The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (16 page)

I saw the back of a ghost. Today, a little while ago, shortly after arriving. I came
to the hotel from the bus terminal, checked in, went up to my room to leave my bag,
and went out for a walk almost straightaway to stretch my legs and get to know the
city. Tandil’s not much more than a big town built on the pampa, at the foot of some
hills that are among the oldest in the world. It seemed to be livening up a bit at
that time: kids were gathering on the street corners, people were leaving work and
heading home, or going to cafés, but only in the small downtown area. I returned to
the hotel via some streets a bit farther out (just a bit), and they were deserted: I
didn’t see a soul for quite a while. By then it should have been dark already. The
day’s afterglow was still hanging in the air. All the colors were shrouded in a
uniform silver, and a deep silence reigned. The rectilinear streets ran away toward
the horizon, and they looked so alike that on one corner I thought I’d lost my sense
of direction. I hadn’t, but when I set off again, sure that I knew which way to go,
I walked a bit more quickly, paying more attention. To what? There was nothing to
pay attention to.

Perhaps because of the pallid absence surrounding me, I noticed a little movement
that I would have overlooked in the bustle of a busy street. Not so much a movement
as its shadow, the shifting of a minuscule volume of air, or not even that. I was
walking past an empty house, whose façade was hollowed out into a kind of loggia
with columns: no doubt the whim of a traditional Italian builder, one of the many
who left their mark on our provincial towns. Time had darkened the gray of the
stucco, and, beyond the arch, the dim light of dusk gave out entirely. There at the
back, floating halfway between floor and ceiling, in front of the walled-up door,
was a ghost. The movement that had revealed his presence must have been a tic. It
was followed by intense stillness. He looked at me, we looked at each other, for
barely an instant, no more than the moment it took for fright to imprint itself on
his weary features. Before I had time to be afraid, he had turned and gone back in.
Clearly, it was a chance occurrence that he could not have foreseen. Decades of
habit and boredom would have convinced him that no one went past at that time. But
that “no one” didn’t include me. I was a stranger who had just arrived in town,
walking about idly with nowhere to go. My presence there took him by surprise,
interrupting his “stepping out for a breath of fresh air,” which was perhaps the
repetition of an evening habit from the old days, when he was alive. And he reacted
to the surprise by turning around and going back the way he had come (through the
wall), without realizing that this instinctive movement would show me something no
human being had ever seen: his back.

Humans have seen a great many things in the course of their long history; it might be
said that, collectively, they have “seen it all.” I thought I’d seen it all myself,
even with my limited experience. The individual repeats the “alls” and the
“nothings” of the species, but there is always “something” that is extra or missing.
Only the unrepeatable is truly alive. That unrepeatable “something” is a single,
unique entity, in which the worlds of life and death come together like the points
of an inconceivable double vertex. And nobody, until today, had seen the back of a
ghost.

I saw it for the very briefest moment, but I saw it. Then, suddenly, the scene
vanished, and I continued on my way, quickening my pace, rushing to get back, to
shut myself into the hotel room and start writing (the floor plan flashed vividly
before my mind’s eye, with the table and chair, and even the notebook open on the
table). That was when I said to myself for the first time: Literature . . . Or
rather I shouted it, inwardly. But there was no need to articulate the word: I could
feel it in every fiber of my body. Such was my excitement that I really did get lost
this time. I had to summon all my orientation skills to find the way, walking faster
and faster. I was almost running. Even so, every few steps I reached into my
pockets, took out the ballpoint pen and the papers that I happened to have on me
(the bus ticket, the hotel card, a few other scraps), and, barely stopping,
scribbled a note, then set off again more quickly than before.

And here I am, at last, writing like a man possessed. As well I might: not even a
whole lifetime of adventures and study could have given me more reason to write. And
now I come, with a natural ease, to the climax: the description of that back, hidden
from the eyes of humanity until now.

But . . . I don’t know if it’s my impatience, or the excess of energy that has taken
hold of me since the ghost turned around, but there’s a sharp pain in the middle of
my chest, and it keeps getting more and more intense, forcing me to grimace
horribly. It’s becoming unbearable, climbing to a spasmodic peak, and when it seems
about to relent, it doesn’t. I’m finding it hard to write. My vision is clouding
over, my eyes are half closed, and I’m clamping my jaws so tightly to stop myself
crying out that my molars feel like they’re going to explode.

At this very moment, as I persist in the effort to trace these increasingly distorted
letters and words, I’m assailed by the idea that I could die right here, bent over
my notebook, before I can describe what I saw . . .

