by Cesar Aira
“All the paperwork is there, including his clinical history, up-to-date as of today. Though we suppose you don’t work along those lines. It documents the failure of the best oncologists in the country and around the world. They no longer even bother to pretend to hold out any hope at all.”
“How long do they give him?”
“Weeks. Days.”
They had waited a long time to come to him. Anyway, it was impossible. They had probably begun alternative treatments months ago, and all available charlatans and healers must have already filed through. He felt paradoxically flattered to be the last one. They apologized with vague lies, unaware of how unnecessary it was to do so: their brother had undergone the conventional treatments with admirable stoicism; he had not given up even in the face of the most adverse outcomes . . . Finally, he had given them permission to try the Miracle Cure, and, as he had done from the very beginning, he was bringing all his faith, all his trust into play: Dr. Aira could count on that.
There was nothing more to say. He looked at the file and shook his head as if to say: I don’t need this; I know what awaits me. The truth was, he would have liked to take a peek, just out of curiosity, though he would not have understood anything because surely every entry was in medical jargon, which was inaccessible to him. Moreover, it was true that he didn’t need it because his intervention occurred on a different level. The case had to be shut in order for him to come on stage; the clinical history had to have reached its end. And by all appearances, this is what had happened with this man.
The next step: he accepted the mission. Why? In spite of all his promises and precautions, he took the plunge. Once again, the well-known saying proved true: “Never say never.” He vowed he would never do it (his interlocutors must not have known about this vow because they took his acceptance as a matter of course), and now he rushed to say yes, almost before they had finished making their proposal. This could be explained a priori by a defect in his personality, which had caused him many problems throughout his life: he didn’t know how to say no. A basic insecurity, a lack of confidence in his own worth, prevented him from doing so. This became more pronounced and more plausible because the people who had requested his services on the basis of his capabilities and talents were, by definition, unfamiliar with his field, and little or poorly informed about his worth and his history. Hence, a refusal on his part would leave them totally blank, thinking, “Who does this guy think he is, playing hard to get like this? Why did we bother to call him?” It was as if he could only refuse those who were fully informed about his system, those who had already entered his system, and by definition such people would never ask him for a Cure, or they wouldn’t ask him for one in earnest.
There was an additional motive, related to the previous one, and the result of another defect, one that was quite common but very pronounced in Dr. Aira: snobbery. This office with its Picassos and its Persian carpets had impressed him, and the opportunity to enter into contact with such a first-rate celebrity was irresistible. It’s true that until that day he had never heard of this man, and the family name was totally unfamiliar to him. But that only magnified the effect. He knew there were very important people who maintained a “low profile” policy. And it had to have been really low to go unnoticed by a snob of his caliber. An unknown celebrity was as if on another — a higher — level.
But before all that, and as if obscured under a leaf storm of circumstantial and psychological motives, his acceptance had a much more concrete cause: it was the first time he had been asked. Like so many other phenomena in our era dominated by media fiction, his fame had preceded him. His own myth surrounded him, and the myth’s mechanism had continually delayed him from going into action, until there came a point when doing so had become inconceivable. These wealthy barbarians had to come along with their ignorance of the subtle mechanism of the esoteric for the unthinkable to occur. In fact, Dr. Aira could have gotten out of it by telling them that there had been a mistake, a misunderstanding; he was a theoretician, one could almost say a “writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of metaphor . . . At the same time, however, it was not a metaphor; it was real, and its truth resided in this reality. This would be his first and perhaps last chance to prove it.
They wanted to know when he could begin the procedure. They felt a certain urgency due to the very nature of the problem: there was no time to lose. They managed to include in their proposal a discreet query about the nature of his method, of which they obviously had not the slightest idea (this was obvious, above all, because nobody did).
Swept into the vortex of the blind impulse that had led him to accept the job, Dr. Aira said he needed a little time to prepare.
“Let’s see . . . Today is . . . I don’t know what day it is.”
“Friday.”
“Very good. I’ll do it on Sunday night. The day after tomorrow. Does that work for you?”
“Of course. We are at your disposal.” A pause. They looked quite intrigued. “And then what?”
“Then nothing. It is only one session. I figure it should last one hour, more or less.”
They exchanged glances. They all decided at once not to ask any more questions. What for? One of them wrote the address down on a piece of paper, then they stood up — serious, circumspect.
“We’ll expect you then.”
“At ten.”
“Perfect. Any instructions?”
“No. See you on Sunday.”
They began to shake hands. As could be expected, they had left the question of compensation for this already marginal moment.
“Needless to say . . . your fee . . . ”
Dr. Aira, categorical:
“I don’t charge. Not a cent.”
