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Authors: César Aira
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the
stores, we had lunch early, she took me to school, came to pick me up at five, and then
we stayed in for the rest of the evening. Lured by the radio, we lost ourselves in a
labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step.
Everything in this story I am telling is guaranteed by my perfect memory. My memory has
stored away each passing instant. And the eternal instants too, the ones that
didn’t pass, enclosing the others in their golden capsules. And the instants that
were repeated, which of course were the majority.
But my memory merges with the radio. Or rather: I am the radio. Thanks to the faultless
perfection of my memory, I am the radio of that winter. Not the receiver, the device,
but what came out of it, the broadcast, the continuity, what was being transmitted, even
when we switched it off, even when I was asleep or at school. My memory contains it all,
but the radio is a memory that contains itself and I am the radio.
Life without the radio was inconceivable for me. What happens, if you decide to define
life as radio (which, as an intellectual exercise, is not entirely without merit), is
that it automatically produces a sustaining plenitude. It was important for Mom as well,
it was company … Remember that the disaster had befallen us immediately after our
move to Rosario, where we had neither relatives nor friends. And the circumstances were
not ideal for making new friends, so Mom was all alone in the world … She had her
daughter, of course, but even though I was everything to her, that wasn’t much.
She was a sociable woman who loved to chat … So she got to know people in the
end, without having to make a particular effort: storekeepers, neighbors, people she did
ironing for. They were all keen to hear the story of her recent misfortune, which she
told over and over … She repeated herself a bit, but that was only natural.
Society was destined to absorb her life again; that winter was a mere interlude …
The radio fulfilled a function. In her case it was instrumental: it gathered her
scattered parts, it reassembled her identity as woman and housewife … By contrast
I achieved a complete identification with the voices in the ether … I embodied
them.
Those evenings, those nights in fact, for it grew dark very early, especially in our
room, had an atmosphere of shelter and refuge, which was intensely enjoyable, especially
for me, I’m not sure why. They were a kind of paradise, which, like all cut-price
paradises, had an infernal side. All the ironing Mom had taken in meant that she
couldn’t go out, but she didn’t mind; she was happy in that seeming
paradise, contenting herself with appearances, as usual. Her return to society would
have to wait. I fastened onto the illusion like a vampire: I lived on the blood of a
fantasy paradise.
In this kind of situation, repetition dominates. Each new day is the same as all the
others. The radio broadcast was different every day. And yet it was the same. The
programs we followed repeated themselves … We wouldn’t have been able to
follow them if they hadn’t; we would have lost track. And in the breaks the
announcers always read the same advertisements, which I had learned by heart. No
surprise there, since memory was, and still is, my forte. I repeated them aloud as they
were spoken, one after another. The same with the introductions to the programs and the
accompanying music. I shut up when the programs themselves began.
We followed three soap operas. One was about the life of Jesus Christ, or rather the
childhood of the God made flesh; it was aimed at children and sponsored by a brand of
malt drink, which I had never tasted in spite of the identically repeated panegyrics
(with me doubling the speaker’s words) celebrating its nutritional and
growth-promoting virtues. Jesus and his pals were a likeable gang; there was a black
boy, a fat boy, a stammerer and a
stores, we had lunch early, she took me to school, came to pick me up at five, and then
we stayed in for the rest of the evening. Lured by the radio, we lost ourselves in a
labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step.
Everything in this story I am telling is guaranteed by my perfect memory. My memory has
stored away each passing instant. And the eternal instants too, the ones that
didn’t pass, enclosing the others in their golden capsules. And the instants that
were repeated, which of course were the majority.
But my memory merges with the radio. Or rather: I am the radio. Thanks to the faultless
perfection of my memory, I am the radio of that winter. Not the receiver, the device,
but what came out of it, the broadcast, the continuity, what was being transmitted, even
when we switched it off, even when I was asleep or at school. My memory contains it all,
but the radio is a memory that contains itself and I am the radio.
Life without the radio was inconceivable for me. What happens, if you decide to define
life as radio (which, as an intellectual exercise, is not entirely without merit), is
that it automatically produces a sustaining plenitude. It was important for Mom as well,
it was company … Remember that the disaster had befallen us immediately after our
move to Rosario, where we had neither relatives nor friends. And the circumstances were
not ideal for making new friends, so Mom was all alone in the world … She had her
daughter, of course, but even though I was everything to her, that wasn’t much.
She was a sociable woman who loved to chat … So she got to know people in the
end, without having to make a particular effort: storekeepers, neighbors, people she did
ironing for. They were all keen to hear the story of her recent misfortune, which she
told over and over … She repeated herself a bit, but that was only natural.
Society was destined to absorb her life again; that winter was a mere interlude …
The radio fulfilled a function. In her case it was instrumental: it gathered her
scattered parts, it reassembled her identity as woman and housewife … By contrast
I achieved a complete identification with the voices in the ether … I embodied
them.
Those evenings, those nights in fact, for it grew dark very early, especially in our
room, had an atmosphere of shelter and refuge, which was intensely enjoyable, especially
for me, I’m not sure why. They were a kind of paradise, which, like all cut-price
paradises, had an infernal side. All the ironing Mom had taken in meant that she
couldn’t go out, but she didn’t mind; she was happy in that seeming
paradise, contenting herself with appearances, as usual. Her return to society would
have to wait. I fastened onto the illusion like a vampire: I lived on the blood of a
fantasy paradise.
In this kind of situation, repetition dominates. Each new day is the same as all the
others. The radio broadcast was different every day. And yet it was the same. The
programs we followed repeated themselves … We wouldn’t have been able to
follow them if they hadn’t; we would have lost track. And in the breaks the
announcers always read the same advertisements, which I had learned by heart. No
surprise there, since memory was, and still is, my forte. I repeated them aloud as they
were spoken, one after another. The same with the introductions to the programs and the
accompanying music. I shut up when the programs themselves began.
We followed three soap operas. One was about the life of Jesus Christ, or rather the
childhood of the God made flesh; it was aimed at children and sponsored by a brand of
malt drink, which I had never tasted in spite of the identically repeated panegyrics
(with me doubling the speaker’s words) celebrating its nutritional and
growth-promoting virtues. Jesus and his pals were a likeable gang; there was a black
boy, a fat boy, a stammerer and a
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