relaxing because it gives license to do anything. Nevertheless, what he was doing was deeply human, and given the mechanism of automatic re-absorption the Cure enacted, his exhaustion approached rest; pressure, relaxation.
In fact, the hinges on the last panels of each screen began to get welded to the other screens whose last panels were nearby, and with this the process of exclusion and inclusion was concluding. These welds happened on their own, one after the other, in cascades of billions that burst the heart of a second, of the final seconds. This produced a greasy white spark in the black depth of the Night. It was something like a nightmare, that “schluik. .” Dr. Aira’s utter exhaustion also contributed to this sense of feverish delirium, for at the very end of his strength he felt nauseated, as if he were suffocating; his ears were ringing, and there were red spots in front of his eyes.
But the important thing was that the siege had been laid, and the new Universe had been formed, as unfathomably complex as the old Universe had been until then, but different, and just right for the cancer of that man in that bed to never have been. . The work of the Cure had been completed right in front of his own eyes, half-closed from fatigue; his arms fell to his sides, flaccid, his legs were barely able to hold him up; the room, which he was now seeing again, was waltzing before his dizzy eyes; and in it the patient’s bed, the spotlights, the cameramen, the nurses, the relatives. . The next time, he told himself in a state of exhaustion that rendered him idiotic, he would have to think up a machine that could spread out the screens for him. Compared with an automated system, more appropriate for the times in which he lived, the dance to which he had surrendered would seem like some kind of imperfect, handmade prehistoric Cure. But before thinking about an improbable second time, he had to wait for the results of this one.
It was a wait truly laden with unknowns. Already, when he witnessed the welds, and in the sudden passivity these allowed him after such dense, nonstop action, he perceived that with each “closure” the plausible had changed, only to change again with the next one; the closures, of course, didn’t just happen; they were cumulative until they had formed one definitive closure. It was an extreme case of “doing something with words.” The transposition of plausibles was vertiginous, and Dr. Aira had no way of knowing where things would stand in the end. That’s what mattered, when all was said and done.
It didn’t take long for him to find out. In fact, in the overdetermination of the present, waking up was accompanied by guffaws. . which was part of the nightmare, but on another level. Laughter was increasing around him, reordering and giving substance to the space of the bedroom, and from there to the house, the neighborhood, Buenos Aires, the world. He was the last to sort himself out and to understand what was happening; he knew himself and was resigned to such delays. In the meantime, the only thing he knew was that from that moment on whatever happened in reality depended on the angle some panel of the screen was hung, no matter how far-flung it was; for example, the one that had excluded from this new Universe of reality a bonfire, or the flying sparks of a bonfire, in the prehistory of the Maori people. . Amid the laughter, his eyes opened onto a New World, really truly new.
And in this new world, those present were laughing heartily; the cameramen were turning off their cameras and lowering them, revealing themselves as the two fake doctors from the ambulance on Bonifacio Street; and the patient, choking on his laughter, was sitting up in bed and pointing a finger at him, unable to speak because he was laughing so hard. . It was Actyn! That wretch. . Everything had been staged by him! Or at least that’s what he thought. The truth is that he wasn’t dying, he didn’t have cancer nor had he ever, and he wasn’t a very wealthy businessman. . The plausible had completely changed. Laughter was justified; happiness needed no other motive. After years of trying in vain, Actyn had managed to get Dr. Aira to commit the biggest blunder of his career, the definitive one. . And in reality it was: the blunder as the transformation of the plausible, that is, as a visible trace — the only one that could remain inscribed on memory — of the transformation of one Universe into another, and hence of the secret power of the Miracle Cure.
PRINGLES, 6 SEPTEMBER 1996
PRAISE FOR CÉSAR AIRA
“Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Aira is a master at pivoting between the mundane and the metaphysical.”
— The Millions
“An improvisatory wildness that opens up possibilities where there had seemed to be brick walls.”
— The Paris Review
AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER
“César Aira’s strange and arresting novel, in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald. . a memorable performance whose tone and oddly compelling vision are distinctly Aira’s own.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Aira’s most dazzling novel to be published in English thus far.”
— The New York Review of Books
“Astonishing. . a supercharged Céline, writing with a Star Wars laser sword, turning Don Quixote into Picasso.”
— Harpers
“Multifaceted and transporting. . I get so absorbed that upon finishing I don’t remember anything, like a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.”
— Patti Smith
GHOSTS
“An incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.”
— The Los Angeles Times
“Exhilarating. Cesar Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature. Ghosts is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Between hauntings, Ghosts is filled with Aira’s beautifully precise observation of the texture of everyday life.”
— The Millions
“Aira conjures a languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows that puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico.”
— The New Yorker
HOW I BECAME A NUN
“Oblique and darkly humorous. Through the marginal, Aira imaginatively explores the foibles of the human condition.”
— The Harvard Review
“Aira is a man of multiple, slipping masks, and How I Became a Nun is the work of an uncompromising literary trickster.”
— Time Out
“A foreboding fable of life and art.”
— Publishers Weekly
THE LITERARY CONFERENCE
“Aira’s novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper and everything happens at the speed of thought.”
— The Millions
“Disarming. . amusing.”
— The New Yorker
“César Aira’s tale of mad scientists, literary doubles and world domination offers a gloriously absurdist example of the ‘constant flight forward’ that powers his inimitable fiction.”
— The National
THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND
“Genius.”