César Aira's Magic
How the eccentric Argentine author took over Latin American literature.
APRIL 30, 2024
It was the end of 2002, and Michael Gaeb had just founded his literary agency. He was 29 years old and had traveled from Berlin, where he still lives, to Guadalajara, Mexico, to visit one of the major Latin American book fairs. The first morning of the event, as he walked around the stands at random, the cover of a book drew his attention. It showed a man in a kepi and overcoat sitting on the bank of a river. The man was concentrating on painting a canvas amid rocks and dense vegetation. Behind him, a peasant in a hat stood observing him.
Gaeb recognized the painting, a work by François Mathurin Adalbert, Baron de Courcy. It depicts Johann Moritz Rugendas, a 19th-century Bavarian artist known for his travels through the Latin American continent. The book, Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter), was signed by César Aira, an Argentine author Gaeb had never heard of.
That night in the hotel, before going out to a party, Gaeb read the novel, which is very short, with a feverish intensity. It recounts the journey Rugendas and his colleague Robert Krause attempt to make from the Andes to Buenos Aires, passing through Mendoza and the Argentine Pampas. The protagonist is driven by the explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s idea of a supposed “physiognomy of nature,” the fusion of art and science in an ideal totality. He is convinced that only in the vastness of the Southern Cone lowlands will he achieve the inspiration necessary for his paintings. There, he suffers a traumatic accident and is disfigured. Addicted to morphine and subject to hallucinations, Rugendas gets drawn into a pitched battle between ranch owners and an Indigenous tribe.
“It’s a more conventional book by the standards of César’s literature,” Gaeb told me in late November, when we spoke over Zoom. In fact, the density of reflections (about art, about travel, about art made during travel) and the mad dash of the plot would sound excessive for anyone but Aira, whose small surrealist books shift atmosphere, and sometimes even genre, from one page to another. Gaeb was enchanted. He contacted the editor of the book, who gave him the author’s telephone number. The negotiation was swift and amicable, and Gaeb became Aira’s agent outside of Argentina.
A few years ago, when Patti Smith played at a cultural festival in Denmark, the organizer of the event confided to Gaeb that Smith had only agreed to perform because Aira would be there.
With the fair over and the contract signed, Gaeb traveled to Xalapa to visit the Mexican author Sergio Pitol, who until then had been Gaeb’s only Latin American client. “César is a genius, Michael!” Pitol told him. Pitol and Aira had met a few years earlier in Venezuela, also at a literary fair, the same one that inspired Aira’s 1997 novel El congreso de literatura (The Literary Conference), which is now one of the Argentine author’s most famous books. In that story, a translator who is also a mad inventor, a kind of alter ego of Aira, heads to a book fair in Venezuela and tries, among other things, to resume a past love story and to achieve world domination by enlisting an army of clones of the writer Carlos Fuentes. An error in the cloning process results in a catastrophe with giant blue worms.
Borrowing Pitol’s copies of Aira’s books, Gaeb familiarized himself with the Airean universe and began to try to sell him. In around six months he managed to sell the rights to An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter in seven languages. The other books, however, took longer to catch on. “I realized that the fundamental problem when promoting César’s work is that the editor always asks: ‘What is the novel about?’” Gaeb said. “And in the case of César, it’s not easy to answer that question.” In 2007, Gaeb decided to change his approach. He produced a 40-page booklet titled How To Read and Publish César Aira. The booklet includes translated excerpts from three of the author’s novels, each with a very different style, and a short essay written by Gaeb himself. “That was when things took off,” he said.
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Today, Aira has been translated into 37 languages. A few years ago, when Patti Smith played at a cultural festival in Denmark, the organizer of the event confided to Gaeb that Smith had only agreed to perform because Aira would be there. (During the show, she told the crowd that she was happy to be playing in the presence of one of her favorite authors.) At the start of October last year, the English betting site Nicer Odds named Aira as a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, slightly ahead of candidates, such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie, who have appeared more regularly on such lists.
“I already know that every October, until my death, I’m going to have to put up with that,” Aira told me one afternoon in mid-November, when we met in his study in Buenos Aires. Said by any other writer, this would come across as an obtuse humble brag. But Aira doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who appreciates destabilizing events. “Sometimes the candidacy is useful to me,” he said, laughing. “For instance, now we live in a more luxurious apartment, one a little beyond my circumstances. And they rent to me because they see that I am a candidate for the Nobel.”
His apartment is located just five blocks from his study, which in its turn was the house where he lived for over 40 years with his two children and his wife, Liliana Ponce, a poet and a scholar of Japanese literature. The recent move took place because Ponce suffers from an illness that affects her mobility, and the new building has an elevator. The afternoon he received me, Aira, who turned 75 this year, was wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, jeans and sneakers. The move had clearly been recent. The atmosphere of the study was still that of an inhabited house, and in the main bedroom, surrounded by cardboard boxes full of books, there was a made-up double bed.