Is it possible? Could anyone be so unlucky? Now the pain has eased a little, but it’s
worse: I can feel it tearing the chambers of my heart with “a sound of silk being
slashed,” and the blood’s gushing inside me, getting all mixed up. My writing hand
is shaking and starting to turn purple . . . I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep
the pen moving . . .

My sight is blurred, I’m staring desperately at the lines my hand keeps tracing . . .
At the darkening edge of my field of vision, I can see the crumpled papers on which
I made notes when I was out walking . . . But they’re not even notes; they’re no
more than cryptic reminders that nobody will be able to understand (because of my
pernicious habit of using abbreviations). My death will condemn them to
indecipherability forever . . . unless someone very clever comes along and by means
of meticulous inductive and deductive reasoning (over years or decades) is able to
arrive at a plausible reconstruction . . . But no, that kind of treatment is
reserved for the papers of a great writer; no one will bother with mine . . .

Maybe I could leave some kind of key . . . but no, it’s impossible. I don’t have
time. I can’t maintain the rhythm and the rigor of good prose, the kind of prose I
would like to have written, the kind that would have made me a great writer, worthy
of serious study. All I can do is use the last of my strength to scrawl a few
disjointed, almost incoherent sentences . . . I don’t have time because I’m dying .
. . Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming
literature . . . The hardest thing for me is that I did, in fact, have time (once),
and I wasted it shamefully. The lesson, if a lesson can in some small way redeem my
wasted life, is this: you have to get straight to the point . . . I should have
begun with the crucial thing, which no one but I knew about . . . I wouldn’t even
have had to sacrifice the flow and the balance of a well-told story, because I could
have written the introductory sections later and rearranged it all when preparing
the final draft . . . This stupid compulsion to narrate events in chronological
order . . .

DECEMBER 8, 2003

The Ovenbird

THE HYPOTHESIS UNDERLYING THIS STUDY
is that human beings act in
strict accordance with an instinctive program, which governs all of our actions,
however unpredictable or freely chosen they may seem, and that our “cultural” free
will is consequently no more than a kindly illusion with which we dupe ourselves, as
much a part of our innate heritage as the rest. On the face of it, this proposal is
extremely bold or outright preposterous: the idea that everything could be
foreordained would seem to be refuted by the wild variety of human lives, beginning
with the extravagant iridescence of thought, the unpredictability of our least
reactions, and the ideas that come to mind willy-nilly; and if it’s unconvincing in
an individual case, how could it explain the incalculable differences between one
human being and another, no matter how closely related they are? But this impression
of difference is precisely the illusion that the hypothesis aims to dispel, and all
one has to do (I’m not saying this is easy) is accept that it is an illusion for the
variations to become irrelevant and the veil that hid our essential instinctive
uniformity to fall away. There’s no need to give up those variations, or sacrifice
one’s “surface” differences to a “deep” essence, because, in fact, there’s no such
essence; it’s all surface. And what’s to stop all the countless minutiae of our
acts, thoughts, desires, dreams, and creations, everything that happens second by
second between birth and death, being inscribed a priori in our genes, in the form
of a program that’s identical for every member of the species? Science has
accustomed us, by now, to greater wonders of computing. Humans have always been very
sure that their actions are determined by a kind of causation that is free and
superior, “cultural” rather than natural . . . while the equally ancient hypothesis
of instinctive programming has always been reserved for animals and applied to them
with fanatical rigor.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade anyone. The idea is too shocking and
arbitrary; and in a way it’s self-defeating because if it’s not built into our
program, how could we accept it? But maybe it
is
built into our program; after all it occurred to me (and I’m not the first). And
it’s true that persuasion is one of our instinctive gifts, along with fiction.

What humans have traditionally believed about animals owes a great deal to fiction.
I’m not saying it isn’t true. How could I? Let’s take it at face value, and turn it
around. Let’s imagine, for the purposes of demonstration, how an animal of some kind
might apply its reason to this issue. It might be objected that animals don’t have
reason to apply. Very well, I’m quite prepared to use another word; in any case,
it’s just a question of terminology (and I know I’m not expressing myself well). By
the “reasoning” of an animal, then, I mean something different, for which we don’t
have a word, precisely because we have always stayed on this side of the line. Let’s
forget all the tales and the fables: the traveling ant, the grumbling bear, the fox
and the crow . . . Or, rather, let’s take them to their ultimate conclusions.
Instead of “fiction,” let’s call it “translation,” and translate thoroughly. Now’s
the time to do it, because only translation can get to the bottom of this
nature/culture dialectic. I think it will be clearer if I give an example, but I
should point out that it’s not an example in the conventional sense, that is, a
particular extracted at random from the general by discursive means. What follows is
all general, from start to finish, pure generality.

