by Cesar Aira
But in Patri’s dream the architectural analogy was developed a little further. In Africa there is a curious race of pygmies, the Mbutu, nomadic hunters without a chief or social hierarchies. They look after themselves, and everybody else, without dramas. Their communities are relatively small: twenty or thirty families. When they decide to set up camp, they choose a clearing in the jungle and the dwellings are arranged in a “ring,” which, according to the anthropologists, is typical of egalitarian societies. The huts form a circle with an empty center. But anthropologists are dreamers too, sometimes. How could this ring be visible except from a plane? Needless to say, the Mbutu pygmies don’t fly; if they were meant to fly, they would have been born with wings. Also it’s debatable whether or not the center is empty, since it’s occupied by the space that makes it a center. “Whoever speaks in the center is heard by all,” say the anthropologists, alluding involuntarily to dream ventriloquism. The huts are isotopic shells, in which an opening can be made anywhere. The Mbutu make just one: a door, facing the neighbors they like best. Say the lady of the house is cross with her neighbor for some reason or other. No problem; they block up the door and open another one, facing the neighbors on the other side. The researchers who have observed this system fail to draw the logical conclusion: the house of a truly sociable Mbutu would be all doors, and so not a house at all; conversely, a finished and complete construction presupposes hostility.
A contrasting example: the Bushmen. They too are nomadic and their camps are arranged in a “ring”. Except that there is something in the middle of their ring. They place their little houses around a tree; under the tree the chief of the group builds his hut; at the door of the hut the chief lights a fire. What was lacking from the Mbutu camp was not a center, but its symbol. Providing a symbol engages a process of symbolic accumulation: the tree, the chief, the fire.... Why not a rose, a stuffed giraffe, a sunken boat, a mosquito that happened to alight on the earlobe of a Nazi spy, a downpour, or a replica of the Victory of Samothrace?
The little Bushmen are comical, but it’s the same with the extremely serious Zulu, who are formidable hunters and warriors. Those who have had the misfortune of facing them in battle (for example, the son of the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugenia de Montijo) can confirm that they form a semi-circle, “enveloping” the enemy troops before annihilating them. This is a reproduction of the method they use for hunting. And their camps are arranged in the same way: a semi-circle of huts. When the method is transposed from hunting to war, there is a transition from the real to the symbolic, without any loss of practical efficacy. It’s not that one level replaces the other; the levels can coexist, and a Zulu might even try hunting a tasty zebra with a technique tried and tested on the imperial prince. The architecture of the camp, whatever its degree of realization (interpretations and intentions must be taken into account as well as actual huts), constitutes a return to the real, because life is real, and the Zulu have to live, as well as hunting and making war. But they return involuntarily, as it were, without any plan, the way dreams unfold. The centre of the village is a void elegantly furnished with a bloody suction.
The architectural key to the built / unbuilt opposition, which analogies fail to capture, is the flight of time toward space. And dreaming is that flight. (So it wasn’t a pure coincidence that Patri’s dream was about architecture). Except in fables, people sleep in houses. Even if the houses haven’t yet been built. And therein, perhaps, lies the origin, the original cell, of the sedentary life. While habits, whether sedentary or nomadic, are made of time, dreams are time-free. Dreams are pure space, the species arrayed in eternity. That exclusivity is what makes architecture an art. Beyond this point, the timeless mental material of the unbuilt is detached from the field of possibility, ceases to be the personal failure of an architect whose more daring projects stalled for want of financial backing, and becomes absolute. Even the mixture of the built and the unbuilt becomes absolute. The construction at whose summit Patri was sleeping was a real model of that mixture, by virtue of its incomplete state and everything the decorators were still planning to do. It was a step away from the absolute, waiting only for bricks, mortar and metal to expel time from its atomic matrix in a fluid maneuver. That was the purpose of the girl’s dream.
