The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (6 page)

MARCH 16, 2008

In the Café

A CUTE LITTLE THREE- OR
four-year-old girl was running around among
the tables, laughing, playing on her own, hiding from her mother, who was chatting
with a friend, and responding to the greetings of the customers by smiling and
dashing off again. An old couple called her over; she went, and the man presented
her with a little boat that he had made by folding a paper napkin. She ran to show
it to her mother, who admired it and asked her if she had said thank you to the nice
man. The girl ran back to do that, and played with the boat, which was very flimsy
because of the fineness of the paper and soon came apart in her hands. But by then
another man, sitting alone at another table (he was reading the soccer pages of
Clarín
) had called her over and given her a little plane, also made
from a paper napkin. As before, the girl ran to show it to her mother, and then she
ran to show it to the man who had given her the boat, and her trills of pleasure
made faces at other tables turn and smile. A child requires so little to be happy.
So little, and yet, at the same time, so much, because the little thing that fills
the child with innocent happiness lasts no longer than a sigh and then must be
replaced by another. Sensing this, perhaps, a third customer, with eyes half closed
and a look of intense concentration, had begun to fold a napkin. He was an older
man, really old, in fact, and he must have been concentrating in an effort to
remember; no doubt he’d done this for his grandchildren many years before, but not
for his great-grandchildren, whose preference for electronic games had disheartened
him. Now, in the café, where he came to kill time, he could reuse that modest skill,
acquired so many years ago, to make another child happy; an unexpected opportunity,
handed to him on a platter, to employ a metaphor in keeping with the scene. For a
moment he feared that it had been too long, that forgetfulness had triumphed, as it
had already in so many parts of his brain, disconnected by old age. And then there
was the growing stiffness of his hands, the loss of coordination in his fingers,
whose poor aching bones were inelegantly twisted out of line. But memory stubbornly
threaded its way through the ruins of old age, and the man saw a little doll of
fine, almost transparent paper appear shakily before him, trembling in its
elementary disjointedness. The girl didn’t mind; she was happy just to receive the
gift, to which she’d been drawn as if by a special sense. The paper figure, a
silhouette with a tutu, made only by folding, without a single cut, was supposed to
have joints in the arms and the legs, but because of imperfections resulting from
the man’s memory lapses and alterations, and from the inadequate, ultra-fine paper,
it came out like a limp puppet. Even so, the little girl recognized the shape and,
with a spontaneous gesture that drew smiles from the customers all around the café
who were observing this scene, cradled it in her arms, singing “Rock-a-Bye Baby,”
and carried it to where her mother was sitting with her friend. A sweet sensation
flooded through the old man, but the success of his creation must have been regarded
as suspect, partly because its crude sexism was demagogic and facile (a doll for a
girl, a ball for a boy), partly because that tattered scrap of paper paid scant
honor to the venerable art of figurative origami. The response was already being
prepared at a table occupied by a middle-aged man and a young couple. The difference
in age wasn’t great enough for him to be their father; he looked more like a teacher
with his students, or a boss with two young employees. Their table was covered with
papers, which could have been pages of notes, lists, dispatch slips, bills, or
computer printouts, but now they were focused on the fine paper napkin to which the
young man was applying himself, under the gaze of the girl and the older man, who
was commenting abundantly, gesturing to stress an authority based on age rather than
skill, because it was clear that the boy was the one with the know-how. In his hands
the rectangle of paper, folded and unfolded over and over, became a hen, with a
plump, maternal body, a crescent of triangular tail feathers, a raised head and an
open beak. A cheerful cock-a-doodle-doo from the hen’s creator attracted the little
girl, who in turn attracted the wandering attention of the customers, curious to
discover the new offering, which could have been anything, given the wide range of
possibilities afforded by the material. The need to renew this improvised amusement
was urgent because the little doll was already lying on the floor. The fate of the
previous creation foreshadowed, of course, what was to come; and, if only at a
speculative level, the question arose as to whether it might have been a waste of
effort. But even without an explicit reminder that “Nothing is lost, all is
