The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page B

“It can’t be, this can’t be
happening, I’m dreaming, I must have misinterpreted the data.” This time it wasn’t a
just psychological reaction; it was real. So real I couldn’t look at the dog; I was
scared of what he might be expressing. But I was too nervous to pretend to be
indifferent. I looked straight ahead. I must have been the only one; all the other
passengers were following the race, including the driver, who kept turning his head
to look, or using the rear-view mirror, and joking with the passengers at the front.
I hated him for that: the distraction was making him slow down; otherwise how could
the dog have kept pace all the way to the second intersection? But what did it
matter if he was keeping up? What could he do, apart from bark? He wasn’t going to
get onto the bus. After the initial shock, I began to assess the situation in a more
rational way. I had already decided to deny that I knew the dog, and I held firmly
to that decision. An attack, which I thought unlikely (“his bark is worse than his
bite”), would cast me in the victim’s role and prompt onlookers, and the forces of
order if necessary, to come to my aid. But, of course, I wouldn’t give him the
opportunity. I wasn’t going to get out of the bus until he disappeared from sight,
which was bound to happen sooner or later. The 126 goes right out to Retiro, along a
route that twists and turns after it leaves Avenida San Juan, and it was
inconceivable that a dog could follow it all that way. I dared to glance at him, but
immediately looked away again. Our gazes met, and what I saw in his eyes was not the
fury I’d been expecting but a limitless anguish, a pain that wasn’t human because it
was more than a human could bear. Was the wrong I’d done him really so grave? It
wasn’t the moment to embark on an analysis. And anyway, there could be only one
conclusion. The bus went on accelerating. We crossed the second intersection, and
the dog, who’d fallen back, crossed too, in front of a car that had stopped for the
lights; but if the car had been moving, he would have crossed just the same, he was
running so blindly. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was hoping he’d be killed. Such
things have been known to happen: there’s a film in which a Jew in New York
recognizes a kapo from a concentration camp forty years before, starts chasing him,
and is run down and killed by a car. Remembering this depressed me, rather than
affording some relief as precedents usually do, because it happened in fiction and
made the reality of my situation all the more evident, by contrast. I didn’t want to
look at the dog again, but the sound of his barking indicated that he was falling
behind. The bus driver, no doubt tiring of the joke, had put his foot to the floor.
I dared to turn around and look. There was no risk of drawing attention to myself
because everyone else in the bus was doing the same; on the contrary, it might have
seemed suspicious if I’d been the only one who wasn’t looking. I was also thinking
it might be my last glimpse of him; a chance encounter like that wouldn’t occur
again. Yes, he was definitely fallin g behind. He seemed smaller, more pitiful,
almost ridiculous. The other passengers began to laugh. He was an old, worn-out dog,
on the brink of death, perhaps. The years of resentment and bitterness that lay
behind that outburst had left their mark. The race must have been killing him. But
he’d waited so long for that moment to arrive, he wasn’t going to give up. And he
didn’t. Even though he knew he’d lost, he kept on running and barking, barking and
running. Perhaps, when he lost sight of the bus in the distance, he’d go on running
and barking forever, because there would be nothing else he could do. I had a
fleeting vision of the dog’s figure in an abstract landscape (infinity) and felt
sad, but it was a calm, almost aesthetic feeling, as if the sorrow were seeing me in
the far distance as I imagined I was