We didn’t even know if a billion was bigger than a trillion. What did it matter? It was better not to know. We both hid our ignorance, and never put each other to the test. And in spite of this, the game remained very easy to play.
We were attracted by big numbers, inevitably: it followed from the nature of the game. They were the gravitational force accelerating our fall. But at the same time we held them in contempt, as indicated by the fact that we didn’t bother to find out exactly how big they were. Numbers were one thing and big numbers were another: with numbers we were in the domain of intuition (eight could be eight things or eight points; the same with eighty, or even eight hundred million); but when it came to really big numbers we were thinking blind; the game became purely verbal, a matter of combining words, not numbers.
“A billion.”
“A trillion billions.”
“Half a billion trillion billions.”
“A billion billion trillion billion trillions.”
It’s true that numbers reappeared on the far side of these accumulations.
“A billion billions.”
“A billion billions and six.”
“Six billion billions and six point zero zero zero zero zero zero six.”
These were luxuries, embellishments that we allowed ourselves, as if to stave off a boredom that we didn’t feel and couldn’t have felt, but could nevertheless imagine. On the other hand, we both agreed not to accept things like “six billion six billions”: that wasn’t a number but a multiplication. We had more than enough to do with numbers pure and simple. Why make life complicated?
I don’t know how long this game lasted. Months, years. It never bored us, never ceased to surprise and stimulate us. It was one of the high points of our childhood, and when we finally stopped, it wasn’t because we’d exhausted the game, or tired of it, but because we had grown up and gone our separate ways. I should add that we didn’t play it all the time, and it wasn’t our only game. Not at all. We had dozens of different games, some more extravagant and fantastic than others. I have resolved to describe them one by one, and this is the one I happened to begin with, but I wouldn’t want the rather artificial way in which I’ve isolated the number game to give a false impression. We weren’t a pair of obsessives permanently shut up in the cabin of an old truck spouting numbers. A new fantasy would excite us and we could forget about the numbers for weeks at a time. Then we’d start over, exactly like before. . On reflection, the way I’ve presented the game in isolation is not so artificial after all, because various features did set it apart: its immutable simplicity, its naturalness, its secrecy. I think we kept it secret, but not for any special reason, not because it was a secret: just because we forgot to tell anyone, or the opportunity never arose.
The game was very simple and austere, and that’s why it was inexhaustible. By definition, it couldn’t be boring. And anyway, how could we have been bored? It was pure freedom. In the playing, the game revealed itself as part of life, and life was vast, elastic, endless. We knew that prior to any experience. We were austere, like our parents, the neighborhood, the town, and life in Pringles. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine just how simple that life was. Having lived it myself doesn’t help. I’m trying to imagine it, to give some form to that idea of simplicity, putting memories aside, avoiding them as much as possible.
Sometimes, in the plenitude that followed an especially satisfactory session of play, we did something that seemed to depart from simplicity, but in fact confirmed it. We played the same game as a joke, out of pure exuberance, as if we hadn’t understood, as if we were savages, or stupid.
“One.”
“Zero.”
“Minus a thousand.”
“Zero point zero nine nine nine.”
“Minus three.”
“A hundred and fifteen.”
“A million billion quadrillions.”
“Two.”
“Two.”
This didn’t last very long, because it was too dizzying, too horizontal. A minute of it gave us a totally different perspective on what we’d been doing for hours before, as if we’d jumped down off a horse, descended from the world of mental numbers to that of real numbers, to the earth where the numbers lived. If we had known what surrealism was, we would have cried: Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes everything! Then we went back to the normal game like someone going back to sleep, back to efficiency and representation.
All the same, a certain nostalgia crept in, a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. It didn’t happen at a particular moment, after a day or a month or a year. . I’m not writing a chronological history of this game, from invention and development to decadence and neglect. I couldn’t, because it didn’t happen like that. The successiveness of this narration is an unavoidable defect; I don’t see how I could avoid it while still giving an account of the game. The dissatisfaction had to do with the difference between numbers and words. We had made the very austere decision to limit ourselves to real, “classical” numbers. Positive or negative, but everyday numbers, of the kind that are used for counting things. And numbers are not words. Words are used to name numbers, but they’re not the same.
This, of course, had been a choice, a pact that we renewed each time we started playing, and we didn’t complain. The game made thought mobile and porous, loosened it like a kind of relaxing yoga, allowing us to see the kingdom of the sayable in all its amplitude while preventing us from entering it. Words were more than numbers; they were everything. Numbers were a little subset of the universe of words, a marginal, faraway planetary system where it was always night. We hid there, sheltered from the excesses of the unknown, and tended our garden.
From our hiding place we could see words as we’d never seen them before. We’d distanced ourselves from them so that we could see how beautiful, funny, and amazingly effective they were. Words were magical jewels with unlimited powers, and all we had to do, we felt, was reach out and take them. But that feeling was an effect of the distance, and if we crossed the gap, the game dissolved like a mirage. We knew that, and yet some strange perversion, or the lure of danger, sustained our crazy longing to try. .
We were testing the power of words every day. I never missed an opportunity: I’d see one coming, feel that I was grasping the mirage, taking control of its unerring death ray, and
I wouldn’t rest until I’d fired it. My favorite victim, needless to say, was Omar:
“Let’s play who can tell the biggest lie.”
Omar shrugged:
“I just saw Miguel go past on his bike.”
“No, not like that. . Let’s pretend we’re two fishermen and we’re lying about what we’ve caught. The one who says the biggest lie wins.”
I emphasized “biggest,” to suggest that it had something to do with the number game. Omar, who could be diabolically clever when he wanted, made it hard for me:
“I caught a whale.”
“Listen, Omar. Let’s make it simpler. The only thing you can say is the weight of the fish, its length in yards, or its age. And let’s set some upper limits: eight tons, eighty yards, and eight hundred years. No! Let’s make it really simple! Just the age. Let’s suppose fish go on growing until they die. So by saying the age you’re saying the length, the width, the weight, and all that. And let’s suppose they can live any number of years but the highest number we can say is eight hundred. You start.”