The Literary Conference

by Cesar Aira

  Because I had forgotten everything. The same system that created my thoughts took charge of erasing them, turning them into sinuous white strips that reached across every level. How can there be so much amnesia in a single lifetime? Isn’t this a point in favor of the theory of reincarnation?

  Of course, there is such a thing as “blind translation,” the act of mechanically transposing one language to another, without passing through the content, which is what professional translators do when they come across a technical and detailed description of a machine or a process . . . In order to understand what it’s about, they would need to consult a manual on the subject, study something they know nothing about and doesn’t interest them . . . But that isn’t necessary! By translating correctly, sentence by sentence, the entire page, the translation will turn out well, they will continue to be as happily ignorant as they were at the beginning, and they will get paid for their work. After all, they are paid to know the language, not the subject matter.

  The inverted vortex of the titanic herd of blue worms was located somewhere in the mountains. They emerged from that spot into the light and began to slither — even before they came fully into view — along the broken horizon of the peaks, like a ball circling the top of the roulette wheel, until they stopped, made their appearance, and began to descend. There were so many and their issuance was so constant that they were all descending at once from all points around the circle (in that particular game of roulette, all the numbers came up at once). I could pinpoint the locus of their emergence, and I was the only person who could: it was the cloning machine. It couldn’t be anything else. The years I had devoted full time to the manipulation of cloned materials had so refined my sixth sense that I could recognize it. These worms had all the characteristics; their very excess — where would that come from if not the uncontrolled multiplication of cells that only the cloning machine could generate? Functional beings have inviolable limits. My first thought was that the machine was malfunctioning, had gone haywire. But I immediately corrected myself; that thought was worthy only of a citizen of a consumer society who buys a microwave or a video camera and is overwhelmed by its complexity. This was not the case with me, because I had invented the cloning machine, and nobody knew better than I that it was infallibly rational.

  As I have already mentioned, the worms’ color and texture were their most noticeable characteristics. They are also what led me to the heart of the matter. Because that color, that very peculiar brilliant blue, immediately reminded me of the color of Carlos Fuentes’s cell, which my wasp had brought me . . . Though when I saw that color in the cell it did not evoke what it was evoking now that I was seeing it extended over vast undulating surfaces. I now realized I had seen that same color somewhere else, the very same day the cell had been taken, one week before. Where? On the tie Carlos Fuentes was wearing that day! A splendid Italian raw silk tie, over an immaculate white shirt . . . and a light grey suit . . . (one memory led to another until the picture was complete). And this horrendous piece of evidence revealed the magnitude of the error. The wasp had brought me a cell from Carlos Fuentes’s tie, not his body. A groan escaped my lips.

  “Stupid wasp and the accursed mother who made you!”

  “What?” Nelly asked, surprised.

  “Don’t pay any attention to me, I understand myself.”

  The fact is, I couldn’t blame her. It was all my fault. How could that poor disposable cloned tool know where the man stopped and his clothing began? For her it was all one, it was all “Carlos Fuentes.” After all, it was no different than what happened when the critics and professors who were attending the conference found it difficult to say where the man ended and his books began; for them, too, all of it was “Carlos Fuentes.”

  I saw it with the clarity of the noonday sun: the silk cell contained the DNA of the worm that had produced it, and the cloning machine, functioning perfectly, had done nothing more than decode and recode the information, with the results we were now witnessing. The blue monsters were nothing more nor less than silkworm clones, and if they had been magnified to that absurd size it was simply because I had set the cloning machine to run in “genius” mode. Under other circumstances I would have smiled with melancholic irony upon seeing to what awkward and destructive gigantism literary greatness could be reduced when it was passed through the weave and warp of life.

  I came to my senses after having lost myself in thoughts that rushed through me like a hiccup, and I felt an urgency to do something, anything, to prevent the imminent catastrophe. Regrettably, I have no talent for improvisation. But this was the time for action, not regrets. I would think of something. And even if I didn’t, everything would turn out well. If I had started it, I could end it. If it had come out of me, it had to return to me. It couldn’t be that I would be responsible for the deaths of several tens of thousands of innocent people and the utter devastation — no stone would remain standing — of this old city. The very possibility of the disaster cast over my being a demonic splendor. In my role as a writer, I am inoffensive. What more could I want than to be diabolical, a destroyer of worlds?! But it is impossible. Well reasoned, however, therein lie the benefits of the changes in level, because then I could, in reality, be a diabolical being, an evil monster: such things are fairly relative, as everyone knows from daily experience.

  I grabbed Nelly by the shoulder, and we left the group under the archway. The entire crowd was dispersing, women and men moving suddenly and without any apparent purpose. What could they do? Hide in a cellar? Make final arrangements? In the end, they had to do something.

