A Brick Wall (2011)

César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews

from The Musical Brain and Other Stories (New Directions, 2015)

AS A KID, IN PRINGLES, I went to the movies a lot. Not every day, but I never saw fewer than four or five films a week. Four or six, I should say, because they were double features; two for the price of one, and everybody watched both films. On Sundays the whole family went to the afternoon session that started at five. There were two cinemas to choose from, with different programs. As I said, they were double bills: a B movie first, and then the main attraction (the “premiere,” though I don’t know why it was called that because they were all premieres for us). Sometimes, almost always in fact, I also went to the matinée session at one o’clock on Sunday, which was a double feature, too, intended for children, although back then they didn’t make movies specially for children, so they were westerns, adventure films, that sort of thing (and I got to see some serials, including, I remember, Fu Manchu and Zorro). A bit later on, when I was twelve, I started going in the evenings as well, on Saturdays (the movies were different) or Fridays (it was the same program as the afternoon session on Sundays, but since there were two cinemas . . .) or even on weekday nights. And at some point one of the cinemas started continuous screenings of Argentine films on Tuesdays, all afternoon. How many movies would I have seen? Calculating like this is a bit silly, but four a week makes two hundred a year, at least, and if I kept going that often from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, that makes two thousand movies. It’s even sillier to take the calculation to its ultimate conclusion: two thousand movies at an hour and a half each makes three thousand hours, or a hundred and twenty-five days, that is, four long months of uninterrupted viewing. Four months. A span like that is more concrete than a bare number, but it has the disadvantage of suggesting one excruciatingly long film, when in fact there were two thousand of them, each one unique, spaced out through a long childhood and adolescence, anxiously awaited, then criticized, compared, retold, and remembered. Above all remembered: hoarded like the manifold treasure they were. I can testify to this because those two thousand movies are still alive in me, living a strange life made up of resurrections and apparitions, like ghost stories.

People have often complimented me on my memory, or been amazed by the detail with which I remember conversations or events or books (or movies) from forty or fifty years ago. But the admiration or criticism of others is immaterial, because nobody else can really know what you remember or how you remember it.

It was precisely for that reason (because if I don’t do it, no one else will), rather than as a remedy against “the tedium of hotel life,” that I began to write this account of a curious incident that occurred last night in connection with a movie. I should point out that I’m in Pringles, in a hotel. It’s the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel in my hometown. I came back to see my mother, who has had a fall and is confined to bed, and I’ve found a place on the Avenida because her little apartment is occupied by companions who are looking after her. Last night, as I was flipping through TV channels, I came across an old black-and-white English film (the steering wheels were on the right), which had started but only just (for a seasoned cinephile, a couple of shots are enough to identify the opening scenes of a film). There was something familiar about it, and when, after a few seconds, I saw George Sanders, my suspicions were confirmed: it was Village of the Damned, which I’d seen fifty years earlier, right here in Pringles, two hundred yards from the hotel where I’m staying, at the Cinema San Martín, which no longer exists. I hadn’t seen the movie since, but it was very clear in my mind. Coming across it like that, without warning, was serendipitous. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a film that I remembered from childhood on television or video. But this time it was special, maybe because I was seeing it in Pringles.

The movie, as any buff will know (it’s a minor classic), is about a village that is paralyzed by an unknown force: one day all its inhabitants fall asleep; when they wake up, the women are pregnant, and nine months later they give birth. Ten years pass, and the children begin to demonstrate their terrifying powers. They are all very similar: blond, cold, self-assured. They dress very formally, stick together, and never mix with the other kids. Their eyes light up like little electric lamps and give them the power to dominate the will of the man or woman on whom they fix their gaze. They have no qualms about exercising this domination in the most drastic manner. A man with a shotgun is watching them; using telepathy, they force him to put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and blow his brains out.

George Sanders, who is the “father” of one of these children, realizes what is going on; his observations lead him to conclude that there is only one solution: to eliminate them. Meanwhile, the children make no secret of their intention to take over the world and annihilate the human race. As they grow, their powers increase. Soon they will be invulnerable; they almost are already, because they can read thoughts and anticipate any attack. (There was a similar case in Russia, which the Soviet authorities dealt with in their own way, killing the evil children along with the rest of the local population by carpet-bombing the village concerned.)

The protagonist is at home, wondering what to do. Or rather, how to do it. He knows that any plan he adopts will be present in his mind, which means that it will be visible to the children as soon as he approaches them. He tells himself that he will have to put a solid wall between him and them . . . As he says this, he is looking at the wall of his living room, next to the fireplace, which is covered with fake bricks. He murmurs: “A brick wall . . .”

