Living on the Edge

by

Nicki Leone

I have an irrational fear of heights; or not heights, exactly, but open high places.  I’m fine in airplanes and glassed-in skyscrapers, but shaky near cliffs and ledges and railings. Looking out over the ocean of empty air and down, down to the far away ground sets the adrenalin rushing through my veins until I feel awash in the prickly, cold sensation of alarm and fright. So perhaps it’s not that I’m afraid of heights, but of standing on the edges of them. I can never shake the thought that the only thing between me and stepping off into oblivion is the fact that I haven’t taken that step. 

I am so over-sensitive to this . . . potential for disaster . . . that not only do I have trouble on all ledges, balconies, cliffs, roofs and high ladders I can’t even watch other people at the edges of high places. I feel faint when I see someone perching on a railing or leaning over a balcony even a single storey up. I couldn’t even look at those old photographs of construction workers seated on steel girders in the middle of the sky—New York City spread out behind them far below—until someone told me that all those photos had been taken with safety nets spread, unseen, just below the camera shot. (If this isn’t the case, don’t enlighten me. I prefer to remain deluded.)

Of course, what frightens us fascinates us, which is no doubt why I found César Aira’s short novel Ghosts so eerie and compelling. It is a story set in world of edges and cliffs and jumping off points.

Ghosts takes place over the course of a single day at the site of a half-finished apartment building in Buenos Aires. It is, in fact, the last day of the year, and the future owners of the incomplete condominiums have come by to meet with the developer, take stock of their future new homes and take measurements for their future new carpets and drapes. While the owners are meeting, the construction workers are winding up their half-day of work and looking forward to lunch and an extended siesta. On the top floor of the complex, the family of the night watchman stays out of the way of the hubbub in a temporary make-shift apartment they have occupied while construction continues. The children of the family play in the empty, wall-less rooms on the upper floors, racing their plastic toy cars and inventing elaborate games of hide and seek. Floating along between floors and ceilings, hovering like half-filled helium balloons, are the ghosts that haunt the building site. Although “haunt” doesn’t really describe it—“haunt” implies something menacing, scary. These ghosts (all men, all naked, all covered in the same cement dust that coats everything else at the building site) don’t seem to do much of anything except float and grumble to themselves. They are unseen by the developer and condo owners, and seen but ignored by the construction workers and the children—who seem to accept their presence in the same way that New Yorkers accept the existence of pigeons. 

And that is the sum total of the book. A single ordinary day among very ordinary people. Even the ghosts are ordinary—so ordinary that we never wonder why they are there, or who they are, or why they are naked. Ghosts is the kind of story, one might say, where nothing really happens—if it weren’t for the fact that after a mere thirty pages you feel like everything is happening, all the time. A simple trip to the local supermarket, made by one of the young men at the construction site to get the supplies for that day’s lunch, is nearly an epic saga in its beauty and detail and sharp psychological bite: the boy is a teenager so he eschews using a cart, and prefers to carry his groceries in his arms because it seems “cooler.”  Of course it just makes things awkward and tiring for him. But we all know that for teenagers image is everything. The boy shuffles along, his arms full of frozen pork ribs, over-ripe fruit and loaves of bread. He stands wistfully in front of the ice-cream cooler but there’s no point in actually getting any—it would melt before he got to the cash register—which is a long ways away. The line is very, very long and it isn’t moving quickly because there is only one incompetent cashier. The supermarket is “part of a chain that belonged to an evangelical sect; you could tell by the lack of business sense.” He meets his aunt, who hands him a bottle of bleach she has picked up on a whim and asks him to buy it so she won’t have to stand in line. So now he must shuffle along, arms full of bread and frozen meat, pushing the bottle of bleach along the floor with his foot. This pretty much destroys any hope he has of looking cool for the girls. 

