The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

The Criminal and the Cartoonist

THE CRIMINAL WAS HOLDING a knife to the cartoonist’s throat with one hand while furiously brandishing an open comic book with the other, and, in a voice as full of menace as his body language and the whole situation, subjecting his victim to violent but also bitter and plaintive reproaches.

“You had to go and tell my story, didn’t you, filthy snitch. . Rat, squealer, faggot! And you had to tell it in minute detail, and give the police everything they need to catch me and get a conviction.”

He was trembling with indignation (but the blade of the knife remained steady, gently pressed against the carotid artery), and the comic book, printed on the usual flimsy paper, was shaking in front of the cartoonist’s pale, terrified face.

“You even drew me! And it’s a good likeness, too, son of a bitch: the nose, the mustache, the expression. . the clothes! The black waistcoat, the belt buckle, the striped socks. . You really went to town, you rat. But now you’re going to pay. .”

The cartoonist, faced with what seemed to be the imminent end of the scene, and of his life, drew strength from desperation, and, in a barely audible voice, attempted to defend himself (he had a very strong argument).

“I never informed on you. I got all the information from the newspapers, down to the last detail, like you said! There are photos of you in the paper, hundreds of photos; that’s what I copied your face from, how else could I have done it? This is the first time I’ve seen you in person! Everything was published already.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I swear! You can check for yourself. You must know, but you won’t admit it. You were in the papers every day until the public’s morbid interest in your crimes began to wane, and that’s all the documentation I used; I didn’t put in anything that wasn’t already in the public domain. I didn’t have special sources or prior personal knowledge. I don’t have any underworld contacts; I spend all my time bent over the drawing board, in a world of fantasy. .”

“Don’t lie. It’s no fantasy. Everything you put in this comic happened exactly like you show it.”

The cartoonist’s voice was more natural now, not so shaky; he was taking heart from his irrefutable reasoning.

“But that’s because I got it from the newspapers! It’s all there, you can ask anyone. You weren’t reading the papers in prison, so you don’t know how much space they devoted to your story, how much information they gathered, how many photos of you they found, how meticulously they reconstructed each one of your exploits. . The material was all there, ready and waiting, all I had to do was write the script. . Well, I don’t want to get too technical, but—”

“Don’t lie.”

The same hoarse refrain: the record was stuck. What more could the cartoonist say? His arguments having failed to persuade, the panic was returning and with it the pallor and the urgent desire not to die. He had placed too much faith in language and reason. He’d forgotten that he was at the mercy of a terrible criminal, who could not have become what he was had he not already been an insane monster, impermeable to humanity. Already, and still.

And yet, when the criminal spoke, which he promptly did (all this took place in a few fleeting instants of horror), he too resorted to the irrefutable.

“Look at the date.”

These words introduced a new element, which, on the face of it, undermined the argument based on the newspapers, because if anything is dated, it’s the daily press. A complex rearrangement took place in the cartoonist’s mind, with the instantaneity that characterizes moments of high tension. He felt that he had settled the matter once and for all by appealing to the evidence of the newspapers; now the question of dates would oblige him to enter into the specific details of the proof. On the other hand, it was encouraging; by raising the question, his interlocutor was showing his willingness to rise to the level of a linguistic (and numerical) conversation, and that was a domain in which the cartoonist felt much more at home than in the world of action.

This relief, however, lasted only the few seconds it took him to focus (anxious sweat was running into his eyes, blurring his vision) and read the date in question, written by hand at the top of the cover. Those cheap comic books were almost never dated, and collectors like him had to determine the year of publication indirectly, by means of stubborn, laborious research. They calculated and triangulated, comparing the styles of the cartoonists and the themes of the scriptwriters, using providential references to current affairs that had found their way into the timeless extravagance of the adventures. A wealth of idle, playful erudition was mobilized, with no prestige or award to be won, but that only made it more enjoyable.

The date showed that the comic was forty years old, published when both of them had been children (the criminal and the cartoonist were roughly the same age). That explained the yellowish color of the paper, the neat grid of panels, the old-fashioned layout, and the dog-eared pages. It also explained, compellingly, why the cartoonist’s syllogism had made no impression on the criminal. How could you argue that a comic published forty years ago was based on events reported by the press in the last few months?

Because of its age, this element was, paradoxically, too new for the cartoonist to absorb straightaway. He tried to step back and consider it from a distance, not only to see it in perspective, but also to put the exchange, if he could, on a more civilized footing, and above all to buy time, which, in the circumstances, was the only thing that really mattered:

“I’m a comic book collector. .”

