Free The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by César Aira

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