Aira, who does not speak to the local press and whose interviews with foreign media are usually short and conducted via email, rarely leaves Flores, a lower-middle-class neighborhood that’s best known today as a textile hub for the clothing stores in wealthier areas of the city. Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “flight forward”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” he told me, casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”
The novels were — and sometimes still are — written in neighborhood bars, cafés and even fast food joints, like McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafés started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighboring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”
In his study, a dark room crammed with piles and shelves of books, Aira insisted that I sit down in the chair in front of his computer. His voice, trembling and often low-pitched, sounded at times as if he were about to be overtaken by emotion. It isn’t strange for him to reconsider his answers or deliberate out loud, as if he were, in a way similar to his narrators, forever between a great revelatory moment and a shrug.
Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, a small town in the south of the province of Buenos Aires, 500 kilometers from the capital. “I was thinking just now of my first memories of childhood because they are of the revolution of 1955,” he told me — the year Gen. Juan Domingo Perón was removed from power by a coup the first time. In Coronel Pringles there was only one cinema, and television still had not caught on. But the little village had two well-stocked public libraries. “When I was still a teenager, I was already reading Joyce, Proust and Kafka,” Aira said. His precocity was also stimulated by an amateur public education in which classes were taught not by specialized professors but by volunteers with gigantic private collections of books. There were doctors who taught philosophy classes (“in those days, doctors were humanists”) and lawyers who taught history. “I didn’t have that kind of bureaucratic education where the teacher knows more,” he said. “It was something a lot freer.”
When he was about 14 years old, Aira met Arturo Carrera, a friend who, like him, would also become a nationally recognized writer. Aira dedicated himself to prose; Carrera, poetry. The friends tried to stay up to date with the literary world by getting hold of magazines that were based in the capital. In one of those publications, Testigo (“Witness”), there was a contest. Carrera sent a few poems, and Aira sent a story. The two both came out winners.
To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books.
At the time, the majority of promising secondary school students in Coronel Pringles continued their university studies in Bahía Blanca, a city 130 kilometers away. “Law was the only graduate course they didn’t have,” Aira said. He told his parents he was interested in a law degree and moved to the capital. “I wanted to come for the art galleries, the cinemas,” he told me. For two years, he studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, and then he transferred to the department of literature.
Testigo folded before it could publish Aira’s winning story. But one of the judges of the award, the novelist Abelardo Arias, wrote to congratulate him. Aira and Arias began a correspondence, and soon, Aira showed Arias a manuscript. Arias loved it and passed it on to the publisher Galerna, which agreed to print it.
“It was a big thing, even more so for a young person of that age,” Aira said.
One day, walking aimlessly through the streets of the city with a friend, he came across a building he knew. “Here, in this building, an editor wants to publish a novel of mine,” he told her. “Let’s go up.” When he arrived, he asked to speak with the person responsible for his book. Then he asked for the manuscript back: “I don’t want to publish it anymore.” The editor was astonished.
I asked Aira why he’d acted like that. “Just because,” he said. He shrugged and laughed. “I wanted to impress her.”
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To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books. Nobody I met in Buenos Aires ventured to pin down exactly how many volumes Aira has published. César Aira, un catálogo (César Aira, a Catalog), organized by the writer and lawyer Ricardo Strafacce, is the most notable effort to itemize his work. Launched in 2018 with the aim of helping the uninitiated, the catalog reprints one page from each of Aira’s books. The catalog was commissioned by his publisher in part to commemorate his 100th book (Aira likes round numbers), but in the time the catalog took to reach the printer, Aira had already written two more. In his study, Aira showed me a shelf of his unpublished manuscripts. According to him, there are over 40 titles.
When I sat with Strafacce in the bar Varela-Varelita, in Palermo, at the end of a November afternoon, he was still indignant with the catalog’s publisher, which he said had made changes without telling him. For instance, the publisher had edited the date of publication for the Aira story “El hornero” (“The Ovenbird”). “I’m furious,” he said. “You can talk to [the editor]. I don’t give a shit.” He complained about another small modification: In the biographical info for one of the titles, to his mention of Madrid, the editor had added “Spain.” In Strafacce’s eyes, the detail made him seem like an idiot, a “boludo.”
“Don’t writers get worked up about the most incredible minutiae?” said Francisco Garamona, the editor in question, when I spoke to him a few days later. With a cigarette in one hand and a glass of soda in the other, he explained that he’d merely used the version of “El hornero” that Aira himself had authorized rather than the one in circulation, which was pirated. We were sitting on a sofa in La Internacional Argentina, his bookshop, where he also operates his publishing house, Mansalva. Today, Mansalva is probably the editorial house that publishes the most titles by Aira. “There he is, and here are more, here’s another, and here,” Garamona said as he counted the shelves in the bookshop. “One, two, three … seven. Seven niches of just Aira.”
