The Literary Conference

by Cesar Aira

  “I am no longer young,” I told her. “Haven’t you noticed how much hair I’ve lost since my last visit?”

  She looked at my hair and shook her head. I insisted with the obstinacy of a drunk. I told her that my imminent baldness terrified me. And it wasn’t just out of vanity; there was a very concrete reason. I told her that when I was young I shaved my head in a rapture of madness, then had a message tattooed on my scalp, which my hair then covered when it grew back. If I went bald and this inscription were revealed, it would be the end of the scant prestige I had managed to build up as a fragile defensive shield around me.

  “Why? What does it say?” she asked, pretending for a moment that she believed me.

  “I can only tell you that it is a declaration of belief in the existence of extraterrestrials.”

  A violet light that swept fleetingly over her face showed me her serious smile.

  That was why, I went on to explain, I spent a fortune on shampoos with capillary nutrients, and why, not trusting commercial products, I had dedicated my life to chemistry.

  A while later, changing the subject, I asked about the ring she was wearing on her left hand. It was a fascinating piece of jewelry, shaped like a crown, with a blue stone whose facets seemed to have been set separately. She told me it was her graduation ring, one of the traditions of the university, though hers had a special feature: they had doubled hers in honor of her having earned two simultaneous degrees, as Professor of Literature and Professor of the Teaching of Literature; it was a fairly subtle distinction, but she seemed quite proud of this double achievement.

  She left her silky hand between my paws corroded by the nucleic acid I work with. I lifted it to my eyes so I could examine the ring, which was truly a notable piece for its workmanship and clever design. Each time a ball of strobe light rolled over us, the blue stone lit up brilliantly, and through the two tiny chiseled windows I could see the crowd of young people dancing. The thin gold ribbon that twisted around the stone carried an inscription.

  “Look,” she said turning the ring around with two fingers from her other hand. “Can you see how the words of the inscription recombine to form other words, spelling out both of my two degrees?”

  I couldn’t, of course, due to the lack of light and my befuddlement at that late hour, but I could admire the mechanism. I kissed those fingers.

  May God forgive me, but I began to doubt the seriousness of the course of studies at that tropical university. All those exchanges and caresses in that discotheque were part of a larger context through which I was taking a measure of Nelly’s true intelligence. All my seductive moves, both the innocent and the daring, and even the most impassioned and sincere, have in common the same backdrop: my constant evaluation of the intelligence of the woman in question. I can’t help it. Even further in the background must be my adolescent fantasy of having a sex slave, a woman who submits, without any reserve, to the will of my desire. For this, her intelligence must have a very special size and configuration. But intelligence is mysterious. It always gets the better of me, escapes my manipulations — even my literary ones — and remains an insolvable enigma.

  I was interested in Nelly for another reason, both more positive and more ineffable. She was Amelina’s best friend, her confidante, she knew everything about her . . . Among other things she knew where she was hiding. She was in on the secret, though secretive herself, thereby establishing a continuum of love. The two women weren’t at all alike, they were almost opposites. Once I had compared them, in jest, to the sun and the moon. There in the disco, in my intoxicated state, I had next to me, throbbing and perfect, a reality that touched all other realities and spread through them until it encompassed the entire world. Nelly’s dreamy eyes lost themselves in the night and in me.

  VIII

  At dawn, things emerged from their reality, as if in a drop of water. The most trivial objects, embellished with profound reality, made me quiver almost painfully. A tuft of grass, a paving stone, a scrap of cloth, everything was soft and dense. We were in the Plaza Bolívar, as lush and leafy as a real forest. The sky had turned blue, not a cloud in sight, no stars or airplanes, as if emptied of everything; the sun should have appeared from behind the mountains, but its rays were not yet touching even the highest peak to the west. The light intensified and bodies projected no shadows. The dark and the light floated in layers. The birds didn’t sing, the insects must have been asleep, the trees remained as still as in a painting. And, at my feet, the real kept being born, like a mineral being born atom by atom.

  The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.

  “So, am I capable of love?” I asked myself. “Can I really love truly, like in a soap opera, like in reality?” The question surpassed the thinkable. Love? Me, love? Me, the brain man, the aesthete of the intellect? Wouldn’t something need to happen to make it possible, some cosmic sign, an event that would turn the course of events around, an eclipse of a kind . . . ? Inches away from my shoe, one more atom crystallized in a blaze of transparency, then another . . . If I could love, just like that, without the universe getting turned upside down, the only persistent condition that made reality real was contiguity: that things were next to things, in rows or on plates . . . No, it was impossible, I couldn’t believe it. Nevertheless . . . Plop! Another atom of air, in front of my face, initiating another spiral of splendid combustion. If all conditions can be reduced to a single condition, it is this: Adam and Eve were real.