At this point the camera follows his gaze and focuses on the brick wall for a moment. This fixed shot of a brick wall, with the voice off camera saying “A brick wall” was what fascinated me. In the movies I used to watch back then in Pringles, every image, every word, every gesture had meaning. A look, a silence, an almost imperceptible delay revealed betrayal or love or the existence of a secret. A mere cough could mean that a character would die or come to the brink of death, although she had seemed perfectly healthy up till then. My friends and I had become experts in deciphering that perfect economy of signs. It seemed perfect to us anyway, in contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality. Everything was a clue, a lead. Movies, whatever their genre, were really all detective stories. Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without significance. In the movies, however, everything was invested with meaning, forming a compact mass that captivated us. To us, it seemed like a super-reality, or, rather, reality itself seemed diffuse, disorganized, deprived of that rare, elegant concision that was the secret of cinema.

So that “brick wall” prefigured the idea that would be used to save the world from the impending threat. But for the moment no one knew what the idea might be, and it was impossible to know. The wall wasn’t easy to decode, like an actor’s cough or the close-up of a sidelong glance. In fact, not even the character knew: for him the idea was still at the metaphorical stage. In order to carry out an effective attack on the diabolical children, he had to put a barrier between himself and them that would be impenetrable to telepathy, and the image that came to mind as a representation of that barrier was a brick wall. He could have chosen a different metaphor: “a steel plate,” “a rock,” “the Great Wall of China” . . . His choice must have been determined by the fact that there was a brick wall right in front of him. But despite its visible materiality, the wall was still a metaphor. The children would surely have been able to read thoughts through walls, so a literal wall was not the solution. He was referring to something else, and that gave the shot a disturbing negativity, which made it unforgettable.

A brick wall . . . the expression went on resonating.

I’m not the only admirer of this film, and I certainly didn’t discover it as a cult classic. Nevertheless, I can claim a certain priority, since I saw it when it premiered. That was two or three years after it first came out, as was usually the case in Pringles, but it was still a “premiere” movie, and I was part of the target audience, who watched it without the distance introduced by cinephilia and historical perspective. We were cinephilia and history, both of which I would eventually convert into intellectual pursuits.

And there was something more: I was the same age as the children in the film. I probably tried to make my eyes light up with that electric gleam, to see if I could read people’s minds. And Pringles was a small town, not as small as the one in the film, but small enough to suffer a “damnation” of that kind. For example, the mysterious paralysis of the opening scenes: our town was often empty and silent, as if everyone had died or left, during the siesta, say, or on a Sunday, or any day, really, at any time.

Still, I don’t think anyone in the capacity audience at the Cinema San Martín on that Sunday long ago would have made the connection between the two towns and the two damnations. Not because there were no intelligent and cultivated individuals among the inhabitants of Pringles back then, but because of a certain decorous restraint, prevalent in those bygone days, which kept people well away from meanings and interpretations. Cinema was an elaborate and gratuitous artistic fantasy, nothing more. I don’t mean that we were consummate aesthetes; we didn’t need to be.

The priority that I mentioned owes less to these chance coincidences than to the fact that between my first and second viewings of the film, I accompanied its transformation from commercial product for a general public (that is, for the public, period) to cult object for an enlightened elite. And it was accompaniment in the fullest sense of the word: I was personally converted from public to elite. My life and Village of the Damned have followed the same path of subtle transformation, changing without having changed.

I suppose the same thing happened with the rest of the two thousand movies I saw in those years: the good and the bad, the forgotten and the rediscovered. It must have happened even with the classics, the great films that make it into Top Ten lists. They all crossed over from directness to indirectness, or withdrew to a distance, which is logical and inevitable, given the passing of time. Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which I also saw at the Cinema San Martín in, I’m guessing, 1960 or ’61 (the film dates from 1959), is a case in point. In Argentina it was called Intriga internacional, or International Intrigue, and I probably didn’t find out what it was called in English until twenty years later, when I began to read books about Hitchcock and think about his work in the light of my intellectual concerns. Perhaps because the original title is abstract, or because of the way the translation resonates for me, I still think of it as International Intrigue, though I know it’s rather absurd; the translations of film titles were often ridiculously inappropriate in those days, and they’ve since become a source of jokes.

