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

with magnificent parties held at castles along
the way, attended by the local aristocrats and dignitaries. Coaches, berlins, carts,
and sleds were left in Kiev, and the voyage continued over the water: eighty
luxuriously fitted-out ships set off on the Dnieper, and this was the moment that
had been captured by the napkin: the tsarina in the flagship, surrounded by the
ambassadors of all the European powers, and Potemkin at the prow, making sure that
the grand spectacle that he had orchestrated was going according to plan. (He had
lost an eye in a brawl with the brothers Ostrov, who were also among Catherine’s
lovers.) It was all his creation: the prosperous cities they could see on the
riverbanks, thrown up overnight to be displayed to the visitors; the plump,
multitudinous cattle, brought in specially; the contented peasants cheering the
tsarina, in reality a corps of carefully instructed extras. In the diplomatic
reports that were later sent to various courts, it was clear that none of the
ambassadors were entirely convinced by this playacting, but all admired the industry
of the favorite who, in a few short months, had mocked up an entire country from
scratch. The leap from the legendary tsarina to the delightful little girl had
traversed every kind of representation. The minuscule diorama, treated with a regal
indifference, began to unfold as soon as she touched it, and by the time she reached
her mother’s table, after making all manner of unnecessary detours and digressions
with her new treasure on display, the destruction was almost complete: the queen was
sinking into the waves of the river; the courtiers and ambassadors were collapsing
onto each other in an involuntary orgy; Potemkin was on top of a church tower,
standing on his head; and the ship looked like a bicycle. The ruin, reverting to the
condition of a crumpled napkin, sank in a puddle of Coca-Cola, and the little girl
ran to the other end of the café. A bespectacled youth had set aside his laptop for
a moment to join in the folding game, and was offering her a paper version of
Rodin’s
Thinker
(if the almost impalpable material of the cheap napkins in
those metal dispensers can be dignified with the name of paper). She greeted it with
her indiscriminate trilling and laughter, although, for a child of her age, it was
hardly an appropriate toy. It was probably the only thing that the youth had learned
how to make by folding paper. Or perhaps he had once made other things, but this was
the one that had turned out best, and from then on he had specialized. Or perhaps,
as his use of a computer suggested, he was committed to going paperless and saving
the planet’s forests. If he’d made an exception in this case, it was because he
wanted to take part in the competition along with all the others and not be left
behind; to insist on saving a tiny napkin made of the lightest paper would clearly
have been a symptom of the fanatical rigidity that discredits a good cause. But
there was something else, which had to do, precisely, with
The Thinker
. The
only paper-saving that made sense was the kind that depended on mental work, on
concentration (so finely represented by Rodin’s masterpiece), which enabled a
thinker to skip the intermediate steps, and thus avoid the need to waste reams of
paper on those rough drafts, the works of the philosophers. The girl was a stranger
to philosophies and concentration, and all she could recognize was a human figure,
which she cradled in her arms, singing a simplified lullaby. The customers smiled as
she went past their tables, and there was perhaps—or almost certainly—an
element of vindictive pleasure in the smiles of those who had inwardly condemned the
gift as inappropriate, a form of cultural showing-off quite out of place in that
context. The next object the little girl received (folded by a priest in a break
from his conversation with two contractors about an extension to the parish soup
kitchen) seemed to have been