LIVING WHIPS OF FIRE
And Other StoriesJune 2021Selected by Barbara Epler
César Aira’s The Divorce addresses the meaning (or the meaninglessness) of the hapless life of Enrique, a newly divorced father vacationing in Buenos Aires, and also the meaning of meaning itself (“why clocks had two hands, and some people stuttered, and Jupiter was bigger than Saturn”). Along the way, Enrique meets a talented video artist, the Hindu God Krishna, various challenges as well as Leticia, a girl now all grown up who he knew when he was at boarding school and with whom he fled a terrible fire that consumed the whole campus. Only Aira – who is a born arsonist of narrative expectations – could have lit up this scene, with its priests and moths. — Barbara Epler
To the puzzlement of the expert investigators called in by the insurance company, the fire began simultaneously at various places in the College, on different floors and in different wings of the building, which measured 100 metres across the façade and extended back almost as far, while the towers were 30 metres high. To left and right, up on the balconies and down in the basements, as if the whole College were one tightly packed bundle, wires ignited in a multiple magnetic surge, apparently caused by the overcharged atmosphere, and began to flail about like living whips of fire, striking at the parquetry floors, the wall panelling and the coffered ceilings. Like skilled gauchos, they lassoed armchairs and tables, slipped under the carpets and made them ripple, snapping at the bookshelves with their red-hot copper tips. Nothing flammable escaped contact with the black wires torn from their casings by the violence of the short circuit and animated by the violent metamorphosis of the fairy Electricity into the witch Spontaneous Combustion. It was a moonless midnight. All the lights had been switched off. Everyone was asleep. Unseen, in the dark, the erratic strokes of that hysterical scribbling set fire to everything. The darkness was divided into irregular hemispheres, with flashes of red against the persisting black. The lines became volumes, intangible and mobile, which started to race around, sliding over all the surfaces. The flames began to open doors. The smoke, wearing three-dimensional necklaces of sparks, surged into corridors and stairways. A number of the spot fires joined up before the alarm woke the sleepers. The sound of the burning was growing louder, like a beating of elytra and tambourines, or a million chicks marking microseconds. Enrique woke up in his dormitory, along with the other First House boys; they were already shouting and running around. He stumbled after them in a daze, without even managing to put on his slippers but knowing what was going on. Like all children he knew what a house fire was, although, in his short life, he had never experienced one. Of course it is one thing to know what a fire is, and another to find one actually happening. The group was moving like a breath expelled towards the door at one end of the room, although no one had told them to go that way and not the other. As he was about to pass through, Enrique turned back and saw the explanation: a huge fireball wobbling on the threshold at the far end of the dormitory. That was when he woke up properly. When he started running again, he found that he had been left behind. In a few steps he had caught up with the rest, but he broke away almost immediately. In that unplanned evacuation, the thousand boarders were simultaneously running further into the building and out of it; the College was beginning to reveal its strange reversibilities. Sleep was still present within each student. Disorientation was scaling new spatio-temporal heights. The lack of light didn’t help. Although the flames shone, the smoke was black, and images appeared disjointedly, on twisted, fleeting planes. Enrique found himself in one unfamiliar place after another; all he could do was keep moving, accelerating constantly. Running, running, faster and faster … ◉
César Aira’s novels – which he tends to publish at a rate of a handful or so a year – are seldom more than 100 pages. He has said that “the thicker a book is, the less literature it contains”.
Aira writes using a technique he calls the fuga hacia adelante (the flight forward), whereby he forbids himself from any rewriting.