Few other films, none perhaps, made such an impression on Miguel and me. Miguel López was my best friend in early childhood, and as it turns out—another coincidence, though not a happy one—he died yesterday. They announced it on the local radio, and I heard only because I was in Pringles, otherwise it would have taken me months or years to find out, if I ever did. No one would have thought to tell me: we hadn’t seen each other for decades; there weren’t many people left who remembered that we’d been childhood friends; and here in town it’s generally assumed that the locals have already heard and outsiders wouldn’t care.

And yet, up till the age of eleven or twelve, we were inseparable. He was my first friend, almost like the big brother I never had. He was two years older than me, an only child, and lived across the road. Since we used to play in the street, or in the vacant lots between the houses, I’m guessing that our adventures began as soon as I could exercise a minimal autonomy, at the age of three or four. From a very early age, we became serious movie fans. So did all the other kids we knew, inevitably: the movies were our major source of entertainment, the big outing, the luxury at our disposal. But Miguel and I took it further: we played at cinema, “acting out” whole movies, reinventing them, using them as material for the creation of games. I was the brains, naturally, but Miguel followed me and egged me on, demanding more brains: being a physical, histrionic sort of boy, he needed a script. I greedily consumed the inspiration that each new movie gave me. International Intrigue was a great inspiration, and more than that. I’d almost go so far as to say that we made something out of that film that encompassed our whole childhood, or what was left of it.

I couldn’t say just what it was about International Intrigue that made such an impression. Our enthusiasm was pure and simple, without a trace of snobbery or prejudice: we didn’t even know who Hitchcock was (or maybe we did, but it made no difference), and it can’t have been just because the film was about spies and adventure, because we saw films like that every Sunday. Any hypothesis I hazard now is bound to be contaminated by everything I’ve read about Hitchcock and the ideas I’ve had about his work. Recently someone was asking about my tastes and preferences, and when he came to cinema and my favorite director, he anticipated my response: Hitchcock? I said yes. It wasn’t hard to guess. (I’m one of those people who can’t imagine anyone having a favorite director other than Hitchcock.) I said I’d be more impressed by his perspicacity if he guessed (or deduced) my favorite Hitchcock film. He thought for a moment and then confidently proposed North by Northwest. This left me wondering what kind of visible affinity there might be between North by Northwest and me. It’s a famously empty film, a virtuosic exercise in emptying the spy film and the thriller of all conventional contents. Thanks to the bungling of hopelessly incompetent bad guys, an innocent man finds himself caught up in a conspiracy without an object, and as the action unfolds, all he does is stay alive, without understanding what’s going on. The form that encloses this emptiness could not be more perfect, because it’s nothing more than form, in other words, it doesn’t have to share its quality with any content.

That must have been what fascinated us. The elegance. The irony. Although we didn’t know it at the time. Why would we have needed to know?

My earliest memory of Miguel dates back to when I was six: between a week and two weeks after my sixth birthday. The reason I can be so precise is that my birthday is near the end of February, and the school year begins at the start of March, and this happened on the first day of school. It was my first day ever (there was no preschool in Pringles back then), and my parents were taking it all very seriously. The teacher had given us homework, practicing downstrokes or something like that. After class, or maybe the next morning, they sat me down at a desk in a room facing onto the street, with my exercise book and pencil . . . Just then, Miguel’s face appeared at the window, as it always did when he came to fetch me so we could go and play. It was quite a high window, but he had worked out how to jump up; he was very strong and agile (there was something feline about him), and tall for his age. My father went to the window and sent him packing: I had work to do, I had responsibilities, my days of going out to play at all hours were over . . . He didn’t say it in so many words, but that was what he meant. And there was something more as well, beneath (or above) the words he did say: I was beginning the middle-class journey that would turn me into a professional, and indiscriminate fraternizing with the kids on the street was no longer appropriate (Miguel was very poor—he lived with his parents in a single room in a sort of tenement). The second part of the prophecy was not fulfilled, because we went on being inseparable friends all through primary school, and the time I spent playing was hardly reduced because, given my natural brilliance, I could finish my homework in a flash and didn’t need to go over my lessons.

I don’t need to be reminded that every memory is a screen. Who knows what this memory—one of my earliest—conceals. It has been with me, perfectly vivid, all these fifty-six years, and, within it, Miguel’s round smiling face on the other side of the glass. He wasn’t offended by my father’s abruptness; he just dropped back to the ground. And I wasn’t bothered either; no doubt I was fascinated by the novelty of the exercise book and the pencil, and pleased, perhaps, by the fuss being made of me at home, and convinced, deep down, that I’d be able to go on playing in the street as much as I liked, because, timid and unassuming as I am, I’ve always ended up getting my own way.

