How I Became a Nun by César Aira

Author:César Aira
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 0811216314
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

WINTER CAME, AND MOM began to take in ironing. We spent the interminable evenings inside, listening to the radio, Mom bending over the steaming cloth, me staring at my exercise book, and both of us miles away, our souls meandering in the strangest places. We had adopted an invariable routine. In the morning I went with her to the stores, we had lunch early, she took me to school, came to pick me up at five, and then we stayed in for the rest of the evening. Lured by the radio, we lost ourselves in a labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step.

Everything in this story I am telling is guaranteed by my perfect memory. My memory has stored away each passing instant. And the eternal instants too, the ones that didn’t pass, enclosing the others in their golden capsules. And the instants that were repeated, which of course were the majority.

But my memory merges with the radio. Or rather: I am the radio. Thanks to the faultless perfection of my memory, I am the radio of that winter. Not the receiver, the device, but what came out of it, the broadcast, the continuity, what was being transmitted, even when we switched it off, even when I was asleep or at school. My memory contains it all, but the radio is a memory that contains itself and I am the radio.

Life without the radio was inconceivable for me. What happens, if you decide to define life as radio (which, as an intellectual exercise, is not entirely without merit), is that it automatically produces a sustaining plenitude. It was important for Mom as well, it was company … Remember that the disaster had befallen us immediately after our move to Rosario, where we had neither relatives nor friends. And the circumstances were not ideal for making new friends, so Mom was all alone in the world … She had her daughter, of course, but even though I was everything to her, that wasn’t much. She was a sociable woman who loved to chat … So she got to know people in the end, without having to make a particular effort: storekeepers, neighbors, people she did ironing for. They were all keen to hear the story of her recent misfortune, which she told over and over … She repeated herself a bit, but that was only natural. Society was destined to absorb her life again; that winter was a mere interlude … The radio fulfilled a function. In her case it was instrumental: it gathered her scattered parts, it reassembled her identity as woman and housewife … By contrast I achieved a complete identification with the voices in the ether … I embodied them.

Those evenings, those nights in fact, for it grew dark very early, especially in our room, had an atmosphere of shelter and refuge, which was intensely enjoyable, especially for me, I’m not sure why. They were a kind of paradise, which, like all cut-price paradises, had an infernal side.

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