The Literary Conference

by Cesar Aira

  “Rising above” this situation requires an enormous effort of art-science in the face of which I have not, of course, recoiled. But I engage in this effort on my own terms. Heisenberg’s principle also comes into play here: observation modifies the object of observation and increases its velocity. Under my interior magnifying glass, or inside it, each thought takes on the figure of a clone in its rhetorical anamorphosis: an overdetermined identity.

  Which reminds me of the answer to the question I left hanging: how to measure the velocity of my thoughts. I am trying a method of my own invention: I shoot a

  perfectly empty thought through all the others, and because it has no content of its own, it reveals the furtive outlines — which are stable in the empty one — of the contents of the others. That retrograde cloned mini-man, the Speedometer, is my companion on solitary walks and the only one who knows all my secrets.

  III

  Just as I am total thought, I am total body. This is not a contradiction. All the totals get superimposed upon each other . . . The concept of “totals” is fairly slippery; only a subject in motion can confront it, and the moment that subject is able to enunciate it, it becomes a truth. It was the truth within the restricted Universe of those days of rest I allowed myself under the tropical sun in the swimming pool of a luxury hotel on the outskirts of the city while my operation was underway. I regretted it would last for only the few days of a single week; the pleasure of such delicious passivity could only make me wish that life in its totalness was like that, the total world, the total of totals. It was natural for me to slip into totals. My body accepted it, swelled up with it, radiated it. To top it off, the weather was perfect. Few people went to the pool: several youngsters, male and female, some children with their mothers, one or another loner like me . . . Some mornings nobody was there. The caretaker swam melancholically, lap after lap, dozed in his chair, and amused himself trying to catch drowned mosquitoes floating just under the surface of the water using a net with a very fine mesh. The water was as clear as well-washed crystal: you could have read a newspaper floating on the bottom. My hosts at the conference told me it was logical so few people went . . . In fact, they couldn’t believe it when I told them I was not the only one there. Who would ever think, they exclaimed, of going swimming in the middle of winter? It’s true, it was winter, but being so close to the equator, it made no difference to me; as far as I was concerned it was still summer, and it continued to be a totality of summer, and life.

  One curious thing I noticed and wish to make note of in this report is that all of us who went to the pool those few days, without knowing each other or having planned anything at all among us, were perfect specimens of the human race. What I mean is, we all looked human, with all our members and corresponding muscles and nerves in their proper places and proportions. Physical perfection in the human is rare by definition, for the slightest defect nullifies it. If you look at people in the street, scarcely one in a hundred passes the test. All the rest are monsters. But, to my languid surprise, those of us who came to the pool (different ones every day, except me) constituted a gathering of that one percent. I wonder if it isn’t always like that, in every unplanned encounter. Be that as it may, what with the swimmers wearing only bathing suits, their bodies exposed to the sun, there was no room for denial. The spectacle soothed my eyes and my mind. I didn’t look for defects, because there were none; in a certain sense, there couldn’t be any. Deviations from the physical canon produce monsters; all kinds of monsters, even imperceptible ones. One toe slightly wider or longer than it should be is enough to create some sort of monster. One cell, a spelling mistake within a cell . . . For some reason, monsters manage to escape from the net that brings humans to the surface. They remain floating like Cartesian devils in the half-light of unreality. I know a lot about such things because this is the branch of science I practice.

  Perfections, on the contrary, are all different: perfection in itself is the perfection or full expression of difference. This is why cultivating perfection means collaborating with what a young disciple once defined as the task we should dedicate our lives to: giving birth to the individual.

  My daydreams left me paralyzed. For hours I would lie cataleptic in my lounge chair. The art of perfecting the body could only be practiced during an eternal summer, or an eternal day, or an endless life . . . But, like the seasons in the tropics, like this anachronistic autumnal summer, such eternities must be silhouetted against an alien psyche, and be invisible to all.

  Wasn’t this method more practical than cloning? Was there anything stopping me from adopting it? Now that I was rich, thanks to the Macuto Line (it had happened so recently I still wasn’t used to the idea), I could settle in under that sky and live naked under the sun without worrying about anything. I wouldn’t even have to change my field. Literature, cloning . . . transformations . . . I have become convinced of what I consider to be the basic premise of everything I will ever do in my life: all transformations occur without the least expenditure of energy. This is fundamental. If effort were required, even the most minimal amount — and given that in a transformation the point of departure and arrival are identical, i.e. the “transformed”— energy

  would be left over and would, in turn, inflate one end or the other of the universe, creating a bulge and returning us to the realm of the monstrous.