As awkward as his gestures, his facial expressions, and his tone of voice usually were, in this case, and only in this case, he had struck just the right note.
There couldn’t possibly be a question of money, not for anybody there! And yet, that’s all this was about. Money had been left out, but only because there was so much of it. In spite of this being the first time he’d ever dealt with such affluent people, Dr. Aira had responded with the almost instinctive confidence that only long habit can provide, as if he had done nothing his whole life but prepare himself for this moment. It must have been in his genes. In fact, someone as poor as he was couldn’t charge people as rich as they were for his services. One simply places oneself in their hands, places the rest of one’s life and one’s children’s lives in their hands. After all, billions of dollars were involved. As it was a question of life or death, it was as if the entire family fortune had been translated into wads of bills and stuffed into a briefcase. The amount was so colossal, and what he could charge, or want, or even dream of, was such a minuscule fraction of it, that the two quantities were almost incongruent. No matter how hard he tried not to think about the issue (he’d have time later, once he’d gone out the office door), he couldn’t help making a quick calculation related to the installments. It was a calculation he made totally “in the air,” in the pure relativity of fantasy, because he had still not asked for a single estimate from a printer; he had planned to do so in a few days, but this now prevented him, or better said, it gave him a good excuse to keep postponing it. Be that as it may, publishing was very cheap, and compared with the business they conducted here, the cost was marginal and insignificant. That’s how he liked to think of it: as if the financial a
spect could simply be canceled. This gave real meaning to his publishing business. He realized, in that momentary fantasy, that he could seriously consider things he had been placing in the “fantasy” category, like hard covers made of cardboard wrapped in paper with a satin finish, and full-color illustrations. The leap from the large to the small, from the fortune of these magnates to his trivial dealings with some neighborhood print shop, was so enormous that through it everything became possible: all luxuries, such as folding pages, vegetable inks, transparencies inserted between the pages, engravings . . . And it’s not as if he’d abstained from thinking about these options: one could almost say he had done nothing but. But he had done so as an impractical fantasy, even when he deigned to consider the most practical details. Now, suddenly, reality was intervening, and it was as if he should retrieve each and every dream, and every feature of every passage in every dream, and rethink them. He couldn’t wait to be back in his house in Flores, open his file of notes on the installments, reread them one by one, because surely they would all appear marvelously new in the light of reality. He took a taxi so he could get there more quickly. For once he allowed himself the luxury of not responding to the taxi driver’s crude attempts to engage him in conversation; he had too much to think about. Of course he still didn’t have the money, and he had even rejected it outright. And what if these people, with the insensitivity so typical of millionaires, had taken him literally? It was highly probable, the most probable thing in the world. But it wouldn’t do him any good to worry about it now.
That Sunday, at ten o’clock:
“Ding-a-ling-a-ling.”
A housemaid in uniform opened the door. It was an enormous old palatial mansion in the Recoleta neighborhood. They ushered him into a sitting room to one side, where he found the brothers and a woman in a wheelchair, who was introduced as the mother. From the entryway, Dr. Aira had caught a glimpse of dimly lit rooms, elegantly furnished, the walls covered with paintings. This was the first time he’d entered such a distinguished house, and he would have loved to explore it to his heart’s content, without rushing. But this was not the time. Or maybe it was? While he was exchanging banal greetings, he thought that in reality nobody was preventing him from doing just that, from wandering calmly through all those rooms. Because none of them knew what his method was; by definition they didn’t know what to expect, such as him telling them that he needed everyone, including the servants, to leave the house so he could remain alone with the patient for one or two hours. They would think he was going to use some kind of invasive and potentially dangerous radiation; and they would be in a hurry to leave, dragging the old woman out in her wheelchair; and all of them would climb into their Mercedes Benzes and wait at one of the brothers’ houses. Why would they care, anyway? And he would have the house all to himself for that interval, as if he owned it; the possibility of slipping some valuable object into his pocket occurred to him, but he dismissed it as a too-sordid anticlimax.
Be that as it may, the interior of the house suggested an answer to an enigma that only now, upon intuiting its solution, he could formulate. What did his contemporaries do when he knew nothing about them? What did the great writers and artists whom he admired do during the often long periods of time when they were not presenting a book or making a movie or setting up an exhibit? Because of the amount of time he spent with books, he had grown accustomed to thinking of the great figures as dead, for the simple reason that for the most part they were: in order for their works or their fame to have reached him, some time had to have passed, and even more for him to have decided to study them; and this delay, more often than not, was more than enough for a human life to complete its cycle. That’s why he would feel a little shock whenever he found out that this or that famous person was alive, simply living, without doing the things he was famous for doing. This created a kind of blank in which the nature of fame negated itself. He never understood because, truth be told, he’d never really stopped to think about it, but now he saw it all very clearly: what they did was live, though not just live, which would have been a platitude, but rather enjoy life, practice “the art of living” in houses like this one, or not as luxurious but in any case endowed with the comforts necessary to enjoy oneself and spend one’s time without any concerns. Thanks to the link between reason and imagination, he felt at that moment that he could do the same from then on.
