The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

The Spy

IF I WERE A CHARACTER in a play, the lack of real privacy would make me feel wary, anxious, and suspicious. One way or another I’d sense the quiet, attentive presence of the public. I’d always be conscious that my words were being heard by others, and while that might be appropriate for some of my lines (certain clever remarks are made to impress as many people as possible, and in fact there are times when one regrets not having a public to appreciate them), other lines would, I’m sure, require a real, not a fictitious, intimacy. And they would be crucially important for understanding the plot: all the interest and value of the play would hinge on them. But their importance would not loosen my tongue. On the contrary, I would scrupulously observe the rule of secrecy, as I’ve always done. I would simply choose not to speak. I’d say: “Let’s go to another room; there’s something important I need to tell you that no one else should hear.” But then the curtain would fall, and in the next scene, we’d be in the other room, that is, the same stage with different props. I’d glance around and sense something indefinable. . I know that in the fictional world of the play there are no rows of seats out there, and, as a character, I’d know it better still, because it would be the basis of my existence, but even so. . “No, I can’t talk here either. .” I’d lead my interlocutor to another room, and from that one to yet another. . Realizing eventually that the stage would follow me to the ends of the earth, I would, of course, be able to stay out of trouble by making banal remarks that gave nothing away, which would mean sacrificing the interest of the play. But that’s precisely what I would never be able to sacrifice, because my existence as a character would depend on it. So there would come a moment when I would have no choice but to speak. Even so, I’d hold out, gagged by an overpowering distrust. My lips would be sealed; the keys to the plot (the ones in my possession, at least) would not be revealed, no, never! As in a nightmare, I would look on helplessly as a large or small, but significant and perhaps even crucial, portion of the work’s aesthetic value disappeared. And it would be my fault. The other characters would start to move and act like lost or mutilated puppets, with no life or sense of destiny, as they do in those botched plays where nothing ever happens. .

Then, and only then, would I grasp at my last hope: maybe the audience would guess what it was I had to say, in spite of my refusal to come out and say it. Hardly a realistic hope, because I’d be hiding facts, not just comments or opinions. If what I have to reveal, to someone in particular, with the utmost discretion and for very specific reasons, is that I’m a secret agent working undercover, and if that piece of information has, logically, been kept hidden in everything I’ve said so far and will say in the future (a competent author would see to that), how are the people in the audience supposed to guess? It’s preposterous to hope that they could deduce it from my silence or my scruples about privacy, because, after all, I could be hiding any number of secrets: rather than a spy, I might be the illegitimate son of the master of the house, or a fugitive who has adopted the identity of the man he murdered. .

Crazy as it is, banking like this on the spectator’s superhuman intelligence is the flip side of a fear that is also fairly absurd, but often turns out to be justified: the fear of being found out in spite of everything. The reason I refuse to speak, and behave so circumspectly, to the point of taking precautions based on a superstitious hunch (the feeling that one of the four walls really is missing and that there are people sitting in rows of seats listening to what I say), is that I have secrets to keep, dark secrets.

But isn’t this exactly the wrong thing to be doing: harboring the hope that my secret will be guessed? How could it even occur to me to call this a “hope,” in real life? The cause of this wild aberration is art, the world of art into which I have ventured by becoming a character. In art, there’s a condition that takes precedence over all others: it has to be well done. Which is why I have to be a good actor, in a good play; if I don’t act well, the play will not produce the desired effect, and the performance will collapse. In this field, more than in any other, “doing it well” and simply “doing it” are synonymous. So if I dissociate them, because of my hypersensitive wariness, all I have left is hope: a ruinous hope, equivalent to death. Because my secrets are so terrible that I couldn’t survive their revelation. This is something I hadn’t realized until now, until I found myself in this fix, and I’m tempted to say that I entered the fatal game of art in order to come to this realization.

