The Literary Conference Read online

  The Literary Conference

  •

  César Aira

  Translated by Katherine Silver

  New Directions Publishing

  A New Directions Pearl

  Copyright © 2006 by César Aira

  Translation copyright © 2010 by Katherine Silver

  Originally published by Ediciones ERA, Argentina, as El congreso de literatura

  in 2006; published in conjunction with the literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine,

  radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

  First published as a Pearl (ndp1173) by New Directions in 2010

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aira, César, 1949 –

  [Congreso de literatura. English]

  The literary conference / César Aira ; translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published by Ediciones ERA, Argentina, as El congreso de literatura in 2006” — T.p. verso.

  “A New Directions Paperbook Original ndp1173” — T.p. verso.

  isbn-13: 978-0-8112-1878-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  isbn-10: 0-8112-1878-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Silver, Katherine. II. Title.

  pq7798.1.i7c66513 2010

  863'.64 — dc22

  2009045914

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

  Part I

  The Macuto Line

  ON A RECENT trip to Venezuela I had the opportunity to admire the famous “Hilo de Macuto” or “The Macuto Line,” one of the wonders of the New World — a legacy left by anonymous pirates, a tourist attraction, and an unsolved enigma. A strange monument to human ingenuity that remained a mystery for centuries and, in the process, became an integral part of a Nature that at those latitudes is as rich as all the innovations to which She gives rise. Macuto itself is one of several coastal towns spread out at the foot of Caracas and adjacent to Maiquetía, where the airport I landed in is situated. They put me up temporarily at Las Quince Letras, the modern hotel built on the beach in front of the bar and restaurant of the same name. My room faced the sea, the enormous yet intimate Caribbean Sea, blue and brilliant. The “Line” passed a hundred yards in front of the hotel; I caught a glimpse of it from my window, then went out to take a closer look.

  Throughout my childhood, I, like every child of the Americas, indulged in vain speculations about the Macuto Line, a living relic through which the fictional world of pirates became real and tangible. Encyclopedias — mine was A Childhood Treasury, which didn’t deserve its name except in those pages — contained diagrams and photographs, which I reproduced in my notebooks. And in my games I would untie the knot, reveal the secret . . . Much later, I watched documentaries about the Line on television; I bought books on the subject and came across it many times during my studies of Venezuelan and Caribbean literature, where it appears as a leitmotif. I also followed, along with everyone else (though without any special interest), newspaper articles about new theories, new attempts to solve the enigma . . . The fact that new ones were continually cropping up was a clear indication that the previous ones had failed.

  According to the age-old legend, the Line was devised to recover a treasure from the deep sea, a haul of immense value placed there by pirates. One of the pirates (none of the chronicles and archives used in the research identified him by name) must have been an artistic-scientific genius of the first order, a shipboard Leonardo, to have invented such a marvelous instrument that could both hide and recover the loot.

  The apparatus was ingeniously simple. It was, as the name states, a line, a single line, in reality, a rope made of natural fibers stretched about three yards above the surface of the water over a marine basin off the Macuto coast. One end of the rope disappeared into the basin, then reappeared when it passed through a naturally occurring stone sheave in a rock that rose above the surface of the water about two hundred yards from shore; from there it returned to shore, where it made a somersault of slipknots through an “obelisk” — also natural — then rose to the peaks of two mountains in the coastal range, whence it returned to the obelisk, thereby forming a triangle. The contraption had remained intact for centuries — without needing restoration or any specialized maintenance; on the contrary, always impervious to gross and even brutal mishandling by treasure hunters (everybody, that is), predators, the merely curious, and legions of tourists.

  I was just one more . . . The last, as we shall see. I was quite excited to find myself face to face with it. It doesn’t matter what you know about a famous object — being in its presence is altogether a different story. You must find that sensation of reality, peel back the veil of dreams — which is the substance of reality — and rise to the occasion of the moment, the Everest of the moment. Needless to say, I am not capable of such a feat, I, less than anybody. In any case, there it was . . . gorgeous in its invincible, tense, and lean fragility, capturing the ancient light of navigators and adventurers. I was also able to ascertain the truth of its reputation: it was never completely silent. On stormy nights the wind made it sing, and those who heard it during a hurricane became obsessed for the rest of their lives with its cosmic howls. Sea breezes of all kinds had strummed this lyre with a single chord: memory’s handmaiden, the wind. But even that afternoon, when the air was utterly still (if a bird had dropped a feather, it would have fallen to the ground in a straight line), its murmurings were thunderous. They were solemn and sharp microtones, deep within the silence.

