Ghosts

by Cesar Aira

  They weren’t on the fifth floor either, as she was able to verify (or so she thought), by checking from the front to the back, room by room. The children weren’t there, but the other characters, those bothersome ghosts, were legion. They were always around at that time. To see them, you just had to go and look. Although they kept their distance, with an air of unaccountable haughtiness. For some mysterious reason, they had started shouting, bursting into thunderous peals of laughter that shook the sky. Patri wouldn’t have paid them any more attention than usual, if not for two rather particular circumstances. The first was that there weren’t just two or three or four ghosts, as one might have expected, given their characteristic and constitutive rarity, but a veritable multitude, appearing here and there, then moving away, laughing and shouting all the while like exploding balloons. The second circumstance was even more remarkable: they were looking at her. Normally they didn’t look; they didn’t seem to pay attention to anything in particular, or even to have attention. They were like that now too, except that they seemed to be making an exception for her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious, senseless amusement. She didn’t take offence, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a flying puppet show, an out-of-place, unseemly kind of theater. She had seen naked men before, of course (although not many); she didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible about it, since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the ambivalent impression. She had occasionally heard them speak, and wondered about it afterward, for a while. It seemed easy enough to take them by surprise, to slip past behind them. But perhaps it wasn’t so easy.

  She leant out over the front balcony and looked down at the empty street. A car whizzed past. She went through the apartment, searching for the children, until she reached the back, and looked down from there as well. The sun was beating in; it was an oven. She thought she saw a body falling, even faster than they normally do, the naked body of a ghost, covered with fine, white dust. It might have been an optical illusion, but she knew it wasn’t when she heard another volley of guffaws, a great choral outburst of laughter so loud it was almost desperate. When she turned back toward the stairs, they were there again, or had just appeared, some swinging back and forth stupidly, like garlands, others perfectly balanced—they all were, in fact, it was just that they were using different methods. A quick movement behind her and a touch that felt particularly real made her swing around suddenly. It was Blanca Isabel, looking at her with a fading surprise. She was a pretty girl, an exception in the family, lively, and very intelligent according to her parents. Although she was startled and must have guessed why her sister had come downstairs, a smile was hovering around her lips: she thought she had caught Patri peeking at a forbidden sight. She looked as if she were about to start humming. Patri didn’t feel that she had been “peeking” at the ghost’s genitalia, not at all. Their laughter proved her innocence. “Now we’re going to take a nap,” Patri said energetically, although she too was disconcerted. It was a bad tactic, because Blanca Isabel didn’t feel like a nap, and ran away. She reached the stairs before Patri, and started going down, whispering something to the others, who must have been nearby. Patri knew she had to hurry if she wanted to catch them, but she was half-hearted about it. It was too hot, and she was tired. So she listened, helplessly, as they scattered. Nevertheless her momentum carried her to the stairwell. Juan Sebastián was looking up at her from the next landing, ready to go down to the third floor. “Let’s go,” she said, “or Mom will come and get you.” “Why?” he replied. Children always ask why. “Because you have to take a nap.” “I don’t know how. How do you do it?” “Where are the others?” “How should I know?” Patri started going down and the boy took off. He was already down on the next floor. She’d be able to corner him eventually, if he went all the way down. But the rascal knew hiding places with two escape routes, so the chase could go on forever. It was no good. She raised her voice again hoping to scare him into submission. She was irritated and couldn’t understand why he had to run away. She wasn’t going any further. What a stupid, childish thing to be doing, chasing kids around at siesta time! If they didn’t want to sleep, why should they? It made no difference to her, or to their health, why would it? But since she had come down to the fourth floor, she could fetch the baby girl, at least.

  Luckily for her, little Ernesto was there, looking at her with his beautiful big, dark eyes. Hi, he said, as if hiding something. There was a wet patch on the wall, at a height that indicated clearly what had happened. The children were forbidden to urinate anywhere inside the building, but they did it anyway. She shook her head disapprovingly. I took out my weenie and did it, said the boy. I know how it works, but your dad’s going to tell you off. My dad did it too. Here? she asked him. He looked around, mildly perplexed. He seemed to mean two things: first, “all the floors look the same to me” and, second, “they all take out their weenies.” He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle, docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that naïve) so much as intrigue her. She’d seen the gangs of ghosts shaking their sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the edge.

