by AIRA, CESAR
“Are you going to tell me what’s got into you?”
I didn’t have anything very definite to say, but what came out took her completely by surprise, and me too.
“Where’s my dad?”
The voice I put on! It was a squawk, but crystal clear, without the slightest stammer.
Mom glanced around. The bus was packed full and the people surrounding us, hearing my cry, had turned to look. She didn’t know what to say.
“Where’s my dad?” I raised my voice.
Poor Mom. Who could blame her for thinking I was doing it on purpose?
“You’re going to see him soon,” she said, without committing herself. She tried to change the subject, to distract me: “Look at the pretty flowers.”
We were passing a house with superb flowerbeds in the front garden.
“Is he dead?”
There was no stopping me now. The other passengers were already intrigued by the story, and that excited me inordinately. Because I was the owner of the story. Mom put her arms around my shoulders and pulled me close.
“No, no. I already told you,” she whispered, lowering her voice until it was almost inaudible.
“What?” I yelled.
“Shhh …”
“I can’t hear you, Mom!” I shouted, shaking my head, as if I was afraid that the uncertainty about my dad would make me deaf.
She had no choice but to speak up. “You’re going to see him soon.”
“Yes, I’m going to see him. But is he dead?”
“No, he’s alive.”
I could sense the passengers’ interest. The cityscape slid over the glass of the windows like a forgotten backdrop.
“Mom, where’s Dad? Why doesn’t he come home?”
I adopted a tone of voice that signified: “Stop lying to me. Let’s behave like adults. I might look like I’m three years old, but I’m six, and I have a right to know the truth.”
Mom had told me the whole truth. I knew he was in prison, waiting for the verdict: an eight-year sentence for homicide. I knew all that. The only reason for these untimely doubts of mine was to make her tell the story for the benefit of perfect strangers. How could her daughter be capable of such an idiotic betrayal? She couldn’t believe it (nor could I). But the panic that I was exhibiting was all too real. As usual, I had managed to confuse her. It was easy: all I had to do was confuse myself.
“He’s sick,” she said in another inaudible whisper. “That’s why we’re going to visit him.”
“Sick? Is he going to die? Like grandma?”
One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other was in good health, in Pringles. We never used the expression “grandma” at home. That was a detail I added to make the scene more convincing.
“No. He’s going to get better. Like you. You were sick and you got better, didn’t you?”
“Did the ice cream make him sick?”
And so I went on until we arrived: Mom trying to shut me up all the way and me raising my voice, creating a real scene. When we got off the bus, she didn’t say anything or ask me for an explanation. I felt that my performance had come to an end, a bad end, and that she was ashamed of me … The anxiety intensified and I began to cry again, with much more determination than before. The logical thing to do would have been to stop in the square, sit down on a bench and wait until I got over it. But Mom was tired, sick and tired of me and my carrying-on, and she headed straight for the prison. My tears dried up. I didn’t want Dad to see me crying.
It was visiting time, of course. We joined the line; a lady who seemed nice enough frisked us, checked the string bag full of food that Mom had brought, and let us through. We were already in the visitors’ yard. We had to wait a while for Dad. Mom was off in a world of her own (she didn’t talk to the other women), so I got a chance to go exploring.
There were entries and exits all around the yard. It didn’t seem to be hermetically sealed, which came as something of a surprise. It’s hard not to have a romantic idea of what a prison will be like, even if you don’t know what romanticism is (I certainly didn’t). To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a prison was either. This one was steeped in an intense, destructive realism, strong enough to dissolve all preconceived ideas, whether you had any or not.
I headed for a door, drawn as if by a magnet. Subliminally, I had noticed that there were other children in the yard, all holding their mothers’ hands. A strong autumn sun bleached the surfaces. It was a sleepy time of day. I felt invisible.
Of all the places I knew, the one most like this prison was the hospital. People were shut in both places for a long time. But there was a difference. The reason you couldn’t get out of the hospital was internal: the patient, as my own case had shown, was incapable of moving. There was some other reason why you couldn’t get out of prison. I wasn’t sure what it was: force was still a vague concept for me. I blended the ideas of prison and hospital. There was an invisible exchange between the two. Sickness could disappear and sick thought be transferred to others … It was the perfect escape plan … Perhaps Dad could come back home with us. In that excessively realist building, I was radiating magic … Since it was my fault that Dad was there …
But my magic started acting on me: a melancholy fantasy suddenly transported my soul to a region far, far away. Why didn’t I have any dolls? Why was I the only girl in the world who didn’t have a single doll? My dad was in prison … and I didn’t have a doll to keep me company. I had never had one, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t because my parents were poor or stingy (when did that ever stop a child?). There was some other mysterious reason … And yet, although the mystery remained, poverty was a factor. Especially now. Now we were going to be really poor, Mom and I: abandoned, all on our own. And that was why I felt the need of a doll so sharply, so painfully. True to my dramatic style, I surrendered to a nostalgic lament, rich in variations. The doll had disappeared forever, before I learnt the words with which to ask for it, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of my sentences … I saw myself as a lost doll, discarded, without a girl …
That was me. The inexistent girl. Living, I was dead. If I had died, Dad would have been free. The judges would have been merciful to the father who had taken a life for a life, especially since one was the life of his darling daughter and the other the life of a complete stranger. But I had survived. I wasn’t the same as before, I could tell. I didn’t know how or why, but I wasn’t the same. For one thing, my memory had gone blank. I couldn’t remember anything before the incident in the ice-cream store. Maybe I didn’t even remember that properly. Maybe, in fact, the ice-cream vendor’s life had been swapped for mine. I had begun to live when he died. That’s why I felt like I was dead, dead and invisible …
When I reached the end of this train of thought, I found myself in a new place. I was inside. How had I got there? Where was Dad? This last question was the one that woke me up. It woke me up because it was so much like my dreams. I was alone, abandoned, invisible.