The criminal interrupted him:

“Don’t lie.”

His leitmotif again! But this time the cartoonist had visible proof to back his claim.

“I’ve got lots of comic books, from the forties on, I’ve been collecting since I was a kid. . You can’t say I’m lying, because you saw them and you took this one. . I don’t know how you found it so easily, just like that, among the thousands of comics in my collection. . though they are well organized, it’s true, by year, by publisher, by title. .”

“Shut up and explain—”

This time it was the cartoonist who interrupted:

“Creating and collecting are parallel activities for me. They’re separate, but they nourish each other, inevitably. Most of my colleagues are collectors too.”

“What do I care? Why are you lying? This”—the criminal shook the comic book violently, scrunching it up with no regard for its value as a collector’s item—“didn’t come out of the newspapers, son of a. .!”

“That comic, I swear. . I’d forgotten all about it. You saw yourself how many I’ve collected: thousands and thousands. . That’s how it is with collectors, we can never have enough. . There must be lots I haven’t even read. . All I take from the masters is the form, insofar as I can. For the plots, I use the newspapers, the crime reports. .”

The criminal exploded in fury (miraculously, his shouts were not accompanied by a jerking of the wrist: the slightest movement could have been fatal).

“What the fuck do you mean? The police didn’t know who I was, and the journalists had no idea! Now they know, thanks to you!”

“But I followed the cases in the newspapers!”

“Well, the papers are going to follow you now, smart-ass, bullshit artist! And they won’t have any work to do, because you showed it all just like it happened, and it’s obviously me in the drawings.”

“No. . I don’t know. . you’re confusing me. Now you mention it, maybe I used the Identi-Kit pictures. .”

“Ha!”

The criminal laughed sardonically, full of contempt for those crude sketches patched together by the police. Although the cartoonist shared his opinion, he attempted a lukewarm defense:

“I don’t know. Sometimes they get it right.”

“Come on! Don’t make me angrier than I already am. . No, do! Go on lying, so I lose control and get it over with, since I’m going to do it anyway.”

“No.”

It was a cry from the soul, and the vibration of the cartoonist’s vocal cords perilously tensed the part of his neck on which the blade was pressing. The men were in an uncomfortable, strained position, both standing in the middle of the semidark studio, the criminal’s massive body pressing against the cartoonist’s back, his right arm bent, elbow out, so as to place the knife in exactly the right position for throat-slitting, the left arm around the other side, extended, holding up the comic book. It was almost like a sculptural group, except for the trembling of one figure, the other’s expressive little jolts, and of course the moving lips of both. It was hard to see how the composition could remain stable, given the turbulent passions to which it was subject (revenge, terror). But it wasn’t all that strange: statues hold still too, although they often represent, in a direct or allegorical way, volcanic passions, including, precisely, vindictiveness and fear.

“No,” the cartoonist repeated. “Are you accusing me of plagiarism? No way. . Not because I care about bourgeois morality or property rights. . I’m not like that. .” He was trying, crazily, to win over his attacker by taking the outlaw’s side. “What I care about is innovation, invention, creation. . Anyway, the world of comics is a kind of fan club; like I said, we’re all collectors, we know our stuff, and we can tell a copy at a glance. . You even have to watch out for unconscious memories!”

“What are you talking about? Why should I give a shit about any of that? My life is on the line here! Don’t you understand? No, of course you don’t: you’re stuck in childhood; you know nothing about real life.”

The cartoonist seized the opportunity to change the subject, and said with a stutter that came (like his earlier cry) from the soul:

“The ch-child is fa-father to the m-man.”

“Don’t I know it, jerk! I used to read this comic book when I was a kid; I bought it when it came out, at the stand on the corner of Lavalleja and Bulnes, where the tenement is. I used to wait for them to come out every week. I wasn’t some stupid snobby collector; I bought it because it was the only way I could escape from the dismal reality of my life: we were poor, my father was in prison, and my mother had tuberculosis. And this comic, this one”—he shook it savagely, engrossed in the past—“I read it very carefully, I’m telling you. That’s why I spotted it straightaway among the thousands of others, the tons of old paper you’ve piled up.”

