Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  But the fact was, she didn’t talk about the atlas, though I’m certain she intended to; she was distracted by an association of ideas wherein she found a more dramatic thread: she said she’d had nightmares all night long. It was so obvious, the least one could expect, after a visit to my friend’s house, that museum of horrors. I immediately thought of the elephant mask, and I almost thought I saw that beastly image floating in the blackness, a vengeful Ganesha, soon transformed into a monster (I was also making my own associations, but I didn’t realize it at the moment).

  She told me about one of the nightmares she’d had, or the only one, which she’d had repeatedly. She didn’t, at least, tell me any others. She said she’d had a dream about Crazy Allievi, that she was trying to cure him of his craziness and couldn’t . . . and she tried again, and still couldn’t . . . I don’t think she told me anything else, unless she did and I’ve forgotten, though actually I think I was the one who added something about a mountainous landscape, dusty and vast, under the perennial light of midday that shone on two lost explorers, or better yet, fugitives—running, tripping, on the verge of falling over a cliff: Mother and Crazy Allievi, dressed in old-fashioned black garments among those stones of despair, a hectic scene, but at the same time always at a standstill, like in comic strips.

  In a way, my mother and I could read each other’s minds. So, if she didn’t recount any concrete images from her nightmare, and I saw them anyway, it didn’t mean that I’d invented them or that she hadn’t had them. In any case, they were momentary visions, like those that appear and disappear in the course of a conversation. Otherwise, I couldn’t have had a clear image of Crazy Allievi, because I’d never met him. How could I have met him when he was a character out of my mother’s childhood? I knew him from the stories I’d been hearing since I was a child. My mother’s best friend from childhood was a girl whom everybody called “Crazy Allievi.” They remained friends as they grew up. Crazy Allievi had a brother, who, logically, was also called Crazy Allievi. It was a kind of family problem. The difference is that Crazy Allievi, the sister, was called crazy for being wild, extravagant, “wacky,” as we often say casually. Her brother, on the other hand, was really crazy.

  Of all the many stories my mother would tell about these siblings, I remember only two, one about the crazy sister and one about the crazy brother. The story about the crazy sister is the story of her dog. She had a dog, whom she adored, who was very important to her. She named it Rin Tin Tin, but she called him Reti, or, according to how Mother imitated her pronunciation: Rrreti. When I heard this as a child, it must have set me onto a certain train of thought, which was surely why it had stuck in my memory: you can name a dog whatever you want; it’s not that the dog “has” a name, that gets deformed or abbreviated by the family’s usage; nothing prevents this deformation or abbreviation from “being” the name. But Crazy Allievi would say (Mother always imitated her pronunciation): “My dog is named Rrrin Tin Tin, but I call him Rrreti.” This fact alone showed that she was crazy, though, I repeat, only sort of crazy, inoffensively and picturesquely crazy, nothing more.

  My father, when he was alive, would often say that Mother specialized in crazies, that all her friends were crazy. And he was right, at least if you listened to her talk. Whenever she told anything about some friend or neighbor, it was to show how “crazy” she was. Her mealtime conversations would always start: “Today at Torres’ grocery store, I was chatting with X . . .” and we could already guess what would come next: “She’s crazy”; and throughout all the rest of the story, and in the stories that came after, she’d call her “Crazy X.” Her definition of “crazy” must have been much broader than the psychiatric one and included all those oddities that make people interesting, or interesting to her.

  Returning to Crazy Allievi, the sister, and the only story I remember about her: when her dog died, she buried him and erected a gravestone with the inscription: “Here lies Reti” and the dates. That is, she definitely favored the nickname, not the name, and I suppose it was totally her right to do so, at least her right as a crazy person.

  Remembering what had happened during the night, I thought that a name doesn’t only accompany us to the grave (Pringlesians often say, when they are trying to encourage someone to eat and drink heartily: “It’s the only thing you can take with you”; they’re wrong; you also take your name), but it also makes us return there in case of a breakout.

  The story of her brother (that is, the anecdote about him that I remember) is more pathological: he drove his car all the way from their house in town to their farm, in reverse. The family had a farm, called La Cambacita, near Pringles, but not that near, about twenty-five or thirty miles away. And what with the bad dirt roads at the time, and in one of those black cars, driving that distance in reverse must have put Crazy Allievi’s driving skills to the test. But this was precisely what showed how deranged he was, because crazy people often have extreme capabilities, which can seem magical, in very specific skill sets. For starters, of course, his craziness was already expressed in the decision to drive in reverse. He did it only because the car was parked in front of the house facing the opposite direction from La Cambacita, and since he was going to La Cambacita, it must have seemed natural to him to go in that direction, instead of doing something as complicated as starting off in the wrong direction and only afterwards taking the correct one. Craziness is more of an exacerbation of logic than its negation. Moreover, if the transmission included a reverse gear, there must have been a reason for it.

