The next step: he accepted the mission. Why? In spite of all his promises and precautions, he took the plunge. Once again, the well-known saying proved true: “Never say never.” He vowed he would never do it (his interlocutors must not have known about this vow because they took his acceptance as a matter of course), and now he rushed to say yes, almost before they had finished making their proposal. This could be explained a priori by a defect in his personality, which had caused him many problems throughout his life: he didn’t know how to say no. A basic insecurity, a lack of confidence in his own worth, prevented him from doing so. This became more pronounced and more plausible because the people who had requested his services on the basis of his capabilities and talents were, by definition, unfamiliar with his field, and little or poorly informed about his worth and his history. Hence, a refusal on his part would leave them totally blank, thinking, “Who does this guy think he is, playing hard to get like this? Why did we bother to call him?” It was as if he could only refuse those who were fully informed about his system, those who had already entered his system, and by definition such people would never ask him for a Cure, or they wouldn’t ask him for one in earnest.
There was an additional motive, related to the previous one, and the result of another defect, one that was quite common but very pronounced in Dr. Aira: snobbery. This office with its Picassos and its Persian carpets had impressed him, and the opportunity to enter into contact with such a first-rate celebrity was irresistible. It’s true that until that day he had never heard of this man, and the family name was totally unfamiliar to him. But that only magnified the effect. He knew there were very important people who maintained a “low profile” policy. And it had to have been really low to go unnoticed by a snob of his caliber. An unknown celebrity was as if on another — a higher — level.
But before all that, and as if obscured under a leaf storm of circumstantial and psychological motives, his acceptance had a much more concrete cause: it was the first time he had been asked. Like so many other phenomena in our era dominated by media fiction, his fame had preceded him. His own myth surrounded him, and the myth’s mechanism had continually delayed him from going into action, until there came a point when doing so had become inconceivable. These wealthy barbarians had to come along with their ignorance of the subtle mechanism of the esoteric for the unthinkable to occur. In fact, Dr. Aira could have gotten out of it by telling them that there had been a mistake, a misunderstanding; he was a theoretician, one could almost say a “writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of metaphor. . At the same time, however, it was not a metaphor; it was real, and its truth resided in this reality. This would be his first and perhaps last chance to prove it.
They wanted to know when he could begin the procedure. They felt a certain urgency due to the very nature of the problem: there was no time to lose. They managed to include in their proposal a discreet query about the nature of his method, of which they obviously had not the slightest idea (this was obvious, above all, because nobody did).
Swept into the vortex of the blind impulse that had led him to accept the job, Dr. Aira said he needed a little time to prepare.
“Let’s see. . Today is. . I don’t know what day it is.”
“Friday.”
“Very good. I’ll do it on Sunday night. The day after tomorrow. Does that work for you?”
“Of course. We are at your disposal.” A pause. They looked quite intrigued. “And then what?”
“Then nothing. It is only one session. I figure it should last one hour, more or less.”
They exchanged glances. They all decided at once not to ask any more questions. What for? One of them wrote the address down on a piece of paper, then they stood up — serious, circumspect.
“We’ll expect you then.”
“At ten.”
“Perfect. Any instructions?”
“No. See you on Sunday.”
They began to shake hands. As could be expected, they had left the question of compensation for this already marginal moment.
“Needless to say. . your fee. . ”
Dr. Aira, categoricaclass="underline"
“I don’t charge. Not a cent.”
As awkward as his gestures, his facial expressions, and his tone of voice usually were, in this case, and only in this case, he had struck just the right note.
There couldn’t possibly be a question of money, not for anybody there! And yet, that’s all this was about. Money had been left out, but only because there was so much of it. In spite of this being the first time he’d ever dealt with such affluent people, Dr. Aira had responded with the almost instinctive confidence that only long habit can provide, as if he had done nothing his whole life but prepare himself for this moment. It must have been in his genes. In fact, someone as poor as he was couldn’t charge people as rich as they were for his services. One simply places oneself in their hands, places the rest of one’s life and one’s children’s lives in their hands. After all, billions of dollars were involved. As it was a question of life or death, it was as if the entire family fortune had been translated into wads of bills and stuffed into a briefcase. The amount was so colossal, and what he could charge, or want, or even dream of, was such a minuscule fraction of it, that the two quantities were almost incongruent. No matter how hard he tried not to think about the issue (he’d have time later, once he’d gone out the office door), he couldn’t help making a quick calculation related to the installments. It was a calculation he made totally “in the air,” in the pure relativity of fantasy, because he had still not asked for a single estimate from a printer; he had planned to do so in a few days, but this now prevented him, or better said, it gave him a good excuse to keep postponing it. Be that as it may, publishing was very cheap, and compared with the business they conducted here, the cost was marginal and insignificant. That’s how he liked to think of it: as if the financial aspect could simply be canceled. This gave real meaning to his publishing business. He realized, in that momentary fantasy, that he could seriously consider things he had been placing in the “fantasy” category, like hard covers made of cardboard wrapped in paper with a satin finish, and full-color illustrations. The leap from the large to the small, from the fortune of these magnates to his trivial dealings with some neighborhood print shop, was so enormous that through it everything became possible: all luxuries, such as folding pages, vegetable inks, transparencies inserted between the pages, engravings. . And it’s not as if he’d abstained from thinking about these options: one could almost say he had done nothing but. But he had done so as an impractical fantasy, even when he deigned to consider the most practical details. Now, suddenly, reality was intervening, and it was as if he should retrieve each and every dream, and every feature of every passage in every dream, and rethink them. He couldn’t wait to be back in his house in Flores, open his file of notes on the installments, reread them one by one, because surely they would all appear marvelously new in the light of reality. He took a taxi so he could get there more quickly. For once he allowed himself the luxury of not responding to the taxi driver’s crude attempts to engage him in conversation; he had too much to think about. Of course he still didn’t have the money, and he had even rejected it outright. And what if these people, with the insensitivity so typical of millionaires, had taken him literally? It was highly probable, the most probable thing in the world. But it wouldn’t do him any good to worry about it now.