The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

A Thousand Drops

ONE DAY THE MONA LISA disappeared from the Louvre, provoking a public outcry, a national scandal, and a media frenzy. It wasn’t the first time: almost a hundred years earlier, in 1911, a young Italian immigrant, Vincenzo Peruggia, who had free access to the building because he was working there as a painter and decorator, walked out with the masterpiece under his workman’s apron. He kept it hidden for two years in his garret, and in 1913 took it to Florence, with the intention of selling it to the Uffizi gallery, justifying the robbery as a patriotic act, the restitution of a national treasure. The police were waiting for him, and the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre, while the thief, who by this stage was going by the name of Leonardo Peruggia, went to jail for a few years (he died in 1947).

This time it was worse, because what disappeared was the painting, literally: the thin layer of oil paint that constituted the famous masterpiece. The board underneath was still there, and so was the frame, but the board was blank, as if it had never been painted. They took it to a laboratory and subjected it to all sorts of tests: there was no evidence that it had been scraped or treated with acid or any other chemical; it was intact. The paint had evaporated. The only signs of force were a number of tiny, perfectly circular holes, a millimeter in diameter, in the reinforced glass case that separated the portrait from its viewers. These little holes were also examined, although there was nothing to examine; no traces of any substance were found, and no one could understand what kind of instrument could have been used to make them. This gave rise to journalistic speculation about extraterrestrials: some gelatinous creature, perhaps, that had applied a sucker equipped with perforating cilia, etc. The public is so gullible! So irrational. The real explanation was perfectly simple: the layer of paint had reverted to the state of live drops, and the droplets had set off to travel the world. After five centuries in a masterpiece, they were so full of energy that no sheet of glass, however well reinforced, was going to stop them. Nor could walls or mountains or seas or distances. The drops of color could go wherever they liked; they were endowed with superpowers. If the investigators had counted the little holes in the glass, they would have discovered how many there were: a thousand. But no one could be bothered to undertake that simple task; they were all too busy coming up with far-fetched and contradictory theories.

The drops scattered themselves over the five continents, eager for adventures, action, and experience. For a while, at the start, they stayed on the edges of daylight and toured the planet several times in the same direction, fanning out, moving at a range of speeds, some in the subtle grays of dawn, others in the passionate pinks of evening, many in the bustling mornings of the great cities or the drowsy siestas of the countryside, in the spring meadows or the autumn woods, in the polar ice fields or the burning deserts, or riding a little bee in a garden. Until one of them, by chance, discovered the depths of the night, and was followed by another, and another, and from then on there were no limits to their voyages and discoveries. When the urge to keep moving petered out, they were able to settle wherever they liked and display their inexhaustible creative ingenuity.

One ended up in Japan, where he set up a factory to make scented candles. They were called Minute Candles, and they smelled of Moon. Protected by strict patents and favored by the night, they were a huge success. Vast dance venues began to use Minute Candles, and so did temples, mountains, woods, and the whole realms of various shoguns. They were sold in boxes of six, twelve, twenty-four, and a thousand (everyone bought the boxes of a thousand). The multiplication of their little pink flames created a shadowless half-light in which near and far, before and after were abolished. Not even the longest winter nights, it transpired, could hold so much intimacy. Drop San, rich as Croesus, had two geisha wives, who lugged around bundles of swords and performed dancing duels to entertain their husband. Absorbed in the study of ballistics, Drop San paid them less and less attention, and finally forgot all about them. Their reactions revealed a stark difference between the two girls, so similar in other ways that everyone got them mixed up. One remained faithful, and loved Drop San even more than when he had been attentive to her; the other looked elsewhere for the love she could no longer find at home. One was “forever,” the other “while it lasts,” and when she felt it had already lasted long enough she said, That’s it, and took up with a photographer. Mr. Photo San was always traveling to Korea for business. One day, when he was away, the Drop family picnicked in the rain, with a big stripy umbrella, various boxes of Minute Candles, and a basket of shrimps. They drank tea, ate, admired the silhouettes of the trees against the violet sky, and then amused themselves with a curious toy: a foldable cardboard tennis court the size of a chessboard, on which four frogs dressed in white played a match of mixed doubles with little raffia racquets. The frogs were real, and neither alive nor dead. They were activated by electrodes, which was rather inconvenient. In addition, since neither Mr. Drop nor his wives knew the rules of tennis, the match was somewhat chaotic. But events took a tragic turn when one of the frogs, subjected to an excessive voltage, jumped onto Drop San’s shoulder, put his head in the magnate’s ear and uttered a single word: cuckold. One disadvantage of having two wives is that in cases of adultery you have to work out which is the culprit. In the frenzy that overcame Drop San, there was no stopping to think: he was going to kill them both. He jumped on the one who was closest and strangled her. As bad luck would have it, she was the faithful wife; the unfaithful one got away, mounted on the frogs’ little tennis ball, believing it would take her to Korea (in fact it went to Osaka). The cuckolded avenger was left looking at the dead body. His status as a supernatural traveling drop exempted him from the consequences that any conventional criminal would have had to face. Or so he believed, in any case. But in fact no being in the universe is immune to bad luck. A suave and tuneful music opened slowly over the picnic, like a second umbrella. The candles were, it’s true, Debussy-scented.

