The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) by César Aira Page A

know if this made it more or less of a coincidence.
    And, though I didn’t say so, this fact explained something else: that both of us could have seen the entire movie in spite of the telephone interruptions. We had referred to these more than once in the course of our conversation, without saying, or perhaps without remembering, that the longest one had, in fact, been a phone call between the two of us, when we called each other to make the date to meet at the café the following afternoon, and we had prolonged it with remarks about our recent readings, as we always did, anticipating the conversation itself and touching on some topics we wanted to discuss. Th is shared distraction must have also created a shared blank, but the time lag (which, if it really was a half-hour long, coincided with the amount of time we spent on the phone) voided that blank.
    But, to return to his previous question, which had been left unanswered: no, when I spoke of fragmentation I was not referring to channel surfing, or not exclusively to it. Experience itself, the experience of reality, already posited a model of fragmentation. Without needing to get philosophical, we could say that this happened in life the same way it happened in the movies. As real humans — imperfect and incomplete because real and human — we were always missing important things, essential links needed to understand the greater general story; afterward, full of doubts and errors, we pieced it together. It was memory that established the continuum; and since memory was also a reality of experience, it was also fragmented.
    According to a well-conceived and well-executed constructivism, seeing half a painting should make it possible to know what the other half contained. And reading half a novel or poem, the same thing. Or half a symphony. Or half a movie, right? Though speaking of “halves” could lead one to think of bilateral symmetry, which is not what this was about. It could be any fragment, even a dinosaur’s worn-out vertebra.
    But, haven’t we then fallen into the conventional and the predictable?
    Yes, maybe so. But this was about a special kind of predictability, for it obeyed a convention created for that particular work, one that did not serve any other. At the end of the day, art was a convention, and if pushed, everything was a convention. Art was creation, and the first thing it created was its own convention.
    My thoughts were fleeting, and I revisited them under less pressure while I was reconstructing this step in the conversation, in my conversations, to be more precise. Didn’t I re-
establish the continuum of what was naturally fragmentary and interrupted? Because a conversation, no matter how civilized and articulate it may be, is always made up of leaps and digressions, and steps backward, and, “I didn’t understand you,” and, “I understood you all too well.” The memory that organizes and completes them is a chance excrescence, which exists as it did for me: secretly, almost shamefully. Although it probably isn’t all chance, judging from the fact that memory is full of conversations.
    Could a conversation be completed by deducing the recently born conventions after hearing only half of it? One would have to consider a conversation a work of art, which was not far from what I thought. But which half? Because it could be a temporal half, for example, the first hour, or the second, if it lasted two hours. Or the half that belongs to the responses of only one of the interlocutors. In this case it would be the kind of reconstruction — so common — that one performs when one hears someone talking on the telephone.
    My friend responded to all of this with a sleepy expression on his face, his eyes half closed, staring off into space. He must have been carrying out a general review of our digressions, and the conclusion he reached is that we hadn’t made any progress. We continued in the same “tic” or the same “toc” of the