transformed,” the atmosphere was suddenly charged with gain, not loss. The little
girl’s rapid consumption of novelties was accepted as something natural, even
exciting. This is how it should always be, some people were thinking,
philosophically: getting and losing, enjoying and letting go. Everything passes, and
that’s why we’re here. Eternity and its more or less convincing simulacra are not a
part of life. The girl, who was life and nothing but, was delighted by the hen,
which served as a pretext to dash off again, holding it up as if to make the bird
fly, although, because of her unsteady, beginner’s steps—she was perpetually
about to fall, perpetually recovering her balance—it flapped more like a
butterfly. She clearly wasn’t bothered by the fact that hens don’t fly, or at least
not like that. In the simple zoology of children, one animal shape covers a range of
species, geographies, and epochs, and can even encompass night and day, since the
little flying hen was also flying like a bat and, given the inherent ambiguity of
all chunky forms, might in this case have been taken for one, except that a bat
would have been completely out of place in the hands of candor incarnate. And
speaking of candor, the color of the paper napkins conspired against that
interpretation too: their white was irreversible. In any case, all that flying and
the erratic pressure of the child’s little pink fingers proved to be utterly
destructive: the hen’s round body became a pyramid in ruins, the proud triangles of
the tail were soon all askew, and by the time the junior test pilot remembered to
show it to her mother (a ceremony to which she seemed to attribute the gravity of a
certification), it was already in tatters. But obviously no one minded, and they
wanted to go on indulging her. Two girls who were having a lively conversation and
had not appeared, up till then, to be paying attention to what was going on, waved
something white, which, like a red rag to a bull, brought the interested party
rushing over: it was a clown made by ingeniously folding a small paper napkin.
Presumably, then, they had been inattentive to the girl’s forays because they were
attending to the little work in progress. And it was a remarkable work, superior in
quality to what had been produced so far: the clown had a round hat, a
disproportionate protuberance to represent his rubber nose in the middle of the
paper circle that was his face, a tail coat, baggy pants and the classic shoes that
reach all the way to next door. To judge from appearances, neither the girl who was
now handing the clown to its eager recipient nor her companion would have seemed
capable of such an exploit: they looked like airheads, good for nothing but idle
chatter (which is what they had seemed to be engaged in, at least for those out of
earshot). The only explanation that bridged the gap was that they were kindergarten
teachers, or one of them was, and her training must have included an obligatory or
optional unit on making paper figures. A clown! Every child’s best friend, who keeps
his little charges company even when they close their eyes, tucked into bed, and
never forsakes them, not even in their worst nightmares; on the contrary, that’s
where he takes the lead role, in order to prevent others—monsters, for
example—from stepping in. This inoffensive little clown, made of paper so
fragile a gaze could tear it, had been marked somehow by his contact with monsters
in the world of dreams. But how? The trace was perceived subliminally, and in no
other way, because the co
ntinual movements of the clown’s possessor—her dashes
and sudden displays—prevented any detailed observation. It was, in fact, a
stain: the paper clown’s white was not immaculate like that of the earlier figures.
Not a very noticeable stain, just a dirty brown smudge, of indeterminate shape,
which, because of the folding, appeared on various separate parts of the body.
Coffee, from the lips of one of the girls. So they must have folded a used napkin.
That was strange. Given a choice, why pick faulty materials for a delicate and
difficult piece of work? Maybe they had started folding just to see (could it be
done with this sort of paper and a sheet of this size?), using the first napkin that
came to hand, and by the time they realized it was possible, the work was so far
advanced that it wasn’t worth getting a new napkin and starting all over again. If
they really were kindergarten teachers, as it seemed from the general impression
they gave—the loud voices, the dyed hair, the spontaneity—satisfying
childish desires with whatever came to hand was what they did every day. Now might
be the moment to say a few words about the napkins that were being used to make
these gifts for the little girl. A well-stocked napkin dispenser sits on every café
table in Buenos Aires. The 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 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