How I Became A Nun (7 page)

All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him. Although I thought I loved him before,
when he held me in his arms or led me by the hand, now I knew that love was more, much
more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover
what love really was.

It was a mystical experience, and it lasted many hours. The experience of intimate
contact with humanity as a whole, as only a guardian angel can know it. Not even the
fact that I didn’t have wings could shake my conviction. On the contrary: wings
would have allowed me to get away, up through that square of sky above me.

It was, as I said, a prolonged episode. It lasted all evening and all night. They found
me at ten o’clock the next morning. I fantasized about the search provoked by my
disappearance, conducted in my absence (knowing how it would end). I could even hear
voices calling me; I could hear them coming through the loudspeakers:
“César Aira … a boy by the name of César Aira.” But
this was not part of the fantasy, the mental reconstruction. I was meant to respond to
those voices. And I wanted to, I wanted to say, for example, “Here I am. Help! I
don’t know how to get down.” But I couldn’t. Powerless to act, I could
only anticipate future events. I imagined a scene in which I was explaining to the
governor of the prison what had really happened: “… it was my dad. He
grabbed me and hid me somewhere … he was going to use me as a hostage in the
breakout he’s planning with his accomplices … “All this was
forgivable, even Dad could have forgiven me, considering my innocence, my character, my
fears … All the same, to ease my conscience, I tried to improve the story:
“But Dad was forced to do it, by the King of the Criminals; he would never have
chosen to kidnap his own daughter …” And then, worried that the governor
would get the wrong idea, I added a clarification: “But my Dad isn’t the
King ….” I had embarked on the complex task of lying. The experienced liar
knows that the secret of success is to pretend convincingly not to know certain things.
For example the consequences of what one is saying, so that others will seem to discover
them first. “Not that Dad ever mentioned the King … it was the others, they
were talking about him, afraid, in awe … They were calling Dad your Jamesty
… I don’t know why, because my dad’s called Tomás
…” The governor was bound to fall for my ploy. He would think: It’s
too complicated not to be true. That’s what they always think; it’s the
golden rule of fiction. He would believe me completely. Not Dad. Dad knew my tricks; he
was
my tricks. He would see through them, but he would forgive me, even if
it meant another ten years in jail … These were not exactly the reflections of an
angel. The sound of the loudspeaker (it was already night, the stars were shining in the
sky) swept through the jail, calling me: “Come out of your hiding place,
César, your mother is waiting to take you home …” Women’s
voices, the social workers … Mom’s voice too … I even thought I
heard Dad’s voice—my heart skipped a beat—that beloved voice, which I
hadn’t heard for so many months, and then I really did wish I had wings to fly
away … But I couldn’t. This was always happening, so often that it
literally was the story of my life: hearing a voice, understanding the orders it was
giving me, wanting to obey, and not being able to … Because reality, the only
sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter
it …

In this case, and maybe in all the others too, I had the marvelous consolation of knowing
that I was an angel. This knowledge transformed the situation, turning it into a dream,
but a real dream. It was a transformation of reality. The cruel delirium I had suffered
as a result of the fever was a transformation too, but the opposite kind. In the real
dream, reality took the form of happiness or paradise. The transformation could go
either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in
turn, becoming the angel, or reality.

WINTER CAME, AND MOM began to take in ironing. We spent the interminable
evenings inside, listening to the radio, Mom bending over the steaming cloth, me staring
at my exercise book, and both of us miles away, our souls meandering in the strangest
places. We had adopted an invariable routine. In the morning I went with her to the
stores, we had lunch early, she took me to school, came to pick me up at five, and then
we stayed in for the rest of the evening. Lured by the radio, we lost ourselves in a
labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step.

Everything in this story I am telling is guaranteed by my perfect memory. My memory has
stored away each passing instant. And the eternal instants too, the ones that
didn’t pass, enclosing the others in their golden capsules. And the instants that
were repeated, which of course were the majority.