  Nelly was in shock. I brought my face up to hers and spoke to provoke a response from her.

  “I’m going to do something. I think I can stop them.” She looked at me incredulously. I repeated, “If anyone can save the city, I can.”

  “But, how?” she stammered, looking behind her.

  “You’re going to have to help me,” which wasn’t altogether true, among other reasons because I still hadn’t devised a plan. But it worked, her eyes recovered a glimmer of interest. She must have remembered that I was the hero of the Macuto Line and that performing feats of historical proportion was not unknown to me.

  We didn’t have to go far. We literally bumped into an empty car that had its motor running and the door open; its owner must have joined the group watching events from the archway.

  “Let’s go!” I said. I got in behind the wheel. Nelly sat in the passenger seat. We drove off. It was a taxi, an old Pontiac from the seventies, as long and wide as only cars in Venezuela can be today.

  I feared the streets would be blocked, but they weren’t. The paralysis of uncertainty persisted throughout the city. I sped up, and we came to Viaduct Avenue. The only solution I could think of was to find a way through the new-born beasts, reach the cloning machine, and turn it off. In this way at least I could stop their emergence. I didn’t know if putting the machine in reverse would reabsorb the worms, but I could try. In the meantime, I stepped on the gas. We were soon on the viaduct, where we commanded an excellent view of the blue masses slithering down the mountains.

  “Where are we going?” Nelly asked. “I don’t think we can escape.”

  “That is not my intention, quite the contrary. I’m going to try to get to the place where they are coming from,” at which point I inserted a tiny white lie, because I didn’t want her to guess th
at I was responsible for the disaster. “What we have to do is close the . . . hole they are coming out of, and perhaps make them go back . . . underground.”

  She believed me. It was absurd, but in a certain way it evoked the spring mechanism of the Macuto Line, over which I had already been triumphant, and this lent it a patina of truth.

  I kept climbing, driving faster and faster. The old Pontiac vibrated, its panels rattling. Driving helped me recuperate some of my lost coordination; a sleepless night and the alcohol had left every cell in my body dead tired. I was overwhelmed with exhaustion. But the internal adrenalin bath sustained my movements, and slowly I recovered my faculties.

  I turned left onto a small, very steep street, shifted into first gear, and floored the gas until the motor roared. In a final effort the clunker carried us onto the highway that circled the city. I turned right, moving in the same direction as the morning breeze; snakes and rats, escaping in terror from the mountains, were scrambling across the asphalt. We could now see from close up what was happening. The blue of the worms filled the windshield. They were everywhere, nearby and far away, and their forward march was inexorable. The route we were taking would be quite dangerous in a matter of minutes, and if not, would become so later on. We heard a few rocks, luckily quite small, falling on the roof of the car. I began to doubt the feasibility of my plan. Reaching the cloning machine seemed like mission impossible. We would have to abandon the car sooner or later, perhaps quite soon; I hoped to drive at least as far as the intersection with the road that continued along the plateau; but I remembered that I had climbed on foot for an hour or more before setting down the machine. And based on the way events were unfolding, this interval would give the worms plenty of time to turn the city into a tabula rasa. That is, if we managed to avoid them and reach our goal. We passed by one that was slithering down the hill about two hundred yards from the road. Seen from close up, they were overwhelming. Their shape, which from far away had seemed so well defined, so worm-like, here turned into a blue mess, cloudlike. Nelly devoured it all with her eyes, in silence. She turned to look back at the city, as if calculating the time left before the inevitable occurred. At that moment I sensed she was remembering something, and, in fact, she let out a choked exclamation and looked at me.

  “César!”

  “What?” I said, lifting my foot off the gas pedal.

  “I forgot about Amelina!”

  This surprise completely confused me. At that moment more than ever before, Amelina felt like a myth, the legend of love. I had already resigned myself to never seeing her again, so her name came to me from a distance that was purely linguistic. But Nelly’s words carried with them an urgency of reality that forced me to adopt a more practical perspective, as if Amelina really did exist. And, undoubtedly, she did. She was somewhere in the city we saw spread out to our right, small and threatened like the model of a city in the hands of an angry child. The image of Florencia, my childhood love, flitted through my mind, the young and enamored Florencia, whom I felt had been reborn in Amelina thirty years later. Like in a trick diorama, what was far away looked close and vice versa. Love’s ghostly stand-ins, which had shaped my life, were spinning around me, forming a tunnel of black light that I was sinking into.

  “Where is she?”

  “At her house. She sleeps late and very heavily. We must go wake her up and tell her what’s going on!”

