Birthday Read online

  She is seventeen years old and comes from Suárez; she’s only in Pringles because she got a job here. On her days off she goes back to Suárez, where her parents and brothers live. She’s not studying. She’s very blonde, very white, tall and extremely slim, not pretty but fresh and eager. She must belong to one of the numerous communities of so-called “Russians” in Suárez. They call themselves “Germans,” and curiously they’re both, as I understand: “Volga Germans,” that is, Germans who immigrated to Russia during the time of Catherine the Great and Potemkin, or something like that; I ought to know, because I’m descended from them too.

  She writes. She’s always writing, she couldn’t live without it. She can put in writing what she couldn’t say out loud. One time she got the second prize in an essay competition, with a “Letter to Jesus.” I asked her if the theme was set or if she had chosen it herself. It took her a very long time to understand what I was asking. It was her choice. She felt that people, especially the young, were neglecting Jesus. They only remember Jesus when they need him, when things go wrong, and the rest of the time they forget him. There was nothing I could say to that.

  For her, writing is the only way to express and understand what is happening to her. At this point I asked her how old she was. “A lot has happened in my life,” she said. The main thing is that now she has overcome the fear of death, which obsessed her for many years. Now she has realized that death is not the end, that after this life, there is another, like this one or better, because there’s no pain. She learned this from the death of her older brother, who was the most important person in her life. Her brother was a father to her, the father she didn’t have because her real father walked out when she was little and never came back. Her brother was always there for her, whenever she needed him, helping her even before she had asked him for his help. And even though he’s dead now, he’s still there for her. Sometimes she finds herself talking to him, sometimes she can sense that someone is there beside her, and it’s her brother. For her, this supernatural accompaniment is linked to the experience of writing. And it’s the source of her conviction that there is another life: her brother is still alive in some way, free of the pain that was all he knew in this life. I wasn’t saying much, just nodding and asking a question every now and then, but later on it occurred to me that she was contradicting herself, because what the accompaniment showed was that her brother hadn’t gone off to live another life (like her father), but had stayed in this one, doing what he did for her when he was alive, except that he had been relieved of his wretched material form.

  After these confidences, delivered so naturally, as if her whole life was made of nothing else, as if speaking and confiding were the same, she returned without missing a beat to her habit: she’s always writing, especially going home on the bus. The last time, for example, just as she was about to arrive, something occurred to her, and she had to scribble it down in a hurry before the bus came to a stop, because she was afraid she might forget it otherwise. There I was able to add my two cents’ worth: the same thing happens to me; I’m always noting down my ideas because if I don’t, I forget them; they disappear completely, especially the ideas in my mind at the moment of waking, which are the most fugitive because there’s no way to reconstruct the chain of thoughts that led to them. I’ve kicked myself so many times for not having noted them down! Later I remember having had an excellent idea, but I can’t remember what it was and I agonize over that empty, definitively empty promise. She stood there in silence, with a blank look, as if to say, “How strange.” We were talking about two different things.

  Her hands were red, no doubt from all the washing of glasses and cups that she has to do at the café. Pretty teeth. Underneath her childlike confidence, there was a kind of anxiety that was hard to pin down. I made some remark about writing as a secret, for something to say more than anything else, but she didn’t react: it clearly wasn’t a secret for her. I had been thinking of myself at her age: secrecy and writing were almost synonymous. Maybe she didn’t have any secrets. Or just the two that she had already told me: the fear of death, which she had overcome, and her habit of noting down ideas. I pictured her in the context of her community: the harsh climate, the devout faith, the ignorance, the poverty, the tradition of endogamy that had made her so blonde and confident, and possibly killed her brother, who may have been ill from birth and had survived and suffered for twenty years. Her brother was Jesus, dead and risen, and she was his evangelist.

  There was something I really wanted to ask her, but I was too embarrassed: what kind of notebook did she use for noting down her ideas on the fly, for example in the bus? It’s a question I would like to ask all writers, in the hope that statistics might help me approach my dream of a notebook adapted to all circumstances.