Now if the unbuilt, or the mixture in which it participates, can be considered as a “mental” phenomenon, like dreaming or the general play of intentions, the mind, in turn, can be seen to depend on the phenomenon of the unbuilt, of which architecture is the exemplary manifestation.
There are societies in which the unbuilt dominates almost entirely: for example, among the Australian Aborigines, those “provincial spinsters” in the words of Lévi-Strauss. Instead of building, the Australians concentrate on thinking and dreaming the landscape in which they live, until by multiplying their stories they transform it into a complete and significant “construction.” The process is not as exotic as it seems. It happens every day in the western world: it’s the same as the “mental city,” Joyce’s Dublin, for instance. Which leads one to wonder whether unbuilt architecture might not, in fact, be literature. In urbanized societies, city planning doubles architecture, robbing its symbolic function. If, in nomadic societies, the arrangement of the camp performed a function that was not performed by the construction of houses, that is, symbolizing society, in the planning of large contemporary cities, where the buildings require the convergence of skills and know-how from a great range of social sectors, urban planning repeats a function already satisfactorily performed, and ends up having no function of it own (or rather it symbolizes the policing of society). But perhaps it would be better to say that it leaves a “symbolic vacancy,” an energy unemployed by any current necessity. The Nias come to mind with their twin deities, Lowalani, who represents positive forces, and his enemy, Latura Dano, god of the negative. According to the Nias, the world is layered, made up of nine superposed planes, on the highest of which resides Lowanlani, sleeping with his consort, a nameless goddess (let’s call her Patri), who is a kind of mediator. The planning of the Nia villages “represents” this construction, horizontally of course, the high, for example, corresponding to the right-hand side, and the low to the left, or whatever. Now the condominiums, the skyscrapers that the Nias haven’t built (negating the negation of the unbuilt, as it were), would represent symbolism itself. From which it could be deduced that for every building there is a corresponding non-building. On the same principle, the natives of Madagascar make pretty wooden models of multi-story houses, crammed with little people and animals, which are used as toys. If those models represent anything, it is “the children’s house,” another form of the unbuilt.
But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the “dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These “intellectual dandies,” these “spinsters,” these curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.
The dreamtime, as giver of meaning or guarantor of th
e stability of meanings, is the equivalent of language. But why did the Australian Aborigines need an equivalent? Didn’t they already have languages? Maybe they also wanted a hieroglyphic script, like the Egyptians, and they made it from the ground under their feet.
The elements of Australian geography are as simple as they are effective: the point and the line, that’s it. As the Aborigines proceed over plains and through forests, the point and the line are represented by the halt and the journey. With a line and a point, a line that passes through many points in the course of a year, frequently changing direction, they trace out a vast drawing, the representation of destiny. But there is something very special going on here: via the point, the precise point in space, the nomads can pass through to the other side, like a dressmaker’s pin or needle, through to the side of dreaming, which changes the nature of the line: the hunting or gathering route becomes a mythic itinerary. Which adds a third dimension to the drawing of destiny. But the passage through the point is happening all the time, since no point is specially privileged (not even waterholes—contrary to the anthropologists’ initial assumptions—although they serve as models for the points of passage, which can, by rights, be found anywhere, at any point along the line), so the food-gathering route is always taking on a mythical significance and vice versa. There is something dreamlike about the points that provide a view of the other side, but they belong not so much to the dreamtime as to dream work. The nomads enter the dreamtime not by setting off on some extraordinary, dangerous voyage, but through their everyday, ambulatory movement.
To symbolize the point, the Australian Aborigines have a “sacred post” (a rough translation, of course, because it’s not sacred in the western sense), which they carry with them and drive into the ground when they camp each night, at a slight angle, like the tower of Pisa, to indicate the direction they will take the next day. This post is decorated with carvings, which allude to the mythic itinerary, and in this way it combines the two contrasting motifs of the halt (signaled by the place where the post has been driven into the ground) and the itinerary (doubly represented by its inclination and the carvings, since the itinerary has two aspects, relating to food-gathering and to myth, while the point is single in its nature—it is always a point of passage.)
