Birthday E-Book

César Aira

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 103

Beschreibung

'Suddenly it hits you: you're not twenty; you're not young any more . . . and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed.'Birthday begins with a fiftieth birthday. It comes and goes without fanfare, but just a few months later, an apparently banal comment that reveals a gap in the author's knowledge of the world prompts him to sit down in a café and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves memories together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author's and the reader's point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation by And Other Stories in 2019 Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published in Spanish by Mondadori in 2001 as Cumpleaños.

© César Aira 2001, published by arrangement with Literary Agency Michael Gaeb, Berlin.

English-language translation copyright © 2019 Chris Andrews

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

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ISBN: 978-1-911508-40-3 eBook ISBN: 978-1-911508-41-0

Proofreader: Alex Middleton; Typesetting and eBook creation: Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Edward Bettison.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This work was published within the framework of the Sur Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic. Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.

This book was also supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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Contents

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Recently I turned fifty, and in the lead-up to the big day I began to have great expectations, but not really because I was hoping to take stock of my life up to that point; I saw it more as a chance for renewal, a fresh start, a change of habits. In fact, I didn’t even consider taking stock, or weighing up the half-century gone by. My gaze was fixed on the future. I was thinking of the birthday exclusively as a point of departure, and although I hadn’t worked out anything in detail or made any concrete plans, I had very bright hopes, if not of starting over entirely, at least of using that milestone to shed some of my old defects, the worst of which is precisely procrastination, the way I keep breaking my promises to change. It wasn’t so preposterous. After all, it was entirely up to me. It was more reasonable than the hopes and fears pinned on the year 2000, because turning fifty is less arbitrary than a date in the almanac. In a reversal of the usual scenario, the hopes, however groundless, were working in my favour, because they could sustain a self-fulfilling prophecy. And everything suggested that they would, or so I felt.

And yet nothing happened. My birthday came and went. The tasks to be completed, the chores to be done and the force of routine – which is so powerful by the age of fifty – vied with each other to ensure that the day went by like any other. It was my fault, of course: if I wanted there to be a change, I should have made it happen myself, but instead I trusted to the magic of the event, I took it easy and went on being the same old me. What else could I expect, in practical terms, if I had no intention of getting divorced, or moving house, or starting a new job, or doing anything special? In the end, I took it philosophically and went on living, which is no mean feat.

The mistake, if there was one, lay in not realising that changes come from the most unexpected directions, which is what makes them genuine changes. It’s a fundamental law of reality. What changes is something else, not what you were expecting. Otherwise, it would be business as usual. It’s not really a failure of planning or foresight, or even a lack of imagination, because even imagination has its limits. Expectations of change develop around a particular subject, but change always changes the subject. I should have known that from my experience as a novelist. But I had to wait for events to bring it home to me.

A few months later, one beautiful autumn morning, I was walking along the street with Liliana. I looked up, breathing the cold, bracing air. The sky was clear, a luminous blue; up there, to my left, the moon, half-full, with that porous white colour it has in the daylight; to the right, hidden from us by the buildings, the sun, still low. I was feeling euphoric, not unusually (it’s my natural state): buoyant and optimistic. I was chatting away about something, and then, with the vague intention of cracking some kind of joke, I said:

‘It can’t be true that the phases of the moon are produced by the earth’s shadow when it comes between the moon and the sun, because the sun and the moon are both in the sky now, the earth isn’t between them at all, but the moon isn’t full. They’ve been fooling us! Hehehe. The phases of the moon must be caused by something else, and they’re telling us it’s the shadow of the earth! Hehe. It’s rubbish!’

My wife, who doesn’t always appreciate my sense of humour, looked up too, in puzzlement, and asked me:

‘But who said the phases of the moon were caused by the earth’s shadow? Where did you get that from?’

‘That’s what I was taught in Pringles,’ I said, lying.

‘It can’t be. No one could have come up with that sort of nonsense.’

‘But how does it work then?’

‘There’s no shadow. The sun illuminates the moon, but only half of it, the way it is with any light source illuminating a spherical body. Depending on the relative position of the earth, we see a portion of the illuminated half; it grows until we’re seeing it all, and that’s when there’s a full moon; then it shrinks down to nothing. Simple.’

‘Are you serious? So I was the only one getting it wrong all this time? Hehe!’

We left it there, in a comic haze, one of the many I generate in the course of a day. All you have to do is say it’s a ‘bad’ joke, and no one bothers to look for its meaning. Except that I didn’t forget this ‘joke’, and little by little the monstrosity of my ignorance dawned on me. I had indeed been getting it wrong, and it wasn’t as if, in this case, ‘it’ was something obscure that anyone might be excused for misunderstanding. On the contrary, ‘it’ was almost the model of the obvious and the visible. The fact that I considered myself an intellectual, an educated, curious, intelligent man, made the joke all the funnier. The moon is always suspended there in full view, lit up and conspicuous, each and every night, punctually running through the cycle of its phases twelve times a year. And the sun like a spotlight and the earth with its days and nights, the whole rotating system… Any eight-year old with a modicum of intelligence could have reached the correct conclusions. Or a savage, a primitive, the first man making a first attempt at thought.

Preposterous as it may seem, there is a simple explanation for my ignorance on this point of basic cosmology: distraction. A historical moment of distraction. At some point in my childhood, I must have come up with that explanation of the moon’s phases, perhaps in passing, without really thinking, using the narrow crescent of my brain that happened to be illuminated by my attention, and in all the years since then (almost fifty of them!) I had never given it another moment’s thought. It wasn’t a case of ‘I never thought about it’; I thought about it once, which is worse.

It’s ironic, because I was always being told that I was miles away, ‘on the moon’. If that had been literally true, I’d have been none the wiser, because the earth, seen from there, would have similar phases, and for the same reason. Although on the moon (and this was something I did think about), I wouldn’t have survived for more than half a minute, because of the lack of air. I wouldn’t have had the time or the peace of mind to invent crazy stories about the heavenly bodies. The fear of suffocation, which has haunted every minute of my life, would have given me an excuse for not thinking. Meanwhile, I was on the earth, breathing perfectly, but the excuse remained. All I managed to come up with in a whole half-century was a blank, a gap. The worst thing was knowing that my thought could have been full of gaps like that.

My only miserable consolation was to think that these moments of distraction were the price that I had paid for attending to other questions, that economising mental activity in one area had allowed me to concentrate more lucidly in others. As an excuse, it’s flimsy, but perhaps there’s a thread of truth in it. Flimsy because the blind spot is so outrageous; but the truth might lie precisely in the exorbitance of the price. Maybe I had ignored too much in order to give myself the latitude for invention that I needed to cover up my ignorance in other areas. Since I didn’t even know how to live, it would have been a scandalous waste of my modest capacities to devote them to understanding something as useless and decorative as the phases of the moon. The sole and ultimate aim of all my work has been to compensate for my incapacity to live, and the work has barely sufficed to keep me afloat. I have done a lot, but only just enough. Is it really so surprising that I’ve had to pay for my survival with scandalous gaps? To reach the age of fifty, a man with my abysmal defects would have to be a genius, and since I’m not, I’ve had to pretend, constructing a laborious and complicated simulation, which was bound to produce an unbalanced figure, with dramatic highs and lows in all the wrong places, that is, the silhouette of a monster.