Our lives are full of small agonizing dramas like this one, are they not? The boy’s dilemma is pathetic but utterly familiar. Indeed, I’d say that Aira has an excellent sense of the beauty to be found in the pathos of the ordinary. But what moves Ghosts from a short series of poignant character sketches to something more strange and wonderful is the other story, the one that is being whispered in the background as we read about Abel (the boy), about Felix Tello, the developer, Raúl Viñas (the night watchman) and Elisa Vicuña (his wife) and especially Patri, their intelligent but frivolous, bored daughter. The sketches of these people are about what is. But the background story is about what is still to come. What will this empty, half-finished building become? What will the wall-less, windowless rooms become? What will Raúl and Elisa become when the job is done and they must move? What will become of Patri? Every direction one looks from their sky-high apartment on the unfinished sixth floor one sees the vast, unbroken expanse of possibility, or emptiness.

Ghosts seems to play in this brief moment between what is, and what could be. The novel is filled with dualities and juxtapositions: the wealthy owners and poor workers, the Argentinean landlords and the Chilean immigrants, the young children running wild and the tired adults ready for their siesta. Patri is especially poised in the in-between state of existence. At fifteen, she is no longer a child—she helps her mother with chores and with taking care of her younger brothers and sisters. She is no virgin. But she is not quite realized as a woman. She has no lover, no husband, no one she wants to marry. Her mother and aunts keep advising her to find a “real man” which is ironic because the men Patri sees most often are the ghosts that haunt the building. The male ghosts. The naked male ghosts. Patri doesn’t find them frightening. She also doesn’t find them impressive. Neither attracted nor repulsed, she lived poised on the edge of maturity. Woman and not quite woman. Finished and the unfinished. The built and the unbuilt.

In the world of the apartment building, everyone lives only steps away from a completely different state of existence. The visiting owners seems to feel this instinctively and nervously keep their children away from the open, unguarded edges of every floor. Elisa and Raul’s children ignore the edges and so do Elisa and Raul since, in their pragmatic way they note that adults were “just as likely to fall as a child; there was no difference, because the planet’s gravitational force worked the same way on both.” In other words, no one was going to fall, unless one deliberately chose to step off the edge.

And there was that feeling in me again—that irrational fear that disaster was only a step—a deliberate step—in a certain direction.

César Aira has been called “avant-garde,” a term which when applied to art and literature means pushing beyond conventional boundaries, but which Aira himself points out in various interviews (1) is actually a military term (“advanced guard”) for the elite company that would clear the way for the regular army. It is a destructive force, not a constructive one. Aira prefers to think of himself as a builder, not a destroyer. He writes, he says, a page or two every day—never writing himself out but always leaving something for the next day. (He claims he got this notion from Hemingway). And because he never goes back to edit what he has already done, Aira  writes in what he calls fuga hacia adelante or “flight forward”—a kind of continuum where he is constantly writing himself out of the situations he has written himself into.

Perhaps this is why his stories are usually short (for how could anyone keep that process up for any length of time?) and why they seem to gather focus and momentum as they progress. The sedate feeling of the morning meeting of the owners—complacent in their plans for their future homes gives way to uneasy, restless motion as the day goes on and the heat climbs. First in the frenetic playfulness of the children, (all children love a construction site), and then in Elisa’s and Patri’s own restless discontent, until finally even the ghosts—to which we’ve given barely a thought all day because they just aren’t very interesting—even they start to rise and rush.

I was mesmerized by Aira’s vivid, painterly descriptions of the skeleton-like building and the way the light moved across its unfinished concrete floors as the sun rose, then fell into dusk. I think I was also mesmerized by that imagined view of Buenos Ares from the edge of an unfinished, six storey building. I was diverted by his frequent dreamy musings on the nature of the what is finished and what is not—placed unapologetically into the heads of construction workers and flighty young girls who have no business losing themselves in philosophical contemplations about the nature of tribal architecture and anthropological research (and yes, Patri has a dream about just these unlikely things). It isn’t a linear story by any means—the only sense of progress comes from the changing light as the sun runs its course over head, and the changing behavior of the ghosts, who get more and more restless as dusk falls, and midnight approaches. It isn’t until evening, when the scorching heat of the day is finally dissipating and the night manager’s family is getting ready to celebrate the incoming New Year that the ghosts do something more than drift. And then, the only thing they do is speak to Patri, to invite her to their own New Year’s Eve party.

Of course, the only way she can attend is to be dead.

Books mentioned in this column:
Ghosts by César Aira (New Directions, 2009)

1) 1) “César Aira” by María Moreno, Bomb Magazine , Issue 106 Winter 2009