Free The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by César Aira Page 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