In Oklahoma, far from the land of chrysanthemums, a drop confronted Turpentine in one-on-one combat. Turpentine was a skinny little blond guy, who looked very much like Kant, fashionably well dressed, but not in a showy way. The only showy thing about him was his quiff, which rose without gel (an aid he disdained), by dint of sheer sculptural skill, to the great height of half an inch. This may seem a meager achievement, but only to those who are unaware that Turpentine was an inch tall, or an inch and a half, with the quiff. Among the whirls of dust whipped up by the prairie winds, Joe Peter Drop shouted: “It’s him or me!” One of the two had to die. Deep in his oil-painterly soul, it pained him to destroy so fine a creature as Turpentine — an exquisite living trinket in a world of barbarity — but it had to be done. The world is big and there’s room for us all — if anyone knows that it’s a wandering drop — but there are situations in which incompatibility becomes acute. Not that it’s such a great tragedy. Death for some means that others can live, while life for some, the simple, plain life we’re living — that routine, boring, meaningless life — gradually brings about the death of some brilliant, storybook other. And perhaps repentance gave some meaning to that drift. Turpentine, trusting to his elegance, which up until that day had invariably ensured his triumph, rushed at his adversary with a little cactus pistol, emptying the magazine. Joe Pete Drop had a perfectly spherical nose; in fact it was a rubber ball, which absorbed the nine bullets. The counterattack was a dream that enveloped Turpentine in a Precambrian pastoral, and when his friends from the bridge club came looking they couldn’t find him. He was never seen again. Joe Pete Drop went on running his plant for extracting cactus pink, which he exported to Korea in a gelatin solution, to be used as a photographic developer. He was wealthy, fulfilled, and married, but from time to time Turpentine’s ghost visited him in the form of a sad little tune. He dealt with this by telling himself that all music was sad and that the general weariness he’d been feeling was natural; but in his franker moments, he admitted that by killing Turpentine he’d also killed the elegance he once had, and that elegance is a form of energy.

When it rained, the drop called Euphoria accelerated; she became a brain drop. When all the others fell, she rose. Gravity watched her thoughtfully, wondering, How could she be of use to me? What benefit could I extract from her? Euphoria flew through the clouds shouting, “I am a drop of Extreme Unction!” Water and oil never mix. All their weddings are followed by divorce.

When it rained on the Pope, the Great Bachelor, Gravity deigned to lower the ladder and let his retarded little sister, Mysticism, come down to earth.

One drop, hitching rides with the rain, infiltrated the Vatican, the Holy Vat and Can, and tried to go farther and enter the Calendar of Pluvial Feast Days. He had an affair with the Pope, a passionate romance that couldn’t last. The Pope offered to name him Primate of Turkey, so he could prepare the forthcoming tour; it would be the first time a pope had visited the Anatolian tablelands. They planned it all carefully, but it was really just an excuse to get rid of the drop; the Pope was tired of him. After anal coitus, man is sad.

Once the drop reached Ankara, he opened a school and convinced the Cooperative Association to set up a pencil factory to finance the purchase of teaching materials. In his correspondence with the Eucharistic Synod he hinted at the possibility of a coup d’état. It was set to take place on the thirteenth of June, the day on which Gravity celebrated the anniversary of his symbolic Pact with the Pope. Each year he threw a party and invited the raindrops. Not all of them. He didn’t have enough glasses: just a delegate from each shower. Every twelfth of June there were elections to determine the delegates. The votes were cast in the tears of a young girl, Rosa Edmunda González.

In Turkey, the Pope’s decision to name a drop as Primate had caused perplexity and not a little suspicion. There was a rumor going around that the drop had lived for a whole year in the Pope’s colon, and the new Primate’s shape and size made the story credible. One thing led to another, and the drop decided to canonize himself without waiting for the papal visit. In the minutes before his ascension, he dictated a memo setting out how the pencils were to be sold: there would be boxes of six for poor children, boxes of twelve for the middle class, and of twenty-four for the rich. Plus specially produced boxes of a thousand, for the children of heads of state. At some point, the pencils in the boxes of six turned into burning Minute Candles, to the terror and distress of the children. The child who suffered most was Rosa Edmunda González, whose mother, a humble hairdresser, had made a great sacrifice to purchase one of the smallest boxes.