Up until now I have lived in the certainty that my secrets are safe; they’re in the past, and the past is inviolable. I’m the only one who has a key to that chest. Or so I believe, at least: the past has been shut off definitively, and its secrets, my secrets, will never be revealed to anyone, unless I start divulging them, which is something I have no intention of doing. Sometimes, however, I’m not so sure that the chest is closed forever. Time might turn back on itself somehow, in a way that my imagination is unable to foresee — even though (or because) it’s precisely my imagination that is generating these wild conjectures — making the hidden visible. But then I always come around to thinking that the past really is secure, inviolable, sealed, and that if worrying is what I really want to do, there are better things to worry about. So many, in fact, that if I started counting them, I could go on forever, because there’d always be something new. But they all converge on the center, the spot to which I’m rooted at the center of the floodlit stage, in my restless paralysis, quivering, bathed in a cold sweat. .

There’s an actor joined to me. I can’t separate him from myself, except by means of negative statements: I don’t know what he wants; I don’t know what he can do. I don’t know what he’s thinking, either. . He’s a statue of fear, an automaton of apprehension, a fiber-for-fiber replica of me. The author has written him into the play, as a doppelgänger. The idea has been done to death: one actor playing two characters, who turn out to be twins or doubles. Given the limitations of the theater, the two characters have to operate in distinct spaces if they are to be played by the same actor. In between, there’s always a door, an entrance or an exit, a mistake or a change of scenery. The staging dislocates the spaces, but also, insofar as it builds up the fiction, establishes a continuity between them, creating the horrific prospect of a face-to-face encounter with the double. And it’s possible to go a little further, approaching Grand Guignol, and actually represent the encounter, with the help of makeup, costumes, and lighting, as long as the audience is not too close. (Note, however that this applies only to modern theater, because in ancient times, masks made physical distance unnecessary.) In cinema, montage solves the problem perfectly. In the theater, unless you resort to dubious tricks (or you have a pair of actors who are really twins), the process of making the double a theme has to become a theme in turn, so that the two identical characters turn out to be one in the end.

Looking back at what I’ve written, it all seems rather muddled, and if I want to be understood, I need to say it differently (not by means of examples, but, once again, by making it the theme). Sooner or later there comes a time when being correctly understood is vitally important. The hidden cannot endure without that transparency, against which it becomes visible. The hidden: that is, secrets. I have secrets, like everyone else; I don’t know if mine are especially shameful, but I take all sorts of precautions to prevent them from coming to light. It’s natural for people to feel that their own affairs are important; the self is a natural amplifier. When the person concerned is a character in a dramatic performance, at the very center of the plot, the amplification reaches deafening extremes. The whirlwind of the action forbids any kind of detachment.

But if my best-kept secret is what I did in the past, perhaps that secret is revealing itself in what is happening now, since, logically, the present must be the result of the past, a result that, for an analytic mind, displays the traces of all the events that played a part in producing it. But any attempt to unmask me with the classic “by their fruit shall ye know them” would backfire, because what I’m trying to hide is precisely the fact that in my case the process operated in reverse: the fruits remained in the past, and no one could deduce their nature from observations of the flower that is open in the present. This curious aberration could be due to the nature of my original action, which was a separation, a “distancing” with respect to my own person. I thought that I was seriously ill (I’m not going to go into details) and I did something disgraceful: I abandoned my wife and young children. . The years went by, I adopted a new personality, I lived. I realized the dream of living. As a young man I knew nothing of life, and as an older man too. All I knew was that life existed, and love, and adventure; that there was something beyond the world of books. And since I’d always been an optimist and trusted my intelligence, I reached the alarming conclusion that I, too, could come to know what life was and how it should be lived.

So, in desperation, I broke with my past, before it was too late. When the curtain rises, I am the double of the man I was, a duplicate of myself, my identical twin. Twenty years have gone by, but I’m still at the same point (I can’t fool myself), in spite of being an other, my own other. I have learned computing, and channeled the intellectual brilliance that characterized my writing into politics and betrayal, and now it turns out that I am a double agent working undercover for both the high command of the forces occupying Argentina and the secret Committee of the Resistance. The action takes place in the palatial salons of the Quinta de Olivos, around midnight, during a reception for the ambassadors of Atlantis. I’m wearing a dinner jacket, looking very stylish: cool, competent, and hypocritical as ever. The most amazing thing is that I haven’t aged; the mirrors show me as I was at thirty, but I know that old age is just a step away, behind a door. I’ve always thought that my youthful appearance (which, even at thirty, was very marked) is a symptom of my failure to live. The sentence has only been suspended — for how long? The biological process follows its inexorable course, but if the suspension continues after a change of name, personality, and occupation, I really don’t know what I should do.