  My presence there, in front of the monument, had enormous consequences: objective, historical consequences; not only for me but for the entire world. My discreet, unassuming, fleeting presence, almost like that of any other tourist . . . Because that afternoon I solved the enigma, activated the slumbering device, and recovered the treasure from the depth of the sea.

  It is not that I am a genius or exceptionally gifted, not by any means. Quite the contrary. What happened (I shall try to explain it) is that every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them and to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out. In this case, all others had failed because they had counted on the simple quantitative progression of intelligence
and ingenuity, when what was required was an unspecified quantity, but of the appropriate quality, of both. My own intelligence is quite minimal, a fact I have ascertained at great cost to myself. It has been just barely adequate to keep me afloat in the tempestuous waters of life. Yet, its quality is unique; not because I decided it would be, but rather because that is how it must be.

  This is and always has been the case in just this way with all people, at all times, everywhere. A single example taken from the world of culture (and what other world should we take it from?) might help clarify this point. An intellectual’s uniqueness can be established by examining their combined readings. How many people can there be in the world who have read these two books: The Philosophy of Life Experience by A. Bogdanov, and Faust by Estanislao del Campo? Let us put aside, for the moment, any reflections these books might have provoked, how they resonated or were assimilated, all of which would necessarily be personal and nontransferable. Let us instead turn to the raw fact of the two books themselves. The concurrence of both in one reader is improbable, insofar as they belong to two distinct cultural environments and neither belongs to the canon of universal classics. Even so, it is possible that one or two dozen intellectuals across a wide swathe of time and space might have taken in this twin nourishment. As soon as we add a third book, however, let us say La Poussière de soleil by Raymond Roussel, that number becomes drastically reduced. If it is not “one” (that is, I), it will come very close. Perhaps it is “two,” and I would have good reason to call the other “mon semblable, mon frère.” One more book, a fourth, and I could be absolutely certain of my solitude. But I have not read four books; chance and curiosity have placed thousands in my hands. And besides books, and without departing from the realm of culture, there are records, paintings, movies . . .

  All of that, as well as the texture of my days and nights since the day I was born, gave me a mental configuration different from all others. And it just so happened to be precisely the one required to solve the problem of the Macuto Line; to solve it with the greatest of ease,

  effortlessly, like adding two plus two. To solve it, I said, not explain it; by no means am I suggesting that the anonymous pirate who devised it was my intellectual twin. I have no twin, which is why I was able to come upon the key that unlocked the enigma, which hundreds of scholars and thousands of treasure hunters had sought in vain for four centuries — and in more recent years with access to a much broader range of resources, including deep-sea divers, sonar, computers, and teams of multidisciplinary experts. I was the only one; in a certain sense, I was the appointed one.

  Though, I must warn you, not unique in the literal sense. Anybody who’d had the same experiences as I’d had (all of them, that is, because it is impossible to determine a priori which are relevant) could also have done it. And they don’t even have to be literally the “same” experiences, because experiences can have equivalents.

  So, I do not feel much like boasting. All the credit goes to the happenstance that placed me, precisely me, in the right place — at Las Quince Letras Hotel — one November afternoon with several hours and nothing to do (I had missed my connecting flight and had to wait until the next day). On my way there I wasn’t thinking about the Macuto Line, I hadn’t even remembered its existence. I was surprised to find it, a few steps away from the hotel, like a souvenir from my childhood love for books about pirates.

  It just so happened, and in keeping with the rule of the law of explanations, another related enigma got solved, which was the discovery of how the rope (the “line,” in question) had withstood the elements intact for such a long time. Synthetic fibers could have, but there was nothing synthetic about the Macuto Line, as exhaustive laboratory analyses had shown, analyses conducted on miniscule strands extracted with diamond-pointed tweezers: the material consisted of nothing but pine and liana fibers around a hemp core.