Let’s imagine an ovenbird, in the year 1895, in the province of Buenos Aires. And
let’s stay with the human perspective for a moment, in order to make the contrast
clearer.

The ovenbird begins to build in autumn . . . while building its nest, the bird keeps
an eye on its human neighbors . . . when the construction has attained its spherical
form . . . the bird mates for life and gathers its food, which consists of larvae
and worms, exclusively on the ground . . . it struts around with a gravely serious
air . . . its strong, confident, clinking cry . . .

That’s enough. The reader will have recognized the tone. It’s a human speaking, a
naturalist. Like all styles, this one takes the eternal existence of its object for
granted. We have turned the lives of the animals into a voyage through various
styles, and in the process our lives have become a voyage through styles as well
(which is what allows me to conduct this experiment).

The ovenbird was building his hut. Let’s say it was autumn, so as not to offend
against plausibility, or just for fun. Enormous country afternoons. A shower at
five. The sixteenth of April 1895. Let’s go back to a sentence from the naturalist’s
paragraph: While building its nest, the bird keeps an eye on its human neighbors (in
context, the point of this observation is to explain why the entrance to the bird’s
hut always faces the nearest house or ranch, or the road). In his plentiful spare
time, the ovenbird thought . . .

But is this possible? Is it possible to go this way without straying into the world
of Disney? Isn’t this taking translation too far? It might be acceptable to the use
the verb “to think” as a translation, a way of communicating, when referring to what
is going on in the animal’s brain, or its nervous system, or, more precisely, in its
life and history. But what about the content of this thought? Even if it’s
acceptable for me to say that the bird thinks, can I say
what
he thinks? I think I can. Because it’s the same thing.

So, what was he thinking? Nothing. His mind was blank. Fatigue and anxiety (these
words are translations too, like all the words that follow; I won’t be pointing this
out again) had left him in a daze.

Translating from “ovenbirdese”: he felt overwhelmed by an accumulation of disasters,
which is how he saw his life. So much work, so much suffering, so many obligations!
And the constant uncertainty: always having to choose, without ever knowing if you
were making the right choice . . . The only thing he knew for certain, and this
ruled out the only possible consolation, was that there
was
a right way, a manner of doing things well, of being happy. And he
would never follow that way, or he would, but only as far as the first intersection,
where he would turn off. He knew this for certain because of the humans, always
there right in front of him. Now, for example: the family had come out onto the
balcony, after the rain, and they were drinking maté. He envied the automatic
instincts that determined the behavior of humans and all the other animals, except
for the ovenbird, that accursed species (so he thought). He shivered as he watched
them brewing the maté, passing the gourd around, the whole complicated ceremony,
involving the use of implements and accompanied by words, gestures, movements . . .
Human instincts were so amazing! By instinct they were able to perform this
intricate ballet (and so many others: he was always seeing them do something new)
without hesitation or stopping to think, without wondering if it was the right thing
to do or not, without deliberation, just because that’s how it was written in the
immemorial archives of their happy species. While he . . . Ovenbirds, he thought,
had paid for the skills that allowed them to survive with a drastic weakening of the
instinctive system. It was futile, and perhaps ungrateful, to complain, but he felt
that the price was too high. That’s what the example of the humans was telling him.
Humans lived, and they knew in advance how to do it. The ovenbird was subject to the
terrifying arbitrariness of ideas and thoughts and states of mind, of will and its
endless weaknesses, of climate and history.

How had they known it was time to drink maté? The rain and its stopping had nothing
to do with it, because they often drank maté when it hadn’t rained or stopped
raining, and they didn’t drink it every time the rain came to an end. The
unfathomable wisdom of instinct! And the drink gave them so much pleasure, lucky
bastards. To think that the same instinct had sent them to the store to buy the
maté, to the kitchen to boil the water, to bed for their siesta . . . They were
perfect. Perfect machines for living. An object lesson for an anguished wretch like
him. But what could he do if he belonged to the only species that nature had
neglected to endow with an instinct worthy of the name? There was no point bemoaning
that fateful moment in evolution when the species had strayed from the safe path of
adaptation . . . Maybe the solution was to keep forging ahead into maladaptation
until things came good again . . . But no, it was futile, and dangerous too; making
things worse was not the way to go.