I’m a leading man, the finest flower of humanity, open in the present, in the theater of the world. “By my fruits” I shall not be known, because I left them in another life. And yet those fruits are coming back, in the most unexpected way. They are coming back tonight, at this very moment, so punctually that the timing seems too good to be true; but such is the law that governs the theater of the world. If a man lives happily and peacefully with his family for decades, and one day a psychopath bursts into his house and takes them all hostage, and rapes and kills them, when will the film that tells the story be set? The day before?

There’s an extra guest at the reception, the most surprising of all for me: Liliana, my wife (or I should say: my ex-wife, the wife of the man I was). She doesn’t know I’m here, of course, or that I’m the gray eminence of the High Command; everyone thinks I’m dead, or that I’ve disappeared. My break with the past was so clean that I’ve had no news of Liliana in twenty years: she could have been dead and buried, but no, she’s alive, and here she is. . I see her by chance, in the distance, on the far side of the gilded salon, but she doesn’t see me. I send a secretary to investigate, and slip away to other salons in that labyrinthine palace. Pretexts are easy enough to find: during the “real time” of the reception, meetings are underway behind closed doors. The situation is explosive; imminent upheavals are expected; the atmosphere is charged with anxiety.

Liliana has snuck in to make an appeal to the ambassadors of Atlantis. She won’t have another opportunity because they will only be in the country for a few hours; they have come to sign off on a bridging loan and will leave at midnight. The motors of the limousines that will take them from the party straight to the airport are already running. Liliana’s plan is to plead for the safe return of her son, who (I now discover) has been arrested. Her son is my son too: Tomasito, my firstborn, whom I haven’t seen since I walked out, when he was still a child; I’d forgotten all about him. A simple calculation reveals that he must be twenty-two by now. Hmm. . so he became a dissident and joined the resistance and got caught. That kind of involvement in politics must have been a result of his mother’s influence; and now I remember Liliana’s aversion to Menem, Neustadt, Cavallo, and Zulemita. And I see how she was able to get into the villa tonight: the Resistance Command, to which I belong, must have organized it. I sent them a pair of invitations myself, as I always do, in case they want to plant a bomb or kidnap someone. And she hasn’t come on her own (they’ve used both the invitations I sent): she’s accompanied by a lawyer from the local branch of Amnesty International, whose presence is considered inoffensive; but I know that he has been, and still is, in contact with the Coordinating Committee of the Resistance.

There’s something else, something that defies imagination, which I have discovered by eavesdropping on conversations from behind doors and curtains: Liliana has gone crazy. I have good reason to be amazed. Liliana, of all people! She’s so sensible, so logical! When we were together, she counterbalanced my follies. But the most organized minds are the first to collapse in a major crisis, and hers must have given way under the stress caused by the disappearance of her son. My eavesdropping soon yields irrefutable proof of her madness, when I hear her say that she has been assisted in this mission by her lawyer. . and her husband! Maybe she has remarried? But no, because she mentions me by name: César Aira, the famous writer (she’s exaggerating). She says I got held up in the salon, talking to someone who asked for an autograph, that I’ll be coming soon. . She’s crazy, she’s hallucinating, poor thing. On the spur of the moment I make a bold decision: to realize her illusion, to resume my old identity and go with her to meet the ambassadors. This is not just a sympathetic gesture; it has a practical objective, too: I know exactly what to say to make the ambassadors of Atlantis take action and exert pressure on the occupying forces to return Tomasito: without me the mission is doomed to fail. And this is the least I can do, because although I’ve abandoned and disowned my family, he’s still my son, my blood.

I have a room in the Quinta de Olivos, for use during the frequent crises that require me to be on call twenty-four hours a day. I hurry to my room and change, choosing casual clothes to re-create the way I remember dressing in my former life; then I mess up my hair and put on a pair of glasses, and I’m done! I make my appearance: “Good evening, my apologies for the delay, I’m César Aira, the father of the young man who has disappeared.” The crazy woman doesn’t bat an eyelid, which is proof of her craziness: twenty years of absence mean nothing to her deranged mind. She scolds me out of the corner of her mouth for not changing my sweater: You have another one, that one’s all stained. . people will think I make no effort. . you could have put on your other pants, they’re ironed. . The same as ever! My whole marriage comes back in waves; a marriage is a sum of little details, and any one of them can represent all the others.

