Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  ALSO BY CÉSAR AIRA FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  Conversations

  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

  Ghosts

  The Hare

  How I Became a Nun

  The Literary Conference

  The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

  The Musical Brain

  The Seamstress and the Wind

  Shantytown

  Varamo

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  DINNER

  I

  My friend was home alone, but he invited us over for dinner anyway; he was a very sociable man—liked to talk and tell stories, though he wasn’t any good at it; he’d get the episodes mixed up, leave effects without causes and causes without effects, skip over important parts, and drop anecdotes right in the middle. This didn’t bother my mother, who at her age had reached a level of mental confusion equivalent to what my friend had been born with; I think she didn’t even notice. In fact, she was the one who most enjoyed the conversation that evening—it was the only thing she did enjoy—because the names of the town’s families were being constantly mentioned—magic words that distilled her entire interest in life. I listened to the names drop, as one listens to the falling rain, whereas for her, each was a treasure full of meanings and memories. Mother was enjoying something that was lacking in her daily conversation with me; in that respect, and in that one alone, she and my friend were perfectly in sync. He was a building contractor, and for decades he’d been building houses in Pringles, so he knew the configurations and genealogies of all the town’s families—one name conjured another, driven by the townspeople’s lifelong practice of pursuing their entire intellectual and emotional education by talking about one another. It would have been difficult to do this without names. It’s true that things get lost with age and arterial sclerosis, and they always say that names are the first to go. But names are also the first things to be found, for their search is carried out through other names. They started to talk about a woman, “the daughter of . . . what was her name? Miganne, who lived in front of Cabanillas’ office . . .” “Which Cabanillas?” “The one married to Artola’s daughter?” And they continued in this vein. Each name was a knot of meaning into which many other chains of names converged. The stories crumbled into a hailstorm of names and were left unsolved, like old crimes, swindles, betrayals, or scandals involving these families had also been left unsolved. To me, the names meant nothing, they had never meant anything, but that wasn’t why they didn’t sound familiar. On the contrary, they did sound familiar; I would say they were the most familiar things in the world, because I’d been hearing them since my earliest childhood, from before I could talk. For some reason though, I had never been able, or had never wanted, to associate those names with faces or houses; perhaps this was my way of rejecting the life of the town where I had, nonetheless, spent my entire life, and now, age and the loss of names, had created the curious paradox of losing what I had never had. Even so, when I heard them on the lips of my mother and my friend, each rang out like a chime of memories, empty memories, sounds.

  It wasn’t as if I were devoid of real memories, full-fledged memories, a fact I ascertained after dinner when my friend showed us an old windup toy, which he removed from a glass display cabinet. It was small, barely larger than the palm of his hand, and was a pretty faithful miniature of an old-fashioned bedroom, complete with a bed, a bedside table, a rug, a wardrobe, and a door at the foot of the bed, which, without a wall to open out from, looked like a second wardrobe and was outfitted with a rectangular box, which I assumed hid one of the characters. Another character was in plain sight, lying on the bed: a blind old woman, partially reclining against some cushions. The floor of this room was neither tile nor parquet but rather made of smooth, dark planks, like the floors of the houses in Pringles that I remembered from childhood. I took special notice of it because it made me think of the house of two seamstresses where my mother used to take me when I was little. I have one very strange memory associated with that house. Once, when we went there, the floor was missing from the room where the seamstresses were working, that is a large part of it had been removed for renovations, or had caved in; the entire room was one great big pit, very deep, with dark gullies full of crumbling dirt and rocks, and water at the bottom. The seamstresses, and their assistants and customers, were all around the edges. Everybody was laughing and talking about the catastrophe and offering explanations. It’s one of those inexplicable memories that remains from early childhood. I don’t think it was as extreme as I remember, because nobody can live or work in a place like that, but I was very small—maybe that’s why the pit looked so big to me. I once asked Mother if she remembered it because it is still so vivid. Not only didn’t she remember the pit in the seamstresses’ room, she didn’t even remember the seamstresses. I was irrationally annoyed that she didn’t remember, as if she were forgetting on purpose. The fact was, she had no reason to remember such a trivial event from sixty years before. But she was intrigued, and she turned the subject over in her mind for an entire day. I had only one fact that might have helped her: one of the seamstresses had a finger that was hard and stiff, like wood. Based on this finger, which I could picture very clearly, I thought I could recall its owner, an old woman with dark brown hair in a stiff hairdo, tall and skinny, with strong bones; her finger was enormous. Needless to say, this detail didn’t help at all. My mother asked: Could they be the Adurizes, the Razquines, the Astuttis? It exasperated me that she’d try to get at it through names, which didn’t mean anything to me. My “names” were the pit, the finger, things like that, which didn’t have names. I didn’t insist. I kept the memory to myself, as I had so many others. My first memory, the first memory in my life, is also of an excavation: the street we lived on was dirt, and then they paved it, and to do so they had to dig up a lot of dirt and rocks; I remember the whole street divided up into rectangular pits, like graves, I don’t know why, because I don’t think you have to make a grid like that in order to pave a street.