But Patri’s dream went further, higher, taking in different systems, which were increasingly original and strange. In some cases the construction of the landscape, common to a great variety of carefree indigenous peoples, was simplified to the extreme. For example by certain Polynesian islanders, whose landscape consists entirely of those specks of earth or coral emerging from the sea, which seem to be adrift.... They have a simple fix for this, using two lines that are not so much imaginary as utilitarian: one from the island down to the bottom of the sea, like an anchor, the other up to a star at the zenith, to stop the island from sinking.
And even the Polynesian system is complicated compared to some others, especially virtual systems, which start from humanity and proceed toward thought—an itinerary which, in turn, is doubled with dreaming.
After non-building comes its logical antecedent, building. As a real practice, building is decoration. In architecture, decoration is always an expansion, expanding anything and everything, until only the process of expansion remains. In agricultural societies, the accumulation of goods and the management of social inequalities gives building the function of creating an “artificial world,” in which the privileged are confined by their status, whatever it may be (even the status of pariah). At which point architecture (paradoxically) becomes “real”; and if, until then, the world—the landscape or the territory—had been humanity’s artistic miniature, its little dream-lantern, now the opposite phase begins, the phase of expansion, which gives rise to decoration, which is everything.
The development of “real” architecture, that is, of the decorative elements, is directly linked to the possibility of accumulating provisions for the workers or the slaves who do the building, and don’t have time to go hunting or gathering food. Such accumulations result in inequalities. There is a mechanism for reducing excessive accumulation, and regulating wealth (without regulation there would be no wealth): potlatch, the festivity that involves squandering food and drink and other sorts of goods in a brief, crazy splurge, and so reducing the stocks to a satisfactory level. By staging a grand and brilliant spectacle, comparable to a temporary or perishable work of art, the festivity performs the function of attracting the greatest possible quantity of people. The size of the audience on the day is crucial, since this artistic manifestation will not endure in time. Art, in all its forms, has an inherent economy, and this case is no exception.
The potlatch, of course, belongs to the prehistory, or the genealogy, of festivities and partying, because with the passage of time, an alternative must arise at some point: instead of more and more people being present, a subtler form of sociability limits attendance to special people, the people that matter. The logical conclusion of this process is the single-person party, and the best model for that is dreaming.
In Patri’s dream the building on the Calle José Bonifacio was under construction. Standing still yet seized by an interior, interstitial movement. Suddenly a wind, a typical dream-wind, so typical that dreams might be said to consist of it, arose and blew the building apart, reducing it to little cubes the size of dice. This was the transition to the world of cartoons. The building was reconstructed somewhere else, in another form, its atoms recombined. Then it disintegrated again, the wind scattering its particles, one of which came to rest on Patri’s open eye, and in its microscopic interior, an entire house was visible, with all its rooms and furniture, its candelabras, carpets, glassware, and the little golden mill that spins in the wind from the stars.