  There was another important point that we didn’t go into: the ideas that are there in your mind when you wake up. That must have been what she was noting down in the bus. She would have fallen asleep during the trip, the way young people do when they travel. Otherwise she wouldn’t have told me specifically that it happened as the bus was coming into her town. Habit’s internal clock had woken her on arrival, and there it was, the idea that she wanted to record. That’s when ideas come to me too, although of course at my age I sleep much less. But this is more than balanced by all the sleeping I’ve done in fifty years. I attach a special importance to those waking ideas, not because they rise from some oneiric or unconscious depth (I don’t believe in such things), but because of the position they occupy, on the far side of an absence. You have left the world, for a long or short span of time . . . and then you return. On returning, you find the world where you left it but slightly altered by the action of time (even if you were only gone for a minute).

  Or a tenth of a second, the blink of an eye. Things move very quickly in these absences. Even if there were notebooks and pens that made it possible to keep up with thought, the leap between the departure and the return would still elude them.

  I am not an adept of Jesus, but I can imagine more or less how his historical nature works on believers. He gave our civilization the Past. Death and resurrection made him the god of the leap, the model for the functioning of gaps in time. A longstanding fear of death can prepare the way for his teaching.

  The girl at the Avenida came to the conclusion that there is no reason to fear death. She learned this from the habit of writing (the secret that is not a secret) and the ideas that come out of the blue and have to be noted down. Personally, I think there’s something much more frightening than individual death, and that’s the death of everyone, the death of the world that we know and are, in other words, the End of the World. Paradoxically, we don’t have to wait until we die as individuals to experience that great death, because the End of the World is with us every day; it is occurring imperceptibly in every little thing that happens, in the randomness of acts and thoughts.

  III

  My main fault, and the root of all the others, is the lack of a stable and predictable rhythm in which acts and ideas would find their places one after another. If I had such a rhythm, it wouldn’t matter if there were gaps here and there, because they would fill themselves. It would even be gratifying to have specific gaps in my knowledge or experience: I would have the satisfaction of seeing them closed as a matter of course by the natural progression of my existence (it would make me feel that life, with all its lessons, is worth living).

  My style is irregular: scatterbrained, spasmodic, jokey — necessarily jokey because I have to justify the unjustifiable by saying that I didn’t mean it seriously. But if necessity intervenes, it’s no joke. I wasn’t really joking when I made that stupid quip about the moon. And of course it didn’t fool anyone. The gaps go on being gaps forever, unless some wildly improbable circumstance happens to correct me. If they were only gaps in knowledge, I wouldn’t be so worried; but there are gaps in experience too, and again they can only be plugged by seren
dipity. The numbers in this game of chance are so enormous that just thinking about them makes me dizzy. What can I hope for, realistically, if all the objective conditions required for such an event line up once in a million years?

  This lack of a regular rhythm explains why I have to note down each idea that occurs to me. My ideas are as slight and fleeting as seconds in the totality of time and so incoherent that I lose them if I don’t make a note, because there’s no connecting thread that I could follow back through all my distractions to recover them.

  For the same reason, my mind is in continuous movement, flittering restlessly. Making a note of everything is beyond the bounds of human possibility. One thing I have idly fantasized about is inventing a notepad capable of capturing the hyperactivity of the brain. That must be the source of my fetishistic attachment to stationery and pens. I really should use some kind of shorthand, but I manage more or less with normal writing. In the end, all these daydreams about being the designer of one’s own peculiarities are futile because they are just metaphors for what ends up happening anyway: I became a writer and my little novels fulfil the roles of magic notepad and shorthand.

