The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page B

all his wishes. Though primitive, he was a dreamer and had the soul of a poet. The fugitive of the legend had lived in his fantasies ever since he was a small boy, and this had been the reason he had chosen, when he was an adolescent, the solitary and unrewarding work as a hiemal goatherd, disappointing his father, who hoped he would become a blacksmith like him. There in the mountains he felt closer to his ideal of womanhood, ideal even if he knew deep down that she didn’t exist. And now, against all hope, he had found her.
    In a precarious high-wire act, the couple was balancing on the fragile spiderweb with which fiction clings to reality. Aria, who was on the side of reality, understood her lover, but did not tell him the truth. She not only knew the legend but it touched her very personally. Her great-grandmother had been the first Miss Ukraine, during the Stalinist era. Th e documentary details were lost in the successive ideological purges and the fraudulent rewriting of History, which were the trademarks of the Soviet regime. Hence the proliferation of fictional accounts that filled the need for genealogical explanations, which every nation has. And one of the versions of the story claimed that the winner had not, in reality, been Señorita Civilized but rather her rival, for the night before the finale the two had switched identities (they looked very much alike). Whereby the real Señorita Wild Savage had stayed in Kiev representing civilization and modernization and planting within them the seeds of savagery that had prevented Ukraine from joining the chorus of Sustainable Development.
    The very hazardous return of this woman’s descendent to the Coal Mountains, Aria thought, smacked of the culmination of Destiny. She was having a firsthand experience of poetic justice, one of the pillars on which sits the art of film. She felt this justice that much more strongly because she knew that if it were a movie, she and her great-grandmother would be played by the same actress (they always do that). But in this movie, in particular — my friend said, raising his voice in a triumphant finale of “I told you so” — she knew it was a movie!
    While I was reconstructing these words, in bed, I realized that the images had joined hands with the words, as always happens when films are invoked. But I had to remember, I reminded myself then, in retrospect, that words, not images, were what we had; that it was with words that we were going to solve our little puzzle; the images that overwhelmed me in the mental fog of semi-somnolence could only further distance me from the solution. I ascertained this at my own expense when I saw that I had not grasped the meaning of my friend’s last statement. Thinking about it a little, I realized that I didn’t understand it because it could not be understood. It was obviously absurd, and with it, we were returning to the point of departure. I knew what reductio ad absurdum was, but for the moment I still could not grasp that a statement could be affirmed through the absurd. The only remaining possibility was that after tracing a large circle, my poor friend would return to his initial confusion — now from a psychological standpoint — and believe that after all he had convinced me that the actor was the same as the character. Which meant that he was an idiot, and that I would have to relapse into my previous fears and sorrows.
    Already, the mere fact that we had continued talking about this subject, after I realized that he did not know the difference between reality and fiction, was an aberration. But he was not to blame: I was, for having realized it. In a normal conversation between people like us, that kind of error or ignorance remains camouflaged in intelligent discourse — unseen, unnoticed, or, one believes, misheard. Once it is noticed, there is no going back.
    Moreover, I didn’t feel like going back. Th e images had given me wings, and I preferred to attempt a