The Literary Conference

by Cesar Aira

  It may have had something to do with the time of day. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, which were so high and so close, thereby causing confusion. After disappearing from the sky, the sun’s golden glow in the atmosphere intensified.

  The moment the first lines of dialogue were spoken — which I remembered better than I would have wanted to — things got stranger. My eyes were drawn, as if magnetically, to Carlos Fuentes, sitting in the front row. I saw he was absorbed in the play, totally focused, transported to another world. By his side sat his wife, Sylvia, as beautiful as the good fairy of storybook fame, looking relaxed and with a vague smile of interest playing on her lips. Authorial vanity, which never completely fell away, not even at that moment, made me wonder what they would think of my little play. I feared I would come up short in their estimation. But, I told myself, this was inevitable, and anyway, what did it matter at this point?

  The laughter surprised me. I had forgotten that an audience could react. I quickly turned my attention back to the actors, who were evolving in the middle of the garden. Eve was lying on a divan, wearing a cumbersome red sultana’s dress and holding in her arms a rubber Mickey Mouse doll. She seemed to be waiting for something with great impatience. Two jesters played on harps at her feet. A servant entered and announced:

  “Mr. Adam can’t come right now. He’s busy.”

  What was all this about? I didn’t recognize it, it was too Dadaist. Nevertheless, I had written it. Eve went to his laboratory to get him. Adam agreed to have tea with her, but not to put down his Exoscope, an enormous instrument he carried around with great difficulty. Slowly, I began to remember. Yes, I had written that. Moreover, they were scrupulously following the text, to the very last comma. Gone were any remaining doubts that I had written it, for there were my recurrent themes, my little tricks, and even the dialogues I had lifted verbatim from reality and that carried me back to teas I’d had with my wife on long-ago summer afternoons. But why were they drinking from such oversized five-gallon cups? At that point, I had to remember (which I did) my mental process while I was writing; in this case, remembering meant reconstructing. That detail about the cups meant to suggest that at the beginning of the world there was still no congruency in the sizes of things: this had required a much longer span of evolution. The dialogues, spoken with a Caribbean accent, sounded strange to me, especially when I began to recall their intellectual pulse, but I had to admit they were verbatim.

  There was only one innovation in this production: Adam was black. Though this didn’t exactly qualify as an innovation. The actor was black, and he was probably the best actor they had. They weren’t about to discriminate against him! In Venezuela there are lots of blacks, though many fewer in the Andean region, and even fewer at the university. Those there are tend to be outstanding, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that they had given him the main role. They probably pretended he was just another actor, like any of the others, and, to tell the truth, I was probably the only one who realized he was black.

  As for the Exoscope Adam carried around with him throughout the entire play, they had, indeed, done a good job, even though they resorted to the simplest and most unimaginative solution. The entire play pivoted on this instrument. In the notes, I had specified only its size (six-and-a-half feet by five feet by three-and-a-half feet, more or less) and that it should look like a scientific-optical device. The idea, which the props person had understood, was that it would be a celibate machine; perhaps he had understood it a little too well, because this Exoscope looked a lot like Duchamp’s Large Glass.

  The plot unfolded one event at a time. The entire drama was based on the mysterious impossibility nested at the very heart of the relationship between the two protagonists. Their love was real, but at the same time it was impossible. Adam’s experiments, Eve’s courtesan frivolities, all were mere evasions. Love was revealed as an impossibility that seemed either metaphysical or supernatural, but was in reality very simple and even prosaic: Adam was married.

  I must confess, I didn’t know how to resolve the difficult problem this plot line presented. Because if Adam and Eve were, respectively, the only man and the only woman on the planet, then Adam’s wife — the absent wife whose existence prevented him from living out his love with Eve — couldn’t be anybody other than Eve herself. The idea (very characteristic of me, to the point that I believe it to be how I conceive of literature) had been to create something equivalent to those figures that was both realistic and impossible, like Escher’s Belvedere, figures that look viable in a drawing but could not be built because they are but an illusion of perspective. Such a thing can be written, but one must be very inspired, very focused. I fail because of my precipitousness, my rush to finish, and my desperation to please. I was able to sustain it in this play only through the strength of ambiguities and funny repartees. And only for a short time, because very soon things started to happen.

