will “translate” only when necessary; all other fragments of the Fable will remain in the original language; and though I am aware that this might affect its credibility, I believe it to be the preferred solution. By way of supplemental warning, I would like to add that the Fable in question takes its logic from a prior Fable, on yet another level of discourse; similarly on the other end, the story provides the immanent logic to another story, thus ad infinitum. And (in conclusion) I have filled these plots with contents that have between them a relationship of only approximate equivalencies, not meanings.
So, once upon a time . . . an Argentinean scientist conducted experiments in the cloning of cells, organs, and limbs, and achieved the ability to reproduce, at will, whole individuals in indefinite quantities. First, he worked with insects, then higher animals, and finally human beings. His success did not vary, though as he approached human beings the nature of the clones subtly changed; they became non-similar clones. He overcame his disappointment with this variation by telling himself that in the final analysis the perception of similarity is quite subjective and always questionable. He had no doubt, however, that his clones were genuine, legions of Ones whose numbers he could multiply as often as he wished.
At this point he reached an impasse and found himself unable to proceed toward his final goal, which was nothing less than world domination. In this respect he was the typical Mad Scientist of the comic books. He was incapable of setting a more modest goal for himself; at his level, it simply wouldn’t have been worth his while. He then discovered that to achieve this final goal, his armies of clones (virtual, in the meantime, because for practical reasons he had created only a few samples) were utterly useless.
In a certain sense he had become a prisoner of his own success, according to the classic depiction of the Mad Scientist, who, in the course of the adventure itself, in the politics of the action, always ends up defeated, no matter how great his previous achievements in the field of science have been. Fortunately for him, he was not truly mad — his thirst for power had not blinded him; around the edges he retained enough lucidity to change the direction of his experiments. This was possible due to the material conditions under which he carried them out: the precarious conditions of a do-it-yourself amateur, making do with cardboard boxes and bottles, with recycled toys and bargain basement made-in-China retorts. He had set up his laboratory in the tiny servant’s room in his old apartment; as he had no morgue, he let his human clones roam the streets of the neighborhood. Poverty, which had caused him so much frustration, revealed its positive aspect when he saw that he could only achieve his goals by radically transforming his methods, something he could do without any adverse effect on his investments or installations, which either didn’t exist or were worth nothing at all.
The problem, and the solution, were the following: he could create a human being from a single cell, a being that was identical in body and soul to the specimen from which the cell was taken. One or many, as many as he wished. Up to this point, everything was okay. The only difficulty, paradoxical if you wish, is that these creatures had to be at his mercy. He could not be at their mercy. They could obey him, but he couldn’t obey them; he saw no reason to do so: they were beings with no prestige, no ideas, no originality. This circumstance thwarted all further action, for he still had to carry the burden of the initiative. And what could he do, even as the general in charge of countless legions, to achieve his ultimate goal of world domination? Declare war? Launch an assault against those in power? It would be his to lose. He didn’t even have weapons, nor did he know how to acquire them; weapons could not be reproduced through cloning; cloning worked only on living organic material; thus, life was the only element he could count on. And the mere multiplication of life cannot be considered a weapon, at least not under his conditions, through cloning. The miracle of the spontaneous creation of an additional nervous system was cancelled out by stripping it, from the outset, of the ability to give orders, and with that, to create.
It was on this point that our Mad Scientist most differed from the stereotype of the Mad Scientist, who would typically dig in his heels with self-destructive resolve in order to maintain the central role of his own intellect. Ours reached the conclusion that he could only manage to take a “leap forward” from his current stage if he found a way to get out from the middle, if his intellect could be placed at the service of another intellect, his power at the service of another greater power . . . if his will deteriorated within a system of external gravitations. Therein lay his unparalleled originality (as far as Mad Scientists go): in recognizing that “another” idea is always more efficient than “an” idea, by the mere virtue of being an-other. And an idea does not get enriched through expansion or multiplication (clones) but rather by passing through another brain.