  But no. I was roused from these fantasies when I remembered the work at hand. I dove into the water one last time, swam for a while in the now-deserted pool, then walked around the edge, letting the setting sun and the gentle breeze from the highlands dry me off. All around me I could see the mountains and their snow-covered peaks. Up there, in some inaccessible spot, the cloning machine, the hidden heart of the heights, was carrying out its secret task.

  My shadow stretched out in front of me, a human shadow, but also alien, irreconcilable. I stretched out my arms, and the arms of the shadow did the same; I lifted a leg, bent at the waist, turned my head, and the shadow imitated me. Would it do the same if I stretched out the fingers on one of my hands? I tried it. I abandoned myself to a dance of recognition . . . The other bathers watched me out of the corners of their eyes, discreetly . . . When you are traveling the thought that nobody knows you gives you a certain feeling of impunity. That wasn’t the case with me. The breeze carried snippets of their conversations, and I realized they were talking about me: “famous writer . . . Macuto Line . . . he was in the newspapers . . .”

  Impunity: it’s always impunity that gets you dancing. What did I care about being ridiculous? I was on my way to earning a superior kind of impunity, and nobody knew it.

  IV

  The only interruption to this rash of days of repose and swimming was on Wednesday night, when I felt obliged to perform a very private ceremony. That afternoon, the wasp had died.

  Two days earlier, I returned her to the cage I had carried her in from Buenos Aires after she had brought me a cell from Carlos Fuentes. When I decided to bring her, I knew that for her it would be a one-way trip. Those insects have very short lives, and by the time she was five days old, hers, in fact, had already been a long one. Once she had completed her mission, I didn’t need her anymore and could have destroyed her, as well as her little cage, and thereby left no trace of my activities. Traveling with her brought with it a touch of risk, so I kept her hidden. Despite there being no law regarding the internatio
nal transport of cloned materials, the custom agents’ sensitivities to the transport of drugs, genetic mutations, and bacterial weapons could have created problems. I had no choice but to bring her, so I took the chance. Luckily nothing happened.

  Nor did I want anybody at the hotel to know of her existence: my scientific activities are secret; giving explanations would have put me on the spot, especially if it became known that I was experimenting with a renowned Mexican author. All things considered, disposing of the wasp the moment I no longer needed her would have been the most prudent thing to do; and I needn’t have felt any scruples for she would anyway have soon died a natural death. But my loyalty to my little creature won the day. I preferred to wait for her to perish on her own, complete her own life cycle, as if Nature were mediating between her and me according to Her own sacrosanct laws.

  Even though I didn’t trust the hotel maids, with their curiosity and brutality, I left her in the room. I could have carried her in my pocket wherever I went, but I trusted the maids more than my own absentmindedness: I’m always losing things, or leaving them somewhere, anywhere. So, I left her in the room for whole days at a time during my interminable sessions at the pool. Under lock and key, of course. Fortunately, I had no occasion for regret. Upon returning to my room, I’d take her out and place the little cage on my bedside table while I read lying down or napped. In addition to my sense of loyalty, there must have been an element of sentimentality or loneliness: after all, she was company, a reminder of my life at home and in my laboratory, a minuscule Argentinean spark.

  To speak of “wasp” or “insect” as I have is an abusive oversimplification; they are words I use, as I do repeatedly in this book, only to make myself understood. To create my “wasp,” I used wasp DNA, that’s true, because I needed certain wasp traits, but I used them only as a “mannequin” (I resort to specialized jargon) for other traits my mission required and that I extracted from my gene catalogue. If I chose the wasp mannequin over that of, say, the dragonfly or the bee, it was because of its greater ability to bond with foreign genes. But the resulting critter had little in common with a wasp: for starters, it was the size of a speck of dust. Under the microscope, she looked more like a golden sea horse with strong mothlike wings shaped like fans, and something between a rhinoceros horn and a crab claw — though articulated — sprouted from her head: this was the cell punch. All of these — and more — exist in zoology. She was a prototype, a unique specimen, a nice little monster that would never be repeated.

  As I was saying, I found her dead upon my return from the pool on Wednesday afternoon. Her life had been consummated in less than one week: it began in Argentina and ended in Venezuela, several thousand miles to the north. I contemplated her briefly and felt sad without knowing why. Her cadaver, which had become translucent and acquired a touch of an amber hue, was nothing more than a spot on the floor of her little house that nobody else would ever inhabit because I had built it for her. When earlier I spoke of “cage,” I did so, once again, to simplify things; it was, in fact, a cubicle the size of a thimble made of cellophane, which on a whim I fashioned into the shape of a Swiss chalet, with a pressurized chamber made of lamprey eel genes. I’m such a perfectionist that if there were a gene for furnishings, I would have made her a beautiful trousseau.

