Free The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira Page A

or
types or families or anything else. You could not take “a dog wagging his tail”
but rather “this” dog wagging his tail at a specific hour and minute of a
particular day, month, year, “this” particular instance of tail-wagging.
    It was the complete Encyclopedia of everything, not only
of the particular (the general was also included as a fact, made particular in
order to appear on the list, on the same level as everything else). Nothing less
than this would work. Because if the goal was to prevent from taking place an
event that the entire order of the Universe threatened to make happen, he had to
search through the farthest-flung folds of the Universe for every concomitant
fact.
    Granted, it would be impossible to compile such an
Encyclopedia. This is a typical divine idea. But the originality of Dr. Aira’s
idea resided precisely in the passage to the human along the road of
imperfection. He was not compiling it because he felt like it, or out of vanity,
or emulation, but rather due to an urgent practical necessity: to produce an
immediate and tangible result; and to do this, much less than perfection would
suffice (at least: could suffice). It wasn’t a question of giving the patient
perfect health but rather of extricating him from his death trance.
    Even so, it was a titanic task, for the listing of the
facts was merely the qualifying round before carrying out the operation itself:
the selection of the concomitant facts, those that have to be set aside in order
to create a provisional new Universe in which “something else” could happen and
not what was supposed to happen. By the way, these exclusions and the resulting
formation of a field that would serve as a different universe had an antecedent:
nothing less than the Novel itself. In fact, it could be said that to write a
novel one must make a list of particulars, then draw a line that leaves only
some of them “inside” and all the rest in an absent or virtual state. Which
constitutes a kind of exclusion sui generis. There are many things a novel does
not say, and this absence makes it possible for action to take place within its
restricted universe. Hence, the novel is also an antecedent of Miracles,
precisely because the events the novel recounts can happen as a result of what
it excludes. Admittedly, here we are not talking about Reality but rather its
Representation, but if the novel is good, if it is a work of art and not merely
entertainment, it takes on the weight of reality as well. Then the cliché that
states that a good novel is a true miracle becomes warranted.
    We have divided up the work (first, the identification of
all the facts, then the selection of the relevant ones) for the purpose of
clarifying the explanation. In practice, it was all done at the same time. So
that when Dr. Aira took off, he did so in a block, and his uncertainty included
everything.
    The foldout screen began to trace its white zigzag through
the inextricable confusion of everything.
    Yes . . . Indeed . . . The places it would have to pass
through would appear on their own, almost without searching for them. To speak
of a “search” was a contradiction in terms; as all places were being dealt with,
it was enough to encounter them. In any case, what had to be sought were the
paths that led through the overabundance of encounters. And within the action,
which had already begun, within the miracle of the action, he was already
dodging global cells, and in a matter of seconds he had become extremely busy.
The elements came, magnetized by the capricious laws of attraction as well as
the rigorous law of laws, and also by the lack or absence of any law. Hence, at
the precise moment the screen was initiating its trajectory, the first elements
appeared with clear outlines between which the lines of exclusion were drawn:
those initial elements were none other than journeys and displacements: comings
and goings in airplanes, taxis, shuttles, ships, subways, Ferris