The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (7 page)

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 that
counts.” But it’s true: the intention counts so much it disappears into the gift,
just as a smaller number, 843, say, disappears into a bigger one like 1,000 and,
lying hidden there, is extremely hard to find, as hard as winning the lottery.
Brandishing the bouquet of paper flowers, the girl set off, spinning like a bee, as
if she were sending a coded message to all the little girls in the world, indicating
the direction of the garden. Her handling accentuated the ephemeral nature of
flowers: before she had finished transmitting her message, the delicate posy,
bouncing crazily as she leaped about, had totally lost its shape. If anyone
regretted the rapid destruction of these fugitive playthings, it certainly wasn’t
her. She was riding the succession of novelties, which, in turn, because they were
novelties, were riding on time, which was emitting speed and unpredictability, like
sparks streaming off in two different directions. The late bouquet lay on the floor,
where countless shoes would step on it, while, with her winning smile, the girl laid
claim to what was already coming her way from a table occupied by four men, not all
that young but “still young” all the same, rock fans or bikers, one of whom had
folded and refolded a paper napkin (who knows where and how he’d learned to do this)
to make a quivering replica of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with all its bold
intersecting planes, every single one. Trills and laughter from the recipient, the
squealing of a happy little creature: she was delighted, although she had no idea
what it represented—but that might have been, and no doubt it was, precisely
what delighted her. Children have a very special attachment to the incomprehensible;
there’s so much they don’t understand at that age, they have no choice but to love
it, blindly, like an enigma, but also like a world. It teaches them what love is. It
traces out the vacant shape of their lives, heralding the marvelous variety of
forms. Incomprehensible objects are keys to the word
incomprehensible
, and
that’s why children are so fond of the word, which holds the promise of an object to
be opened and entered into. They live, provisionally, in that correspondence. With
the imaginative flexibility particular to her age, the girl entered the museum and
walked through its rooms, among the works of contemporary art, those supremely
strange works that, for the uninitiated, belong to the realm of the
incomprehensible. Arbitrary objects and excessive complications reversed themselves
for the benefit of innocence. But the almost transparent paper of the napkin from
which the museum was made was so flimsy, and the tensions that held it all in place
were so delicately balanced that it was already coming apart under the clumsy
pressure of the girl’s little fingers, and the renowned curved surfaces were flexing
with a pliability that no architect, least of all Frank Gehry, would have been able
to foresee. Folding, enfolding, and unfolding were all gathered into the abstraction
of a geometrical point. And at that point a question arose spontaneously: how could
it be that the set of customers who happened to have come to one of the
multitudinous cafés scattered around the city at that hour of the afternoon included
so many people who had so thoroughly mastered the art of paper folding? Was it an
almost miraculous coincidence? A gratuitous conspiracy? A moment’s inspiration? But
folding paper into recognizable shapes is not a skill that requires long study, or
travel to the Far East for classes with a master. It would have been more surprising
to find that among the customers sitting in a café at a certain time, there were
twenty podiatrists or sociolinguists, sitting on their own or in pairs or little
groups at each table, who didn’t know each other and had come to the café at that
time for twenty different reasons—
that
would have been truly
jaw-dropping. Up to a point, figurative paper-folding is a natural and spontaneous
activity, but only up to a point: the starting point, that is, the making of little
boats or planes. And yet, because of the natural tendency to elaborate and the spare
time that, in retrospect, we generally turn out to have had, in this case the idle
pastime had given rise to escalating transformations. And that was precisely where
the solution began to emerge. The question at issue could not, in fact, be answered
by comparing or juxtaposing paper-folding with other activities, or considering
fortuitous groupings of things or people. The answer lay in the reason for the
activity of folding, which was originally to fold the spatiotemporal coordinates in
which coincidences occurred. These coincidences gave rise to many misunderstandings
and arguments, which were never resolved. Were they coincidences or were they
reality? Here, two incompatible modes of thought—statistical and
historical—entered into conflict. Representative figures made by folding paper
must have first appeared when someone discovered that a sheet of paper cannot,
however hard one tries, be folded in half more than nine times, no matter how large
or thin the sheet is. Faced with this limit, what had been simply a piece of folded
paper flowered into something that resembled a piece of the world. The work of
folding, in other words, bounced off the wall of the incomprehensible and opened
into the figurative. The discovery of the ninefold limit had taken place in the
legendary time of origins. The Dawn of Humanity, it must have been, since the limit
was a mathematical absolute. But it turned out that paper had been invented at a
relatively late stage in History, before which it was already impossible to fold a
sheet of paper more than nine times, although there was no paper. What this meant
for Humanity was that the ingenious and amusing figures achieved by folding were, as
they say, “within everyone’s reach.” Doubt once dispelled, the series continued and