  Nelly and I, sitting on a stone bench under the trees, were as pale as a sheet of paper. My features were as drawn as could be, an old man’s face, pale, bloodless, my hair sticking out. I knew this because I was looking at my reflection in the glass of the Exoscope we had in front of us. The actors of the University Theatre had brought it to the disco at the end of the party, to pay me a goodbye homage; we danced around it like savages enacting a rain dance, watching our reflections in miniature and upside down. Afterward, drunk as they were, they left it behind, and I made the effort to carry it to the plaza, thinking that sooner or later they would remember it and come get it — they needed it for the show’s official opening.

  I had to admit they had done a good job. The dawn was fully reflected in the Exoscope, and in that dawn, the two of us, as if after the end of the world. With great effort I turned my eyes away from the instrument’s glass and looked directly at Nelly. Without knowing why, I asked her a stupid question.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  She remained quiet but alert for a moment, her eyes lost in the void.

  “Do you hear that, César? What’s going on?”

  I could have sworn the silence was absolute, though as a foreigner I was unable to determine what was normal or abnormal within that silence. In any case, it was not the silence that was puzzling Nelly. Awakening from my reverie, I heard shouts of alarm, cars suddenly accelerating, sirens, all in a kind of dull buzz that pulsated around me, still not disturbing the otherworldly peace of the city center, though approaching.

  “The birds have stopped singing,” Nelly whispered, “even the flies have gone into hiding.”

  “Could it be an earthquake?” I ventured.

  “Could be,” she said noncommittally.

  A car drove past the plaza at full speed. Behind it came a military truck full of armed soldiers, one of whom saw us and shouted something, but they wer
e driving so fast we couldn’t understand him.

  “Look!” Nelly shouted, pointing up.

  I looked up and saw a crowd of people on the roof terrace of a building, all staring off into the distance and shouting. The same thing was happening on the balconies of the other buildings around that plaza. Right in front of us the cathedral bells began to ring. In a flash the streets were thronging with cars filled with entire families . . . It seemed like collective madness. As far as I was concerned, it might have been normal: I didn’t know the customs of that city, and nothing precluded this from being what happened every Sunday at dawn: the locals coming out onto their balconies and terraces to check the weather, and shouting out joyfully that it was a beautiful day for their outings and sporting events; the cathedral bells, for their part, calling people to morning services; families leaving early for their picnics . . . If I hadn’t been with Nelly I could have taken it as the normal Sunday routine. But she was extremely puzzled, and even a bit alarmed.

  It was obvious that whatever was happening was happening far away, and far away in this small, enclosed valley meant the surrounding mountains. We couldn’t see them from the plaza, but there were panoramic views from any of the adjacent streets, one of the city’s great tourist attractions. I stood up. Nelly must have been thinking the same thing because she also got up and quickly figured out the closest spot where we could find out what was happening.

  “Let’s go to the archway on Humboldt Street,” she said, already starting off. That archway, which I was familiar with, was about one hundred yards away; it stood at the foot of a very long public stairway that was so steep you could see half the valley from there. I started to follow her, then stopped her with my hand.

  “Should we leave this monstrosity here?” I asked, pointing to the Exoscope.

  She shrugged. We left it and walked off quickly. In the brief time it took us to get to the archway, just a short distance away, the activity in the streets had increased so much it was difficult to make our way through the crowds. Everybody was nervous, some were terrified, most were rushing around as if their lives depended on it. Everyone was talking, but I couldn’t understand a word, as if they were speaking foreign languages, which must be a natural effect of panic.

  When we got there, we saw it. It was so astonishing it took a while for me to absorb. To begin with, we saw that the alarm was justified, to say the least. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. At first, it was otherworldly; it was still dawn, the sun hadn’t yet appeared, the sky was very clear and very empty, bodies projected no shadows . . . and colossal blue worms were slowly descending from the mountain peaks . . . I’m aware that stating it like this might bring automatic writing to mind, but stating it is my only choice. It seems like the insertion of a different plot line, from an old B-rated science fiction movie, for example. Nevertheless, the seamless continuity had at no time been interrupted. They were living beings, of this I was certain: I had too much experience manipulating life forms to make that mistake. There are some movements no machine can imitate. I calculated the size of the worms: they were approximately one thousand feet long and seventy feet in diameter; they were almost perfect cylinders, with no heads or tails, although their geometric form had to be mentally reconstructed because they were coiling and twisting and changing shape as they moved across the anfractuous mountain terrain. They also looked soft and slimy, but their formidable weight could be deduced by observing them displace enormous rocks along their way, sunder the mountainside, and reduce whole trees to splinters. The most extraordinary thing, which would have been worthy of admiration had the circumstances not added an extra touch of terror, was their color: a phosphorescent blue with watery tones, like an almost darkened sky, a blue that seemed dampened by fresh placentas.