So, what to do? The obvious solution was to clone a superior man . . . Though choosing which one was not a simple matter. Superiority is a relative condition and eminently subject to disagreement. Above all, it is not easy to decide from one’s own point of view, which is the only point of view at one’s disposition. And the adoption of objective criteria can be deceptive; be that as it may, he had no choice but to adopt some kind of objective criteria, which he would then need to refine. In the first instance, he had to disregard statistical appearances, such as would predominate in a survey, which would skew the sample toward those at the top of the visible pyramid of power: heads of state, business magnates, generals . . . No. Just thinking about this put a smile on his lips, the same smile he could well imagine appearing on the lips of those who wielded true power upon hearing those words. Because life experience had taught him that, say what you will, real power — which makes one smile with disdain at apparent power — resided in a different kind of person whose central and defining acquisition was high culture: Philosophy, History, Literature, the Classics. The self-proclaimed stand-ins from popular culture and advanced technology, and those who had accumulated enormous fortunes through financial manipulation, were ineffectual shams. In fact, high culture’s disguise as something old fashioned and out-of-date was the perfect strategy to disorient the unsuspecting masses. This is why high culture continued to be the almost exclusive privilege of the upper classes. But the Mad Scientist wasn’t even thinking of cloning a member of that class. Precisely because they were so fully guaranteed the exercise of definitive and ultimate power, and because this guarantee lasted throughout all successive generations, they didn’t suit his purposes. Then he thought of resorting
to a great criminal, but this was a romantic notion, compelling only for its Nietzschean resonance, and at its core, absurd.
Finally, he decided on what was simplest and most effective: a Celebrity. A recognized and celebrated Genius. To clone a genius! This was the decisive step. This would set him firmly on the road to world domination (because, among other reasons, he’d already covered half of it). He felt the excitement of a momentous moment. Beyond this decision, he had no need to make plans or harbor hopes, for everything would be placed, “invested,” in the Great Man, who would take charge because he was superior. As for the scientist, he would remain free from all responsibility — other than his role as the bootlicker, the heinous clown — and his own incompetence, his poverty and his blunders, would no longer matter; on the contrary, they would become his trump cards.
He chose his genius carefully, or better said, he didn’t need to choose him because fate placed him in his path, within reach: the most unassailable and undisputed genius there could ever be; his level of respectability touched on the transcendent. This was his natural target, and he set to work without further delay.
To say that he had him “within reach” is an exaggeration; in our celebrity culture, celebrities live isolated behind impregnable walls of privacy and move around inside invisible fortresses nobody can breach. But the same opportunity that had called him to his attention also brought him more or less close by . . . He didn’t need to be too close. All he needed was one cell from his body, any cell, for each one contains the information necessary to clone the entire individual. Unwilling to trust fate to afford him the opportunity to obtain a hair or a nail trimming or a flake of skin, he employed one of his most trusted creatures, a small wasp reduced to the size of a period and loaded from birth with the identifying data of the aforementioned Genius; he sent her on her secret mission at noon under conditions of certain proximity (the wasp has a very short flight range). He trusted her blindly for he knew her to be at the mercy of the infallible force of instinct, of never-erring Nature. And she did not disappoint him: ten minutes later she returned, carrying the cell on her feet . . . He immediately placed it on the slide of his pocket microscope and became ecstatic. The strength of his strategy was confirmed: it was a gorgeous cell, deep, filled with languages, iridescent, a limpid blue with transparent highlights. He’d never seen such a cell, it almost didn’t seem human. He placed it in the portable cloning machine he had brought with him, called a taxi, told the driver to take him to the highest plateau in the vicinity, continued from there on foot for a few hours, and when he had reached windswept heights where he was gasping for breath, he looked around for a remote spot to leave the machine. Incubation on a mountain peak was not a poetic detail: the specific conditions of pressure and temperature at these altitudes were what the process required: to reproduce them artificially he would need to be in his modest laboratory, from which he was separated by thousands of miles, and he feared the cell would not survive the rigors of the journey, or would lose its vitality. He left it there and climbed down. Now all he could do was wait . . .
Here I must attempt a first and partial translation. The “Mad Scientist” is, of course, me. The identification of the Genius may end up being more problematic, but it’s not worth wasting time with conjectures: it is Carlos Fuentes. If I agreed to go to that conference in Mérida it was only after I had confirmation that he would attend; I needed to get close enough so that my cloned wasp could take a cell from him. It was a unique opportunity to gain access to him for my scientific manipulations. They served him to me on a platter, and I didn’t even have to spend money on an airplane ticket, which I wouldn’t have been able to afford, given how bad things had been lately. Or how they had been before the Macuto Line episode. I had had a terrible year, without work, a result of the seriousness of the economic crisis, which especially affected publishing. In spite of this, I had not interrupted my experiments, because at the level on which I was working, I didn’t need money. In addition to suiting to a tee the pursuit of my secret goals, this invitation to the conference gave me the opportunity to spend a week in the tropics and take a vacation; rest, recuperate, and refresh myself after a year of constant worries.