soared away from the simple and the clichéd. And so it was that the next gift, which
the little girl received from a short man with an impressive quiff of black hair
combed back and held in place with brilliantine, who was eating a sandwich and
drinking a beer, realized the possibilities of a little paper napkin in the most
elaborate way. It was a boat, not a schematic representation like the first gift,
but an elegant sailing ship decked with flags, and the folding continued out from
the keel to show the wavy water of a river and the banks on either side, and houses
on the banks, and stores, a church, gardens, and people crowding the streets along
the waterfront, waving to the passing ship. On board, the crew was busy working the
sails, while the passengers admired the view and waved back to the locals. The group
of passengers, who were obviously important people, in eighteenth-century attire
(wigs, ermine stoles, braid), was dominated by the majestic, rotund figure of a
queen, disproportionately large and clearly in command. Standing slightly apart from
the group, and just as prominent as the queen, was a handsome, prepossessing man in
full military regalia, with a plumed hat, a fur cape, and a sword hanging from his
belt. An almost microscopic fold of the tortured napkin used to construct this
panorama showed that he had only one eye. That detail was enough to identify him and
situate the scene, for this was, in fact, the depiction of a very particular
historical event. In 1786, Potemkin, Prince of Tauris, favorite of Catherine the
Great, completed the conquest and pacification of the Crimea, and in the spring of
the following year, he arranged for the sovereign to visit the peninsula, as well as
Ukraine, which had also been annexed to her empire. She traveled in grand style,
with all the court and the diplomatic corps, and hundreds of servants, cooks,
musicians, and actors, plus a portable theater and salons, libraries, and pets. Each
stage of the journey was celebrated with magnificent parties held at castles along
the way, attended by the local aristocrats and dignitaries. Coaches, berlins, carts,
and sleds were left in Kiev, and the voyage continued over the water: eighty
luxuriously fitted-out ships set off on the Dnieper, and this was the moment that
had been captured by the napkin: the tsarina in the flagship, surrounded by the
ambassadors of all the European powers, and Potemkin at the prow, making sure that
the grand spectacle that he had orchestrated was going according to plan. (He had
lost an eye in a brawl with the brothers Ostrov, who were also among Catherine’s
lovers.) It was all his creation: the prosperous cities they could see on the
riverbanks, thrown up overnight to be displayed to the visitors; the plump,
multitudinous cattle, brought in specially; the contented peasants cheering the
tsarina, in reality a corps of carefully instructed extras. In the diplomatic
reports that were later sent to various courts, it was clear that none of the
ambassadors were entirely convinced by this playacting, but all admired the industry
of the favorite who, in a few short months, had mocked up an entire country from
scratch. The leap from the legendary tsarina to the delightful little girl had
traversed every kind of representation. The minuscule diorama, treated with a regal
indifference, began to unfold as soon as she touched it, and by the time she reached
her mother’s table, after making all manner of unnecessary detours and digressions
with her new treasure on display, the destruction was almost complete: the queen was
sinking into the waves of the river; the courtiers and ambassadors were collapsing
onto each other in an involuntary orgy; Potemkin was on top of a church tower,
standing on his head; and the ship looked like a bicycle. The ruin, reverting to the
condition of a crumpled napkin, sank in a puddle of Coca-Cola, and the little girl
ran to the other end of the café. A bespectacled youth had set aside his laptop for
a moment to join in the folding game, and was offering her a paper version of
Rodin’s
Thinker
(if the almost impalpable material of the cheap napkins in
those metal dispensers can be dignified with the name of paper). She greeted it with
her indiscriminate trilling and laughter, although, for a child of her age, it was
hardly an appropriate toy. It was probably the only thing that the youth had learned
how to make by folding paper. Or perhaps he had once made other things, but this was
the one that had turned out best, and from then on he had specialized. Or perhaps,
as his use of a computer suggested, he was committed to going paperless and saving
the planet’s forests. If he’d made an exception in this case, it was because he
wanted to take part in the competition along with all the others and not be left
behind; to insist on saving a tiny napkin made of the lightest paper would clearly
have been a symptom of the fanatical rigidity that discredits a good cause. But
there was something else, which had to do, precisely, with
The Thinker
. The
only paper-saving that made sense was the kind that depended on mental work, on
concentration (so finely represented by Rodin’s masterpiece), which enabled a
thinker to skip the intermediate steps, and thus avoid the need to waste reams of
paper on those rough drafts, the works of the philosophers. The girl was a stranger
to philosophies and concentration, and all she could recognize was a human figure,
which she cradled in her arms, singing a simplified lullaby. The customers smiled as
she went past their tables, and there was perhaps—or almost certainly—an
element of vindictive pleasure in the smiles of those who had inwardly condemned the
gift as inappropriate, a form of cultural showing-off quite out of place in that
context. The next object the little girl received (folded by a priest in a break
from his conversation with two contractors about an extension to the parish soup
kitchen) seemed to have been intended to contrast with the incongruous