  What good would that do her? None, of course. And us, even less. But the idea attracted me for two reasons: first, I could see Amelina again, and under savage and peremptory circumstances; second, it was the perfect excuse to abandon my impractical plan of reaching the cloning machine. The very instant I made the decision to go, I became possessed by an almost infantile euphoria, because Nelly’s words implied that Amelina still lived alone, she had not gotten married, and she, Nelly, continued to think of her in relation to me, and if she had decided to mention her only under this extremity, it was because our love story was real, it carried across all the translations, it would keep its appointment . . .

  “Let’s go,” I said. “But you’ll have to guide me.”

  She pointed to the first exit, and I veered off the highway, making the tires screech. We turned our backs on the mountain and the worms, as if to say, “Who cares!” and we returned to the city along a road I didn’t know. She told me that Amelina was still living in one of the student apartments in the Nancy Building, the same one where I had visited her years before. It wasn’t far away, but nothing was in such a small city.

  The traffic got heavier, though it was still moving because nobody was paying any attention to the traffic lights. I wondered where they were all going. From the terraces, people kept looking toward the mountains with the same expectations, the same alarm, the same dismay. They were not taking any measures, but what could they do? The cars were driving like crazy, all in the same direction . . .

  “Where are they going?” Nelly asked.

  Suddenly, I knew: to the airport. It seemed strange that I hadn’t thought of that sooner; apparently others had. The only way out was by air. But, even assuming there were still some private airplanes available and that military planes were on their way, many could not be saved, let alone all. The commercial flight arrived at ten and departed at eleven, if they hadn’t cancelled it. And if it arrived full of passengers, the passengers themselves would want to remain on the flight back to Caracas.

  A Mercedes Benz, its horn blasting like a siren, passed us; I glimpsed Carlos Fuentes and his wife in the back seat, their profiles set in serious expressions. They, too, were on their way to the airport. How naive! Or, perhaps, they had been offered seats on an official plane? The city was the provincial capital, and surely the governor would have one . . . but I found it hard to believe that in this predicament of “save yourself if you can,” literary hierarchies would be respected. No way! Surely they were going to try to somehow wangle a seat, like so many others . . . I remembered that I had a reservation for the eleven o’clock flight, I was even carrying the ticket in my pocket . . . If I had been able to catch up with that powerful Mercedes I would have offered them my seat . . . I’ve always liked Carlos Fuentes; not in vain had I chosen him for my experiment. I felt like a scoundrel. Everything that was happening was my fault, and now, instead of putting everything on the line to rid the world of this threat (it was the least I could do), I was allowing myself to be carried away by a private, sentimental whim; I was ashamed of my lack of responsibility.

  To appease my conscience, I said out loud, “It will take us only a few minutes. Then all three of us will go to the mountain.”

  She indicated where to turn and continued directing me along a sinuous route. She leaned forward and pointed her finger in the direction I should go. I couldn’t avoid looking at her, and I seemed to be seeing her, again, for the first time. Again I discovered her beauty, her youth . . . a bit excessive for me, but that’s what it was all about. To be young again, “good and beautiful,” as she had said. She was mysterious, that little Nelly, her serenity and silence shielded some kind of secret that enthralled me . . .

  Here there is a blank in the story. I don’t know what happened in the following few minutes. Perhaps we never reached Amelina’s place, perhaps we got there and didn’t find her, or couldn’t rouse her. What I do know is that I suddenly found myself about a hundred feet below street level on the banks
of a stream through a deep gorge that crosses the valley and the city longitudinally. Behind me, far above, was the viaduct, the most centrally located bridge connecting the two sides of the gorge. A large crowd had gathered on the other side and was watching me. In front of me, almost perfectly still, was a worm. He was little more than fifty feet away. Apparently the monster had rolled there: his descent had been brutal, judging from what he had left in his wake: fallen trees, houses smashed to smithereens. His congeners must have been surrounding the city in a deadly grip. I looked around. The balconies of the buildings along the edge of the gorge were full of people, eager to witness the confrontation. I recognized the Nancy Building, whose pinkish walls emitted an opaque hue that tinged everybody with their color.

  But I had to hurry. The sense of urgency was the only thing that had survived my amnesia. My hands were clutching the vertical bars of the Exoscope, and Nelly was holding the other end. I saw her through the glass panels. How had we gotten there, and with that device? I didn’t have time to reconstruct it all, but I could imagine it. Upon seeing the worm fall into the deep riverbed, the lowest level it could reach, I must have thought it would be at my mercy, at least for a few minutes, so I could test an annihilation experiment. We probably ran to the plaza, several hundred feet away, to get the Exoscope, then carried it (this was evident from how every muscle in my body ached) and lowered it from the viaduct: the rope still attached to it was testimony enough.

  Whatever the nature of the experiment, I didn’t even have to think about it because my brain, in parallel, was already making the calculations . . .