  These recurrent memories of pits, so primitive and maybe purely fantastical, had maybe come to symbolize “holes” in memory, or rather holes in stories, ones that not only don’t exist in the stories I tell but that I am always filling up in stories others tell me. I find fault in everybody else’s narrative art, almost always with good reason. My mother and my friend were particularly deficient in this respect, perhaps because of their passion for names, which prevented the stories’ normal development.

  It was truly magical: names came to their lips with enormous facility and in abundant quantities. Did so many people now live or had so many people ever lived in Pringles? Any excuse would suffice for them to conjure up a whole new bunch of names. Those who’d lived on the block. Those who’d moved away from the block. Those who’d lost money on their houses. Those who grew aromatic herbs. These last came up after my friend began to praise the meal, which led to the story of how he had obtained the fresh sage for the rice. Packaged sage wasn’t any good—it lost most of its aroma during the drying process. And his own sage plants had been accidentally destroyed a few days before during one of his frequent house renovations or additions. So, that afternoon he had gone out to pay visits to some acquaintances whom he knew had herb gardens. He had no luck at the first place: their sage had been contaminated with toxic dust; maybe he could wash it well and use it but it wouldn’t be worth it if anyway he’d have to worry about it being poisoned. I asked if they’d used some kind of insecticide. No, something much worse! Delia Martínez, that was her name, never used any chemicals in her garden. The name, which didn’t mean anything to me, roused my mother out of her silence. Delia Martínez, the one who’s married to Liuzzi? The one who liv
ed on the Boulevard? Yes, that’s the one. I noticed that habit of calling women by their maiden names: it was like constantly bringing up people’s histories. Mother said she had run into her the day before and had heard all about her agonizing ordeal with the statue . . . My friend interrupted her: that was precisely what had contaminated her sage plants, and her other herbs, and the whole garden. They explained—taking for granted that I didn’t know—that this woman lived in front of the small plaza along the Boulevard, where for months a sculptor had been working on a monument commissioned by the city. The marble dust blew toward her house, forcing her to live with her doors and windows hermetically sealed, and covered every last leaf in her garden, which was her great passion and her life’s masterwork. She’d complained to the mayor and on the local radio and television stations. Looking worried and peering down at her half-eaten dinner, Mother said that marble dust was very bad for your health. That was news to me, and it sounded like nonsense, so I started to say something, anything that would serve as an excuse for my friend in case he had used that sage, but he was already emphatically agreeing with her: it was the worst thing in the world, a poison, it could even kill you. And he should know, because of his profession. Of course he hadn’t taken sage from Delia’s garden! Anyway, she never would have given him any under those conditions. No, the sage that flavored the rice we were eating came from elsewhere. Delia Martínez herself had referred him on. The person with the sage was Mrs. Gardey, the owner of Pensión Gardey. A beauty! my mother exclaimed, and then she began, willy-nilly, to praise the woman, who, according to her, was still beautiful at ninety; in her youth she had been crowned Miss Pringles, and she was beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside: so good, kind, sweet, and intelligent—a real contrast to all the mean women in town. My friend nodded distractedly and ended the story by saying that when he went to see her, the old woman had greeted him by saying that she didn’t have any rooms available, that she was very sorry but the wedding of some French landowners had brought many people to town (some from France), and she was fully booked; when he explained why he’d come, she went to get some scissors, led him to her garden in the back, and cut him some sage, not without first offering him a “guided tour” of her establishment. My mother: the pension, it’s so beautiful, so well cared for, so clean, when she was young she always went to the carnival balls the late Mr. Gardey would organize. My friend corrected her: it wasn’t the same building . . . But Mother was sure of what she was saying, she argued with him forcefully, and enthusiastically elaborated upon her memories. But it simply wasn’t so, my friend knew exactly what he was talking about and silenced her with his own more precise information: the old Pensión Gardey, one of the most prominent buildings in town, had been demolished, and the current one—a much more modest and architecturally dull building—had been built on the same site. There was no question about the accuracy of what he was saying because there had been a trial that had reached epic proportions. It all happened when the owner of the adjacent lot, which was vacant, wanted to build. When he examined the maps in the lands registry, he discovered that the people who had built the pension had made a mistake and erected the dividing wall beyond the legal boundary, four inches into his—the neighbor’s—property. This was a serious problem: Gardey was not allowed to purchase that strip, usurped inadvertently, for land couldn’t be partitioned into plots less than a yard wide, and any offer of monetary compensation was contingent on the good will of the one accepting. There were arguments, misunderstandings, and the whole thing ended up in court; the neighbor was intransigent, and since the law was on his side, the pension, that fantastic Beaux Arts palace, the pride of the town and the site of the most wonderful memories for those who’d attended the grand carnival balls, had to be torn down—all because of four lousy inches! At this point, in the middle of the story, my friend stretched out his hand and held his thumb and index finger apart (four inches apart). This had been the ruin of Gardey, who was a good man; the neighbor was the bad one, all of Pringles blamed him. Gardey died soon thereafter, a bitter man, and it was his wife who rebuilt the pension and had been running it for the last several decades.

