Free Ghosts by César Aira Page A

of
passage.)
    But Patri’s dream went further, higher, taking in different systems,
which were increasingly original and strange. In some cases the construction of
the landscape, common to a great variety of carefree indigenous peoples, was
simplified to the extreme. For example by certain Polynesian islanders, whose
landscape consists entirely of those specks of earth or coral emerging from the
sea, which seem to be adrift.... They have a simple fix for
this, using two lines that are not so much imaginary as utilitarian: one from
the island down to the bottom of the sea, like an anchor, the other up to a star
at the zenith, to stop the island from sinking.
    And even the Polynesian system is complicated compared to some others,
especially virtual systems, which start from humanity and proceed toward
thought—an itinerary which, in turn, is doubled with dreaming.
    After non-building comes its logical antecedent, building.
As a real practice, building is decoration. In architecture, decoration is
always an expansion, expanding anything and everything, until only the process
of expansion remains. In agricultural societies, the accumulation of goods and
the management of social inequalities gives building the function of creating an
“artificial world,” in which the privileged are confined by their status,
whatever it may be (even the status of pariah). At which point architecture
(paradoxically) becomes “real”; and if, until then, the world—the
landscape or the territory—had been humanity’s artistic miniature, its
little dream-lantern, now the opposite phase begins, the phase of
expansion, which gives rise to decoration, which is everything.
    The development of “real” architecture, that is, of the decorative
elements, is directly linked to the possibility of accumulating provisions for
the workers or the slaves who do the building, and don’t have time to go hunting
or gathering food. Such accumulations result in inequalities. There is a
mechanism for reducing excessive accumulation, and regulating wealth (without
regulation there would be no wealth): potlatch , the festivity that involves squandering food and drink and
other sorts of goods in a brief, crazy splurge, and so reducing the stocks to a
satisfactory level. By staging a grand and brilliant spectacle, comparable to a
temporary or perishable work of art, the festivity performs the function of
attracting the greatest possible quantity of people. The size of the audience on
the day is crucial, since this artistic manifestation will not endure in time.
Art, in all its forms, has an inherent economy, and this case is no
exception.
    The potlatch , of course,
belongs to the prehistory, or the genealogy, of festivities and partying,
because with the passage of time, an alternative must arise at some point:
instead of more and more people being present, a subtler form of sociability
limits attendance to special people, the people that matter. The logical
conclusion of this process is the single-person party, and the best
model for that is dreaming.
    In Patri’s dream the building on the Calle José Bonifacio was under
construction. Standing still yet seized by an interior, interstitial movement.
Suddenly a wind, a typical dream-wind, so typical that dreams might be
said to consist of it, arose and blew the building apart, reducing it to little
cubes the size of dice. This was the transition to the world of cartoons. The
building was reconstructed somewhere else, in another form, its atoms
recombined. Then it disintegrated again, the wind scattering its particles, one
of which came to rest on Patri’s open eye, and in its microscopic interior, an
entire house was visible, with all its rooms and furniture, its candelabras,
carpets, glassware, and the little golden mill that spins in the wind from the
stars.
    Two hours after going down, Elisa Vicuña came back up the stairs,
laden with bags full of shopping. The heat had not eased off in the least; on
the