  Night came. I went down to eat, then killed some time in the bar until eleven o’clock. Uncustomarily, I drank a cup of coffee. I never do so at that time of day, because then I cannot sleep, and I am terrified of insomnia. But that night I would stay up, because I had already devised a plan of action. Moreover, considering that overdetermination I know so well, how it gets set in motion and proliferates as soon as an action begins, I would need one of the coffee implements: the spoon, which I stole. It was a beautiful silver spoon with a clown engraved on the handle.

  A short while later, after telling my bar companions that I was going to sleep, I left the hotel. The city was deserted. I went in the opposite direction from downtown; the road climbed steeply until it reached the highway that encircles the city; once past that, I found myself in open country in the foothills of the mountains. I continued walking for several hundred yards, until I could no longer hear the automobiles. The only light was the light of the stars, but they were so bright, so captivating, so close, that I could see everything, far and near: the blunt masses of the rocks, the deep recesses of the valley, the river flowing under the bridges.

  The precise spot didn’t matter, and the one I was in was as good as any other, so I reached my hand into my pocket and took out the tiny corpse. At that moment I observed some movement among the dark masses around my feet, which I had assumed were rocks. I looked more carefully and saw that they were all moving with the slowness and regularity of zombies. They were turkey vultures, those black buzzards who spent their days hovering over the valley. Seeing them perched like that for the first time, I thought they looked like small, gloomy hunchbacked chickens. It appears I had happened upon one of their mountainside bedrooms. The walking around I was witnessing may have been due to having woken them up with my intrusion, or perhaps they really were zombies. They seemed the perfect funeral cortege for my wasp’s burial. I set to work.

  With my spoon I dug a round hole about two inches wide and almost eight deep, at the bottom of which I carved out a nearly circular burial chamber; there I placed the tiny cellophane Swiss chalet with its eternal resident. I sealed the entrance with a coin and filled the vertical tunnel with dirt that I pressed down with my thumb. I placed a triangular-shaped pebble on top for a gravestone.

  I stood up and dedicated a final thought to my wasp. Goodbye little friend! Goodbye . . . ! We would never see each other again, but I would never forget her . . . I would never be able to forget her, even if I wanted to. Because nothing could replace her. Excitement mixed with melancholy. The Mad Scientist (and I, myself, on another level of this story’s meaning) could boast about the unprecedented luxury of having made the entire evolutionary process serve a unique and determined — as well as subsidiary — purpose, almost like going to buy a newspaper . . . I needed somebody to get me a cell belonging to Carlos Fuentes, and for that reason, and no other, I created a being within which converged millions of years and many more millions of fine points of selection, adaptation, and evolution . . . to carry out a unique service and thereby complete its purpose; a throw-away creature, as if the miracle that is man had been created one afternoon just so he could walk over to the door to look outside and see if it were raining, and once this task had been accomplished, he would be annihilated. Needless to say, the cloning procedure reduced such excessive periods of natural labor to a few days, though they remained, essentially, the same.

  V

  The moment has come, I believe, to do another “translation” of the story I am telling in order to make clear my true intentions. My Great Work is secret, clandestine, and encompasses my life in its entirety, even its most insignificant folds and those that seem the most banal. Until now I have concealed my purpose under the accommodating guise of literature. Because I am a writer, this causes no particular concern.

  Marginally, this pretense has afforded me certain mundane pleasures, and an acceptable modus vivendi. But my goal — which in my quest for transparency has become my best kept secret — is typical of the comic-book Mad Scientist: to extend my dominion over the entire world.

  I am aware that we have here a metaphorical alibi; “dominion” an
d “world” are words, and the sentence containing them lends itself to intellectual, philosophical, and paradoxical interpretations . . . I refuse to fall into that trap. The dominion I’m talking about wants to be extended across reality, the “world” is none other than the objective, shared world . . . The only paradox, if there is one, is that language has shaped our expectations so

  extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.

  The opening of the doors of reality is the infinite prolegomenon to my Great Work. And I have already made reference to one of these “doors” (an inoffensive metaphor): perfection. From there to the pool. My brain: the battlefield.

  After a certain age, doubt threatens the perfection of the body. Assessing ourselves objectively is difficult because we continue to think of ourselves as adolescent, and others always have a reason to lie. Perfection becomes a longing, sometimes all-consuming. We would do anything to achieve it, we really would: any diet, any exercise. We would not shrink from any effort. But we don’t know what that “anything” is and have no way of finding out. If we ask ten people, we get ten different answers. And thus we squander the most genuine of longings. We would do whatever was necessary . . . if we knew what that was. But we don’t.