Birthday

by Cesar Aira

  Wells makes a gross error when he assumes that in the twenty-second century women will still be submitting to their husbands, unmarried girls will still be accompanied by chaperones, and so on. When it’s just a matter of projecting on the basis of a quantitative trend, it’s easy. So Wells imagines more populous cities, faster vehicles, taller buildings. But it doesn’t even occur to him that men might go out into the street without hats or sticks. Some things are unthinkable, and we don’t know what they are. Whatever the conditions that shape our thought, those conditions exist, and there is, by definition, no way to think outside them. This is the historical equivalent of “changing the subject” in everyday life.

  A perfectly easy and effective way of changing the subject is to change books: you finish one, you start another. How many books have I read in my life? I’ve lost count. It never occurred to me to make lists or keep a running total, but I realize now that I have always considered books in what could be called a quantitative light. It must be because, as discrete and tangible objects, they gave me a handle on the changing of the subject, making it countable from a certain point of view (although I never actually counted them). In a conversation, or in the course of a morning, thought twists and turns, flowing almost indivisibly, while books begin and end, and make up a clear and obvious series.

  I subscribe to the unoriginal theory that what makes a person unique and different from everyone else is a sum of particular experiences accumulated over the course of an existence. This is what makes each person precious and irreplaceable, as Nero implied when he said: “What a great artist the world is losing.” I don’t know why people have been so hard on him. Reading a book is, of course, an experience too, and the sum of books that a person has read makes him or her unique as a reader. One personal “library” is never quite the same as another. I suppose it could be, by an unlikely coincidence, if it contained just a few, predictable titles; but with each new book that is read, the probability of a match diminishes exponentially. And I’m safe, because I have read a great deal, in several languages, ranging over many ancient and modern literatures. Although I can’t claim to have set out to do this, it’s as if my eagerness to go on reading, at random, indiscriminately, one book after another, good and bad, was a way of ensuring that the “sum” finally produced by my experience as a reader would be absolutely unique and without equal. That uniqueness, on its own, ought to make me precious and irreplaceable, and give me the equivalent of superpowers, or one at least, of a highly specialized kind: something that no one else can do; and that’s enough for me.

  But this reasoning doesn’t really make much sense. If the idea is to obtain a certain “sum” and make myself unique (so that there will be a reason to lament my annihilation), there’s no need for thousands of books. Or anything, really, because that sum is automatically produced by the elementary combination of four or five givens, which made me unique right from the start. Child of W and X, born in place Y on day Z: that’s all you need. Of course this is the basic sum and not worth much, because every last blade of grass has one. But there are other sums, progressively acquired by work or luck, like decorations. They are all particularities, and for as long as I live, each moment of my existence will shower them upon me, countless and varied.

  Not that they are necessarily virtuous, as the decoration metaphor might suggest. In fact, the most obvious individualizers are almost always defects: tics, bad habits, vices, transgressions. But they can also be odd gaps in knowledge. How many distinguished fifty-year-old writers could there be who don’t know what makes the moon wax and wane? To accentuate the positive, it might be supposed that the bad exists for a good reason and without it things would be worse overall. The inexistence of anything, even crime, is an impoverishment. “Everything in life, even the performance of an autopsy, ends up producing some effect” (O. Lamborghini). Actually, I believe that the bad is more fertile than the good, because the good tends to produce satisfaction and complacency, while the bad generates uneasiness, which leads to the renewal of action. Action produces further errors, and the spiral of particularity spins off into the infinite. We all aspire to goodness, but because of the very conditions under which judgments of goodness are made, good people tend to resemble one another, and going too far in that direction would transform humanity into an undifferentiated and inert mass.

  Action, the daughter of negativity, turns the “sum” back on itself. There is a kind of payment, a “refunding of the sum.” To become unique and distinct is to prepare a testimony, for which our civilization has invented an ideal vehicle: art. Artists tend to be eccentric people, but I don’t think it’s because art has made them strange; rather their strangeness has led them to art. Or perhaps there is a reciprocal effect. In any case, this dialectic of debit and credit sums could resolve the fascinating aporias of Life and Work. Searching for the new and the strange in art is not the narcissistic task it might at first appear to be, because, for a start, it’s not a matter of searching but of having found.

  Of course, things don’t always turn out as intended; if they did, all works would be masterpieces, and artists would always be young. To demonstrate this, it would suffice to compare the two images of my personal sum: what I would like to be and what I am.

  V

  One of my frustrated aspirations is to dress impeccably. It’s something I have never achieved or even approximated. I have always been messy, awkward, inelegant: too warmly dressed in summer, shivering in winter.

  It’s one of the many things I keep putting off for when I get rich; not that I expect to, on the contrary.

