Authors: César Aira

Ghosts (15 page)

BOOK: Ghosts

7.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Listen, said Elisa Vicuña: Chilean men, all Chilean men, speak softly,
with a slightly feminine tone of voice, don’t they? Whereas Argentinean men are
always shouting out loud. I don’t know what they’ve got in their throats, but
they’re like megaphones. Well, at first you can get the impression that all
Argentinean men are super-virile, I mean,
we
can get that impression. But more
careful and detailed observation reveals something else, almost the opposite, in
fact. Haven’t you noticed? Patri shrugged her shoulders. Her mother went on:
Think of the architect who designed this building, and the decorators who come
with the owners, all the men who came this morning, for
example.... Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, Patricita: those
pink silk cravats, the aftershave, those tank tops, the oohs! and ahs! In spite
of everything that was on her mind, Patri couldn’t help smiling at her mother’s
mimicry. Elisa went on:

Now there’s another question, and it’s closely related: the question
of money. Having money is a kind of virility,
the only kind that counts in Argentina
.
That’s why this country we have come to is so unique and strange. That’s why it
has cut us off from the rest of the world, to which we belong by right as
foreigners, and held us like hostages. It’s true that there is, or at least
should be, another form of virility, which doesn’t depend on money. But where we
are now, it’s hard to imagine; as if, to understand it, we’d have to go back in
time and space, back to Chile and even further, to something before that. What
is that other form of virility?
Popular
virility? No, because the popular is subordinate; it’s an
eminently subordinate form in the hierarchy of virilities. It’s the primitive
form; that is, virility independent of the state. Although in principle it might
seem preferable to the popular form, the primitive form can be dangerous for us
too. It could imply that women are condemned to the primitive, to savagery. And
wouldn’t that be dangerous? Isn’t the state, after all, a safeguard, a kind of
guarantee, which stops us disappearing altogether, even if it relegates us to
the bottom of the ladder? Women, said Patri, will never disappear. That, my
girl, replied her mother vigorously, is precisely what’s in doubt.

But what has all this got to do with ghosts? Patri asked her
again.

Ah, ghosts.... Well, what is a ghost? I’ve been
talking about Argentinean men and Chilean men, but that was just to make it
clearer, the way animals are used in fables. Well, so far it’s not all that
clear, said Patri. Come on, a smart girl like
you....
You see, for us there are always
ghosts. Subtract a Chilean man from an Argentinean, or vice versa. Or add them
up. You can actually do whatever you like. The result will always be the same: a
ghost.

OK, but why do they have to be gay?

Even at that critical moment, when, as she was intuitively aware, her
beloved daughter’s life hung in the balance, Elisa Vicuña could not bring
herself to answer with anything more than a mysterious smile, the “serious
smile.”

Since the coffee was ready, and a fragrant plume of steam was rising
from the spout of the pot, they went back out. Patri put the tray on the table,
and Inés Viñas took charge of filling each cup. The coffee was so well brewed,
so aromatic, that hardly anyone felt the need to sweeten it. Patri took a sip,
and waited for it to cool. She was thinking about the conversation with her
mother just before: they hadn’t come to any kind of conclusion; in fact, her
doubts had multiplied. And yet the conversation had produced effects, and that
was what she was thinking about as she drank her coffee. The danger, she
thought, was not so much that the ghosts who were waiting for her would turn out
to be a complete flop as far their virility was concerned, but that none of them
would deign to talk to her, and give her the explanations she needed so badly.
On second thought, however, the conversation had produced the opposite effect,
since it was all about entering a state where she would no longer need anyone to
look after her, or provide explanations, or even give her what her mom gave as
abundantly as anyone could: love. And as she proceeded from this conclusion to a
third stage in her reflections, the question of the ghosts’ real virility
recovered its importance. It might seem odd that this relatively uneducated
young woman, who hadn’t even finished secondary school, should entertain such
elaborate thoughts. But it’s not as strange as it seems. A person might never
have thought at all, might have lived as a quivering bundle of futile, momentary
passions, and yet at any moment, just like that, ideas as subtle as any that
have ever occurred to the greatest philosophers might dawn on him or her. This
seems utterly paradoxical, but in fact it happens every day.
Thought is absorbed from others, who don’t think either, but find their
thoughts ready-made, and so on. This might seem to be a system spinning in a
void, but not entirely; it is grounded, although it’s hard to say just
how.
An example might clarify the point, though only in an
analogical mode: imagine one of those people who don’t think, a man whose only
activity is reading novels, which for him is a purely pleasurable activity, and
requires not the slightest intellectual effort; it’s simply a matter of letting
the pleasure of reading carry him along. Suddenly, some gesture or sentence, not
to speak of a “thought,” reveals that he is a philosopher in spite of himself.
Where did he get that knowledge? From pleasure? From novels? An absurd
supposition, given his reading material (if he read Thomas Mann, at least, it
might be a different story). Knowledge comes
through
the novels, of course, but not really
from
them. They are not the ground; you
couldn’t expect them to be. They’re suspended in the void, like everything else.
But there they are, they exist: you can’t say that it’s a complete void. (With
television, the argument would be harder to sustain.)