Shortly afterward, a Japanese delinquent named Photo San published compromising photographs, developed in pink: spherical cubist photos that showed the Pope kissing Drop.

Irresponsible and inhuman, the drop, made up of a thousand drops of the most beautiful colors, was everywhere. It’s the End of Art! announced the eternal alarmists, claiming that in the future the only thing left to do would be to shut oneself in a garret, cut photos from magazines by the light of a Minute Candle, and make collages. But the pieces would never fit back together. There would never be a Mona Lisa again, because once the drops had tasted the salt of liberty, they would never return to the Louvre. And even if, by some supremely improbable coincidence, they did return, how likely was it that each one would go back in through the right hole?

In the city of Bogotá, there was a black dog wandering around in the streets, a great big beast made of black vanilla pods. He scavenged in the trash, slept in the sun, and sheltered from the rain in doorways. His size made him threatening and no one came near him, but he was gentle. Every stray is looking for a master, and the black dog found his in a drop that had come to visit that cold and rainy capital. They became friends. They obeyed each other; neither gave orders. It was a master-slave relation without a master or a slave, a marriage more than a friendship. They bought a little car, and last thing on a Friday evening they would set off for their cabin on the Lake of the Scented Candle. Their petit-bourgeois habits brought the End of Art down to the level of the Weekend.

One drop ended up in the luxuriant vegetation of a tropical land, among emerald leaves covered with dew, and mallows, fennel, and chard. The dew balls with which the drop played billiards had hearts of ice and hair of sun. And in that drop, evolution was stirring: she grew two pairs of rubber antennae; the top ones were long, the bottom ones short, and they were all retractable. She moved over the leaves, ate a green cell, digested it at the speed of light, and expelled a black dot, a suspension point. She turned gray, became almost transparent, and took on an elongated form, with something like a head (and antennae) at one end, a pointed tail at the other, and a hump in between. The excess nutrients that she had not metabolized for the purposes of movement were secreted from the hump as a hard, yellowish layer, forming a hollow spiral, which she began to use as a shelter, retreating into it to sleep.

Some children discovered her by chance and took her home. They put her in a plastic container and adopted her as a pet. They made holes in the lid with a pin so she could breathe. They called her Snailie, and every now and then they said: I wonder what Snailie’s doing? They went to see. They guessed or invented her states of mind, the desires, dreams, and adventures that made up her minimalist life enclosed in transparent plastic. They fed her with moistened blades of grass, celery, and polenta.

And then one day, when they went to look, she was gone. She had turned back into a drop of oil paint from the Mona Lisa and escaped through one of the holes, repeating an ancestral pattern. It was proof that life in this world is not all of one kind; there are many varieties, each functioning according to its own logic, and evolution is not enough to unify them.

Other children, who lived in the city and were playing in the living room of a sixth-floor apartment, saw a wandering drop that had flown onto their balcony and couldn’t find its way out again. The balcony had those wire-mesh guards that parents put up when they have small children.

“Daddy! Daddy! A little bird with a moustache!”

In that little space full of potted ferns and geraniums, the drop flew around as if afraid, back and forth, doing figure eights, loop-the-loops, and spirals, unable to escape. The children in the apartment, on the other side of the glass, were no less agitated. They sensed that the divine fly would not stay, and even though they lived in the fleeting instants of their attention, as children do, they were overawed by the eternity of the flight. They would have liked to keep the drop as a pet. They would have made a little paper house with doors and windows, an igloo, and a tiny bicycle for him to ride.

But suddenly he was gone.

“He escaped! Daddy! Mummy! He escaped! He was round! He was so cute!”

No one believed them, of course.

Meanwhile, in Norway, a drop was heading for the icy north in search of the nightingale of the snows. She ventured into a vast endless day in pursuit of a dubious legend. Dawns of never-ending pink were reflected in a crystalline lake, on the floor of which a Minute Candle in a diving suit burned without consuming itself. Indolent eagles with horses’ heads glided over an endless grid of cold. The drop traveled in a Sherman tank, which crunched through the frost, leaving broad tracks. The natives were terrified. All Norway shook in fear before the advance of the Armored Drop. How far would she go? According to the local legends, which had never been contested, if the nightingale sang, the candle at the bottom of the lake would go out, and the inspiration of the artists would be extinguished along with that flame. In return, they would receive the scent of eternal melancholy.

