Free The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) by César Aira Page A

in bed, that when one watches movies in the theater, one’s concentration, enhanced by the darkness and the fact itself of going to the theater, takes one into the fiction completely and makes one cease to think of it as fiction. On the contrary, at home, when watching movies on television, one inevitably does not enter it completely. A part of one’s consciousness remains outside, contemplating the game of fiction and reality, and here the emergence of a critical sensibility becomes inevitable. It ceases to be a dream one is dreaming alone and becomes the dream that others are dreaming. It is not so much an issue of finding mistakes in the construction or the logic (that would be too easy) but rather the birth of a certain nostalgia, of partially glimpsed worlds, within reach, but still inaccessible . . .
    What kinds of worlds? my friend wanted to know.
    I didn’t want to tell him that I was thinking about my nocturnal “revisions,” because I kept my little drowsy and solitary theater a secret, and this was not the moment to reveal it (that moment would never come). I squirmed out of it by telling him that I wanted to finish my explanation, and then maybe we could clear things up once and for all and return to a civilized conversation, without retro-algae or exo-phosphorus . . .
    Or Señorita Wild Savage . . .
    Ugh! I had forgotten. That, too, and so many other things. So many circles we had to run around in to get to the Rolex!
    An entire lifetime, right? my friend said, and when I reached this remark in my memory, and only then, did I remember something else that subtly changed the tone and meaning of our conversation. I just said that I had never told him, nor did I ever plan to, about my habit of recalling at night the conversations we had had in the afternoon. Nor had I told my other friends I met and conversed with, nor anybody else. But I had told each of them, on some occasion brought about by the haphazard nature of conversation, about some of my obsessions or whims or little oddities, because I can say that I am a man without secrets. So, I must have told somebody that ever since I was a little boy, I had dreamed of owning a Rolex. It was completely gratuitous, and I had never taken it seriously, to the point that I had never even considered buying one, or even finding out how much one cost. Moreover, it didn’t fit my personality; and that’s precisely where the idea must have come from: from that vague longing we all have to be somebody else. What I didn’t remember was if I had told this friend in particular. If I had (and in my nocturnal reflection I had no reason to suspect that I had, besides the slight intonation in that “right?” of his), the whole conversation, from the moment I had brought up the movie, began to have a double bottom, and there emerged a new possibility for the interpretation of each remark.
    It was a little too obvious for me to start speculating about where this old, never explored fantasy had come from; we all have fantasies, old and new, and that little luxury item was probably, at some moment in my childhood, a good vehicle for my imagination. Whatever the case, I glanced at it quickly and from afar (at the fantasy, at the always deferred work of analyzing myself and trying to understand my life), and with this distraction in addition to the previous reflections, I got behind as far as the movie was concerned. What I mean is: in the real conversation, in the café, I had kept talking about the movie; the entire parenthesis took place in the nocturnal reconstruction. And it really should have been a parenthesis, there was nothing preventing it from being a parenthesis, but, whether because of contamination by movies in general and by particular movies that keep playing while one is distracted and thinking about something else or going to the bathroom, the truth is that it was as if the conversation had continued, and I had been left behind. So, to catch up I had to sum