Either I had climbed a staircase without realizing, or, more likely, there were converted basements in the building, because when I got to the end of an empty corridor going off at right angles, which I had hoped would take me back to the yard, where I could run to my dad’s arms, I found myself on a kind of platform suspended over a square enclosure divided in two by a grill. With a certain disquiet, I realized I had gone too far. Looking for a way out, in the grip of a horribly familiar panic, I made a crucial mistake: instead of trusting myself to go back the way I had come, I went through the first gap I could find, a gap in the wall, where they must have been doing some kind of renovation: it was a small hole, not much more than a crack, forty centimeters high and twenty wide at the most, at the level of the baseboard. It struck me as the perfect shortcut for getting back to where I had begun. I came out onto a kind of cornice ten meters above the floor. I edged along it with my back to the wall (I was terrified of heights). The roof wasn’t far above me. Since I didn’t go
near the uneven edge, all I could see below was a corridor. It was fairly dark too. The cornice, which in fact was the remains of a plaster ceiling, led to a cubicle, which I crawled into. It was a skylight, about a square meter in cross section, and two or three meters high: at the top, a square of sky. At the base of the walls, level with my feet, were slots opening onto deep, unlighted rooms. Once I was in there, I kept quiet. I sat down on the floor. I thought: I’m going to spend the whole night here. It was four in the afternoon, but for me the night had already begun. I couldn’t go any further, because it was a dead end. And it didn’t occur to me to go back … In that respect I was consistent. Even if my parents didn’t always say it, their eternal refrain was “This time you’ve gone too far.” Never “You’ve come back from too far away,” I guess because once you’ve gone too far there’s no way back.
I thought of Dad, mostly to pass the time and stop me from worrying about other things. I multiplied him by all the other men shut in that prison, those desperate men, expelled from society, who couldn’t hug their children … And there I was on high, hovering over them all … I was the angel … and it came as no surprise. Each successive incident, right from the start, from the moment I tasted the strawberry ice cream, had been leading me to this crowning moment, preparing me to be the angel, the guardian angel of all the criminals, the thieves and murderers …
All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him. Although I thought I loved him before, when he held me in his arms or led me by the hand, now I knew that love was more, much more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover what love really was.
It was a mystical experience, and it lasted many hours. The experience of intimate contact with humanity as a whole, as only a guardian angel can know it. Not even the fact that I didn’t have wings could shake my conviction. On the contrary: wings would have allowed me to get away, up through that square of sky above me.
It was, as I said, a prolonged episode. It lasted all evening and all night. They found me at ten o’clock the next morning. I fantasized about the search provoked by my disappearance, conducted in my absence (knowing how it would end). I could even hear voices calling me; I could hear them coming through the loudspeakers: “César Aira … a boy by the name of César Aira.” But this was not part of the fantasy, the mental reconstruction. I was meant to respond to those voices. And I wanted to, I wanted to say, for example, “Here I am. Help! I don’t know how to get down.” But I couldn’t. Powerless to act, I could only anticipate future events. I imagined a scene in which I was explaining to the governor of the prison what had really happened: “… it was my dad. He grabbed me and hid me somewhere … he was going to use me as a hostage in the breakout he’s planning with his accomplices … “All this was forgivable, even Dad could have forgiven me, considering my innocence, my character, my fears … All the same, to ease my conscience, I tried to improve the story: “But Dad was forced to do it, by the King of the Criminals; he would never have chosen to kidnap his own daughter …” And then, worried that the governor would get the wrong idea, I added a clarification: “But my Dad isn’t the King ….” I had embarked on the complex task of lying. The experienced liar knows that the secret of success is to pretend convincingly not to know certain things. For example the consequences of what one is saying, so that others will seem to discover them first. “Not that Dad ever mentioned the King … it was the others, they were talking about him, afraid, in awe … They were calling Dad your Jamesty … I don’t know why, because my dad’s called Tomás …” The governor was bound to fall for my ploy. He would think: It’s too complicated not to be true. That’s what they always think; it’s the golden rule of fiction. He would believe me completely. Not Dad. Dad knew my tricks; he was my tricks. He would see through them, but he would forgive me, even if it meant another ten years in jail … These were not exactly the reflections of an angel. The sound of the loudspeaker (it was already night, the stars were shining in the sky) swept through the jail, calling me: “Come out of your hiding place, César, your mother is waiting to take you home …” Women’s voices, the social workers … Mom’s voice too … I even thought I heard Dad’s voice—my heart skipped a beat—that beloved voice, which I hadn’t heard for so many months, and then I really did wish I had wings to fly away … But I couldn’t. This was always happening, so often that it literally was the story of my life: hearing a voice, understanding the orders it was giving me, wanting to obey, and not being able to … Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it …
In this case, and maybe in all the others too, I had the marvelous consolation of knowing that I was an angel. This knowledge transformed the situation, turning it into a dream, but a real dream. It was a transformation of reality. The cruel delirium I had suffered as a result of the fever was a transformation too, but the opposite kind. In the real dream, reality took the form of happiness or paradise. The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality.