The guests were cracking jokes and laughing heartily as they drank
their coffee and smoked cigarettes. They all gulped their cups down and asked if
there was more. If I’d known you were going to like it so much I would have made
a bigger pot, said Elisa Vicuña. Still, there was enough left to give a few
people a smaller second cup. The children had started to agitate about the
rockets, and since Javier, who was in charge of all the pyrotechnical gear, had
told them to wait for the grown-ups, not even letting them have the
lighter, they kept begging the adults to finish their coffee and come and help.
All right, all right. The moon bathed them all in a marvelous whiteness, which
even crept into the light globe’s yellow glow. An atmosphere of carefree
triviality reigned: keeping an eye on the time to see how many minutes were
left, that sort of thing. The “real men” thought Patri, in her philosophical
reverie, were none other than the men she could see before her now. And that was
how it had to be, given everything her mother had been telling her for years.
Elisa Vicuña’s thoughts had not come out of nowhere, arbitrarily. They had come
out of men, and gone in a circle, from men back to men, and that route made them
“real” whether or not they really were. It was almost like getting used to
something, anything, even this after-dinner banality. She started to
think more carefully about the problem or the choice she was facing; she tried
to put her thoughts in order.

Finally the parents agreed to oversee the lighting of the fireworks.
Although it would have seemed impossible only a minute before, the level of
excitement among the children rose abruptly. Roberto, who according to his
girlfriend was a child at heart, was the keenest to join in, and to the
amusement of all present, he even reached into his pocket and produced a
sizeable supply of rockets, which he had brought “just in case.” So they started
with rockets, as well as jumping jacks and firecrackers. The explosions were
lots of fun. They tried throwing a cracker into the pool, and the explosion
resonated like a building collapsing. More! Come on! They wanted to make a much
bigger din. But Javier suggested they fire off some tubes. They used an empty
bottle as a launcher. Instead of choosing a distant constellation, they aimed
straight at the moon. I think it’ll make it, said Ernesto. Roberto had an
excellent silver lighter, which allowed him to adjust the flame’s intensity as
well as its length. Raúl Viñas called it a blowtorch. They lit the first tube’s
fuse and waited. Miraculously, or because it was well made (a rarity in recent
times), it shot straight up into the sky leaving a golden wake. This time they
all looked. It exploded way up high in a burst of very white phosphorescence.
The same thing happened with the second tube, except that the explosion was red,
a dark, metallic red. They had some very big, powerful fireworks, but they were
keeping them for later. The smaller children, Ernesto and Jacqueline, were
twirling sparklers.

The only one who wasn’t taking part in the fun, or not directly, was
Patri, because she was busy thinking. It had occurred to her that she didn’t
really have to wait to find out, she could make a deductive leap: by deducing
correctly it was possible to tell what would happen. She couldn’t base her
deductions on the ghosts, because she didn’t know anything about them. But she
could use facial expressions instead. She did her very best, calling on her
imagination, her unschooled—some might say naïve—creative
gifts, but she kept coming to the same conclusion: the mysterious smile on the
lips of the ghosts. It was inevitable, given her skeptical nature: ending with a
mysterious smile, like an impenetrable barrier.