Inevitably, war broke out. The tank multiplied and became a thousand tanks, each in a glass hexagon, advancing over transparencies of ice. It was a war entirely made up of mirages and phantasmagoria. The Snow multiplied too. She was a fat, white princess, the daughter of King Pole, and rivalry for her hand led to hostilities among the Scandinavian powers. Her lineage was especially illustrious. But when the Snow Princesses began to proliferate, perspectives in those icy wastes were thrown into confusion. General Panzer Drop Kick commanded the operation, enclosed in an engraved dropper. The battles were an incredible spectacle: millions of soldiers on bicycles plowing up the polar ice cap, the eagles growing visibly, and, always there in the background, the silver nightingale in its tabernacle of atoms. And all because of a drop!

Then a crack in the glass of the dropper allowed it to fill with mist. When, on the orders of the Norwegian Prime Minister, the mist was extracted with a pump, it turned out that the drop was no longer inside. It reappeared at the bottom of the lake, suspended over the tip of the candle’s flame. The heat softened and deformed it, brightened its colors and made it give off a strange smell of old flowers.

On the wide grasslands of China, a drop set up a news agency. Village life, with its immutable cycles of yin and yang, was unsettled by the din of the transmissions. The DropToday agency bought a basketball team and the inaugural match (both for the team and for the luxurious stadium built in the wilds of outer Mongolia) was against an NBA all-star selection. The North Americans were keen to conquer the Yellow Empire’s massive sports market, and the visit was managed by the State Department. The Pope promised to attend the event. The team was made up of China’s tallest and strongest men, and Mr. Drop, who had been appointed coach, adopted a novel procedure for the training sessions. Or not so novel, in fact, because it had already been used by the ancient Romans, and was still being used by Hawaiian surfers. It consisted of practicing with a very heavy sphere of bronze instead of a normal ball. In this way the athletes developed powerful reflexes that would enable them to handle the ball like a dream when it came to a real match. The first day they used a twenty-kilo bronze ball, the second day it was twenty-five kilos, and on the third day it was thirty. The Chinese giants buckled under the weight of that hefty projectile. Drop went to the next level: he made them train on a court that was six miles long and two miles wide. Its dimensions were proportioned to the weight of the bronze ball. Drop was very adept at calculating proportions, and he didn’t need to use graph paper. He applied the same skill to news stories, enlarging them while maintaining their proportions. This was the reason for the success of his agency; he pioneered the “Chinese news” technique and made it popular around the world.

It goes without saying that this aggravated exercise drew big drops of sweat from the athletes. It was inhuman, heaving that ball around and racing constantly from one hoop to the other. Heedless of the cost, Drop had hired a consultant: Gravity, who’d come to China to await the arrival of the Pope, with whom he was to be united in marriage. It was the story of the century. The newspaper headlines had quoted Gravity, the Universal Playboy, taking leave of the Holy Father after their first night of love: “SEE YOU ON THE BALTIC!” That northern sea was to be enclosed by a wall of red marble, which was under construction; one of its wings would join up with the Great Wall, making a thunderous crash.

Drop went so far as to get the five giant team members out of bed the night before the match and whisk them away in secret for a last training session by moonlight. They traveled by truck to the outer reaches of Mongolia. They stopped in a silvery desert, got out and looked around. A hoop reared on the horizon, a hundred and twenty feet high. Facing it, on the opposite horizon, was another hoop, the pole half hidden by the curvature of the earth. A motorcycle that had been following them roared to a halt. They stared at the rider, who dismounted and removed his helmet. It was Gravity. The Chinese giants, who had seen him only on television, gaped in amazement. This is what happens with media celebrities: it’s hard to accept that they really exist. Mr. Drop floated over to the motorbike, and together they undid the straps that were holding a large chest in place behind the seat. The Vatican’s coat of arms was carved into the lid. Inside the chest was a golden seal’s head, which weighed fifty kilos. This was what they were to use for the last training session, pushing their strength to the limit, and receiving the head’s famous powers in return.

“Long passes,” ordered Drop. They began. The crushing weight of the seal’s head bent them double. Catching it, they staggered backward; their veins swelled and they grimaced in pain. Drop shouted himself hoarse, demanding more speed, more precision. And to Gravity, who was beside him, looking on worriedly, he said, “A few drops of height are no match for savagery.” The players’ falling sweat echoed throughout Mongolia.

With the movement and the handling, the seal’s head warmed up. The gold began to shine; the fat in the seal’s brain melted, running between the players' fingers, making the large projectile slippery, all the more difficult to catch and throw.