It’s strange: in the days that have followed Miguel’s death, that fleeting vision of his face in the window has seemed like the last time I saw him: a farewell. Strange, because it wasn’t the last time but the first. Although not really: it’s just the first sight of him I remember. That’s what I had in mind when I began to recount this memory. The reason my parents and I were so quick to interpret his presence was that he came to fetch me every day. That first memory, while still the first, is also a memory of what happened before, of what has been forgotten. Forgetting stretches away, before and after; my memory of the first day of school is a tiny, solitary island. There are a few other childhood memories, also discrete and isolated, erratic and inexplicable. Nevertheless, I treasure them, and I’m thankful for the screening mechanism that has preserved them for me. All the rest has been lost. This so-called “infantile amnesia,” the total oblivion that swallows up the first years of our lives, is a remarkable phenomenon, and has been explained and understood in various ways. Personally, I subscribe to Dr. Schachtel’s explanation, which runs, in essence, as follows:

Small children lack linguistic or cultural frames to put around their perceptions. Reality enters them torrentially, without passing through the schematizing filters of words and concepts. Gradually they incorporate the frames, and the reality that they experience is stereotyped accordingly, becoming linguistic and therefore retrievable in so far as it has adapted itself to being consciously recorded. That initial phase of immersion in brute reality is totally lost, because things and sensations have no limits or set formats. The immediate absorption of reality, which mystics and poets strive for in vain, is what children do every day. Everything after that is inevitably an impoverishment. Our new capacities come at a cost. We need to impoverish and schematize in order to keep a record, otherwise we’d be living in a perpetual present, which would be completely impractical. Even so, it’s sad to realize how much has been lost: not only the capacity to absorb the world in its fullness, with all its riches and nuances, but also the material absorbed during that phase, a treasure that has vanished because it wasn’t stored away in retrievable frames.

Dr. Schachtel’s book, so persuasive in its dry, scientific eloquence, avoids what, in this context, could only be a false poetry. It also avoids giving examples, which would lead inevitably to poetic falsification. Poetry is made of words, and every word in a poem is an example of that particular word in its everyday use. To give a truly adequate example, every word would have to be accompanied by a chaotic enumeration encompassing, or at least suggesting, the entire universe. We see a bird flying, and at once the adult mind says “bird.” The child, by contrast, sees something that not only does not have a name but is not even a nameless thing: it is (although the verb to be should be used with caution here) a limitless continuum involving the air, the trees, the time of day, movement, temperature, the mother’s voice, the color of the sky, almost everything. The same goes for all objects and events, or what we call objects and events. It could almost be an artistic project, or the model or matrix from which all artistic projects are derived. What’s more, when thought attempts to examine its own roots, perhaps it is trying, unwittingly, to return to a time before it existed, or at least trying to dismantle itself piece by piece, to see what riches it conceals.

This would change the meaning of nostalgia for the “green paradise” of childhood: perhaps the object of longing is not so much (or not at all) an innocent state of nature, but an incomparably richer, more subtle and developed intellectual life.

It is my belief that all the lost memories of my early years are recorded in the two thousand films I saw in that time. I will try to illuminate the nature of that vast archive by describing an invention that Miguel and I came up with. I said that North by Northwest—or International Intrigue, as we knew it—made an impression on us, no more perhaps than many other films, but in a different way. The day after seeing it, we decided to create a secret society dedicated to international intrigue. Now that I think of it, the sound of those two words might have been what triggered our initiative: intrigue, an intriguing word in itself, which could refer to just about anything; and international, indicating importance, the world beyond Pringles. Without secrecy, of course, there would have been no point. Secrecy was at the center of it all.

We were possessed of the easiest and safest means of keeping secrets, simply by being children and letting the adults think, rightly, that there was no need to investigate our games because they belonged to a sphere apart, separate from their reality. We must have known—it was obvious—that nothing we could do would be of the slightest interest to adults, which devalued our secrecy. In order for a secret to be a secret, it had to kept from someone. Since we had no one else, we would have to keep it from ourselves. We had to find a way to split ourselves in two, but that was not impossible in the world of play.