Two hours after going down, Elisa Vicuña came back up the stairs, laden with bags full of shopping. The heat had not eased off in the least; on the contrary. It was the time of day when one suspects the climate of malevolence. She climbed the last flights of stairs on her own, because Juan Sebastián and Blanca Isabel went to get the toy cars they had left behind and resumed their games; not that they really wanted to go on playing, but they were still scared that their mother would put them to bed. There was no danger of that any more, because the hour of the siesta had passed, but just in case, and out of sheer willfulness, they ran away. They had been to an ice-cream shop with air conditioning, where they had stayed a fair while. The cool interlude had refreshed them a bit, but the contrast when they came out made the persistence of the heat all the more terrible. Elisa saw that her eldest daughter was asleep. She didn’t wake her up. She went to the kitchen, and took the shopping out of the bags, but didn’t put anything in the fridge, because they didn’t have a fridge. Then she started washing. They didn’t have a washing machine either, but that didn’t bother her too much, although she would have liked one. In fact she enjoyed washing, and spent quite a lot on soaps and special products, as well as the bleach. Oddly, for someone who was so fond of this pastime, her hands were not ruined. So what if those two brats didn’t want to sleep. She hadn’t taken a siesta today either; she didn’t feel like it. For various reasons, the washing had built up. She filled the two washbowls and the two plastic buckets, and began to make a mixture of various products, which she always finished off with a healthy squirt of bleach. She started scrubbing some of the kids’ little T-shirts. She felt depressed, because of the heat, because of all the work she had done already that day, and what rem
ained to do, because of the end of the year, and her husband, and so on, and so on. It wasn’t a momentary low. She was going through a period of depression due mainly to the fact that they hadn’t moved, as she had hoped, or rather planned. Her husband had been tempted by the special bonus they had promised him if he stayed until the building was finished. By now, she thought, she should have been in the new place. Not that it was better, but she had got used to the idea, and no one likes having to give up an idea, even, or especially, if it doesn’t have have any intrinsic merit. She would buy something with the extra money, but it wouldn’t be the same: money and new things, they were explicable, whereas her idea of moving before the end of the year was beyond explanation; it belonged to the world of whim. Anyway, it was Raúl’s decision, and today he would get to hit the booze twice. He often scored a double: lunch and dinner. What a liver he must have! thought his wife. It’s incredible, it must be made of iron. Drunks were tougher all round, or in a different way from normal people; she liked the feeling of being protected by that superhuman vigor. What other protection did she have? She liked a lot of things about her husband and had no desire to complain about him, not even in the privacy of her ruminations. For example, she couldn’t imagine herself married to a sober man.
As she put some of Patri’s clothes into the wash, Elisa’s thoughts turned to her daughter: now she was a more serious worry. Elisa had never known such a mixed-up girl. No one could say how she would turn out, least of all her mother. It was partly her age of course, but even so, she was a particularly worrying case. She never stuck at anything; she had no perseverance, as if she didn’t really know what she liked. If only she would fall in love! Proceeding mechanically through the washing, Elisa set out the problem point by point. Like many Chileans, she had the secret and inoffensive habit of addressing long, casuistic explanations to an imaginary interlocutor, or rather a real but physically absent person. In her case it was a friend she hadn’t seen for years, not since she had come to Buenos Aires, even longer, in fact. Nevertheless, it was to this friend that she explained the case of her eldest daughter. Look, she didn’t even stick with the karate; that was my husband’s bright idea, typical! But at least it was something. And those mother-of-pearl buttons she used to polish so nicely, she gave that up too, even sooner. I can’t really blame her for that, though, because we moved here. OK. But what about school? Same again: she refused to sit the equivalence tests. She wanted to be an electrician. Crazy! I’d have as much hope of doing that. As Elisa explained to her absent friend, the fundamental problem and the source of all the others, was Patri’s frivolity. Was there ever a more frivolous girl in the world? It was hard to imagine. She didn’t take serious things seriously because she was always serious about something else. She was a little dreamer, living in a looking-glass world. Not that she wasn’t intelligent; but her frivolity made her come across as silly. She had talent, and plenty of it. She was a talented seamstress, for a start. She could have been earning a living already from her sewing, if she’d wanted to. There was some hope, then, for the future, faint though it was, because sewing was a frivolous occupation. All that mattered was the result, not the intentions, which could be supremely whimsical. And Patri’s whims were limitless. For example, six years ago, when Blanca Isabel was born, she had prevailed against Elisa and insisted on choosing the baby’s name. It was the name of a famous fashion designer: an Argentinean woman, but the daughter of a Chilean, who in turn was the daughter of a woman who had been the godmother of Raúl Viñas’s grandfather. Elisa’s heart had been set on baptizing the child Maruxa Jacqueline, a desire she had partially satisfied later on, with her youngest girl.