In the end, the group rose up, forming a kind of cone whose apex was the seal’s head, exuding fat, shinier than the moon, with the five basketball players underneath, stretched like phylacteries. They took off, into the black, starless sky. Gravity was irresistibly drawn up in their wake, and the motorcycle followed him. Drop watched them shrink as they climbed, until they disappeared. The only thought that occurred to him was that the wedding would have to be put off again.

Later he was criticized for his extravagant and inappropriate training methods. He even wondered himself, for a moment, if he hadn’t gone too far.

But for him it was a point of honor to maintain a superior indifference. The game of realism, by its very nature, neutralized everything. Even invention, to which the scattered drops had devoted themselves with a passion, had a retroactive effect on realism. It might have been said that in each of its avatars, invention was writing itself with a drop of ink and an obsessive attention to plausibility. Each drop was self-contained, thanks to the delicate balance of its surface tension. There was no context, just pure irradiation.

The drop had neither doors nor windows. History had countless generative tips. A certain drop, virginal and vaginal in equal parts, had, by a miracle of naptime surgery, undergone gender reassignment and adopted the name Aureole. Initially his name had been Dr. Aureole. Due to a suspension, Aureole was left hanging in the air. .

The suspension gave rise to a sublime romanticism: Aureole, in a nightgown, on the balcony of her little castle, overlooking a dark garden alive with the sounds of insects and fountains, lost in her reverie, her spidery weaving. The castle was in flames, but the fire was suspended too. The drop was in another dimension. It could only have happened to her: another display of indifference, made plausible by the devices of realism.

Suddenly, on a third level of the story, three cloaked figures dropped from the eaves and the drainpipes, landing all at once on the balcony. Torn from her reverie, Aureole began to spin, squealing in distress. She tried various falling movements to escape from the gloved hands of her attackers, but it was as if she were floating on mercury. All she succeeded in doing was to make them tear her nightgown and mess up her hair. Working as a team, the three figures thrust her, terrified and tearful, into a box, which closed with a resonant clack. The crowd that had gathered around the castle to watch the fire saw nothing of this maneuver, and the firemen busy extending their ladders like pirates boarding a ship saw even less. The kidnappers took advantage of the confusion to escape with their captive; a car was waiting for them on the other side of the moat. They traveled through the hills for a long time, and before the moon rose they came to the gardens of an abandoned country house. They entered the house through the back door and shut the prisoner in the cellar.

Only then did they relax and take off their hoods. They were a trio of dangerous criminals: Shower, Hose, and Faucet. For many years they had been plotting to kidnap a drop. Chubby, hoarse, chrome-plated, they danced about on the table like Maenads, making metallic noises, drank a bottle of cognac, and called Gravity on the telephone to demand a ransom.

Ring. . ring. . ring. .

The sound of the little bell reverberated throughout the mountains. The echo carried it from peak to peak, creating a kind of succession.

The documents relating to the case were published by Drop Press. Pocket museums had become a possibility, thanks to technical progress in photography and printing. Here a flashback to an earlier part of the story is needed to complete the “picture.” The Mona Lisa is, as it happens, the emblem of the mechanical reproduction of the work of art (whether by photography, printing, or digital media). The merits of this splendid portrait are not to be denied, but it’s important to recall some of the historical events that propelled it to the position of supremacy it occupies today. There are other portraits of women by Leonardo that could perfectly well have stolen the limelight. There’s the portrait of Cecilia Galleriani, the Lady with an Ermine, which more than a few critics have praised as the most beautiful ever painted, the most perfect. Or the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, that childlike woman with her severe, round face. Neither is lacking in the mystery that stimulates the imagination. . What, then, explains the incomparable popularity of the Mona Lisa? It so happened that throughout the nineteenth century, as tourism began to develop and the books that would establish the canon of Western art were being written, the Mona Lisa was on display in the Louvre for everyone to see, while Cecilia and Ginevra were languishing in obscure collections in Krakow and Lichtenstein.

The theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 put the picture on the front pages of the newspapers, just when photography and printing were making it possible to reproduce works of art on a massive scale. The news story had natural flow-on effects, and the Mona Lisa, reproduced ad infinitum, became an indestructible icon.

But there was something more, another new development in civilization, which contributed to the process: the invention of the global news story. Just when journalism had reached its industrial maturity, two events occurred within a few months of each other that justified that maturity and brought it to fruition: the theft of the Mona Lisa and the wreck of the Titanic. Both events instituted a myth. Because these stories were the first of their kind, they were the biggest and the most productive. All the rest were condemned to operate within a system of substitutions. It was pure poetic justice that one of the Mona Lisa’s runaway drops should set up a news agency, and precisely in China, humanity’s great neural puzzle.

