The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira Page B

screens, and the jungle of
iridescent elements they were cleaving through, his movement around the room
always ended with him banging into the walls, the furniture . . . He stumbled
frequently, and he was down on the floor more than he was standing up. Depending
on how much impetus he had, he was either stretched out or rolling around doing
spectacular half somersaults; but he took advantage of these involuntary plunges
to hang the screens in places he couldn’t have reached otherwise. Everything was
useful.
    He never stopped moving. He was bathed in sweat; it was
streaming through his hair, and his clothes were stuck to his skin. He went back
and forth, up and down, every cell in his body shaking, arms and legs stretching
and contracting like rubber bands, and he was leaping around like an insect. His
face, usually so inexpressive, churned like ocean waves during a storm, never
pausing at any one expression; his lips formed all kinds of fleeting words,
drowned out by the panting, and when they opened, his tongue appeared, twisting
like an epileptic snake. If it had been possible to follow, with a stopwatch,
the rising and falling of his eyebrows, one could have read millions of
overlapping surprises. His gaze was fixed on his visions.
    From the outside, and without knowing what any of it
was about, the practice of the Cure looked like a dance without music or rhythm,
a kind of gymnastic dance, which might appear to be designed to shape a
nonexistent specimen of the human. Admittedly, it was pretty demented. He looked
like Don Quixote attacking his invisible enemies, except his sword was the
bundle of metaphysical foldout screens and his opponent was the Universe.
    Thud! He crashed into a chair and fell headfirst to the
floor, both his legs shaking; the crown of his head left a round damp mark on
the rug; but even down there he kept working: his right hand was tracing a large
semicircle, placing a screen that divided up the joys and sorrows of Muslims;
his left was pulling a little on another screen that had excluded too many
apples . . . Now he was on his feet again, lifting the white accordion of a
vertical screen that was crossing levels of reality as it sorted through
“latenesses” and “earlynesses” . . . ! And what looked like a tap dance meant to
recover his balance was him hanging two screens that would exclude certain
rickshaws and particular conversations. With his chest, his rear end, his knees,
his shoulders, and head-butts, he corrected the positions, angles, and
inclinations of the panels, enacting a true St. Vitus dance in the process. And
to think that this grotesque puppet was creating a New Universe!
    And so it went. One might have thought that the space of
representation at his disposal was going to get overcrowded, that it was going
to start to get difficult to keep inserting more screens. But this didn’t happen
because the space wasn’t exactly the one of the representation but rather of
reality itself. In this way, miniaturization led to its own amplification. Like
in an individual big bang, space was being created, not getting filled, through
the process, hence within each pom-pom an entire Universe was being formed.
    In honor of reality, he had left the door to the balcony
open. Through it long strips of screens were swept out into the heavens. He
couldn’t even see what some of them were excluding, but he trusted that in any
case they would leave at least one particularity in each arena on this side. As
often happens with difficult jobs, a point came when the only thing that
mattered was to finish. He almost lost interest in the results, because the
result that included all the others was to finish what he had started. He had
really had to dig in to find out how demanding the problem of Everything was,
what brain-racking pressure it created . . . Only by living it could he find
out; all prior calculations or fantasies fell short. Even though he didn’t have
the time, he fervently longed to