The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page A

moment
arises and force them to start over again on a different basis. That surprise
consists of the discovery that they are, in reality, one thing or another; in
other words, that they embody one human type — for example, a Miser, or a
Genius, or a Believer, or anything else — a type that until then they have only
known through portrayals in books, portrayals they’ve never truly taken
seriously, and in any case have never seriously considered applying to reality.
This revelation is inevitable at a certain point in life, and the upheaval it
creates (gaping mouth, wide eyes, stupor), the sensation of a personal End of
the World, of “the thing I most feared is happening to me,” is tailor-made to
the frivolity of everything that preceded it.
    There’s no set age, as we know: everything depends on
individual variables, which all variables are because the process of living is
nothing but their accumulation. But it usually happens around fifty, which these
days is the time when one begins to think that everything is over. In the
subsequent psychic reshuffling, the horrified victim has an additional reason to
feel bitter when he realizes that this discovery will no longer do him any good,
that it is now a useless cruelty; if it had happened thirty or forty years
before, he would have lived knowing it; he would have boarded the train of the
real.
    And this happens even when — especially when — the
aforementioned subject has spent his life identified with the human type he
later discovers he belongs to. In fact, in those cases the surprise turns out to
be more disruptive and creates a deeper impression.
    This is what had happened to Dr. Aira during this period.
It would have happened to him anyway because the time had come, but the fact is
that the revelation was unleashed by an incident that interrupted his publishing
project before he had had a chance to begin it.
    He received a call, which resulted in him attending a
rather secret meeting in an elegant suite of offices in Puerto Madero . . . and
contrary to all his expectations he found himself embarked on the process of a
Miracle Cure. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to swear that he’d
never do it, that he was already past all temptation, that he had it beaten. His
decision to publish installments had emerged precisely from his conviction that
he’d left behind the call to practice. But, as we can see, man proposes and God
disposes.
    The people who contacted him were the brothers of an
important businessman, the president of a petroleum holding company with vast
influence on industry and finance, who had been unexpectedly stricken with a
terminal illness. He was under sixty and of course didn’t want to die, not yet.
Nobody wants to. Human beings always cling to life, whatever the circumstances,
and whether or not it is worth it. In the case of such a wealthy man, with so
many possibilities of squeezing the most out of each day, the desire to prolong
life burgeoned. The brothers tried, in their own way, to explain this to Dr.
Aira, as if to justify themselves. Circumscribed by their professions and their
education, they expressed it in their own terms: the holding company had
embarked with great success on a process of privatization; it was one of a
select group of local businesses that had managed to broaden its field of
operations by reorganizing its assets. They were diversifying without losing
strength and were on the verge of realizing the benefits of consolidation, the
incorporation of Mercosur, the export stimulus, the retrofitting of their
industrial plants with the latest technologies . . . They got excited as they
were describing it, even though it was obvious they were repeating a speech they
had learned by heart, and it was no less obvious that they were reciting it to a
total layman. A bit embarrassed, they returned to the subject at hand,
suggesting that they were not singing their own praises but rather those of
their sick brother,