  It wasn’t due to a mere accident of memory that I associated Crazy Allievi, the brother, with this anecdote; Mother did, too, and to prove it, whenever she remembered him it was to remember that he drove to La Cambacita in reverse. And spending an entire life harboring that image necessarily had to engender vague suggestions of magical journeys, or magical landscapes traversed backwards, a journey around the world in reverse, or the expanding universe turned toward its infinite contraction. An inordinately large atlas belongs to this genre of magic, so inordinate as to threaten to equate itself with the territories it mapped.

  The distress she had felt in the nightmare was the distress of the impossibility that accompanied the premise. Psychiatrists don’t cure crazies, especially not a crazy who’s been dead for sixty years. Moreover, my mother, in her (oneiric) role as psychiatrist, was diminished by the “broadened definition” of craziness I alluded to. Perhaps as a child she had learned what a crazy was like, thanks to her best friend’s brother, and since then she’d used the word as an adjective—for it could also be used as a noun—to describe everybody, until the word had lost substance and precision. By applying it to my friend, and by insisting on applying it to him in order to rescue me from the disgrace of being a failure, she was terrified to discover that it didn’t work. Garrisoned in his house, with his collection, his museum of toys, dolls, and masks, my friend resisted being defined as “crazy,” and she had had to turn back to the original crazy, who was still driving in reverse in his black car in her desolate little theater of memory.

  Be that as it may, for the rest of the morning I had to listen to her repeat all her complaints. To escape such melancholy, I stared out the window, and that made it worse, because outside prevailed the excruciating monotony of a Sunday morning in Pringles—white and empty. I asked myself if in the long run my personality was working against me. I had always congratulated myself for being calm and polite, for my complacency, my tolerance, my almost invariable smile. I had not inherited my mother’s depressive and confrontational character but rather my father’s, which generally included an acceptance of the world that approached indifference, an aversion to arguments and conflicts, neither optimist nor pessimist, all against a backdrop of melancholy that he never took completely seriously. I had reasons to congratulate myself because if I’d had any other personality, I wouldn’t have survived the successive catastrophes that had sunk my life into nothingness. On the other hand, that personalit
y excluded passions, outbursts, possessions, which would have given color to my existence and made it more interesting.

  I waited for her to leave (she said she was going to the bakery) to call my friend and thank him for dinner. I hadn’t wanted to call in front of her because she would have said that there was nothing to thank him for, and she was even capable of asking for the phone and saying something rude to him. That was the reason I didn’t go out all morning, in spite of my desire to see how the town looked after the invasion. She always went out in the mornings, to go shopping and chat with her friends, who also went out; but that morning she took forever to leave, so keen was she to complain about the dinner and the toys and everything else; it had been a long time since she’d had so much subject matter.

  I ended up impatient and in a bad mood. It seemed like she did it to me on purpose, a possibility not to be dismissed out of hand, because living together had made us sensitive to even our most secret intentions. Finally, she left, and she hadn’t even finished closing the door when I was already on the phone. My intentions really were “secret” because they included—using politeness as an excuse—a backdrop of self-interest. I was planning to rekindle our friendship, turn it up a notch, set the stage to ask him to finance a project (I still didn’t know which) I could use to get back on my feet. I know, one should never mix business with friendship, but all my bridges had been burned, and out of desperation I was willing to take extreme measures, no longer caring if they were inappropriate or Machiavellian. Since he was the only friend I had left, and everything indicated that this would be my last chance, I planned to tread very carefully.

  My first move had been to get myself invited over for dinner with Mother, so that he could gauge, without knowing that he was gauging, my situation. It’s not that I saw him as a prodigy of psychological or human insight, but seeing the two of us together he’d have to perceive the terrible straits my misfortune had put me in. Of course, he knew about my situation, he knew I’d had to go live with my mother and that I depended on her economically. But I also wanted him to see us, see us arrive, see us leave, feel our relationship. There are things that are impossible not to understand if you experience them, or at least if you inhale their atmosphere, because then, even if you don’t grasp them with your understanding, you grasp them with your being, and you register them deeply, which is what I wanted my friend to do, to prepare him for my request for help.

  Not for a single instant did I give any credence to the report that he was broke, even though Mother had made it so verisimilar (by using names). But the fact that she’d said it worried me. Might she have sensed my intentions? Was I that transparent? If I was, my whole plan was in danger from the get-go. I regretted having had these thoughts, because they sapped my confidence.

  He answered after several rings. His house was very big, and he usually had to walk through all of it to get to the phone. He said he’d just gotten up, and he did, in fact, sound half asleep, but he started perking up as we talked. No, he hadn’t gone to bed very late, but whenever his family was in Buenos Aires and he stayed home alone, he took the opportunity to sleep in. Especially on Sundays. I congratulated him: his ability to sleep indicated that his system had stayed young; I, on the other hand, I said, must be getting older faster than him because I slept less and less. Today I’d gotten up early, even though I’d stayed up till the wee hours.