  The solution to the main problem did not occur to me immediately. For two or three hours I was not even aware that my brain was working on it while I was taking a walk, going up to my room to write for a while, watching the sea from my window, and going out again, all in the tedium of waiting. During that interlude I had time to observe the antics of some children who were diving off some rocks into the sea some sixty feet from shore. This already constitutes part of the “short story” and, as a matter of fact, holds interest only for me. But out of such ineffable and microscopic pieces the puzzle is made. Because there is, in fact, no such thing as “in the meantime.” For example, I was thinking absentmindedly about the children’s game as a humble artifact construed from natural elements, one of which was the recognition of the kinetic pleasure of the plunge, the muscular contractions, the swimming-respiration . . . How did they avoid those rocky ridges scattered haphazardly among the waves? How did they manage to land only inches away from a rock that would have killed them with its rigid Medusa-like caress? Habit. They probably did the same thing every afternoon. Which gave the game the weight necessary to become a legend. Those children themselves were a habit of the Macuto coast, but a legend is also a habit. And that time of day, that precise hour, twilight in the tropics, which arrives so early and at the same time is so belated, so majestic in its harmonies, that hour was part of this habit . . .

  Suddenly, everything fell into place. I, who only understand anything through sheer exhaustion and resignation, suddenly understood everything. I thought I’d make a note for a short novel, but why not do it for once rather than write about it? I quickly went to the platform where the Line’s triangle had its vertex . . . I just barely touched the bundle of knots with the tips of my fingers, turning it over without attempting to untie anything . . . A humming could be heard for miles around, and the Line began to run over itself at a cosmic velocity. The mountain it was attached to seemed to shudder, surely an illusion created by the sliding of the cord, which soon spread to the section that sank into the sea. The onlookers who had been watching my actions and those who came to the windows of the nearby buildings were all looking out toward the high seas . . .

  And there, with a prodigious crack and a burst of foam, the treasure chest at the sunken end of the Line leapt so forcefully out of the sea that it rose about two hundred feet in the air, hung there for an instant, then shot down in a straight line, while the Line retracted, pulling back, until the treasure fell intact onto the stone platform, about three feet from where I was standing, waiting for it.

  I won’t go into the whole explanation here, because it would take many pages, and I have imposed upon myself a strict length limit for this text (of which this is only a prologue) out of respect for the reader’s time.

  What I would like to point out is that I did not limit myself to solving the enigma speculatively but also did so in practice. That is to say: after understanding what I had to do, I went and did it. And the object responded. The Line, a taut bow for centuries, finally shot its arrow, bringing to my feet the sunken treasure and instantaneously making me a wealthy man. Which was quite practical, because I have always been poor, lately more so than usual.

  I had just spent a year in financial despair and, to tell the truth, had been wondering how I was going to get out of a situation that was deteriorating by the day. My literary activities, cloaked in terms of unassailable artistic purity, never rendered me much material gain. The same held true for my scientific labors, in large part due to the secrecy with which I have carried them out and about which
I will speak more later. From an early age I have earned my living as a translator. With time I have perfected my professional skills and achieved a certain amount of prestige; during the last several years I enjoyed some stability though never abundance, which never bothered me as my lifestyle is quite austere. But now, the economic crisis has seriously affected the publishing business, which is paying for its previous years of euphoria. The euphoria led to oversupply, the bookstores were filled with locally produced books, and when the public needed to tighten its belt, the purchase of books was the first thing to go. Publishers, then, found themselves with huge inventories they couldn’t sell, their only remaining recourse being to cut production. They cut it so much that I spent the whole year unemployed, sorrowfully spending my savings and eyeing the future with increasing anxiety. One can, thus, see how opportune this incident was for me.

  Here is an additional cause for astonishment: to wonder how wealth from four hundred years ago could have retained some value, and how this value could be so enormous. Above all taking into account the speed of currency devaluations in our countries, the changes in the denomination of our currencies, and economic policies of all kinds. But I’m not going to go into that subject. On the other hand, wealth always has something inexplicable about it, more so than poverty. As of that moment, I was wealthy, and that’s all there is to it. If I hadn’t had to leave the next day for Mérida to fulfill a commitment I couldn’t (and didn’t wish to) break, I would have gone to Paris or New York to show off my newly acquired opulence.

  So it was that the next morning, with my pockets full and preceded by a clamor of fame that filled all the newspapers of the world, I boarded an airplane that carried me to the beautiful Andean city where the literary conference, the subject of this story, was being held.