Nor had he figured out the costs. He would, needless to say, have to spend the minimum amount possible; in fact, he couldn’t talk about “costs” because there would be nothing to offset them, that is, against which to measure them. The project didn’t include selling the installments; to do that he would have to set up a company, register as a publisher, pay value-added tax, and a thousand other things he would never dream of doing. He would give them away; nobody could stop him from doing that.
The ideal thing would have been to operate with a dual monetary system, such as the one in Ancient China. There, they had official money for ordinary citizens and another for the poor, who were, of course, the vast majority of the population. The connection between the two, which never played out in reality, consisted of dividing the smallest unit of the official money — let’s say, a cent — into ten thousand units; that multiple was the sapek, the basic unit in the poor people’s system. A fistful of watermelon seeds cost a sapek. All business in the impoverished sectors was conducted with this money; the poor, the peasants, and children used no other, and these humble transactions met their survival needs. There was never any “exchange” because who would ever collect a million sapeks to exchange for one “cent” of the official money, a unit that had, on the other hand and on another level of life, a minute value, not even enough to pay for the cheapest item in a store, or the simplest dish in a restaurant? Whereas with much less money than that — under certain circumstances, a mere hundred sapeks! — a poor person could pay an entire month’s food, shelter, and all other necessities. And everybody was happy and well fed.
III
Even for people who lead a routine life without incident, for those who are sedentary and methodical, who have renounced adventure and planned their future, a colossal surprise is waiting in the wings, one that will take place when the moment arises and force them to start over again on a different basis. That surprise consists of the discovery that they are, in reality, one thing or another; in other words, that they embody one human type — for example, a Miser, or a Genius, or a Believer, or anything else — a type that until then they have only known through portrayals in books, portrayals they’ve never truly taken seriously, and in any case have never seriously considered applying to reality. This revelation is inevitable at a certain point in life, and the upheaval it creates (gaping mouth, wide eyes, stupor), the sensation of a personal End of the World, of “the thing I most feared is happening to me,” is tailor-made to the frivolity of everything that preceded it.
There’s no set age, as we know: everything depends on individual variables, which all variables are because the process of living is nothing but their accumulation. But it usually happens around fifty, which these days is the time when one begins to think that everything is over. In the subsequent psychic reshuffling, the horrified victim has an additional reason to feel bitter when he realizes that this discovery will no longer do him any good, that it is now a useless cruelty; if it had happened thirty or forty years before, he would have lived knowing it; he would have boarded the train of the real.
And this happens even when — especially when — the aforementioned subject has spent his life identified with the human type he later discovers he belongs to. In fact, in those cases the surprise turns out to be more disruptive and creates a deeper impression.
This is what had happened to Dr. Aira during this period. It would have happened to him anyway because the time had come, but the fact is that the revelation was unleashed by an incident that interrupted his publishing project before he had had a chance to begin it.
He received a call, which resulted in him attending a rather secret meeting in an elegant suite of offices in Puerto Madero. . and contrary to all his expectations he found himself embarked on the process of a Miracle Cure. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to swear that he’d never do it, that he was already past all temptation, that he had it beaten. His decision to publish installments had emerged precisely from his conviction that he’d left behind the call to practice. But, as we can see, man proposes and God disposes.
The people who contacted him were the brothers of an important businessman, the president of a petroleum holding company with vast influence on industry and finance, who had been unexpectedly stricken with a terminal illness. He was under sixty and of course didn’t want to die, not yet. Nobody wants to. Human beings always cling to life, whatever the circumstances, and whether or not it is worth it. In the case of such a wealthy man, with so many possibilities of squeezing the most out of each day, the desire to prolong life burgeoned. The brothers tried, in their own way, to explain this to Dr. Aira, as if to justify themselves. Circumscribed by their professions and their education, they expressed it in their own terms: the holding company had embarked with great success on a process of privatization; it was one of a select group of local businesses that had managed to broaden its field of operations by reorganizing its assets. They were diversifying without losing strength and were on the verge of realizing the benefits of consolidation, the incorporation of Mercosur, the export stimulus, the retrofitting of their industrial plants with the latest technologies. . They got excited as they were describing it, even though it was obvious they were repeating a speech they had learned by heart, and it was no less obvious that they were reciting it to a total layman. A bit embarrassed, they returned to the subject at hand, suggesting that they were not singing their own praises but rather those of their sick brother, the brains and engine behind the group’s entire operation,
the natural head of the family. What they wanted to emphasize was the unacceptable injustice that he of all people would have to depart before seeing the fruits of his talents, his creativity in the business world, his boundless energy.
Dr. Aira’s head was crackling, as if it were full of soda. He was also slightly embarrassed for having paid such close attention to the explanations, and he wanted to get back to the purpose of his being there. What was the illness? he asked. Cancer, regrettably. Cancer of everything. Large spreading masses, metastasis, the disease’s uncontrollable growth. They pointed to a file on the glass desktop.
“All the paperwork is there, including his clinical history, up-to-date as of today. Though we suppose you don’t work along those lines. It documents the failure of the best oncologists in the country and around the world. They no longer even bother to pretend to hold out any hope at all.”
“How long do they give him?”
“Weeks. Days.”
They had waited a long time to come to him. Anyway, it was impossible. They had probably begun alternative treatments months ago, and all available charlatans and healers must have already filed through. He felt paradoxically flattered to be the last one. They apologized with vague lies, unaware of how unnecessary it was to do so: their brother had undergone the conventional treatments with admirable stoicism; he had not given up even in the face of the most adverse outcomes. . Finally, he had given them permission to try the Miracle Cure, and, as he had done from the very beginning, he was bringing all his faith, all his trust into play: Dr. Aira could count on that.
There was nothing more to say. He looked at the file and shook his head as if to say: I don’t need this; I know what awaits me. The truth was, he would have liked to take a peek, just out of curiosity, though he would not have understood anything because surely every entry was in medical jargon, which was inaccessible to him. Moreover, it was true that he didn’t need it because his intervention occurred on a different level. The case had to be shut in order for him to come on stage; the clinical history had to have reached its end. And by all appearances, this is what had happened with this man.