  Nelly grabbed my arm. She was horrified. I swept my eyes along the perimeter of this great Andean amphitheater: there were hundreds of worms, all descending toward the city. From the shouts, which I quickly began to understand, I learned that the same thing was occurring in the mountains behind us, the ones we couldn’t see from where we stood. I’ve already said that Mérida is completely surrounded by mountains. This meant only one thing: very soon we would be crushed by the monsters. The landslides they were provoking were cataclysmic; the entire valley shook as stones the size of houses tumbled down the slopes, and there was probably already vast destruction on the outskirts. A simple projected calculation revealed that the city was doomed. Two or three of these worms would be enough to leave no brick standing. And there were hundreds of them! Moreover, with horror and despair I realized that the quantity was indefinite . . . and increasing. It was as if they kept being born, and the process showed no signs of stopping.

  The ones in front were already halfway between the highest peaks and the valley floor. That’s why they were descending: their own multiplication was forcing them downhill. It was an almost mechanical destiny, not one due to any murderous impulse on the part of these strange beasts. In fact, they were much too strange to harbor any agenda. Their size was what would destroy us . . . If anyone entertained a hope that their size was an optical illusion, and that they would get smaller as they descended until they appeared as inoffensive as cigarette butts under the soles of our shoes, they would have to dismiss the idea: they were very real, and having one nearby would be a terminal experience.

  Any hope regarding the relativity of their size was painfully dispelled a few minutes later, when we witnessed the following episode from where we were standing under the archway. Several military trucks, the one we had seen driving past the plaza and others, converged on a road that rose in the direction of the worms. We saw them stop when they reached the one nearest the city. The soldiers got out and fanned out in front of the blue mass. At that moment denial was no longer possible: the men looked like insects next to the monster — and pathetically ineffectual. This became obvious once they began to shoot at it with their machine guns. They didn’t miss their target once (it was like aiming at the mountain itself), but they could have continued for an eternity to the same effect, that is, to no effect. The bullets disappeared into the soft tons of blue flesh like pebbles tossed into the sea. They tried bazookas, cannons, hand grenades, even antiaircraft missiles fired from the hood of one of the trucks, all with the same derisive futility. The climax came when the worm, in the course of its blind march, slid down a steep slope and one section of its body rolled onto the road, crushing trucks and men like an enormous rolling pin, reducing them to laminas. The survivors ran off in terror. The crowd broke their awed silence as they watched the events unfold, and I heard cries and shouts of anguish. Their worst fears were being confirmed. Somebody pointed to another spot, to one side, where another catastrophe was taking place: it was the highway that led across the plateau and out of the valley. Another worm had fallen over a compact line of cars trying to escape, causing innumerable fatalities. Traffic came to a standstill, and people abandoned their cars and ran between the rocks and bushes back toward the city. There was no escape. This was definitive. Eyes turned with fear toward the old colonial buildings around us: the city itself seemed to be the last possible refuge, and it was an illusion to think that its feeble walls could withstand the weight of the worms.

  The collective attention turned back to itself, as if to confirm the reality of what was occurring through the reaction of fear. And I was implicated in this reversion. Like so many others, like everybody,
perhaps, I have always thought that in a real collective catastrophe I would find the material of my dreams, take it in hand, shape it, finally; then, even if only for an instant, everything would be permitted. It would take something as grand and widespread as an earthquake, an interplanetary collision, or a war to make the circumstances genuinely objective and thus make room for my subjectivity to take hold of the reins of action.

  But the subjective was made manifest even in the supremely objective. The examples of cataclysms hereby offered, which in reality are not examples, do not include the invasion of enormous slimy creatures. That would never happen in real life; it rises out of a feverish imagination, in this case mine, and returns to it as a metaphor for my private life.

  Here I have again reached the moment to change levels, to make another “translation.” But this one is so radical that it comes full circle and reties the plot line exactly where I left it.

  The mental process of the character representing me in the previous “translation,” from the point at which he was contemplating the benefits of a collective catastrophe, apparently dissolved entirely into fiction, then gathered up all the loose ends and elaborated a generalized reinterpretation, not only of the previous “translations” but of the process itself out of which “translations” arise.

  Just as when interpreting a nightmare, I was assailed by a sudden doubt: might it be my fault? A priori, this seemed absurd, an extreme manifestation — exaggerated to the point of caricature — of the lack of proportion between small causes and grand effects. But one thing led to the next, and in a vertiginous process this conjecture became more and more plausible. I went back and reviewed my own “translations” until I found the root of them all, the device from which they had emerged. In my mind, the march of the worms became retrograde, and with the same brutal blindness with which they were descending, they turned and climbed back up, destroying my inventions, from whose crushed cadavers rose little clouds of memory, ghosts of memory.