  It was then, when the action rushed toward a resolution, after the exasperating teatime dialogues, that the extent of my fiasco fell on me like a mental atomic bomb. Once again I had submitted to nonsense, to the frivolity of invention for invention’s sake, resorting to the unexpected as if it were some kind of deus ex machina! Again I had squandered the wise ancient advice adorning the frontispiece of my literary ethic, “Simplify, my son, simplify!” I have managed to write a few good things by following, quite by accident, that advice. What a waste! Only through minimalism is it possible to achieve the asymmetry that for me is the flower of art; complications inevitably form heavy symmetries, which are vulgar and overwrought.

  But my mania — to be constantly adding things, episodes, characters, paragraphs, to be constantly veering off course, branching out — is fatal. It must be due to insecurity, fear that the basics are not enough, so I have to keep adding more and more adornment until I achieve a kind of surrealist rococo, which exasperates me more than it does anybody else.

  It was like a nightmare (the mother of all nightmares) to watch the living defects of what I had written materialize in front of me. Though my punishment was a kind of poetic justice, because from that point on the logic the play began to obey was the logic of nightmares. Poor Adam’s brain began to rebel against him, and in a burst of dementia he murdered Eve . . . The scene was full of gruesome details: he decapitated her, and, after performing a few macabre juggling acts with her head, he divided her long blond hair into two locks and tied them around the waist of the corpse, which he left standing. The hair knot hung over her buttocks, and her head hung down in front of her sex, like a codpiece . . . then he ran off, still carrying the Exoscope. The police of Babylon got involved, and the inspector in charge proclaimed: We are dealing with a serial killer, there is a pattern, this is the seventh such crime, all with long blond hair, all with the head tied around the waist . . . But Adam, by definition, was the first and only man! Therefore, he couldn’t be just one among many suspects, he was by necessity the guilty party. And moreover, if Eve were the only woman, how could she be one in a series of victims? Serial killers came later in evolution. I myself didn’t even understand it.

  In the next scene, in the cave where Adam went to hide, Eve’s ghost appeared as an integral part of the glass of the celibate machine. Agents of a foreign power took advantage of the situation to steal the Exoscope from him, without knowing that Eve continued to live inside it . . . It was grotesque, repulsive; I was
mortified.

  VII

  Difficult as it is to believe, people liked that crap. It was nighttime by the time it ended. In the last light of day, at the culminating moment of the show, the evening flight arrived; there are two flights a day to Mérida, and both have to land during daylight hours because of how difficult it is to land a plane in this narrow valley surrounded by high peaks. The noise of the engines drowned out a few lines, and shortly thereafter the passengers walked in single file across the stage carrying their bags and suitcases but without interrupting the show. That detail was the most widely discussed during the reception hosted afterward by the airport director. There was a festive atmosphere, almost euphoric; everybody seemed happy, except me. I allowed myself to carry out the bad idea of drinking myself out of my depression. Since my detoxification, ten years earlier, I had not had a drop of alcohol. At least I had the good sense not to mix my drinks, but rum is deceptive, always so smooth, so calming, like a perennial cause with no effect, until the effect shows itself, and then you realize the effect had been there from the beginning, even before there began to be a cause. The hall had a bad echo. Everybody was shouting and nobody could hear anybody else. I accepted the congratulations with the graciousness of a perfect idiot. I watched lips move and smiles appear, sometimes I moved my lips, too, and drank, and smiled again; my face was hurting from holding that grimace for so long. That was even how I received Carlos Fuentes’s words.

  What happened next is blurred by the fog of intoxication. We boarded buses that took us directly to the hotel dining room for dinner, from there we went to the bar so we could keep drinking, and at midnight we took taxis to a discotheque . . . Throughout the many stages of that night I felt, underneath the strong effects of the rum, a discomfort that never let up, undoubtedly because I never managed to put my finger on what it was. I didn’t know what was wrong; it couldn’t be that I felt out of place, because that was normal for me. In retrospect, I understood what was happening to me: in my semiconscious state I had joined the group of young people: I returned with them on the bus, sat with them at dinner, and continued in their company through all that followed. They were the students who did volunteer work (they called it “logistics”) for the convention, almost all of them female, almost none older than twenty. People who signed up for this were not necessarily devotees of literature. My colleagues had done nothing to extricate me from them, on the contrary. They were corroborating the reputation I had forged for myself of preferring “life” to literature. They were convinced that I was pursuing the young women, and they approved; in a certain way it legitimized them indirectly by showing that literature was part of life and passion. As far as the students were concerned, they asked for nothing more than the attention I seemed to be paying them, the fact that I chose them over the famous writers I should have been interacting with, and the chance to be seen in public with the hero of the Macuto Line.