7
WINTER CAME, AND MOM began to take in ironing. We spent the interminable evenings inside, listening to the radio, Mom bending over the steaming cloth, me staring at my exercise book, and both of us miles away, our souls meandering in the strangest places. We had adopted an invariable routine. In the morning I went with her to the stores, we had lunch early, she took me to school, came to pick me up at five, and then we stayed in for the rest of the evening. Lured by the radio, we lost ourselves in a labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step.
Everything in this story I am telling is guaranteed by my perfect memory. My memory has stored away each passing instant. And the eternal instants too, the ones that didn’t pass, enclosing the others in their golden capsules. And the instants that were repeated, which of course were the majority.
But my memory merges with the radio. Or rather: I am the radio. Thanks to the faultless perfection of my memory, I am the radio of that winter. Not the receiver, the device, but what came out of it, the broadcast, the continuity, what was being transmitted, even when we switched it off, even when I was asleep or at school. My memory contains it all, but the radio is a memory that contains itself and I am the radio.
Life without the radio was inconceivable for me. What happens, if you decide to define life as radio (which, as an intellectual exercise, is not entirely without merit), is that it automatically produces a sustaining plenitude. It was important for Mom as well, it was company … Remember that the disaster had befallen us immediately after our move to Rosario, where we had neither relatives nor friends. And the circumstances were not ideal for making new friends, so Mom was all alone in the world … She had her daughter, of course, but even though I was everything to her, that wasn’t much. She was a sociable woman who loved to chat … So she got to know people in the end, without having to make a particular effort: storekeepers, neighbors, people she did ironing for. They were all keen to hear the story of her recent misfortune, which she told over and over … She repeated herself a bit, but that was only natural. Society was destined to absorb her life again; that winter was a mere interlude … The radio fulfilled a function. In her case it was instrumental: it gathered her scattered parts, it reassembled her identity as woman and housewife … By contrast I achieved a complete identification with the voices in the ether … I embodied them.
Those evenings, those nights in fact, for it grew dark very early, especially in our room, had an atmosphere of shelter and refuge, which was intensely enjoyable, especially for me, I’m not sure why. They were a kind of paradise, which, like all cut-price paradises, had an infernal side. All the ironing Mom had taken in meant that she couldn’t go out, but she didn’t mind; she was happy in that seeming paradise, contenting herself with appearances, as usual. Her return to society would have to wait. I fastened onto the illusion like a vampire: I lived on the bloo
d of a fantasy paradise.
In this kind of situation, repetition dominates. Each new day is the same as all the others. The radio broadcast was different every day. And yet it was the same. The programs we followed repeated themselves … We wouldn’t have been able to follow them if they hadn’t; we would have lost track. And in the breaks the announcers always read the same advertisements, which I had learned by heart. No surprise there, since memory was, and still is, my forte. I repeated them aloud as they were spoken, one after another. The same with the introductions to the programs and the accompanying music. I shut up when the programs themselves began.
We followed three soap operas. One was about the life of Jesus Christ, or rather the childhood of the God made flesh; it was aimed at children and sponsored by a brand of malt drink, which I had never tasted in spite of the identically repeated panegyrics (with me doubling the speaker’s words) celebrating its nutritional and growth-promoting virtues. Jesus and his pals were a likeable gang; there was a black boy, a fat boy, a stammerer and a little giant. The Messiah was the gang leader, and in each episode he performed a mini-miracle, as if he was in training for later life. He wasn’t infallible yet and used to get into all sorts of trouble in his efforts to help the poor and the wayward of Nazareth; but things always worked out and, at the end, the deep, resonant voice of God the Father pronounced the moral, if there was one, or some words of wise advice. Those boys became my best friends. I loved their adventures and pranks so much that my imagination worked at top speed, coming up with variations and alternative outcomes; but in the end I always found the scriptwriters’ solutions more satisfying. For me it was a kind of reality. A reality that couldn’t be seen, only heard, that existed as voices and sounds. It was up to me to provide the images. But within this reality there came a moment—my favorite—when the Father spoke, and at that point everyone, not just me, had to provide an image. God was the radio within the radio.