He had just sat down when he had to stand up again, because the other brothers had come in to tell him that the patient was awake and expecting him. They didn’t sit down, so he didn’t again, either. They told him that they’d given him his injections early so that he would be lucid at ten o’clock. They didn’t know if it was necessary, but the patient himself had requested it.
“Perfect,” said Dr. Aira, just to say something and without giving an explanation such as they must have been expecting.
In the blink of an eye, he didn’t know exactly how, they were climbing the stairs to the bedroom. The moment of truth was approaching.
The truth was, he hadn’t finished deciding what to do. He had spent the last two days considering his options with the same uncertainty he’d had for the last few decades, ever since that day in his far-distant youth when he had intuited the Cures. The idea had remained more or less intact since then, not counting the natural alternation between doubt and enthusiasm characteristic of a genuinely original concept. It had been the center of his life, the pivot around which his readings, meditations, and quite varied interests had turned. Of course, in order to keep it in this central position he had had to endow it with a plasticity that resisted any definition. It had always been right in front of his nose, like the proverbial carrot hanging in front of a donkey, indicating the direction of his prolonged flight forward. He owed his life to it, the life he had, after all, lived, and for this he was grateful. He could not complain about it just because it refused to give him a practical set of instructions at a decisive moment. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful, like those infamous scroungers who spend twenty years taking money from a generous friend, and when finally the friend can’t or doesn’t want to do as they ask, they condemn him without appeal.
Moreover — as he had been repeating to himself throughout that atypical weekend — something would occur to him. It’s not that he trusted his ability as an improviser; on the contrary, he had serious reasons to distrust it. But he knew that for better or for worse he’d manage, because one always does. It’s enough for time to pass, and it inevitably will. It wasn’t strictly a question of “improvising” but rather of finding in the teeming treasure of a lifetime of reflections the one gesture that would do the trick. It was less an improvisation than an instantaneous mnemonic. Evaluating the results was another issue. There would be time for that, too. After all, if it was a failure, it would be the first, and the last.
The door to the bedroom. They opened it; they motioned for him to go in. He entered . . . And it was as if he had entered a different world, incomparably more vivid and more real, a world of pure and compressed action where there was no room for thought, and where, nevertheless, thought was destined to triumph in the end.
The first thing that struck him was the lighting, which was very white and very strong; it seemed excessive, though perhaps this was due to its contrast with the gloomy semidarkness in the rest of the house. Even so, it was the last thing one would expect in a sickroom, unless it was an operating room. He immediately turned to look at the bed and the man lying in it, which
barely gave him a chance to register along the outer edges of his attention certain elements that contributed to the creation of a high-tech environment and explained the lighting.
The man in the bed warranted Dr. Aira’s most intense interest. Never before had he seen someone so close to death. He was so close that he had already shed all his attributes and had become purely human. By the same token, this shedding had removed him from the human. His first impression was that it was too late. If there was even the remotest possibility of bringing him back to life, it would have to be via one of his qualities. And it looked as if he hadn’t a single one left; perhaps, in the spiritual process of preparing himself for death, he had undergone a “cleansing” that had been set in motion by the illness. But this was not the case. Despite everything he and the cancer had done, one of his attributes remained: wealth. He may have cut all his ties to life, but he remained the owner of this house, and of his lands and factories. And that would suffice, for money had the marvelous property of including everything else. He should definitely start there.
Just thinking about it was enough to re-orient him in reality. He looked around. The room was large, and many people were there, all of them strangers, except for the patient’s brothers. They were all looking at him, but as nobody showed any intention of introducing themselves, he merely greeted them with a nod and turned his attention to the room and the furnishings. There were chairs, armchairs, tables, bookshelves, and a lot of electronic equipment. It took him a moment to notice — even though they stood out more than anything else — two supermodern television cameras each on top of a tripod, one on either side of the bed and each with its respective cameraman: two young men wearing wireless earphones. The spotlights and large microphones with black felt heads placed at strategic spots apparently belonged to the same set-up, as did the echo-reducing panels and a technician sitting in front of a sound board next to the wall. He wondered, intrigued, if this was a custom he had never heard of, to record the final days of important people. That wasn’t it, he found out right away, because one of the brothers, as if reading his mind, said: