It’s tricky. In the middle of the explanation I have to find a pretext to slip away, put on my dinner suit, comb my hair, and attend to the senior officials of the occupying forces, who need my advice on questions of the utmost urgency: the internal strife within their high command is threatening to explode this very night, although it’s actually a coup planned by the command itself (they’re offering me the chairmanship of the Central Bank). The shootings and slaughter in their ranks will be hidden from the public.
In an intermediate room (all this is happening very quickly) I become “the writer” César Aira again, accompanying Liliana. . And then back into the tuxedo. . It’s all entrances and exits, vaudeville style, further complicated by another mission that I’ve taken on: to inform the Amnesty lawyer about the sham coup, and transmit a plan that I’ve hatched, with instructions for the resistance so that they can take advantage of this internal turmoil and mobilize the people just when the occupying forces are virtually leaderless. It has to be tonight. . Speed and secrecy are crucial to the palace coup: they reckon it will all be over in a couple of hours (they’re using the widely reported visit of the ambassadors of Atlantis as a cover and this reception as a way of gathering all the conspirators and their victims without awakening suspicion). It would never occur to them that the resistance might be in the know and poised to strike like lightning. . And strike it will! At least if I can talk to this so-called lawyer, who is, I know, in contact with the Committee of the Resistance. . I made sure he was kept busy during my previous maneuvers, so that he wouldn’t be surprised by the unexpected appearance of “César Aira.” Now, playing my other role, with my tuxedo and slicked-back hair, I take him aside. . and it has to be “really” aside. I’m well aware, more keenly aware than anyone, that “walls have ears,” especially here, but I also know that there are many little salons and offices where I can take him to make my disclosure. . I supervised the installation of the microphones myself; I know where they are and how to place myself in a “cone of silence”. . And yet I’m suddenly seized by a suspicion that is quite irrational, from the point of view of my current identity as a technocrat: I have the feeling that we are being listened to. . as if the fourth wall were suddenly missing, and there were people sitting in the dark, intently following everything I say. It’s just the kind of fantasy that would have occurred to the writer I was, who is returning now. I find it hard to believe, but I dare not disregard the possibility altogether: there is too much at stake. So I say to the lawyer: “No, wait a moment, we can’t talk here, come into the office next door. .” But when we’re there, it’s the same thing, and if we move again, the suspicion comes along with us. These useless sets are costing a fortune, and the cost could only be justified by record-breaking audiences, but this gives rise to a vicious circle, because the more spectators there are, the stronger my suspicion that I’m being spied on, and the more imperious my need to move in search of an elusive privacy. . Also, the minutes are passing, and the action’s going nowhere. . It’s a disaster, the play is collapsing. I don’t know how to solve the problem: deep down I know it’s too late for solutions now. My mistake was to forget, in the heat of the action, that this is a play. . Or rather, not to “forget” but “never to have known,” because for me, as a character, all this is reality. I should make it clear that this scene, aborted by my infinite delays and relocations, was fundamental, because up till now the spectators (whether hypothetical or real — I can’t tell anymore) had no way of knowing why one actor was playing two such different roles, and the conversation with the lawyer was supposed to be a major revelation that would function as an overall explanation of the plot.
The whole thing is falling apart. . Which is no great loss, because the play is absurd, farfetched, based on facile devices. Maybe it was a project without merit from the start, as well as being flawed in its execution. In my previous life I used to think of myself as a good writer, but neither success nor personal satisfaction could really count as proof. The isolated admirers who kept popping up didn’t prove anything; they could have been as mistaken as I was. I used to think death would provide an answer; I thought it would cut the Gordian knot, but since my disappearance twenty years ago, nothing has changed: a few readers, always academics or students, writing theses on my work, and that’s it. I never had a real public. A public would have made me rich, and then I could have forgotten about literature. Was I a misunderstood genius or some barely half-talented writer lost in the ambiguous meanders of the avant-garde? Impossible to say. The suspicion that gags and paralyzes me in the theater, with its layering of real and virtual spaces, also suspends the question of my life or death as a writer.
JULY 3, 1995
The Two Men
I WAS THE ONLY PERSON WHO visited the house where the two men lived in seclusion; I used to wonder if anyone else knew of their existence. Once, in the early days, I resorted to a trick I’d learned as a kid, playing at spies: I stuck a hair to the front door and the frame, and the next day it was still there, unbroken. I think I did it again, to make sure, but later, as the years went by, those suspicions came to seem absurd. By then I was sure that the secret was safe, not because anyone was trying to protect it, but because of indifference, or incredulity, or the desertion of the surrounding area. I never saw any neighbors; it was a street of run-down little houses that looked as if they must have been inhabited by old people, but if that was the case, those people can’t have gone on living through all the years of my visits. Maybe the houses were empty.
It seemed that the men had always been living there, just the two of them, all on their own. If they hadn’t been born in the house (which seemed unlikely), they must have grown up there, behind closed doors, never going out, so as not to reveal their deformities. Merciful guardians had shielded them from the gazes of the world, so that they wouldn’t be treated like monsters. They weren’t monsters. Except for their hands and feet they were just like other men, and even well proportioned: athletic and strong, with something savage about them, something of the animal perfection that we like to attribute to savages; but this might have been a result of their circumstances. I estimated their age at somewhere between thirty and forty: the prime of life. Their features, gestures, and reactions were vaguely similar, but this too may have been an illusion created by the very special circumstances that had brought them together. I never knew if they were related; at first it seemed almost self-evident that they were brothers, but the simplest reasoning obliged me to abandon that idea, which persisted nevertheless, the term “brothers” taking on a broader or more figurative meaning. The more likely scenario was that they were unrelated, and had been brought together by their corresponding deformities, which were so strange that they must have been unique to that pair.
One of them had giant feet, the other, giant hands. The proportions were more or less the same in both cases. The feet of “the one with the feet” and the hands of “the one with the hands” were as big as the rest of their bodies, or even slightly bigger. The hands of the one with giant feet were, like the rest of him, normal in size. The “one with the hands” had normal feet. The oversize extremities were truly amazing: huge masses of flesh, bone, muscle, and nails, almost always resting on the floor. They didn’t quite have the standard form: as well as being gigantic, they were swollen, and somewhat misshapen; perhaps the forms of feet and hands are gradually determined by use, and these were never used, or hardly ever.