  You get to bed, or Mom’s going to smack you, she said. Compliantly, half-asleep, Ernesto headed for the stairs. Where’s Jacqueline, she asked? The two youngest children were never far apart. He shrugged his shoulders. Patri called her. I’m going, she said finally. She followed the little boy up the stairs. When she was half way up, Blanca Isabel appeared behind her, with the baby girl in her arms, intending to move her to a safe place on the third floor. Patri turned around and started back down. The movement was enough to make Blanca Isabel deposit her sister and take off alone, jumping down the stairs three at a time. Jacqueline burst into tears. As soon as Patri picked her up, she calmed down. She put her arms around Patri’s neck and rested her head on her shoulder. She weighed nothing at all. Amazingly, she was still the size of a doll at the age of two. But, in fact, it was like that with all children. They might be relatively big or small for their age, but, compared to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream. As Ernesto had said a moment ago: the weenie. That must be why children were always playing with scaled-down models of things: cars, houses, people. A miniature theater, with its doors opening and closing, over and over again. The previous night, on television, they had seen The Kiss’n Cuddle Love Show, in which two puppets, a frog and a bear recited the names of the birthday boys and girls, and those who had written in. They never missed the show, although they had never written in themselves. Anyway, the puppets appeared on a tiny scene, with two window shutters instead of a curtain, which opened when their act began, and closed again at the end. In the course of normal distracted viewing, Patri had assumed that the shutters opened on their own,
as they seemed to do, or were pushed from the inside, or something like that. But last night a problem with the lighting or the general clumsiness of the production had allowed her to see that the white shutters were opened by hands in white gloves, which were supposed to be invisible. The children didn’t realize, but she did. Her mother noticed too, and although they said nothing, both she and Patri thought of the ghosts. They said nothing because it wasn’t worth the effort of opening their mouths. But now, in retrospect, Patri felt that the incident had a sexual significance, or connotations at least.

  She asked Ernesto what game they had been playing. We were pretending that the people who came this morning were our parents. She sighed in disapproval. Appalling! That must have been the older two children; they were always coming up with ideas like that, the little devils.

  The third floor was the same, yet different; it wrapped the three of them in a fresh layer of silence. They say that silence increases with height, but Patri, who lived at altitude most of the time, wasn’t so sure about that. Anyway, if it was true, and if there was a gradual increase, the difference between one floor and the next should have been perceptible, at least for someone with a sensitive enough ear, a musician, for example, listening in reverse, as it were. As she went from the fourth to the fifth floor, she felt the silence thicken, but that didn’t prove anything, because the data of reality, as she had observed in the past, were produced by chance, or rather by an inextricable accumulation of chances. Also, since it’s well known that sounds rise (which must be because “they’re lighter than air,” as the saying goes, or a lighter kind of air), you should hear more noise as you go up; it should be quiet on the ground. True, sounds fade progressively as they rise, because height is a kind of distance. But under normal circumstances, human beings are at or near ground level. If a man were placed at a great height, and he looked down, somewhere near halfway he would see two corresponding limits, floating like magnetized Cartesian divers: the limit of the sound as it passed into imperceptibility, and that of his own hearing range. But those divers.... men floating in the air.... she knew what that was about. And speaking of noise (and magnetism too, come to think of it), the most clamorous and disturbing noises she had heard in her months on the site had been made by cats. The neighborhood was populated by strays. Their survival and proliferation were favored by the gardens of the Theological University, the car bodies that the police left permanently parked all along in front of the station, the square a hundred yards away, the convent school’s enormous park (the size of a whole block) with its luxuriant foliage, and, above all, the empty buildings, each with its clientele of old witches who came twice a day to put out milk and hamburger steak. The way the cats howled was beyond belief. At first she had thought they were children gone crazy. But that wouldn’t have been so bad. The inhumanity of the cats’ screams gave them something extra. And their speed, because those sounds were produced in the course of races and escapes, as opposed to the karateka’s shout, which issues from a still body. (Patri had taken karate lessons in Chile, on the advice of her stepfather. For various reasons, including her innate distaste for perfection, she had neglected to sit the exam which would have given her a blue belt. Even though blue was her favorite color.) The astonishing activity of the cats, obscene as it was, reminded her of the ghosts, who manifested themselves as the opposite of obscenity, as a kind of innocence.