  But to return to the toy with the blind doll, which he showed us after dinner: there were two cranks on the platform, one on either side. Did it still work? My friend said it did, perfectly, he had taken it out of the glass case so we could “watch the show.” It was almost a hundred years old, made in France; he wound it up every once in a while—not often because he cherished it as one of the crown jewels of his collection—setting it in motion so it wouldn’t rust. There were basically two mechanisms that had to function at the same time, that’s why there were two cranks. One was for the music box; the other controlled the automatons. A spring-loaded button in front guaranteed simultaneity. He pressed it, then proceeded to turn both cranks. They were two very small bronze “butterflies,” which he turned with the skill acquired through a lot of practice. His thick, rough fingers seemed unsuitable for such tiny devices, but they managed without a hitch. His hands were swollen and looked worn—the hands of a bricklayer. He had once told me that if he ever committed a crime, he wouldn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints because working with bricks and mortar had erased them. I noticed that my mother was following these manipulations only out of politeness and with poorly disguised impatience. It’s not that she was a stickler for decorum, but she might have felt a bit intimidated. With a collector’s typical lack of sensitivity, my friend would never notice that she was wholly indifferent to his toys, and his pictures, and his objects. Perhaps even more than indifferent. Mother found them inexplicable, useless (they were, eminently), and therefore unwholesome. I realized that the lighting, which had been decreasing throughout our dinner, contributed to this feeling. We had eaten by candlelight, but afterwards, while wandering through the showrooms, I saw that the whole house was dimly lit. A few standing lamps in the corners, others on small tables and shelves, cast shrouded glows through their shades. My mother, my whole family, had always lived in interiors brightly lit either with bare bulbs, the strongest they had in the shops, or fluorescent tubes. I sensed that she found this system of discreetly and artistically placing lamps around the rooms somewhat suspect, like some kind of questionable symbol of social class. My friend, who, unlike us, came from the coarsest stratum of the proletariat, had embarked on a long and gradual process of refinement thanks to his contact with rich clients, whose houses he’d built. His antiquarian passions had done the rest.