The DropToday agency specialized in the hunt for the new Grail, the greasy golden seal’s head that had begun to think for humans. There was a lead to follow: the spectacular melodrama of Gravity, who was wandering through the deserts of the world after leaving the Pope at the altar, dressed as a bride, holding a suppository. Gravity himself was impossible to follow, but his movements could be calculated using geographical logarithms. He also left a trail of slime. Laboratory tests revealed that this slime was principally composed of an organic substance, newtonia, whose cells could expand in response to sexual desire. The expansion was practically unlimited and the discovery of the cell membrane’s flexibility and strength revolutionized the textile industry. From then on, the substance was used to make shirts for basketball players, who kept getting bigger and taller.

Sparky, the funny drop, became a humorist. He strung together a bunch of old jokes and got up every night in a bar in Baden Baden adjoining the casino to run through his routine. He was slotted in between a pair of sopranos and the Sensitive Steel Robot, and the master of ceremonies presented him as “the funniest drop in the world.” The jokes were terrible, but the comic effect was produced by the contrast between his diminutive size and his stentorian voice, between his helpless condition as a drop, easily squashed by a fingertip, and the way he fancied himself as a Don Juan, eyeing off the fat ladies of the nomenklatura, who had come to the spa town to blow the rubles that their husbands had squeezed from the udder of Soviet corruption. Even before he opened his mouth, his look assured him of a certain indulgence: the top hat, the close-fitting dinner suit, the monocle, the cane, all adapted to his spherical form, without arms or legs. Quite a few members of the audience would gladly have bought a reproduction, to take home as a souvenir.

The season at the casino lasted three months. The rest of the year Sparky hibernated in a log cabin in the middle of a forest, leading the life of a hermit, without servants or neighbors. Like so many humorists, he was a melancholic and a misanthrope. The telling of jokes exhausted his humor and left him feeling bitter and empty. He would have liked to call himself Sparky, the Drop of Gall. He used the same jokes year after year, as if to see how long they’d go on getting a laugh, although they were tattered and shabby, falling apart from the wear. They appeared before his eyes at night, trying to scare him, floating over his canopied bed. And when they realized it was no use, they slipped away to the wasteland, sighing.

Melodious voice, voice of the woods.

Evenings of classic beauty in Buddhist lands. Men and women walking through poor neighborhoods carrying little silver pitchers full of water. Everlasting poverty resisted all the interventions of the permanently new. The only permanent thing was everlasting dailiness. And yet. . suddenly everyone looked up into the sky. And in the sky there was a drop, the drop that decided to make itself visible. It was red, pink, greenish, saffron, orange, turquoise, slightly phosphorescent, velvety, tense, and it had a dimple. It was full of itself but hollow, empty, a little hole in the air. It descended slowly, reaching ground level before night fell. The impoverished Buddhists tried to grab it. In its fluid form, it served as a hinge between the public and the private. The existence of the poverty-stricken Asian masses had become a public issue, a social problem, to be measured statistically; privacy and secrets were limited to the lives of the rich. The silver pitchers, purchased with slowly accumulated savings and cherished as personal or family treasures, prefigured the public-private nexus. The drop made them anachronistic. In the end, no one dared touch the drop, and a delightful park sprang up around it, which by virtue of its sacred status served as a sanctuary for the little foxes that would otherwise have become extinct.

But the forest kept invading the Buddhist lands. And with the forest came snakes, which ventured into the villages and drank the goats’ milk and the blood of the children. They coiled around the bare legs of the lotus worshippers and tripped them up. There was a historical solution to this legendary misadventure: as soon as the poor gave up carrying those pitchers, they had both hands free and were able to do battle with the slippery snakes.

The drop, enthroned at the center of the fox park, was named God Prospero Brilliantine. He didn’t move or speak or gesture. But all thoughts converged on him. The anthropologists of tea studied his social effects and his composition. Was he made of gel? Cerebral matter? Nougat? They couldn’t tell. From the smell, they thought he might be a lunar particle. They gave up on the effects, because they were always indirect, too indirect. The poor folk established a tradition of making silk caps for the foxes; each family had its particular color and pattern. As with the pitchers, they spared no expense, saving up to buy the best silks, even if it meant going hungry. The anthropologists were puzzled. They felt they were touching on the secret of poverty, but from a distance, by remote control.