  But every writer would like to be a different sort of writer. That is what makes for the greatness and variety of literature. I would like to have style; if I did, all my experiences would be connected; my acts and thoughts would follow one another for a reason, not just by chance or on a whim. If there had been stable reasons underlying my behavior, I would have been spared the kind of surprise the moon kept in store for me. I wouldn’t have needed to skip the basics; I would have covered them methodically, in the proper sequence, and now I wouldn’t be regretting the time I wasted in my youth. Leaps are unnatural. Time doesn’t leap. To employ an imperfect but eloquent simile, my intellectual itinerary should have been like the prose of those good eighteenth-century writers I have always tried to take as my models. Each sentence contains an implicit question, to which the next sentence responds while posing a new question . . . Which means that everything is connected, and it’s almost impossible for the reader to get lost, because even scant attention is stimulated and guided by a text put together in that way.

  Like so many before me, I made a virtue of necessity, and turned my lack of style into a style. The concept of style, like the concept of time, is a continuum that takes in everything, including its own negations. This is how I came to be a well-known and celebrated writer. I couldn’t have done it any other way; if I had tried to be like the others, there would have been too much competition, and almost all of them would have been better at it than me. But literature is wonderfully hospitable, even beyond its own bounds, and that’s why I’m so grateful to it. That’s why I have clung to literature in such a fanatical and desperate way. Success never mattered to me . . . That’s what everyone says, and usually it’s not true. Success did actually matter quite a lot to me, but only to provide a justification in the eyes of society and my family, and allow me to go on writing. Otherwise I would have had to do it in secret, which would have been depressing.

  I found life outside literature extremely difficult, so I left hardly anything outside. And yet, there’s a sense in which everything is outside, from the moment I wake up till I go to bed, because I have to live like everyone else. The inside and the outside (of literature) are locked in a permanent struggle for supremacy; but rather than two armies clashing, they’re like fluctuating forces, transforming and consuming each other. The disadvantages and problems and anxieties and paralysis that enter into literature, transformed into happiness machines, leave innumerable offspring behind (outside), which demand the same treatment . . . As the years go by, stranger and more elaborate inventions are required; luckily it keeps getting easier, and History helps me out here too because it gives the impression that I’m developing, deepening my inner world . . . I’ve often wondered how normal people occupy their time, because the work of staying alive takes up all the time I have, down to the last minute, and it’s barely enough.

  From my position as a Writer, I could regard the girl at the Avenida and her amateur’s aspirations with a certain paternalistic superiority. That would be normal; it’s what she would expect. But I feel that the time has come to see this question in a different light. Some time ago I began to feel that the young really can have superior aptitudes, in very rare, exceptional cases, one in a thousand, say . . . But once you have granted the reality of a single case, it can be multiplied by any number you like. For some reason, I had never believed, until recently, in the real existence of prodigies; no doubt it was a defensive strategy, or a way of keeping my skepticism intact, in a single, solid block. I recognized them as a kind of poetic or didactic fiction; I thought that, like alien sightings, they could be explained by natural causes. But then, because of their very inconceivability, I began to accept them. This might be an effect of age: you start to see young people from the outside, as an aesthetic phenomenon, and they become strange, acquiring an objective weight and an opacity that could hide anything.

  Since that grand fiasco with the moon, my embryonic belief has grown. I can extend it from public to private prodigies, and from there to humanity in general. For some reason, I was always surrounded, in my youth, by pedants, know-it-alls and loudmouths, who were always ready to set me straight. I responded with a hostile silence, which allowed me to preserve my mental integrity but also obliged me not to believe a word of what I heard. What if one of those people had taken it into his head to explain the phases of the moon to me? I would have thought him impolite; and this might begin to explain why I attach so much importance to good manners. In any case, those people must have known the real explanation. Who doesn’t? And having that knowledge means taking a dizzying plunge into the past, casting your mind back many years to a youth lived in reality, in all its beauty: the youth of the world and the individual. Such things are learned at the appointed time, or never learned at all.

  These last two days I have come to the Avenida to write, and the blonde girl hasn’t been here. I have to call her the blonde girl because I don’t know her name; I meant to ask her. When you have an inner life as busy as mine, it’s awkward not to know the names of the characters who populate it; you have to make do with periphrases and nicknames, which seems impolite. Even the most casual relationships should begin like Moby Dick. I could ask the others, but I’d rather not. Today the waitress is another blonde girl, who (thankfully) is showing no interest in what I’m doing and seems more conventional. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first girl had found another job, or moved, or got married; perhaps the day we talked was her last day in Pringles, and that detail (which she didn’t disclose) was the key to everything she said. People have a way of disappearing suddenly from my life: I’m used to it. Life is change and movement. I stay still, doing the same thing every day, while everyone else is rushing around at a phenomenal speed.