  Everything I said before about the sum was based on the mistaken postulation of a static figure, without taking the movement of History into account. The sum is in flux, never fixed. That’s why you can never capitalize on it; in other words, it’s no use, except as a simulacrum. Actually, nothing is any use. You can read thousands of books and go on being ignorant, as I proved conclusively with my gaffe about the moon. To plug that humiliating gap in my thought, I would have had to read, in addition to all the other books, one specifically about the visible forms of our poetic satellite. I don’t know if such a book exists (I doubt it). A highly specialized book like that, which would be so useful, justifies the combinatory fable of the monkey infinitely typing at random. It’s a “possible” book like any other, but expecting chance to produce it is just too much of a stretch: various infinities would have to be aligned. Not to mention the fact that for me to understand it, there would have to be diagrams.

  When people talk about astronomy, sooner or later they end up mentioning primitive cultures. In other disciplines too, but in astronomy it’s an obsession. If we took these comments seriously, we’d have to believe that primitive people came up with the most ridiculous ideas about how the stars and planets move, and about nature in general. The supreme and most outrageous example is the idea that when the sun goes down at night, it will never come up again. With the most deeply rooted conviction, I maintain that this is false: there are no primitive peoples, there are no savages, or if we want to use those words to name other civilizations, we have no right to suppose that they are any less intelligent than we presume to be. There have always been stupid, gullible, ignorant people, and there is no shortage of them in our civilization. But a culture, be it that of naked jungle dwellers, has and always had all the knowledge that any other culture had or will have. My position on this is unyielding and militant. I believe that the error, encouraged by a latent racism, even among the most scrupulously right-thinking people, comes from a mistake in translation, or more precisely, a half translation, which isn’t really a translation at all. Let’s suppose that the people of a certain nation notice that the moon’s recurring phases can be used to measure a certain lapse of time (what we call a “month”) and, reasonably economizing their linguistic resources, they use the same word for that lapse and the moon (we do similar things). Now, somebody translating from their
language is bound to write “Five moons ago” (when what the person really said was “Five months ago”) without stopping to think that the same signifier is used for two different signifieds and that the identity between them is merely etymological or genealogical. That’s how the Indians in ethnological studies, and later on in novels and films, end up saying: “Five moons no raining . . .” (since the idea is to make them sound stupid, they’re not allowed to conjugate verbs either).

  This example, apart from the fact that it’s not really an example, is simplistic, but it gives an idea of what I’m getting at. A proper translation is a complete translation. In their language, the Indians say: “It hasn’t rained for five months,” exactly as we would. And when they speak of astronomy, medicine, love or whatever, they speak just as we would, except in their language, as we do in ours. To suppose anything else is an error, however it may gratify our desire to look down on them. Although the expression doesn’t exactly capture my idea, you could say that I’m using an “extended concept of translation.”

  The same logic and the same implicit racism underlie appeals to the notion of “belief.” The most absurd beliefs are always attributed to primitive people of all kinds: that a great snake drank a river, that the souls of the dead travel in a boat, whatever. It’s more or less the same as saying that we “believe” our jokes. Here too it could be pointed out that there are stupid and ignorant people everywhere, but it’s not that simple. “Belief” is shorthand for the acceptance of certain signifying practices, without which society could not continue to function. A catalogue of everything that we believe, left untranslated, would make us look stupid too.

  If I had to nominate my favorite lapse of time, the one I find most practical for organizing my life, it would be the week. Today is my last day in Pringles, a Thursday. I came last Thursday and I’m leaving today. I have come to the café to write, as usual. The blonde girl hasn’t been here since the first day. I haven’t seen her again. Since she told me that she doesn’t live in Pringles, I initially assumed that she came on Thursday and stayed for the weekend, which is when the café must be busiest. When I didn’t see her on Friday, I adopted a new hypothesis, supposing that she worked from Monday to Thursday . . . But that turned out to be wrong too. Maybe she doesn’t work here anymore. Maybe she works certain days in the month, and my week-based reasoning is inapplicable. There are a thousand possibilities. The lives of strangers have their own rules, which differ from case to case, and anyone who tries to deduce them from a chance meeting is bound to get lost in an ocean of conjectures. It’s strange to think that even the most predictable creature of habit, like myself, might, from a stranger’s point of view, appear and disappear in an apparently random fashion. Tonight, for example, I’m leaving Pringles and I won’t be back for several months.