But my memory merges with the radio. Or rather: I am the radio. Thanks to the faultless
perfection of my memory, I am the radio of that winter. Not the receiver, the device,
but what came out of it, the broadcast, the continuity, what was being transmitted, even
when we switched it off, even when I was asleep or at school. My memory contains it all,
but the radio is a memory that contains itself and I am the radio.

Life without the radio was inconceivable for me. What happens, if you decide to define
life as radio (which, as an intellectual exercise, is not entirely without merit), is
that it automatically produces a sustaining plenitude. It was important for Mom as well,
it was company … Remember that the disaster had befallen us immediately after our
move to Rosario, where we had neither relatives nor friends. And the circumstances were
not ideal for making new friends, so Mom was all alone in the world … She had her
daughter, of course, but even though I was everything to her, that wasn’t much.
She was a sociable woman who loved to chat … So she got to know people in the
end, without having to make a particular effort: storekeepers, neighbors, people she did
ironing for. They were all keen to hear the story of her recent misfortune, which she
told over and over … She repeated herself a bit, but that was only natural.
Society was destined to absorb her life again; that winter was a mere interlude …
The radio fulfilled a function. In her case it was instrumental: it gathered her
scattered parts, it reassembled her identity as woman and housewife … By contrast
I achieved a complete identification with the voices in the ether … I embodied
them.

Those evenings, those nights in fact, for it grew dark very early, especially in our
room, had an atmosphere of shelter and refuge, which was intensely enjoyable, especially
for me, I’m not sure why. They were a kind of paradise, which, like all cut-price
paradises, had an infernal side. All the ironing Mom had taken in meant that she
couldn’t go out, but she didn’t mind; she was happy in that seeming
paradise, contenting herself with appearances, as usual. Her return to society would
have to wait. I fastened onto the illusion like a vampire: I lived on the blood of a
fantasy paradise.

In this kind of situation, repetition dominates. Each new day is the same as all the
others. The radio broadcast was different every day. And yet it was the same. The
programs we followed repeated themselves … We wouldn’t have been able to
follow them if they hadn’t; we would have lost track. And in the breaks the
announcers always read the same advertisements, which I had learned by heart. No
surprise there, since memory was, and still is, my forte. I repeated them aloud as they
were spoken, one after another. The same with the introductions to the programs and the
accompanying music. I shut up when the programs themselves began.

We followed three soap operas. One was about the life of Jesus Christ, or rather the
childhood of the God made flesh; it was aimed at children and sponsored by a brand of
malt drink, which I had never tasted in spite of the identically repeated panegyrics
(with me doubling the speaker’s words) celebrating its nutritional and
growth-promoting virtues. Jesus and his pals were a likeable gang; there was a black
boy, a fat boy, a stammerer and a little giant. The Messiah was the gang leader, and in
each episode he performed a mini-miracle, as if he was in training for later life. He
wasn’t infallible yet and used to get into all sorts of trouble in his efforts to
help the poor and the wayward of Nazareth; but things always worked out and, at the end,
the deep, resonant voice of God the Father pronounced the moral, if there was one, or
some words of wise advice. Those boys became my best friends. I loved their adventures
and pranks so much that my imagination worked at top speed, coming up with variations
and alternative outcomes; but in the end I always found the scriptwriters’
solutions more satisfying. For me it was a kind of reality. A reality that
couldn’t be seen, only heard, that existed as voices and sounds. It was up to me
to provide the images. But within this reality there came a moment—my
favorite—when the Father spoke, and at that point everyone, not just me, had to
provide an image. God was the radio within the radio.

The second soap opera was historical too, but secular and Argentinean. Entitled
Tell
me, Grandma,
it was invariably introduced by a sort of prologue, in which the
venerable Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson was questioned by her grandchildren, each
time about a different event in national history to which she had been an eye witness.
One day it would be the first English invasion, another day the second, or some episode
during one or the other, or the May revolution, a party during the Viceroyalty or the
tyranny of Rosas, an incident in the life of Belgrano or San Martín … I
loved the way time was haphazard, the lottery of the years. I knew nothing about
history, of course, but the preliminary dialogues and the old lady’s adorably
hesitant voice made me imagine it as a broad expanse of time, a spread from which to
choose … And Grandma’s memory seemed to be tenuous, hanging from a thread
about to snap … but once she got going, her shaky voice faded, making way for the
actors of the past … This substitution was my favorite part: the voice hesitating
among memories and the mist dissolving to reveal the ultra-real clarity of the scene as
it had happened …

