Read Online The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by César Aira - Free Book Online Page B

previous folded offerings, and since there had already been
one such leap in the series, it was a leap with respect to a leap. The cup was
simply perfect in its Bauhaus simplicity, and its curves, produced without breaking
the basic rule of creating shapes solely by means of folding and unfolding, were a
tour de force. So was the way it was all in one piece, although the real thing was
made up of two: the cup and the saucer, indissolubly united in this case by the
paper. The little girl, who still hadn’t learned to be shy, came over happily,
without needing to be called, to accept this new tribute to her grace and beauty.
Another votive offering to her innocence. She took it in her clumsy little hands
and, laughing triumphantly, ran to show it to her mother, except that this time she
stopped at each table along the way and reached up on tiptoe to place it next to a
real coffee cup where possible, so that everyone could see the resemblance. Many of
the customers—all of them, no doubt—would have been able to appreciate
the full worth and difficulty of that work, but she took it for granted; it was as
natural to her as a flower or a stone, something a nice man had given her as a token
of admiration; there was no need for
her
to admire it. By the time she
reached her mother, the cup was already halfway back to being a napkin again. Her
mother, still chatting, spared her the briefest mechanical glance. After the first
little figure, the first of what was beginning to look like an infinite series, she
had immediately switched off, as adults do when their children are playing. Nobody
loses out, because, from that moment on, the children enter a dimension of their
own, composed of repetitions and intensities. Something like that had happened in
the café. The girl had achieved a kind of invisibility, in which she was moving like
a fish in water. The life of the café continued as normal. The waiters—there
were six of them, each attending to his own group of tables—circulated with
their trays, took orders, served, and collected money. The customers came and went,
greeted one another, took their leave; those arriving late apologized and blamed the
traffic. And even those who had made the ritual folded-napkin offering switched off
after that and got on with their own lives. But the series, if that’s what it really
was, did not come to a halt; it was as if the flow of ordinary time were yielding to
the peremptory nature of childhood. A lady with dyed-red hair, who was drinking tea,
wearing a violet and yellow tracksuit, caught the girl’s eye with a smile and
presented her with what she had constructed from a little paper napkin. This new
creation was a masterful, prize-worthy piece of work, which took the very concept of
the qualitative leap to a whole new level. It was a bunch of flowers, a profusion of
tiny roses, arum lilies, gladioli, daisies, and carnations, crowned by a
chrysanthemum, and filled out with ferns. All this had sprung from half a dozen
folds in the miserable little napkin, and expert unfolding to fluff it into shape.
All the flowers, with their almost microscopic details, were recognizable. The only
thing they lacked was color; the white of the paper made them ghostly. The
qualitative leap wasn’t necessary in itself, since the only thing that mattered from
the girl’s point of view was the continuation of the game, regardless of crescendos
or decrescendos, but the leap’s own necessities favored subtle forms; as a result,
one had to look at this bouquet twice, or three times, to make out the flowers,
otherwise it might have been mistaken for a ball of crumpled paper. This escalation
was inevitable; other kinds of gift-objects—birthday or wedding presents,
offerings made to a bountiful god—could also evolve toward ever-greater
subtlety and ultimately assume the appearance of trinkets, or of nothing at all.
When that happens, people say, with a condescending smile: “It’s the intention