  There’s so much we don’t know! Before coming to Pringles, I had begun to wonder about the things I thought I knew but didn’t really know at all — I must have been following a train of thought prompted by that business with the moon, although I didn’t consciously make the connection. By some association of ideas, it had occurred to me that perhaps I could fill those gaps. I allowed a number of modest but time-honored puzzles to float up at random to the surface of my mind, without making any kind of selection. The first was this: if a circle turns, is it true that the central point remains still? The initial, irresistible impulse is to say: of course! It seems natural. But it should be the other way around; it should seem more natural for the central point to turn as well, like a miniature circle. Some kind of cultural aberration has intervened, and it has become a conditioned reflex to say that the central point is immobile, almost as if that guaranteed the movement of the rest of the circle.

  I pondered this for several days. Little by little, I turned my mind toward the inconceivable. I could imagine a nail hammered into the center of a circle: the nail stays still and the circle turns around it. But in that case the supposed point is not actually a part of the circle, so it’s irrelevant to the problem. In the end, I asked Tomasito, with a certain apprehension, because my son is a bit of a grouch.

  “Of course!” he replied. “The central point doesn’t turn.”

  “But don’t you think that the point, however small, is a little circle too, which has to turn along with the rest?”

  “If it was a physical point, sure. But we’re talking about a mathematical point.”

  I didn’t pursue the matter. Fine. I didn’t want to exasperate him.

  A mathematical point? What is that? If it’s a mental construction, why postulate it? Reality is complicated enough already; why burden it with pedantic fictions? The only function I can think of for that fixed point is keeping the circle in place. And who said the circle has to stay in the same place? Anyway, even if it stays in its place on a table, it’s still moving because the earth is turning, etc. It could even be argued that circles are always still, and when they seem to be spinning it’s because the world is turning around them.

  That night, on my regular walk, I came to a definitive conclusion: there is no still point at the center, because if there was, it would lock the circle in place and stop it from turning. That’s where I dug in my heels. To me, it was clear as day. I know it must be a ridiculous error, but it’s one that I’m prepared to live and die with.

  How we change! I used to scorn people who reasoned in this “Robinson Crusoe” way. I saw it as the epitome of ignorance, the mark of stubborn, self-satisfied fools, who act as if there were no books, as if knowledge began and ended in their vacuous heads. At the height of my extremism, I even regarded simply thinking for oneself as a form of obscurantism. It’s what I still believe, in fact: knowledge is out there in books, not in what you can dream up on your own. People who think deserve their mistakes. And here I am, doing this pathetic intellectual handiwork . . .

  Anyway, tonight I’m off. Time to go. My weeks in Pringles follow a strict pattern; or not so strict, actually, because they consist of a week and a day. The prospect of a long night sitting on the Estrella bus always makes me slightly anxious. Especially before the return trip to Buenos Aires because I won’t get a minute’s sleep. I suppose there is a remote chance of nodding off, but even before I get on the bus I’m resigned to staying awake.

  I’ve done the trip dozens of times in recent years and in spite of my absentmindedness, there’s something I couldn’t help noticing: I sleep on the way down to Pringles but never on the way back. If it didn’t have such an effect on me (that sleepless night is genuine torture, and I’m a wreck the following day), I might have gone back and forth thousands of times without becoming aware of the pattern, but what really brought it home was being politely asked, at one end of the trip or the other, Did you get any sleep? Since noticing, I have examined all the circumstances of each trip, to see if I can single out the one that is responsible for my insomnia: what I ate for dinner, the clothes I was wearing, where I was seated, my posture . . . I even factored in my expectations: the contrasting psychological states of the outward-bound and the homeward-bound traveler. But it’s futile: there don’t seem to be any circumstantial causes. Which leaves only the direction: southward on the way there, northward on the way back. And this may oblige me to reconsider my conviction that the adepts of Feng Shui, terrestrial magnetism, and so on have all been taken in by charlatans. My skepticism has suffered so many blows, one more could bring it tumbling down. For the moment, though, it’s holding out.

  “Pringles, city of scented taxis.” When I arrive at dawn and open the door of one of the taxis waiting in front of the bus terminal, I’m nauseated by the overpowering scent. The town’s taxi drivers, who form a highly organized guild, scent their vehicles with various kinds of air freshener, and emulation or habituation have led them from use to abuse. In a way, it’s understandable. These taxi drivers were once smallholders, pushed off the land by economic concentration and the expansion of agribusiness, and they have inves
ted the money from the sale of their land in precious European or Japanese cars, which they use as taxis and cherish like favorite children. Behind the wheel, their hefty laborer’s bodies are graced with a miraculous delicacy and precision, and their big paw-like hands dance lightly over the buttons of the electronic dashboard. They haven’t had to change their habits all that much: they’re still getting up before dawn, now to fetch travelers from the terminal, and in their obliging customer service, these former lords of the lonely pampas display the finest flowers of adaptation. The cars gleam outside and in. For the drivers, the scent must be a supreme and necessary elegance.