A drop settled in a foggy country. He lived in a three-story, French-style house, an incongruous, stately edifice, built on top of a cliff. He withdrew to his study on the third floor, set up a camera with a telephoto lens on his desk, and, dressed in a tartan bathrobe, smoking three pipes as he watched the churning of the waves, managed his companies and investments all over the globe. None of his many employees in the world’s great capitals ever suspected that the mastermind behind the operation was a drop. They knew he was eccentric and suspected that he was a misanthrope, perhaps even slightly mad. He had adopted a communication system based on images, which were decoded by computers. It was exceedingly inefficient: tens of thousand of images were required to translate a single word (and even so there was often confusion). The method could be justified as a security measure, given the confidential nature of his messages, but that was just an excuse; its real purpose was to cover up the supremely implausible fact that the great financier was a drop of Renaissance paint.

Not all the drops adopted such capricious ways of life, or were engaged in such memorable adventures and discoveries. Most of them, in fact, adapted to the usual ways of getting by: the skeptical conformism of the majority, the minor pleasures of home and work, a comfortable enough routine. They had the same dreams as everyone else; their opinions belonged to the common stock. And when they had to vote (since democracy was spreading around the world), they wondered, as we all do, about the ultimate meaning of life.

All the drops were the Mona Lisa, and none of them were. The submarine goddess of the Louvre no longer existed, in the Louvre or anywhere else, although millions of memory membranes preserved her reflection for a human race without illusions, but not without images. Déjà vu sprang from the heart of every being, smoke without fire, flower without fruit. There are no two people in the world (this calculation has been confirmed) separated by more than six common acquaintances. Both the living and the dead can serve as links. And the law of social entropy always ends up shortening the chain. The general, irreversible tendency is toward recognition. Demographic explosions are really implosions. The time will come when a single man, Anti-Adam, will run into himself and see that the two of him are exactly the same, like peas in a pod or two drops of water, or, rather, like a single drop.

One drop settled in Argentina, the land of representation. He took the very Argentine name Nélido and set about finding a girl to marry. A few hours would have been enough for anybody else. But he was shy, awkward, and conversationally handicapped. He tried for years, without any success. He seemed to be under a curse, or to be dogged by bad luck, but not even he could pretend not to know that luck, good or bad, was a thing of the past. He never turned down an invitation to a party or a gathering, went dancing, took yoga and painting classes, participated in demonstrations and marches, searching desperately, almost like a dog with his tongue hanging out. He knew that opportunities had to be seized as they arose, that it could all depend on an instant, so he sharpened his attention, cultivated his spontaneity, practiced his charm. It’s not that he wasn’t sincere; on the contrary. He wanted, he needed to find a soul mate, and at the end of each day that had passed without breaking the divine porcelain of his solitude, he could feel the bitterness of failure shriveling his tiny droplet’s soul.

He even thought about turning queer. After all, a partner is a partner, love is love, and maybe it wouldn’t be so noticeable in a drop. But he soon put the idea aside, not because of any moral or aesthetic scruples, but simply because it would have been more difficult. And anyway, he didn’t want to do anything unusual; he wanted to have a wife to hug and kiss and cuddle on cold winter nights like everyone else. . You can’t get more normal than that. It’s the original urge of every living being, the motor of eternity that powers the car of time.

Perhaps that was the problem: he didn’t have mortality to spur him on. After all, in his franker moments, he had to admit that there was a difference between a drop of oil paint and a young man, from a woman’s point of view, at least. This was brought home to him every day, not only in his fruitless quest, but also in his work. And it was a mistake to think of those two aspects of his life as separate; he had read in a magazine that eighty percent of relationships begin in the workplace. He had a job in a factory that manufactured cardboard boxes, but there was no chance of starting a relationship there because he worked all on his own in the little printing unit, and anyway there were no women workers. (They had hired him to roll his tiny round body over the spring-loaded stamp that printed the words “MADE IN ARGENTINA” on the cardboard.) So the only possibility was at his other job, selling candy and cigarettes in a kiosk (he started at four after leaving the factory and worked till ten p.m.). Opportunities might have arisen there, and they did, but they weren’t the right kind. Customers approach a kiosk from one side or the other, and they see the vendor at the last minute, suddenly, without any time to adjust. They’ve come to buy something completely banal like a chocolate bar or a pack of cigarettes, so they’re not expecting anything beyond the kind of everyday interaction that people generally have with their fellow human beings. Encountering a colored drop a millimeter in diameter instead of a familiar human form, they were unpleasantly surprised. It was hard to establish, or maintain, any kind of rapport. As for the regulars, they simply stopped noticing him and conducted the transaction in an automatic, absent sort of way.

Eventually, Nélido came to believe that the disease contained its own remedy. A fairly obvious thought occurred to him. If he wasn’t a man, if he was a drop, and a drop from the world’s most famous artwork, he wasn’t constrained by human laws, so he could do anything. In a picture, a drop of paint is powerless, entirely dependent on the matter surrounding it, the artist’s intentions, the effect, and a thousand other things. But once the drop has become independent, and ventured into the world to discover the strange taste of freedom, everything changes.