It’s tricky. In the middle of the explanation I have to find a pretext to slip away, put on my dinner suit, comb my hair, and attend to the senior officials of the occupying forces, who need my advice on questions of the utmost urgency: the internal strife within their high command is threatening to explode this very night, although it’s actually a coup planned by the command itself (they’re offering me the chairmanship of the Central Bank). The shootings and slaughter in their ranks will be hidden from the public.

In an intermediate room (all this is happening very quickly) I become “the writer” César Aira again, accompanying Liliana. . And then back into the tuxedo. . It’s all entrances and exits, vaudeville style, further complicated by another mission that I’ve taken on: to inform the Amnesty lawyer about the sham coup, and transmit a plan that I’ve hatched, with instructions for the resistance so that they can take advantage of this internal turmoil and mobilize the people just when the occupying forces are virtually leaderless. It has to be tonight. . Speed and secrecy are crucial to the palace coup: they reckon it will all be over in a couple of hours (they’re using the widely reported visit of the ambassadors of Atlantis as a cover and this reception as a way of gathering all the conspirators and their victims without awakening suspicion). It would never occur to them that the resistance might be in the know and poised to strike like lightning. . And strike it will! At least if I can talk to this so-called lawyer, who is, I know, in contact with the Committee of the Resistance. . I made sure he was kept busy during my previous maneuvers, so that he wouldn’t be surprised by the unexpected appearance of “César Aira.” Now, playing my other role, with my tuxedo and slicked-back hair, I take him aside. . and it has to be “really” aside. I’m well aware, more keenly aware than anyone, that “walls have ears,” especially here, but I also know that there are many little salons and offices where I can take him to make my disclosure. . I supervised the installation of the microphones myself; I know where they are and how to place myself in a “cone of silence”. . And yet I’m suddenly seized by a suspicion that is quite irrational, from the point of view of my current identity as a technocrat: I have the feeling that we are being listened to. . as if the fourth wall were suddenly missing, and there were people sitting in the dark, intently following everything I say. It’s just the kind of fantasy that would have occurred to the writer I was, who is returning now. I find it hard to believe, but I dare not disregard the possibility altogether: there is too much at stake. So I say to the lawyer: “No, wait a moment, we can’t talk here, come into the office next door. .” But when we’re there, it’s the same thing, and if we move again, the suspicion comes along with us. These useless sets are costing a fortune, and the cost could only be justified by record-breaking audiences, but this gives rise to a vicious circle, because the more spectators there are, the stronger my suspicion that I’m being spied on, and the more imperious my need to move in search of an elusive privacy. . Also, the minutes are passing, and the action’s going nowhere. . It’s a disaster, the play is collapsing. I don’t know how to solve the problem: deep down I know it’s too late for solutions now. My mistake was to forget, in the heat of the action, that this is a play. . Or rather, not to “forget” but “never to have known,” because for me, as a character, all this is reality. I should make it clear that this scene, aborted by my infinite delays and relocations, was fundamental, because up till now the spectators (whether hypothetical or real — I can’t tell anymore) had no way of knowing why one actor was playing two such different roles, and the conversation with the lawyer was supposed to be a major revelation that would function as an overall explanation of the plot.

The whole thing is falling apart. . Which is no great loss, because the play is absurd, farfetched, based on facile devices. Maybe it was a project without merit from the start, as well as being flawed in its execution. In my previous life I used to think of myself as a good writer, but neither success nor personal satisfaction could really count as proof. The isolated admirers who kept popping up didn’t prove anything; they could have been as mistaken as I was. I used to think death would provide an answer; I thought it would cut the Gordian knot, but since my disappearance twenty years ago, nothing has changed: a few readers, always academics or students, writing theses on my work, and that’s it. I never had a real public. A public would have made me rich, and then I could have forgotten about literature. Was I a misunderstood genius or some barely half-talented writer lost in the ambiguous meanders of the avant-garde? Impossible to say. The suspicion that gags and paralyzes me in the theater, with its layering of real and virtual spaces, also suspends the question of my life or death as a writer.

JULY 3, 1995