Upon my return to the hotel, the excitement of the past few hours reached its anticlimax. The first part of the operation, the most demanding part for me, was over: I had obtained a cell from Carlos Fuentes, I had placed it inside the cloning machine, and I had left the machine to operate under optimum conditions. If you add to this the fact that the previous day I had solved the secular enigma of the Macuto Line, I could feel momentarily satisfied and think about other things. I had a few days to do just that. Cloning a living being is not like blowing glass. It happens on its own, but it takes time. Even though the process is prodigiously accelerated, it requires almost a week, according to the human calendar, for it must reconstruct on a small scale the entire geology of the evolution of life.
All I could do was wait. In the meantime, I had to figure out how to spend my time. As I had no intention of attending the tedious sessions of the conference, I bought a bathing suit and, beginning the following day, I spent mornings and afternoons at the swimming pool.
II
At the swimming pool, I focused all my efforts on one goal: to reduce my mental hyperactivity. To let myself be, naked under the sun. To create internal silence. I have pursued this goal through all of life’s twists and turns, almost like an idée fixe. This is the small and alarming idea that stands out in the midst of all other ideas and raises the volume of psychic noise, which is already quite considerable. Hyperactivity has become my brain’s normal way of being. It’s always been like that, to tell the truth, at least since my adolescence, and I’ve learned about the more normal way most other people are — hesitant and half-empty — through reading, observation, deduction, and conjecture. And because, on a few occasions, for a few seconds, I have had that experience. My readings in Eastern psychic techniques, and even those stupid articles about “meditation” that often appear in women’s magazines, have taught me that there is one further step: an empty mind, the complete or almost complete lack of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex, a blackout, rest. And if at one time, with my characteristic ambitiousness, I, too, wished to achieve that, and practiced all the recommended exercises with innocent trust, I finally grew convinced that I was wasting my time. It wasn’t for me. First, I would have to descend from my peaks of frenzy, take hold of the reins, and mollify the runaway beast of my thoughts, force it to slow to a normal pace; only then would I have a chance to glimpse those Eastern worlds of spiritual serenity.
I have often asked myself how I got into this situation, what happened during my formative years that increased the speed of my mental flow so excessively and made it stick there. I have also asked myself (what haven’t I asked myself?) what the exact measure of that speed is, for the very concept of “mental hyperactivity” is approximate and must contain gradations.
To the first question, regarding the history of my malady, I have responded for better or for worse with a small and private “creation myth,” whose modulations have been all the novels I have written. I would be hard put to spell this out in the abstract because the myths’ variations are not specific “examples” of a general form, in the same way that specific thoughts that are always flashing through my head like lightning are not case studies or examples of a type of thought.
That myth of
the ideal myriads, that little drama without characters or plot, would be shaped like a valve. Or, in less technical terms, it would have the characteristic Baudelaire called “irreversibility.” A formulated thought does not pass back through the same Caudine forks of its birth, does not return to the nothingness from which it came. Which explains not only the fierce overcrowding but also a quite visible feature of my personality: my bewilderment, my imprudence, my frivolity. The withdrawal of an idea to the conditions of its production is the necessary condition for its seriousness.
In my case, nothing returns, everything races forward, savagely being pushed from behind by what keeps coming through that accursed valve. This image, brought to its peak of maturation in my vertiginous reflections, revealed to me the path to the solution, which I forcefully put into practice whenever I have time and feel like it. The solution is none other than the greatly overused (by me) “escape forward.” Since turning back is off limits: Forward! To the bitter end! Running, flying, gliding, using up all the possibilities, the conquest of tranquility through the din of the battlefield. The vehicle is language. What else? Because the valve is language. Therein lay the root of the problem. Which doesn’t mean that once in a while, such as during those sessions at the pool, I didn’t attempt a more conventional method, by relaxing, by trying to forget everything, by taking a short vacation.
But I have no illusions: there’s something phony about this effort because I don’t believe I’ll ever renounce my old and beloved cerebral hyperactivity, which, in the end, is what I am. Despite all our plans to change, we never voluntarily do so at the core, in our essence, which is usually where we find the knot of our worst defects. I could change it — and I surely would have already — if it were a visible defect, like a limp or acne; but it isn’t. The rest of the world has no inkling of the mental whirlwinds swirling under my impassive facade, except, perhaps, through the amplification of that impassivity, or through certain digressions I engage in and abandon without warning. Or perhaps, for a superhuman literary critic, through my relationship with language. My cerebral hyperactivity makes itself manifest inside me (and language is my bridge to the exterior) with rhetorical or quasi-rhetorical mechanisms. These then get distorted in a very peculiar fashion. Take metaphor, for example: everything is a metaphor in the hyperkinetic microscope of my psyche, everything is instead of something else . . . But you cannot extract yourself unscathed from the whole: the whole creates a system of pressures that distorts the metaphors, moving their parts around between metaphors, thereby establishing a continuum.