And what was the meaning of the mysterious smile? She could deduce
that too, but in reverse, since any of the people here, the women sitting, the
men crouching with the children and playing with the rockets, any of the things
they might say or do, could provoke the mysterious smile. It was within
everyone’s reach. So life in its entirety, with its infinite conclusions, was,
it turned out, the deduction, the genealogy, of the mysterious smile.

While Raúl Viñas had gone off to refill his glass and drink it (which
meant he would have to fill it again, but that was his business), Roberto and
Javier put one of the really big rockets in a bottle to fire it off, and decided
that in spite of the sparks, they would have to hold the bottle, using a napkin
if need be to protect against burns, because it was so big and
top-heavy it might fall over before take-off. So that was
what they did; they brought Roberto’s aerodynamic lighter up to the fuse, and
shouted to get everyone’s attention. Magnificently, triumphantly, trailing a
dense wake or jet of sparks, the rocket shot up into the starry sky, crowded now
with fireworks from every quarter of the city. As it went past the big parabolic
dish, the glow lit up two ghosts floating in the night air, one perfectly
vertical, the other at a slight angle, his head behind the head of his
companion. That was the time: five to midnight, more or less. At midnight, they
would be lined up perfectly, one behind the other, stuck together. Javier and
Roberto smiled and whispered obscene remarks about that position; then almost
immediately, prompted by the same association of ideas, they both looked at
Patri, who was sitting very stiffly, staring into space, white as a sheet,
cadaverous, so thin and haggard she could have been mistaken for a lifelike
tailor’s dummy.

Around her, the women were talking about New Year’s resolutions,
promises and hopes, which were sometimes indistinguishable. For Inés, it would
be the pivotal year of her life, she said: the year of her marriage. The others
agreed: afterward they would say “a year ago.... two years
ago.... ten years ago”; it would be the milepost. And for
Carmen, of course, the year would be marked by an event that was no less
important for being repeated: the birth of a child. The years, they said, rolled
on, and the children were the years, springing from the earth like capricious
little butterflies, blown about by the breezes, by the days and weeks and
months....

Suddenly the sirens blared. Midnight was imminent. The men rushed to
light a string of rockets, which began to explode like joyous
machine-gun fire. Before the volley was over, Patri got up and headed
for the back of the terrace. Her step grew steadily quicker, although she didn’t
break into a run. All at once the others realized what she was intending to do;
and far from being paralyzed by surprise, they got up in turn and went to stop
her: the women, the men and the children, shouting out as rockets exploded near
and far, and thousands of fireworks flowered in the sky. They didn’t catch up
with her, of course, although they came close. Patri leaped into the void. And
that was it. The whole family came to a halt on the brink, right on the brink,
and stood there speechless, as if their hearts, carried on by the momentum of
the chase, had leaped as well. As she fell, Patri’s thick glasses came off and
went on falling separately, beside her. A ghost, appearing suddenly from
somewhere, caught them safely before they hit the ground, and rose as if lifted
by a gentle spring to the edge of the terrace, where he came to rest, in front
of the family, who were stunned by the tragedy. He held the glasses out to Raúl
Viñas, who reached out and took them. Man and ghost stared at each other.

13th of
February 1987

Originally published as
Los Fantasmas
in 1990;
published by arrangement with the Michael Gaeb Literary Agency, Berlin.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a
newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (
NDP
1133
) in 2008

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada
Limited.

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aira, César, 1949–

[Fantasmas. English]

Ghosts / César Aira ; translated from the Spanish by Chris
Andrews.

p. cm.

“A New Directions Paperbook Original, NDP1133.”

ISBN 978-0-8112-1742-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Andrews, Chris. II. Title.

PQ7798.1.I7F8313 2008