  In fact, they were manifesting themselves at that very moment. They were emerging from the light, from transparency: they were opaque, definitely opaque, but because of the whiteness of the cement dust, they were hard to distinguish from the light. Where could their covering have come from? It was true that everything was dusty on the building site, but the strange thing about the ghosts was how evenly covered they were with that white dust, every square inch of them. And there was quite a lot to cover because they were tall like Argentineans, and solidly built, even chubby. Although well proportioned in general, some of them, the majority in fact, had big bellies. Even their lips were powdered; even the soles of their feet! Only at odd moments, from certain points of view, could you see the foreskin at the tips of their penises parting to reveal a tiny circle of bright red, moist skin. It was the only touch of color on their bodies. Even birds fluttering around in ashes don’t achieve such a uniform result. Patri traversed the air through which they had flowed, unworried by the thought of her breath mixing with theirs. She was walking on the ground. What a destiny: unwittingly, unwillingly thrust into the midst of a nudist colony.

  Tired and annoyed, she paid them no attention. She was sleepy too; since she was barely out of childhood herself, she still needed quite a lot of sleep. She felt she had wasted time, but, on the other hand, it was time that was good for nothing except being wasted. That was in the nature of siesta-time. The mysterious men were watching her from a certain distance, but she couldn’t really be bothered returning their gaze. The laughter, at least, had dissipated. There was something aloof and severe about those insubstantial gangs. They were simply there.

  Elisa was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. What about the others? was the first thing she asked. Ernesto started to explain, but Patri shrugged her shoulders. I couldn’t catch them, she said. They got away. Mother and daughter were silently resigned. Elisa took the children inside. It’s so hot! said the boy, yielding to the truth. She put them in the bedroom, where their father was snoring. She didn’t even wash their feet; in a few seconds they were perfectly quiet. In the dining room, Patri saw the bags left out, and remembered that there was shopping to do. When Elisa came out of the bedroom, she offered to go and do it, with a list. No, said her mother, I have to do it myself this time, because I still haven’t worked out exactly what I’m going to buy; it’ll depend what’s there. No one made a fuss about meals in that family, as long as they were nutritious and tasty. On the way, Elisa added, I’ll look for the other two and take them along. That was a good idea. But then she said: Since they’re not going to sleep, I’ll take them for ice cream. Patri frowned as if to say: Well that’s a great way to punish them for misbehaving. She didn’t get any ice cream, even though she loved it. You lie down too, said her mother. I guess that’s what I’ll be doing, she replied. Elisa put on her shoes and picked up the bags. Back in a bit. See you, said Patri.

  Off she went. Patri removed the crochet rug with which she covered the sofa that was her bed. She pushed the chairs up against the table. She took off her dress and got under the sheet. It was uncomfortable, because of the heat, but it was the prudent thing to do, because that room was the entrance to the little apartment, and anyone could have come along. It was boiling hot. The silence had deepened and was almost complete, with a just a vague echo of cackling, which made her even sleepier. She shut her eyes straight away. And fell asleep.

  She dreamed of the building on top of which she was sleeping, not as it would be later on, not seeing it finished and inhabited, but as it was now, that is, under construction. It was a calm vision, devoid of troubling portents or inventions, almost a verification of the facts. But there is always a difference between dreams and reality, which becomes clearer as the superficial contrast diminishes. The difference in this case was reflected in the architecture, which is, in itself, a reciprocal mirroring of what has already been built and what will be built eventually. The all-important bridge between the two reflections was provided by a third term: the unbuilt.

  The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the rem
unerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all—which technological advances have exacerbated if anything—isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.

  In this sense all the arts have a literary basis, built into their history and their myths. Architecture is no exception. In advanced, or at least sedentary, civilizations, building requires the collaboration of various kinds of tradesmen: bricklayers, carpenters, painters, then electricians, plumbers, glaziers, and so on. In nomadic cultures, dwellings are made by a single person, almost always a woman. Architecture is still symbolic, of course, but its social significations are manifest in the arrangement of dwellings within the camp. The same thing happens in literature: in the composition of some works, the author becomes a whole society, by means of a kind of symbolic condensation, writing with the real or virtual collaboration of all the culture’s specialists, while others works are made by an individual, working alone like the nomadic woman, in which case society is signified by the arrangement of the writer’s books in relation to the books of others, their periodic appearance, and so on.