  The moon also participates in this logic of prodigious gifts. Except for the lack of intention or planning, its play with forms has all the subtle and ingenious precision of a bright young thing with no time to waste. Who will invent the moon’s “magic notepad”? All of reality is like this.

  IV

  I have to say that the weather right now in Pringles is horribly cold. Polar winds are blowing; the sun is a livid spot among the clouds; the roofs that I can see from my mother’s apartment on the fifth floor of this uncommonly tall building are a uniform icy grey. The streets are empty all day, emptier than usual; and at night it’s utterly desolate. There’s something inhuman about this climate; it makes me think of vast interstellar spaces. The only things traversing the spaces outside are cars, driving slowly over the blue paving stones, whose gentle irregularity pummels their tires, making a distinctive, “Pringlish,” murmuring sound that some people claim they could recognize among all the similar sounds produced by the cities of the world. It seems that even the cars are staying home unless they absolutely have to go out: they’re fo
llowing their usual routes, turning where they always turn, braking and accelerating in the same places. They have their own memory. They pass, and the street is empty again, not an atom moving.

  Except for my daily stint of writing in the cafe, I’m spending the days in my room, lying on the bed and reading. I read one book after another, two a day if they’re not too long, and if they’re really bad (though none of them are), I speed up in the final chapters, skipping pages: I never give up before the end — a superstition that I really ought to shed. I get my books from the Municipal Library, which is just nearby, less than a hundred yards away. I go there first thing in the morning, spend a good while rummaging around, then choose something at random, without any plan or purpose, allowing myself to be guided by whims or momentary desires. Here in Pringles, with this inexhaustible library at my disposal, I read books that I would never have chosen otherwise, books that don’t fit into any of the numerous reading projects that I’m constantly undertaking.

  Yesterday, I read a short novel by Wells, Una historia de los tiempos por venir, literally A History of the Times to Come, which is a beautiful title, although I don’t know what it was originally in English; the title page doesn’t say, nor does it give the translator’s name, or the date of publication, but I’m guessing it’s from before 1900, one of the author’s early works. (I know there’s a book from the 1930s called The Shape of Things to Come, but I think that’s a different one). It was one of the little volumes in the Biblioteca de La Nación series and it included “The Plattner Story” and some others. I borrowed the book for that story in particular (which turned out to be pretty slight), because I thought I could remember Borges mentioning it somewhere. I read the little novel about “the times to come” with pleasure, although it’s not much good. As I was reading, I realized that what was really stimulating my interest (and this, I admit, is rather puerile) was finding the errors that the author had made in imagining what the world would be like in two hundred years’ time. We’re halfway there, and it’s already obvious that he got it all wrong. Half the time, he stopped short, failing to imagine, for example, that technology would advance beyond the phonograph and the light bulb, and half the time he miscalculated the directions that progress would take. Wells is not the only one: all those who came after him were just as mistaken, if not more; and there’s something peculiarly unfair about gloating over these errors, because the inescapable conclusion is that if we tried to do the same thing, we’d get it wrong too. The times to come are very slippery, very treacherous. But that extrapolation is just what makes the book interesting to read. Even after comprehending and overcoming the feeling of unjustified superiority that we get from noting the author’s errors, we tend to think that we would not be so spectacularly wrong: after all, we can learn from the errors that Wells and all the others made. But no. The shot would still go wide of the mark; the mistakes would be even cruder. No real learning is possible in this area, because learning is done over time, but here time is the object. The title itself says it all, in a way: it’s a “history” of the times to come, that is, of the future as realized and converted into materials for a narrative. Learning from the errors of others wouldn’t work, because the will to learn would convert them into your own.