Meanwhile, he was feeling increasingly ill. He was dizzy, everything was spinning.
What was he doing there, in the fork of a hackberry tree, six yards from the ground?
He was a ground animal, heights disagreed with him. But he couldn’t go down right
then because there happened to be a hungry, bad-tempered rat prowling around under
the tree. Every time it rained a few drops, that stupid rodent’s burrow would flood,
which made him crazy and vicious. It was true that the ovenbird could fly far away
and land anywhere and walk for a bit, if only to find some relief from his worries.
But it was a bother; afterward, he’d have to come back . . . And where would he find
a decent place for a walk, with all the puddles that had formed? It was better to
stay where he was and try to control the dizziness. Also, he had to wait for his
mate, who’d set out before the rain and ended up who knows where; she’d come back
wet, muddy, grumbling, and they’d have to sleep in that ruin with damp feathers and
empty stomachs . . . he turned to look at the half-built nest. His indecision added
a mental dizziness to the physical sensation, which almost made him lose his balance
and fall like a stone. Sadistically, the rain had chosen the worst possible moment.
By stopping just when he was normally getting ready to end his day’s work, it
confronted him with another one of those difficult decisions that made up the story
of his wretched life: when the sun broke through the clouds, there were still at
least two hours of daylight left. He couldn’t start working instantaneously; he
needed a while to set up the systems for transporting, mixing, and so on. Two hours
was a fair stretch of time, enough to add an inch or two and maybe replace all of
the new section he’d built that morning, which had been damaged by the rain. But
he’d already wasted an hour watching the humans, lost in his melancholic
daydreaming. So was it still worth the effort or not? The mud would have been too
thin, but there was plenty of it . . . He’d lost the will to work, but he knew he’d
feel guilty if he didn’t do something. What could he do, though, in the short time
left before it got dark? If he didn’t get to work, he’d just go on being depressed.
Which is what happened. A wasted day.

The nest was half built. It didn’t exist. Mud origami. All right: tomorrow, first
thing, he’d get straight to work. Or should he do something now? There was more time
left than it seemed, he felt sure; the daylight always lasts longer after rain. Oh,
well . . . Tomorrow. At least he had the consolation that the weather would be fine.
The clouds had gone away; there wasn’t one left in the sky.

The ovenbird saw his constructive art as an accumulation of vague and useless forms,
from which, by chance, something equivalent to a function ended up emerging. He told
himself that he should follow the example of the humans, with their hyperfunctional
houses, built automatically, always the same: vertical walls, a roof, openings, a
system of ways in and out . . . At least they didn’t have to bother with
architecture! They did it the way they did it. They just did it, the same way every
time, and the houses lasted forever. Take location. Guided by an infallible instinct
(that is, by instinct itself), they always built on the ground, right on the ground,
on the surface. They didn’t have to choose; nature had chosen for them. An ovenbird,
by contrast, was subject to the most unpredictable whims: a post, a tree, a roof,
the eaves of a house, five yards from the ground, or six, or fifteen . . . And then
there was the question of which kind of mud to use, and the proportion of straw or
horsehair . . . There were practically no fixed standards to go by (or that, at
least, was how he saw it). And the accidents! Like the rain today. He was at the
mercy of circumstances: the slightest variation could change everything; the
consequences of the most trivial events would ramify right to the end of his life,
piling up to make it unlivably motley and baroque. Humans, by contrast, like all the
other living beings on the planet, had a way of neutralizing the accidental: a
healthy and well-structured instinct allowed them to cancel out randomness by
improvising new circumstances. But not him! Every other creature but him! That was
because the ovenbird was an individual, like all ovenbirds, while humans were a
species. The species was firmly grounded in necessity; the individual was up in the
air, suspended in dizziness and contingency.

But shouldn’t that exceptional status have had some advantages too? Whenever you pay,
thought the ovenbird, in the depths of his terrible wretchedness, you get something
in return. And the “accursed race” to which he belonged had paid a substantial
price: they had given up the peace of living without anxiety, generation after
generation, in happy, trusting submission to the sweet mechanisms of nature. There
had to be some compensation for such a great loss. There
must
have been some advantages. There were: they were great and
definitive. A single word summed them up: freedom. He had freedom. All he had to do
was enjoy it.

If only it were that simple! he silently exclaimed in the throes of a mental agony,
and lifted his aching eyes to the sign that the world had used as an equivalent of
“freedom”: the sky. A rainbow had appeared in its empty dome. He was seeing it
aslant, diagonally, and that made it look more monumental and impressive. For him,
it was charged with “poetic,” “philosophical,” “moral,” and “aesthetic” resonances
(these are equivalents as well, but I trust they will serve to convey my meaning),
while the humans, who were looking at it too, saw it for the simple meteorological
phenomenon, the simple gift, that it was. Beyond: the pink splendor of the dusk.