Tell me, Grandma
was not really aimed at children or at adults, and yet it was
meant for both. It bridged the gap, reminding adults of what they had learned at school
and acquainting children with things they would remember when they learned about them.
Doña Mariquita and her grandchildren were as one: she was the eternal little girl
… Her failing, aged memory was in fact prodigious: scenes remote in time came to
life not as the past usually does, in the form of mute images, but images endowed with
sound, every inflection intact, down to the faintest sigh or the sound of chair legs
scraping on a sitting-room floor as a viceregal official dead seventy years before stood
up suddenly to greet a lady who had lain in her grave for more than half as long, and
with whom he was, naturally, in love.

The third soap opera, which started at eight (they were all half an hour long) was
definitely for adults. It was about love and featured all the stars of the day. In a
sense, this serial connected with reality itself, while the others skirted around it.
One proof of this—I saw it as a proof in any case—was the complication of
the story. The reality that I knew, my reality, wasn’t complicated. On the
contrary, it was simplicity itself. It was too simple. I can’t summarize the Lux
serial as I did with the other two. It didn’t have an underlying mechanism; it was
pure, free-floating complication. There was a given that guaranteed its perpetual
complication: everyone was in love. There were no secondary characters playing
supporting roles. Love was the theme of the serial and everyone was in love. They were
like molecules with love valencies reaching out into space, into the sonorous ether, and
every one of those little yearning arms found a hold. The tangle was so dense, it
created a new simplicity: the simplicity of compactness. Space was no longer empty,
porous and intangible; it had become a solid rock of love. By contrast, my life was so
simple it hardly existed. Deprived as I was, the message I seemed to be receiving from
the “radio drama of the stars” was that growing up was a preparation for
love, and that only the multitudinous night sky could make a totality, or at least
something, out of nothing.

As well as the soap operas, we listened to all sorts of programs: news, quizzes, comedy
and, of course, music. Nicola Paone held me spellbound. But I made no distinctions:
every piece of music was my favorite, at least while I was listening to it. I even liked
tangos, which children usually find boring. The wonderful thing about music for me was
the force with which it took control of the present and banished everything else. No
matter what melody I was listening to, it seemed the most beautiful in the world, the
best, the only one. It was the instant raised to its highest power. The fascination of
the present, a kind of hypnotism (yet another!). Again and again I put it to the test: I
tried to think of other pieces of music, other rhythms, I tried to compare and remember,
but I couldn’t; I was flooded by the musical present, captive in a golden
jail.

Speaking of music, one day, on Radio Belgrano, in between programs, a singer performed
for the first and last time, while Mom and I listened with the utmost attention and not
a little perplexity. On this occasion, I think, Mom’s attention was equal to mine.
No one has ever sung less tunefully than that woman, not even for a joke. No one else
with such a bad sense of pitch would have made it to the end of a measure; this woman
sang five whole songs, boleros or romantic ballads, to the accompaniment of a piano.
Maybe it
was
a joke, I don’t know. But it all seemed very serious; the
presenter introduced her in a formal manner, and read out the tide of each successive
song in a lugubrious voice. It was mysterious. Afterwards, they went on with the normal
programs, without any kind of comment. Maybe she was a relative of the radio
station’s owner; maybe she paid for the airtime to treat herself, or to keep a
promise. Who knows? Most people would be ashamed to sing like that on their own, under
the shower. And she sang on the radio. Maybe she was deaf or otherwise handicapped, and
it was a great achievement (but they had neglected to explain this to the listeners).
Maybe she could sing well, but she got nervous, though it’s hard to believe: it
was too bad for that. She couldn’t have sung worse if she’d tried. Every
note was out of tune, not only the hard ones. It was almost atonal … It’s
inexplicable. It is
the
inexplicable. The mass media provide an ultimate refuge
for the truly inexplicable.