The cartoonist, who should have been comforted by the revelation of this common ground, this comic they had both read, because it was something he shared with a being who until then had seemed entirely other, jumped instead to a higher level of fear and alienation. Apart from fellow members of the trade, who had an artistic or professional investment in the medium, he wasn’t used to dealing with people who actually read comics. People who read them for their content. He knew they existed, of course. But he had shut them out of his consciousness. And to find himself suddenly in the hands of such a person, literally in his hands and at his mercy, paralyzed him with terror. To make things worse, the terror was irrational, without a reason that he could identify and articulate. What happened next deepened the strangeness. Up until then, the criminal had been tight-lipped, but something must have pressed his talk button:

“Yes, I remembered it clearly, panel by panel, drawings and text, every line, every word. Even though I read it when I was. . I don’t know, ten or twelve, and I hadn’t reread it until today. I remembered it so well because I didn’t actually have to remember. It wasn’t just another comic for me, like it is for you, with your thousands; for you, they’re just a fetish, or at best a source of ‘inspiration.’ ” When he put the quotation marks into his speech, a slow music began to play in the distance, a melody made of detached notes, deep in pitch, plucked on some string instrument, distant but curiously loud. “For me it had real importance. I don’t know why God and the Devil set it up like that, or why I read it just at the point in my psychophysical development when it was bound to have the biggest effect on me. And what an effect! That comic strip has been my life, right up to this day. Each one of its panels has become reality: each crime, each flight, each abyss. My features have even come to resemble those of the protagonist, and now no one could deny it’s me. .”

The cartoonist: “Sorry, but it’s not true that this was just ‘another comic’ for me.” (His use of spoken quotation marks made the music stop.) “I don’t know how you can say that, because if you really meant it you wouldn’t be here. That comic is my masterpiece, at least in the eyes of the public; it’s the one that made me rich and famous.”

“Come on, stop fooling yourself. They’re all the same to you. Evil, Cruelty, Blood, and Horror are just the morbid hooks you use to make it sell, and if your marketing consultants told you the fashion was over and something else was cool, you’d be onto it.”

“I don’t have marketing consultants.”

“You do it yourself, I know. You’ve got a fantastic nose for it.”

“Artistic intuition is my only guide.”

“Ha!” The blade pressed harder.

“But in that case,” groaned the cartoonist, who hadn’t lost the thread of the argument, in spite of the knife at his throat, “it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m innocent! My only sin is having debased my art for commercial gain; you’re responsible for the course your life has taken — you or the impressionable child you were.”

“Don’t lie. You know very well you’re responsible. . not for the way my life turned out, true, but for the tip-off, the prison sentence. .” The thought of prison made his rage boil over, and he shouted: “You’re going to pay! Right now!”

“Wait! Maybe we’re misunderstanding each other, or I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Didn’t you say the comic predicted every detail of your life as an outlaw, and this was when I was in primary school and hadn’t even dreamed of becoming a cartoonist? So what are you accusing me of?”

“Of denouncing me, what do you think?”

“But how could I, if it was all denounced already, a priori?”

“That’s how you’re going to die, ‘a priori.’”

Music again, exactly as before: the same deep, resonant notes, very far apart, making up a superhuman melody.

“Hold on, explain. If I’m going to die”—it was the first time he’d acknowledged this, but no doubt just as a way to buy time—“at least I want to know why.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

The comic book was quivering; the criminal was still holding it in front of the cartoonist’s face, although he’d clearly made his point. The rectangle of paper was yellowish, almost brown with age, but it stood out clearly in the steadily deepening dimness. The scene took on a posthumous, terminal air. The cartoonist felt this, and his heart, which had been clenched all along, contracted further still, becoming an iron ball. He was unable to stifle a sob:

“It was you, you and the comic. . not me. . It was the comic and you. .”

“But nobody knew.”

The oral underlining of these words added an unrelated, subterranean tom-tom beat to the musical notes that had been playing since the last quotation marks.

Although his brain was clouded by anxiety, the cartoonist realized the utter irrefutability of the sentence he had just heard. He felt defeated and overwhelmed by the defeat, and yet he knew that irrefutability had been the norm, not the exception, throughout the dialogue. So there was still some hope, like a faraway light: maybe there would be another irrefutable argument, on his side. But then the criminal would produce another one in turn. . There would be no end to it. Only a difference of speed in coming up with these arguments could tell in favor of one or the other, and he had the impression that his killer was quicker. It wasn’t just an impression, either; clearly the killer was always the first to come up with an irrefutable argument. There was a reason for this: his wits had been sharpened by a lifetime of dodging the long arm of the law, while the cartoonist, perpetually bent over his drawing board, in the peace and quiet of his studio, had not undergone that training. In the comics he drew there were conflicts and miraculous last-minute escapes, but they were subject to corrections and revisions; sometimes it took him weeks to come up with a reply or work out an ending.