We named our society the “ISI” (for International Secret Intrigue), and its operations began immediately. The principle rule, as I said, was secrecy. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other about the ISI; I wasn’t supposed to find out that Miguel was a member, and vice versa. Communication was to take place via anonymous written messages placed in a “letter box” to be agreed upon. We agreed that it would be one of the cracks in the wooden door of a derelict house on a corner. Once we had established these rules, we pretended to have forgotten all about the ISI and started playing another game, although our heads were buzzing with plans for conspiracies, investigations, and stunning revelations, which we were scripting in advance. Both of us were itching to go home and write the first message, but we had to hide our impatience, so we went on playing more and more distractedly as the texts took shape in our heads, until nightfall. Only then, with some plausible excuse (“I have to do my homework” or “I have to have a bath”), did we go our separate ways.

The rules, as you can see, were purely formal. We didn’t worry about the content: it would take care of itself. And as it turned out, there was no shortage of material. On the contrary, there was an excess. Writing and drawings filled up the sheets of paper; sometimes we needed two, and the folded wad was so thick we had trouble wedging it into the crack. We tore pages from our school exercise books: it was the only paper we had, and in those days of abundance they made it thick and tough to resist the assault of erasers. We learned the art of folding, and may even have discovered for ourselves that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than nine times.

What did we write? I can’t remember how we began, no doubt by inventing some imminent danger, or giving each other instructions for saving the world, or indicating the enemy’s whereabouts. It became more intense when we started accusing each other of blunders, denunciations, and betrayals, or simply of being dangerous enemy agents who had infiltrated the ranks of the ISI. Threats and death sentences were frequent. Meanwhile, we went on playing together, going to the movies, building tree houses, organizing stone-throwing battles in the vacant lot opposite the school (this dangerous game was a favorite among the local kids), and doing target practice with our slingshots. We never mentioned the ISI, of course. We were leading parallel lives. And we didn’t have to pretend; it was something that came naturally. We had split ourselves in two.

Children quickly tire of games, and we were no exception. Even the games that excited us most were abandoned after a few days. The ISI lasted because of its peculiar format, though I’m not sure whether it was the splitting or the secret that made the difference. I should say that it wasn’t entirely exempt from the general tendency, and the initial frenzy died away after a week or two, but the system of written communication guaranteed a continuity that was, in a way, independent of us.

We started forgetting to go to the old red door to see if there was a new message, and if by chance I passed and saw a folded sheet of white paper wedged into the crack, I would pull it out, only to discover, more often than not, that it was my last message, written and left there so long ago I couldn’t remember what it said, so I would read it with interest before putting it back.

Or else the old message would be from Miguel. In any case, all the workings of the game would come rushing back into consciousness, and arouse a real enthusiasm in me (or him), a feeling of responsibility and loyalty, and admiration for the mind (whose mind?) that had invented such a brilliant source of fun. Development is rapid at that age, and although we were still children, we regarded the already distant creators of the ISI as infants with scant intellectual resources and were amazed by their precociousness; we couldn’t have come up with it, in spite of our age and education. We couldn’t believe it, our past selves seemed so remote and primitive . . . Nevertheless, we’d quickly write a reply, of course, whichever one of us it was, pleased to have the chance to display what we had learned in the meantime. We’d put it into the crack, and for a day or two, we’d go back every half hour to see if there was a response, not realizing that the ISI was as far from the other player’s mind as it had been from mine or Miguel’s before he or I happened to see the message. And this preoccupation would soon be displaced by others and lapse into oblivion.

It’s no exaggeration to say that these interruptions became extremely long. It was as if they corresponded to successive phases of our lives, as if all the body’s cells had to be replaced before one of us could pass the peeling, weather-beaten door, notice a thin white strip in one of its cracks, and ask himself what it might be. Say it was me. Out of pure idle curiosity, and only because I wasn’t in a hurry, I’d pull it out, with difficulty, because time and rain had lodged it firmly. It was a ragged, discolored wad of paper. It came apart along the creases when it was unfolded. There was something written on it, the ink had faded and run, but the message was still legible; the handwriting was childish, interspersed with maps and sketches, and warnings in stern capitals, with underlinings and exclamation marks. For a moment, and this would provoke a certain flutter of excitement, there seemed to be a possibility that it was about something serious like a kidnapping or a denunciation . . . In that case, it would have to be shown to the police. But no, it was too absurd. And suddenly the memory would return, as if from very far away: The ISI! The dear old ISI . . . That game we invented . . . So many memories, so much nostalgia! But then I’d think: It’s my turn to reply. He’ll be so surprised to find that I’m still checking up, still ready to play!

Could it be true, as I seem to remember, that this scenario was repeated over and over? Maybe I’m mistaken. If it had really happened like that, my childhood, and Miguel’s, would have lasted thousands of years, and we’d still be alive today.