And yet it hadn’t worked like that. Nothing had changed. How odd. Perhaps because the laws that apply to beings of any kind, from the most complex organism down to the atom, come into effect universally as soon as one crosses the threshold of reality. The fantastic drop’s reality was the same as that of a human being.

This insight, which had emerged from the experience of a humble Argentine cigarette vendor, was confirmed at the cosmic level as well. There were drops that crossed the last frontier and left the planet behind. They realized that they had been going round and round the world of humans by force of habit, simply because it hadn’t occurred to them to try the measureless expanses of the universe. One drop set off, then others followed. It wasn’t hard at all for them. They didn’t need to breathe, and they weren’t affected by radiation or adverse conditions in the ether. At most they softened a bit in the proximity of suns and hardened when the temperature plummeted below zero. Distances were not a problem. They could cover three hundred thousand light years in a second, thanks to the partitioning of time that had occurred when they dispersed. So the galaxies saw them go whizzing past. Beneath the red skies of those dusks in the void, the drops took charge of organizing matter, leaving the atoms and particles gaping in surprise.

No one was bored in the cosmos. It was as if fierce races were being run in those vacant abysses: luminous, mechanically complex racing cars running on endless circuits. Darkness opened behind screens made of light painted on nothingness, a light without shadows but not without figures. And from a single point of darkness on the screens, new universes opened out, becoming The Universe. Roaring curves, the beams of the headlights sweeping through titanic basement spaces, nebulae for barriers.

Two drops met at one of those inconceivable intersections of parallel lines. On a distant planet, in a sphere of gas, in the midst of a density festival, a drop cast its shadow on a ground of rocky atoms. Because of the drop’s perfectly spherical shape, its shadow was always the same, wherever the suns and moons happened to be. Another drop was approaching from the opposite direction in a rocket. They communicated via microphones. The shadow of the spacecraft expanded and contracted like bellows. The sky remained black, with ringlets of helium.

They got out to explore. The two drops, sealed in their space suits, floated in the fourteen thousand dense atmospheres of planet Carumba. On the horizon, Perspective appeared, perched on stilts, wearing pearl necklaces, carrying a yellow handbag, her white hair swirling in a cloud of quarks. She seemed indifferent. She never looked at anyone because she knew that all eyes were on her; and the enraptured drops were no exception. They had been missing that beautiful deity ever since they left the painting. They would have liked to shelter again under her invisible wings. But she didn’t see them. Her eyes were fixed on the beyond. Was that abandonment the price they had to pay for the freedom that had allowed them to go so far? Unwittingly, the three of them had formed a perfectly symmetrical figure.

Then something happened. With a sound like thunder, the black concavity of the ether tore open, and Gravity appeared, in his crimson plastic cape and pointy shoes. The drops took fright, thinking he would fall and squash them. To their relief, he passed overhead and landed on the downward-curving line of the horizon. Perspective, who was on the same line, slid along it and fell into the arms of Gravity. He was waiting with open arms and an erection. She connected perfectly, like a heart impaling itself on a lance. When they made contact, there was a sound of kissing, and bright rays of light, on which the constellations would come to rest, went shooting out in all directions. What had happened? Simply that the meeting of two drops had brought the ever-remote Perspective into her own proximity. And Gravity, who had been anticipating this opportunity for countless thousands of years, didn’t let it pass him by. In recognition of the favor, he turned, without letting go of Perspective, and gave them a knowing wink. The two drop-astronauts were amazed that their presence in a place that could have been Anywhere should have produced such an extraordinary effect. Since leaving the painting back in the Louvre, they had become accustomed to causing no effect at all. The embrace continued and worked a transformation. Gravity, formerly so serious and rotund, became slim and amusing. Perspective shed her customary air of decrepitude, taking on a compact and tangible form. Their nuptials were celebrated at an instant party; there was no need to send out invitations (they’d been on their way since the Big Bang).

The two drops looked at each other, as if to say: “How about that?” The same thought had occurred to them at the same moment: now they knew for sure that the Pope would remain a bachelor forever. They imagined him in the Vatican, jilted at the altar, standing there in his white dress, holding the suppositories, a tear rolling down his wrinkly old cheek. It was the last fantasy, and the most realistic.

The pair of newlyweds drove off in a car, trailing tin cans through the firmament. It was to be a combative honeymoon, for they were preparing the final assault on Evolution, the eternal spinster, and this time, now that the balance of power had been upset (divide and conquer), she would be defeated.

But the drops that were treading reality’s fantastic limits. . remained within the real and succumbed to melancholy.

JUNE 19, 2003