On this occasion, with the knife blade at his throat, he felt he’d never be able to find a reply, even in an eternity of searching. And to tell the truth (his truth, anyway), every second he spent in that forced, uncomfortable position felt like an eternity. Which must have been why he came out with the answer immediately:

“I didn’t know either! How could I have known? You said it yourself: ‘no one’ knew.”

The quotation marks, indicated orally, put a stop to the deep musical notes that had been playing since the last set; but the tom-tom beats continued, on their own now.

“Now everyone knows, thanks to you, you dirty snitch.”

It was useless. There was no point talking. The irrefutable and the indisputable would go on intervening. Although it wasn’t exactly the case that talking was pointless. There was always a point to talk, because it was the only way to know what was happening. But it was pointless to go on talking, because by the time you knew what was happening, time had spun around, turned back on itself, applying its obverse to its reverse, and the contact between past and future events had created a mass of irresolvable paradoxes.

So there was a silence, punctuated by the monotonous tom-tom. And the silence confirmed the immobility of the characters. Which wasn’t absolute: they had not been petrified or frozen in a still image. Little tremors ran through their bodies; there were imperceptible changes of position, which didn’t alter the overall postures: weight was shifted from one leg to the other, shoulders moved forward or back a fraction of an inch, eyes blinked, breath went in and out between slightly parted lips, occasionally moistened by a tongue. The criminal’s right hand went on holding the knife, with the blade pressed against the cartoonist’s throat, while his outstretched left hand held the old comic book in front of his victim’s face. No one else would have been able to hold up his arms for so long, but living like a hunted animal had given him the strength it took. Each arm performed its function: the knife arm made the threat serious; the comic arm explained it and gave it meaning. One without the other would not have been enough to create the scene, which was a product of their coordination. As for the cartoonist, he kept still for obvious reasons, neck tense and stretched, eyes on the comic.

At a certain point, the light stopped fading, it too froze, in an ambiguous dimness. It had not changed markedly from the beginning of the scene to what appeared to be its end. The effect might have been psychological, the natural illusion of darkening produced by our habitual experience of dusk. But who’s to say that this episode was taking place in the evening? The source of that ambiguous light could have been the morning sun, its radiance dimmed by clouds, or filtered through shutters or venetian blinds, or it could just as well have been the moon, a full moon in a clear midnight sky. . And the lighting could also have resulted from a combination or succession of various hours of the day, or all of them. (Artificial light sources were out of the question, because of the blackout affecting the city.)

Apart from the men, the studio was lifeless. It would have been futile to look for a fly buzzing, or an ant crossing the floor, or a piece of paper stirring in a breeze, or a drop falling from a faucet, or a speck of dust dancing in the air. It was as if even the electrons had frozen in their orbits. Everything that had the capacity to move was concentrated in the two standing figures intertwined at the center. They really were at the geometrical center of that square room, and the empty space around them made it all the more obvious; the drawing board and the ergonomic stool had been knocked over in the struggle and fallen apart. The four walls, equidistant from the human figures, were entirely covered with shelves, and these were chock-full with comic books, of which only the slender spines were visible, pressed up against one another from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling.

How had two such different beings come to be present in the same place at the same time?

Given the stillness of their deadlock, it would have been possible to cut them out (in three dimensions, of course), breaking their potentially violent embrace, and place the separate figures in other scenes: the criminal slitting or about to slit the throat of one of his many victims, a defenseless woman, for example; the cartoonist horrified to see that a bad printing job had spoiled a work that he had spent months bringing to perfection. No changes or adjustments would have been necessary: the same posture and gestures, the same facial expression, could work in any number of different situations, and work so well that nobody would ever know.

Eventually, the top halves of both figures, from the waist up, began to lean forward simultaneously. The relative positions of the arms and heads remained the same, although the faces took on a gray luminosity. The leaning slowed to the point where it was imperceptible to the eye; but after a certain lapse of time it was clear that their faces were now a little closer to the floor. It was as if they were leaning down to look for something at their feet, both at the same time. But it was also as if they were suffering from material fatigue, and the hinges or joints in their waists were loosening.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2009