  He asked me if I’d gone out.

  No, I didn’t go out anymore, I said, using the opportunity to provide grist for my mill. I lived like a shut-in. Where was I going to go? I stayed up watching television, the invasion of the living dead.

  Oh, yeah. That. Wow! What a disaster.

  Hard to believe.

  You said it!

  On top of the drought, the crisis, and now this.

  What a disaster, right?

  We’re going to have to accept that Pringles is a cursed town, I said.

  I was making an allusion to a cliché that had been around for ages: Pringles, a cursed town for doing business in. I’d heard it since I was a kid: no initiative succeeded, no effort bore fruit. But that concept had become devalued from overuse. Nobody wanted to let his neighbor have a leg up on being miserable; everybody competed over who was more destitute, who had more expenses than profits, who was more strangled by taxes (that they didn’t pay). The wealthy were the worst. They’d disembark from their latest-model Mercedes Benz, buy a float of trucks, an airplane, install a swimming pool in town and an artificial lake in the country; they’d buy a house in Monte Hermoso and a flat in Buenos Aires, and they’d still swear they had nothing to eat. We genuine failures were left in an equivocal position: nobody took us seriously. I was prepared for the long and complex task of persuasion. Complex, because just saying it wouldn’t work; everybody said it, and the words no longer meant anything. I would have to resort to a practical combination of image and discourse, and in the discourse to a well-rationed mixture of reality and fiction.

  He pulled me out of these strategic meditations with something surprising.

  We saw it this summer. The kids laughed their heads off.

  That threw me for a loop. What? Had they shown up before? How’s it possible that I hadn’t heard about it?

  Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a thing, he said, and repeated: What a disaster.

  I realized that we were using that last word to mean two different things: I was referring to facts and he to an aesthetic judgment. And that wasn’t the only word; the same thing was happening with “shown”: I was asking “if they had shown up before” and he understood, “if they had shown it before.” Apparently, one was talking about the event, the other about its representation. At that point, I should have asked him to explain, but I was embarrassed because I suspected it would have been the equivalent of confessing to a disqualifying lack of knowledge or a surplus of naïveté. In addition, it occurred to me that there could be another possibility in between: the qualification of disaster could be applied not only to the event as reality or to its representation as fiction but also (leaving between parentheses the decision as to which we were discussing) to the show they’d broadcast on television. I asked him.

  Well what do you think?

  I admitted that it had many defects, but I forgave them due to the difficulties inherent in a live broadcast. I spiced up that comment with a little joke: a “live” broadcast of the dead.

  He didn’t get the play on words because he was already ranting and raving against that television channel, which subjected us Pringlesians to rehashes like that. How could I imagine they’d be able to broadcast live, what with all that obsolete material they had! They hadn’t gotten anything new in the last twenty years, it was a miracle they could stay on the air at all.

  Well, then, I said, here was something to admire: they’d done a good job imitating the rhythm of a live broadcast, or rather, its lack of rhythm, its dead times (another pun, unintended), the accidental framing . . .

  There was a brief pause, and I detected in his response a subtle change of tone, as if he had left the realm of general observations, which he could share with anybody, and begun to address himself specifically to me:

  Don’t waste your time trying to make up excuses for them. Nothing ever goes well for those people, not even by accident. They’re going to keep doing things badly until they die, or get thrown out. You were right about what you said before, even if you did say it as a joke: Pringles is a cursed town for doing business in, and those incompetents are just one more proof, because they’re not going to outlast the year. The channel is dead broke; it carries on thanks to the kindness of a few businesses that still buy advertising. They’re going to have no choice but to shut down. But don’t be fooled: there’s nothing supernatural about that curse. If businesses fail, the Pringlesians are the only ones to blame; they want to make money by imitating real businessmen but without doing what’s necessary to make a business prosper. They’ve never heard of reinvestment, market research,
growth. They’re just shopkeepers, with no vision, and they don’t even have common sense. Tell me the truth . . .! You think they can run a television station without ideas, without creativity, without talent? Do they think it will run itself? Do you think people are idiots? Ple-e-ase! The secret of success is intelligent effort, work accompanied by thought, self-criticism, a realistic assessment of the environment, and above all, demand. Not the paltry demand of profit but on the contrary, of youthful dreams that should never be abandoned. You have to know how to see beyond the interests of survival and make the decision to give something to the world, because only those who give, receive. And for that, you need imagination. The prose of business must express itself in the poetry of life.

  JUNE 28, 2005

  PRAISE FOR CÉSAR AIRA

  “Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.”

  – The New York Times Book Review

  “Aira is a master at pivoting between the mundane and the metaphysical.”

  – The Millions

  “An improvisatory wildness that opens up possibilities where there had seemed to be brick walls.”