Read Online The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by César Aira - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: César Aira
Ads: Link
classic rectangular, elongated napkins in the equally
classic metal dispenser with a spring to push them up have gradually been replaced
by square napkins, made of slightly tougher paper, on which the name, logo, and
address of the café are printed. (There are triangular ones too, but they are less
common.) And the new dispensers are plastic or wooden stands of one sort or another.
The café in which the events recounted here took place had not been modernized in
this regard: they were still using the old metal dispensers with their elongated
napkins, folded twice, resting on a metal plate pushed up from underneath by a
spring: a system that had disappeared, at that point in the city’s history, from all
but the lowliest establishments. It was an anomaly, all the more striking since the
café had recently been renovated in a way that aspired to elegance and modernity.
Either the owners had a large number of old dispensers in good condition and had
decided to avoid the cost of buying new ones, or, more likely, this was simply a
detail that they had overlooked. These possibilities were not mutually exclusive,
and they were complemented, not excluded, by a third, which actually included them:
perhaps the owners regarded the old dispensers as superior, not only from a
practical point of view, but also because of that vague, unconscious fondness that
we have for objects we have lived with for a long time, or all our lives. The
refurbishing of the old cafés, which had to be done in order to attract a new
generation of customers and compete with the new cafés, contributed to the ceaseless
transformation of the city and the consequent obliteration of memories. Preserving
something in the midst of change was a reflex to ensure survival or continuity,
operating on a tiny detail that would then irradiate the whole. But in this case
there was something more: this large, renovated café was situated on an invisible
urban frontier: to one side lay the local shops and businesses; to the other, near
the movie theaters, a space traversed by workers and domestic staff, who lived in
the poor suburbs to the west, coming from or going to the Flores railway station,
just two hundred yards away. The old napkin dispensers linked not only the present
and the past but also the coexisting social strata, which were not mutually
exclusive either, since poverty was a thing of the past. In any case, the division
of a city’s population into socioeconomic classes is a crude simplification because
every person belongs to a stratum of his or her own: there are as many strata as
individuals. One such individual, a man of impressive sartorial elegance, who looked
like an executive, was sitting at a table on which he had opened business files, and
was making marks and notes on the pages with a stylish pen; his cell phone was lying
among the papers, and his briefcase was open on the chair beside him. He must have
been getting ready for an important meeting, absorbed in his figures and arguments,
but not entirely, to judge from what happened next. Absently, without looking, he
plucked a napkin from the metal box. The way he did it spoke of a long familiarity
with the apparatus (with a neat flick of his thumb and index finger he extracted the
napkin without creasing it at all) and hence of a life spent in cafés; perhaps he
had once been a sales rep, selling pharmaceuticals or some other product, stopping
at a café halfway through his daily round to take the weight off his feet and catch
up with his paperwork. If so, he had progressed through the ranks, but as
always—this is how progress works, fundamentally—he still retained the
habits of the world that he had left behind. He had put down his pen and stopped
reading his documents, and in the few seconds it took the girl to destroy the little
clown inadvertently, his clever folding produced the next gift. It
was—surprise!—a coffee cup with its saucer. This was a qualitative leap
with respect to all the
classic metal dispenser with a spring to push them up have gradually been replaced
by square napkins, made of slightly tougher paper, on which the name, logo, and
address of the café are printed. (There are triangular ones too, but they are less
common.) And the new dispensers are plastic or wooden stands of one sort or another.
The café in which the events recounted here took place had not been modernized in
this regard: they were still using the old metal dispensers with their elongated
napkins, folded twice, resting on a metal plate pushed up from underneath by a
spring: a system that had disappeared, at that point in the city’s history, from all
but the lowliest establishments. It was an anomaly, all the more striking since the
café had recently been renovated in a way that aspired to elegance and modernity.
Either the owners had a large number of old dispensers in good condition and had
decided to avoid the cost of buying new ones, or, more likely, this was simply a
detail that they had overlooked. These possibilities were not mutually exclusive,
and they were complemented, not excluded, by a third, which actually included them:
perhaps the owners regarded the old dispensers as superior, not only from a
practical point of view, but also because of that vague, unconscious fondness that
we have for objects we have lived with for a long time, or all our lives. The
refurbishing of the old cafés, which had to be done in order to attract a new
generation of customers and compete with the new cafés, contributed to the ceaseless
transformation of the city and the consequent obliteration of memories. Preserving
something in the midst of change was a reflex to ensure survival or continuity,
operating on a tiny detail that would then irradiate the whole. But in this case
there was something more: this large, renovated café was situated on an invisible
urban frontier: to one side lay the local shops and businesses; to the other, near
the movie theaters, a space traversed by workers and domestic staff, who lived in
the poor suburbs to the west, coming from or going to the Flores railway station,
just two hundred yards away. The old napkin dispensers linked not only the present
and the past but also the coexisting social strata, which were not mutually
exclusive either, since poverty was a thing of the past. In any case, the division
of a city’s population into socioeconomic classes is a crude simplification because
every person belongs to a stratum of his or her own: there are as many strata as
individuals. One such individual, a man of impressive sartorial elegance, who looked
like an executive, was sitting at a table on which he had opened business files, and
was making marks and notes on the pages with a stylish pen; his cell phone was lying
among the papers, and his briefcase was open on the chair beside him. He must have
been getting ready for an important meeting, absorbed in his figures and arguments,
but not entirely, to judge from what happened next. Absently, without looking, he
plucked a napkin from the metal box. The way he did it spoke of a long familiarity
with the apparatus (with a neat flick of his thumb and index finger he extracted the
napkin without creasing it at all) and hence of a life spent in cafés; perhaps he
had once been a sales rep, selling pharmaceuticals or some other product, stopping
at a café halfway through his daily round to take the weight off his feet and catch
up with his paperwork. If so, he had progressed through the ranks, but as
always—this is how progress works, fundamentally—he still retained the
habits of the world that he had left behind. He had put down his pen and stopped
reading his documents, and in the few seconds it took the girl to destroy the little
clown inadvertently, his clever folding produced the next gift. It
was—surprise!—a coffee cup with its saucer. This was a qualitative leap
with respect to all the
Similar Books