  Also, he traveled. Not on cultural trips or to study, but something must have stuck from his visits to the Old World. Like so many Italian immigrants, he had returned to visit his family as soon as he had the means to do so. His parents, who’d brought him to Argentina when he was an infant, had left a lot of relatives behind in Naples. He first went back when he was quite young, shortly after his parents died, and then he returned many times, accumulating vast European experience, from which he never stopped extracting facts and stories to spice up his conversation. During our dinner—not to go too far afield—he regaled us with several odd anecdotes. One of them came up in connection with diseases (my mother had mentioned, I don’t remember apropos of what, a neighbor’s health problems): his Neapolitan cousins, and perhaps, he deduced, all lower-class Neapolitans, concealed illness as if it were something shameful. One of his visits coincided with one of his aunts having minor surgery. They devised thousands of tricks to conceal it from him, which turned out to be not so easy. The closed doors, the sudden silences, the absences, the obvious lies (these people were very naïve), the conversations that stopped short whenever he entered, intrigued him, and in his efforts to figure out what was going on, he reached the conclusion that the Mafia had something to do with it. What else would entail so much secrecy? They had to get him out of the house on the day of the operation, and they did so on the pretext of taking him to see a cactus exhibition nearby, though not too nearby because the excursion had to last all day
. He drove with his cousin and his whole family. The children, trained in finessing the deception, spent the whole trip babbling on and on with feigned excitement about cacti, as if going to see them was the fulfillment of their deepest longings. He wasn’t, of course, particularly interested in cacti, and the whole time he was thinking about how he was taking part in a Mafia operation that would leave a string of dead bodies in its wake. Even so, the exhibition turned out to be interesting. He remembered one of the cacti, very small and shaped exactly like an armchair, with many spines: it was called “mother-in-law’s rest.”

  Once our host had wound both keys, he pressed the button and the toy started up. My friend placed it on his palm facing us so we wouldn’t miss a single detail. The door to the bedroom opened and a fat young man entered, took two steps along an invisible rail to the foot of the bed, then started to sing a tango, in French. In spite of the toy’s age, the music box worked well, though the sound quality was considerably deteriorated. The fat singer’s voice was high-pitched and metallic; it was difficult to make out the melody, and the words were unintelligible. He gestured with both arms, and threw his head back histrionically, fatuously, as if he were on stage. The old woman on the bed also moved, though very discreetly and almost imperceptibly: she shook her head from side to side, effectively imitating the way a blind person moves. And, by observing closely, you could tell that she was picking crumbs or fuzz off the bedcover with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. It was a true miracle of precision mechanics, if you take into account that those tiny movable porcelain hands measured no more than one-fifth of an inch. I had once heard that this action of picking up imaginary crumbs was typical of the dying. The makers of the toy must have wanted to show that the old woman’s death was close at hand. Which made me think that the whole scene was telling a story: until that moment I had only admired the prodigious art of the toy’s mechanics, without wondering what it meant. But its meaning, buried in a superior strangeness, could only be guessed. Perhaps it was about an old woman, bedridden and on the verge of death, whose son came to entertain her with his singing. Or maybe he was a professional singer, whom the old woman had hired. Supporting this hypothesis was the fat man’s black suit, and his elegant bearing and self-confidence. Against it was the modesty of the small room, a modesty that was highlighted with very deliberate details. However, the myth of tango made it more appropriate for it to be a son and his “old mother,” in which the man, disappointed by womankind, proclaims that she was the only good woman, the one who never betrayed him. He might have returned to live at his mother’s house after his wife, “that battle axe,” left him, and then he let himself go, got fat, wore pajamas and flip-flops. But every afternoon at the same time, he put on clothes, and spruced himself up (purely for the sake of ritual because his blind mother couldn’t see him), and showed up in his mother’s room to sing her a few tangos, with that voice and those feelings through which she felt the essence of the life she was departing . . . But if it was a French toy, why tangos? That was strange, and it wasn’t the only thing that had no explanation. What happened next was even stranger.