He chose his genius carefully, or better said, he didn’t need to choose him because fate placed him in his path, within reach: the most unassailable and undisputed genius there could ever be; his level of respectability touched on the transcendent. This was his natural target, and he set to work without further delay.
To say that he had him “within reach” is an exaggeration; in our celebrity culture, celebrities live isolated behind impregnable walls of privacy and move around inside invisible fortresses nobody can breach. But the same opportunity that had called him to his attention also brought him more or less close by. . He didn’t need to be too close. All he needed was one cell from his body, any cell, for each one contains the information necessary to clone the entire individual. Unwilling to trust fate to afford him the opportunity to obtain a hair or a nail trimming or a flake of skin, he employed one of his most trusted creatures, a small wasp reduced to the size of a period and loaded from birth with the identifying data of the aforementioned Genius; he sent her on her secret mission at noon under conditions of certain proximity (the wasp has a very short flight range). He trusted her blindly for he knew her to be at the mercy of the infallible force of instinct, of never-erring Nature. And she did not disappoint him: ten minutes later she returned, carrying the cell on her feet. . He immediately placed it on the slide of his pocket microscope and became ecstatic. The strength of his strategy was confirmed: it was a gorgeous cell, deep, filled with languages, iridescent, a limpid blue with transparent highlights. He’d never seen such a cell, it almost didn’t seem human. He placed it in the portable cloning machine he had brought with him, called a taxi, told the driver to take him to the highest plateau in the vicinity, continued from there on foot for a few hours, and when he had reached windswept heights where he was gasping for breath, he looked around for a remote spot to leave the machine. Incubation on a mountain peak was not a poetic detaiclass="underline" the specific conditions of pressure and temperature at these altitudes were what the process required: to reproduce them artificially he would need to be in his modest laboratory, from which he was separated by thousands of miles, and he feared the cell would not survive the rigors of the journey, or would lose its vitality. He left it there and climbed down. Now all he could do was wait. .
Here I must attempt a first and partial translation. The “Mad Scientist” is, of course, me. The identification of the Genius may end up being more problematic, but it’s not worth wasting time with conjectures: it is Carlos Fuentes. If I agreed to go to that conference in Mérida it was only after I had confirmation that he would attend; I needed to get close enough so that my cloned wasp could take a cell from him. It was a unique opportunity to gain access to him for my scientific manipulations. They served him to me on a platter, and I didn’t even have to spend money on an airplane ticket, which I wouldn’t have been able to afford, given how bad things had been lately. Or how they had been before the Macuto Line episode. I had had a terrible year, without work, a result of the seriousness of the economic crisis, which especially affected publishing. In spite of this, I had not interrupted my experiments, because at the level on which I was working, I didn’t need money. In addition to suiting to a tee the pursuit of my secret goals, this invitation to the conference gave me the opportunity to spend a week in the tropics and take a vacation; rest, recuperate, and refresh myself after a year of constant worries.
Upon my return to the hotel, the excitement of the past few hours reached its anticlimax. The first part of the operation, the most demanding part for me, was over: I had obtained a cell from Carlos Fuentes, I had placed it inside the cloning machine, and I had left the machine to operate under optimum conditions. If you add to this the fact that the previous day I had solved the secular enigma of the Macuto Line, I could feel momentarily satisfied and think about other things. I had a few days to do just that. Cloning a living being is not like blowing glass. It happens on its own, but it takes time. Even though the process is prodigiously accelerated, it requires almost a week, according to the human calendar, for it must reconstruct on a small scale the entire geology of the evolution of life.
All I could do was wait. In the meantime, I had to figure out how to spend my time. As I had no intention of attending the tedious sessions of the conference, I bought a bathing suit and, beginning the following day, I spent mornings and afternoons at the swimming pool.
II
At the swimming pool, I focused all my efforts on one goaclass="underline" to reduce my mental hyperactivity. To let myself be, naked under the sun. To create internal silence. I have pursued this goal through all of life’s twists and turns, almost like an idée fixe. This is the small and alarming idea that stands out in the midst of all other ideas and raises the volume of psychic noise, which is already quite considerable. Hyperactivity has become my brain’s normal way of being. It’s always been like that, to tell the truth, at least since my adolescence, and I’ve learned about the more normal way most other people are — hesitant and half-empty — through reading, observation, deduction, and conjecture. And because, on a few occasions, for a few seconds, I have had that experience. My readings in Eastern psychic techniques, and even those stupid articles about “meditation” that often appear in women’s magazines, have taught me that there is one further step: an empty mind, the complete or almost complete lack of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex, a blackout, rest. And if at one time, with my characteristic ambitiousness, I, too, wished to achieve that, and practiced all the recommended exercises with innocent trust, I finally grew convinced that I was wasting my time. It wasn’t for me. First, I would have to descend from my peaks of frenzy, take hold of the reins, and mollify the runaway beast of my thoughts, force it to slow to a normal pace; only then would I have a chance to glimpse those Eastern worlds of spiritual serenity.
I have often asked myself how I got into this situation, what happened during my formative years that increased the speed of my mental flow so excessively and made it stick there. I have also asked myself (what haven’t I asked myself?) what the exact measure of that speed is, for the very concept of “mental hyperactivity” is approximate and must contain gradations.
To the first question, regarding the history of my malady, I have responded for better or for worse with a small and private “creation myth,” whose modulations have been all the novels I have written. I would be hard put to spell this out in the abstract because the myths’ variations are not specific “examples” of a general form, in the same way that specific thoughts that are always flashing through my head like lightning are not case studies or examples of a type of thought.
That myth of the ideal myriads, that little drama without characters or plot, would be shaped like a valve. Or, in less technical terms, it would have the characteristic Baudelaire called “irreversibility.” A formulated thought does not pass back through the same Caudine forks of its birth, does not return to the nothingness from which it came. Which explains not only the fierce overcrowding but also a quite visible feature of my personality: my bewilderment, my imprudence, my frivolity. The withdrawal of an idea to the conditions of its production is the necessary condition for its seriousness.
In my case, nothing returns, everything races forward, savagely being pushed from behind by what keeps coming through that accursed valve. This image, brought to its peak of maturation in my vertiginous reflections, revealed to me the path to the solution, which I forcefully put into practice whenever I have time and feel like it. The solution is none other than the greatly overused (by me) “escape forward.” Since turning back is off limits: Forward! To the bitter end! Running, flying, gliding, using up all the possibilities, the conquest of tranquility through the din of the battlefield. The vehicle is language. What else? Because the valve is language. Therein lay the root of the problem. Which doesn’t mean that once in a while, such as during those sessions at the pool, I didn’t attempt a more conventional method, by relaxing, by trying to forget everything, by taking a short vacation.