It was amazing that such a tiny being could produce such far-reaching effects. The particle seemed to be everywhere at once, although, of course, she wasn’t. At each moment she was in one place only, but present there as a cause, so her effects were simultaneously present in many other places, and while they were still being produced, she was already generating new planes and scrambling the apes into new configurations. The size of a cause doesn’t matter: a cause is a cause, whether big, medium, or small. Even when it’s the cause of madness.
VI
WITH ITS BAROQUE LAYERING OF necessary accidents and accidental necessities, the Tea Party was, it seemed, complete both as an event and as a symbol. The birthday was duly celebrated, and rather than passing unnoticed, the date was marked, if not with the ecclesiastical pomp that might have been expected, at least with the animal (not to say bestial) energy and joy of the primitive and the authentic.
But, driven on by an obsessive perfectionism appropriate to His status and function, God wanted to add one last stitch, or sew on a final button, and tie off the end of the thread. He still had to give the particle an origin. He had to make her come from somewhere. Or, to put it more precisely, he had “to make her have come from somewhere.” This was a preliminary task, which should come as no surprise, since all God’s tasks are preliminary; otherwise, the completeness of His world would be compromised. It wasn’t a problem, given His habitually bold approach to space and time. The problem came afterward, as we shall see, not that it was really a problem (partly because for Him before and after had no meaning).
God’s Tea Party would have been incomplete without the story of the particle. Because the Party was a story, and every story is made up of stories, and if it’s made up of anything else it ceases to be a story. We will never know whether it was a weakness on God’s part, one of those forgivable little vanities, or a matter of logic, but He dearly wanted the birthday party to make a good story, a “once upon a time,” every repetition of which would be a perfectly accomplished rehearsal. He couldn’t allow the anonymity of the furtive interloper to spoil everything.
The nature of the object meant that his work was already half done: it couldn’t be hard to find the origin of a particle because the word itself indicated that it was part of something. All He had to do was find that something, or invent it. God had made far more arcane discoveries, in the course of His long career. How many times had He found a needle in a haystack, just to satisfy His creatures’ appetite for metaphors or proverbs!
In this case, it could have been anything, literally, and more than literally: the particle could have come not only from a material object but also from an event, a lapse of time, an intention, a thought, a passion, a wave, a form. . By virtue of its size, it belonged in the primordial roundabout, from which the paths of mass and energy depart, with their respective mutual metamorphoses. The particles were at the heart of the action. Which didn’t mean that the origin of this one in particular had to be sought exclusively at the beginning: she could have emanated from any state of the Universe, even the most recent. The infinitesimal birth of that nosy little globule could have taken place in a flare from the surface of Alpha Centauri or a pan used to fry a dove’s egg in China, in a child’s tear or the curvature of space, in hydrogen, blotting paper, a desire for revenge, a cube root, Lord Cavendish, a hair, or the unicorn. . The catalog that God had to flick through, so to speak, was inordinately long. Not for the first time, it was borne home to Him that omnipotence is limited by l’embarras du choix. Words were his only guides in that great chaotic enumeration. At bottom, it was a question of language. There weren’t any things in reality, only words, words that cut the world into pieces, which people end up taking for things. God didn’t need to use words Himself, but when He had to intervene, when, as in this case, He wanted to imprint something on human memory, He had no choice but to take part in the linguistic game. He regarded it as a challenge. It was quite a bit harder for Him than it would have been for a grammar teacher, because He had to consider all languages, living, dead, and potential (each of them carved the world up differently, and, viewed from above, their coincidences, divergences, and overlaps formed a superintricate patchwork).
Cutting to the chase: it has taken longer to formulate the problem than He took to solve it. As if He’d pressed a button, the particle had her birth certificate, which also served as an invitation to the party, to which she would return for her debut. And here, the Creator made an exception: He who keeps no secrets kept one on this occasion. He didn’t tell anyone what He had chosen as the particle’s origin. And that, ever since, has been the profound little mystery that runs through God’s Tea Party.
The Musical Brain
I WAS A KID — I would have been four or five years old. This was in my hometown, Coronel Pringles, at the beginning of the 1950s. One night, it must have been a Saturday, we’d gone to have dinner at the hotel; we didn’t eat out often, not that we were really poor, though we lived pretty much as if we were because of my father’s austere habits and my mother’s invincible suspicion of any food she hadn’t prepared herself. Some obscure combination of circumstances had brought us to the hotel’s luxurious restaurant that night and seated us, stiffly and uncomfortably, around a table covered with a white cloth and laden with silver cutlery, tall wineglasses, and gold-rimmed porcelain dishes. We were dressed up to the nines, like all the other diners. The dress codes in those days were relatively strict.
I remember the continual to-and-fro of people getting up and carrying boxes full of books to a small table like an altar at the far end of the room. Most of them were cardboard boxes, though there were wooden boxes too, and some were even painted or varnished. Sitting behind the table was a little woman wearing a shiny blue dress and a pearl necklace, with a powdered face and white hair combed into the shape of a feathery egg. It was Sarita Subercaseaux, who later on, throughout my time there, was the high school’s headmistress. She took the boxes and examined their contents, making notes in a record book. I was following all this activity with the keenest attention. Some of the boxes were too full to be properly closed, others were half empty, with only a few books knocking around inside, making an ominous sound. Yet it wasn’t so much the quantity of books that determined the value of the boxes, though quantity did matter, as the variety of titles. The ideal box would have been one in which all the books were different; the worst (and this was the most frequent case), a box containing nothing but copies of the same book. I don’t know who explained this rule to me, maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typicaclass="underline" I was always inventing stories and schemes to make sense of things I didn’t understand, and I understood almost nothing. Anyway, where else could the explanation have come from? My parents weren’t very communicative, I couldn’t read, there was no television, and the kids in my gang of neighborhood friends were as ignorant as I was.