As well as the soap operas, we listened to all sorts of programs: news, quizzes, comedy and, of course, music. Nicola Paone held me spellbound. But I made no distinctions: every piece of music was my favorite, at least while I was listening to it. I even liked tangos, which children usually find boring. The wonderful thing about music for me was the force with which it took control of the present and banished everything else. No matter what melody I was listening to, it seemed the most beautiful in the world, the best, the only one. It was the instant raised to its highest power. The fascination of the present, a kind of hypnotism (yet another!). Again and again I put it to the test: I tried to think of other pieces of music, other rhythms, I tried to compare and remember, but I couldn’t; I was flooded by the musical present, captive in a golden jail.
Speaking of music, one day, on Radio Belgrano, in between programs, a singer performed for the first and last time, while Mom and I listened with the utmost attention and not a little perplexity. On this occasion, I think, Mom’s attention was equal to mine. No one has ever sung less tunefully than that woman, not even for a joke. No one else with such a bad sense of pitch would have made it to the end of a measure; this woman sang five whole songs, boleros or romantic ballads, to the accompaniment of a piano. Maybe it was a joke, I don’t know. But it all seemed very serious; the presenter introduced her in a formal manner, and read out the tide of each successive song in a lugubrious voice. It was mysterious. Afterwards, they went on with the normal programs, without any kind of comment. Maybe she was a relative of the radio station’s owner; maybe she paid for the airtime to treat herself, or to keep a promise. Who knows? Most people would be ashamed to sing like that on their own, under the shower. And she sang on the radio. Maybe she was deaf or otherwise handicapped, and it was a great achievement (but they had neglected to explain this to the listeners). Maybe she could sing well, but she got nervous, though it’s hard to believe: it was too bad for that. She couldn’t have sung worse if she’d tried. Every note was out of tune, not only the hard ones. It was almost atonal … It’s inexplicable. It is the inexplicable. The mass media provide an ultimate refuge for the truly inexplicable.
Anyway, the inexplicable presence of that singer in some deep recess of my memory, some deep recess of the radio and the universe, is the strangest thing in this book. The strangest thing that has happened to me. The only thing I can’t account for. Not that my aim is to explain the tissue of deeply strange events that is my life, but in this case I suspect that an explanation exists, really exists, somewhere in Argentina, in the mind of one of her children, one of her nephews or nieces, or an eye witness … Or the mind of the Tone Deaf Singer herself … perhaps she is still alive, and remembers, and if she is reading this … My number is in the telephone book. My answering machine is always on, but I’m here beside the phone. All you have to do is make yourself known … Not by name, of course, your name wouldn’t mean anything to me. Sing. Just a few notes will do, a phrase, however short, from any of those songs, and I will certainly recognize you.
8
THE RADIO HELPED ME to live. The repetition that didn’t always happen gave me a measure of life: a surprise gift for me to unwrap, mad with joy, as the flow of sound made up its mind whether to be the same or different … This calmed my overactive memory … I felt I was no longer beginning to live, with the furious cruelty of beginnings, but simply going on with my life …
I don’t know if this is something that my readers have noticed, but time is always double: one kind of time always conveys another, as its supplement. The time of the radio’s live repetitions conveyed the time that was passing. The palanquin carried the elephant. And time really was passing, slowly and majestically. The catastrophe turned out to be a mere possibility, and was left behind. This gave me the impression that there would be no more catastrophes in my life: I would have a life, like everyone else, and look down on catastrophes from the superior vantage point afforded by the consciousness of time … and this was what seemed to be happening. At school the teacher went on ignoring me, which was just as well. Mom didn’t take me back to the prison. I was in good health. I didn’t mind the simplicity of my life. A certain peace had come over me. I was discovering that time, long-term time made of days, weeks and months, and not of horrific moments as before, was operating in my favor. Nothing else was, but that didn’t worry me. Time was enough. I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.
And that is how, for once in my life, I ended up doing something typical of a girl my age: identifying with the teacher. All girls go through a phase of busily giving lessons to their dolls or the imaginary children who inhabit them. How absurd for someone who knows nothing to throw herself so eagerly into teaching. But what a sublime absurdity. What catechisms of feral pedagogy await the perspicacious observer. What lessons in the primacy of action.
As I had no dolls, I had to make do with make-believe children. And as I didn’t have any already made up, I used real ones, reimagining them as I pleased. They were my classmates, the only children I knew, and they were ideal for my purposes, because I had no idea of their lives outside school. For me they were absolute schoolchildren. To make the game more fun, I gave them twisted, difficult, baroque personalities. Each one suffered from a different and complicated kind of dyslexia. Being the perfect teacher, I dealt with them individually, attentive to their particular needs, setting tasks adapted to their capacities.
For example … In order to explain this game, I have to fall back on examples. This means switching levels, because until now I have managed to avoid the pernicious logic of examples. I’m making a brief exception here solely in the interests of clarity. For example, then, one child’s peculiar dyslexia consisted of putting all the vowels together at the beginning of a word, followed by the consonants. He would write the word “consonants” as “ooacnsnnts”. That was a relatively simple case. Others got the shapes of the letters wrong, writing them back to front … The first example is purely imaginary, no living being has ever been dyslexic in that way; the second is more realistic, but only because it happens to coincide, by pure chance, with a real possibility. I didn’t know what dyslexia was; I didn’t suffer from it myself, nor did any of my classmates. I had reinvented it all on my own, to make the game more fun. I didn’t even suspect that such a disorder might really exist, and would have been surprised to learn that it did.