  I spent the rest of the night at the discotheque. There were strobe lights, blasting salsa music, and so many people you could hardly move. But I didn’t care, I was in the stratosphere. The young people were my drunken bodyguards. The erroneous impression my more mature colleagues got of me could have been seen from a different point of view, which in the end was the same: vampirism. My false maturity could not be seen in any other way. But my vampirism is special, I think.

  Vampirism is the key to my relationships with others, the only mechanism that allows me to interact. Of course, this is a metaphor. Vampires, as such, do not exist, they are merely a hook on which to hang all manner of shameful parasitisms that need metaphor to come to terms with themselves. The shape that metaphor takes in me is special, as I said. What I need — which I suck from the other — is neither money, nor security, nor admiration, nor, in professional terms, subject matter or stories. It is style. I have discovered that every human being, every living being in reality, in addition to everything he has to show for himself by way of material and spiritual possessions, has a style he uses to manage those possessions. And I have learned to detect it and appropriate it. Which has important consequences for my relationships, at least for those I have established since I turned forty: they are temporary, they begin and end, and they are quite fleeting, more and more fleeting as I become increasingly skilled at capturing another’s personal style. Any other kind of vampirism could lead to permanent relationships; for example, if I extracted money or attention from my victim, the other’s reserves would likely become infinite. Even if I were looking for stories, a single subject could supply me indefinitely. But not style. It has a mechanism that gets worn out in the interpersonal transfer. Once in action, I watch my victim quickly dry up, wilted and vacant, and I lose all interest. Then I move on to the next one.

  I have now revealed the entire secret of my scientific activity. My famous clones are nothing more than the duplication of style cells. Which should lead me to question my appetite for styles. I think the answer resides in the mere necessity to persist. I have sought an outlet for this need through love, without any success, so far.

  We were crowded together on a bench pushed against a wall; next to me, at moments talking to me, sat Nelly, one of my young Venezuelan friends, a graduate student in literature. I admired her and I had a tendency to feel toward her that rare kind of envy that crosses sexual barriers. She must have been twenty-one or twenty-two, but she was the embodiment of an ageless ideal. She was small and thin, her features were unusually pure, and she had enormous eyes and an aristocratic air. Her suit — wide pants and bustier — was made of brown satin; her perfect breasts were almost exposed; she wore very pointy Asian slippers on her feet. Her blond curly hair fell over her shoulders at an angle, covering one eye. Part of her charm lay in her incongruity. She was mulatto, perhaps also with some indigenous blood, but her face was French. Her hair color was recent, judging by the comments I heard from her friends; I had met her as a redhead, years before. One could never guess what she was thinking. In the discotheque she was calm, relaxed, a glass of rum in her hand, her beautiful eyes lost in contemplation. She seemed to be elsewhere. She spoke only when spoken to; when not, she allowed a peaceful, cozy silence to envelop her. She spoke in a whisper, but she articulated her words so well that I could understand her perfectly over the loud music.

  “You are enchanting tonight, Nelly,” I told her, my tongue heavy with alcohol. “As usual, I should say. Or did I already say that? Every sentence I utter comes out twice, though that’s why I feel it twice as strongly, wrapped as it is in the deep truth of its meaning and its intention.”

  For a moment she seemed not to have heard me, but that was her usual reaction. In that minuscule space between our two bodies, she turned toward me, like the statue of a goddess turning on the altar.

  “I dressed up especially in your honor, César. Today is your day.”

  “Thank you very much. I am enjoying it. But you are always elegant, it’s a part of you.”

  “That’s kind of you to say so. You are good inside and out, César.” My face must have betrayed my puzzlement at the second statement, because I heard her add, “You are young and beautiful.”

  The lights were very low, we were practically in the dark. Or rather, the beams and pulses of the colored lights allowed us to see what was going on but not reconstruct it in our minds. This is the astute discovery such night spots have made. Their lighting arrangements reproduce subjectivity thereby nullifying it, a proces
s further assisted by the alcohol and the noise. From the depths of this nullification rose, golden and warm like a houri out of paradise, the beautiful Nelly. I slipped my arm around her waist and kissed her. Her lips had a strange flavor, which made me think of the taste of silk. We were so close, so nearly on top of each other, that every gesture we made required only minimal displacement — almost imperceptible.