In a way, the décor reflected the multifaceted career of Garamona, who, in addition to being an editor and a bookshop owner, is a musician, a filmmaker, a poet and the ex-owner of an art gallery. Today he is also one of two editors whom Aira defined for me as “official.” The other is Damián Ríos, from the publisher Blatt & Ríos.
The honor of “official” editors must inspire some pride in Ríos and Garamona, because Aira has worked with more than a few. His extensive body of work is decentralized in dozens of editorial houses, the vast majority of them tiny, which makes him an author at once ubiquitous and elusive. In this context, it’s not difficult to understand how a controversy like the one with “El hornero” came about. Aira must be one of the few writers in the world, maybe the only one, to sell 25,000 copies of one title and at the same time launch other titles in much smaller print runs. He’s never charged royalties or advances for the small publishing houses in Argentina. “That was the agreement I made with Michael,” Aira told me. “I don’t meddle with the world. And he doesn’t meddle with Argentina. In Argentina, everything is free.”
Aira’s strong cultural presence today conceals the stuttering start of his career. “For many years, this was the only proof I was a writer,” he said, showing me a handful of yellowing pages, the nucleus of a book without a cover. His voice shook, and I was left in doubt as to whether, this time, emotion had truly moved him. In his hands was a copy of Moreira, considered by some to be his first published novel. In the background, an atmospheric combination of dissonant chords and piano notes quickly faded away. “I only listen to Morton Feldman these days,” Aira said, when I asked him the name of the composer. He added that he’d recently made an exception to listen to “Now and Then,” the new song by the Beatles launched thanks to artificial intelligence.
After going up to the office of the publishing house Galerna in 1969, in that half-impulsive gesture to ask for his manuscript back, some years went by before Aira had a chance to publish again. Moreira was supposed to come out in 1975, but was delayed. The editor of the book was Aira’s friend Horacio Achával, owner of the publishing house Achával Solo. In 1976, there was another military coup in Argentina. “Horacio was a political militant and had to go away,” Aira said. “He took off. He went to Uruguay.” The copies of Moreira, still without a cover, were left stranded in a warehouse. Years later, Achával returned to the country and finalized the cover. The book was officially launched in December 1981, just weeks after Ema, la cautiva (Ema, the Captive), which came out from another publishing house in November 1981 and today disputes with Moreira the title of Aira’s official debut.
Strafacce, the writer in charge of César Aira, un catálogo, told a different story. “Moreira was printed in June 1975,” he said. “The money ran out, and there wasn’t enough to print the cover because in the same month, there was a financial crisis and a bank run here in Argentina.” When I repeated to him the story Aira had told me, Strafacce said, with a tone that was skeptical and at the same time affectionate, “Yes, yes … But the delay on the cover wasn’t because of that. [The editor] didn’t have the money to pay for it. [Aira] knows that well.”
Aira published a few books in the 1980s, but according to Sandra Contreras, who founded a small publishing house that published Aira throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it was not until 1990’s Los fantasmas (Ghosts) that he accelerated his production. At the time, she said, he also spoke more explicitly of a new phase, “the beginning of the regular publication of his novelas and novelitas.” Aira was the first author to be published not only by Contreras’ publishing house but also by Mansalva and Blatt & Ríos in the early aughts.
In the ’90s, small publishers like these were rare. Garamona told me that this began to change in 2001, when after almost a decade of one-to-one parity between the Argentine peso and the U.S. dollar, the local economy went through one of the worst recessions in Latin American history. Importing books became expensive. And so, after spending years privileging authors from Spain, local bookshop owners finally had eyes for Argentine literature.
When Gaeb first encountered Aira’s work in Guadalajara, in 2002, Aira had thus already begun to occupy his paradoxical central position at the margins of the culture. “He is a writer who exists in different fields, at different levels,” the fiction writer and critic Alan Pauls told me, from his Berlin study, in a conversation over Zoom. “On the one hand, he has quite a lot of popularity. And on the other, he remains a niche writer, a cult writer. We still think of him as a writer of the avant-garde, a manufacturer of very sophisticated objects. He’s someone who occupies the center to his regret, not because he looked for it.”
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To get hold of Moreira today isn’t easy — on the site Mercado Libre Argentina, in mid-December, there was a copy going for around $1,200. On the cover that for years remained unfinished, there is a monstrous saturnine figure riding a yellow horse. Beneath the design, the first sentence of the novel prominently appears: Un día, de madrugada, por las lomas inmóviles del Pensamiento bajaba montado en potro amarillo un horrible gaucho (“One day at dawn, through the unmoving hills of Thought,[1] mounted upon a yellow colt, there descended a horrible gaucho”).
The phrase gives a taste of the kind of mixture harbored within the novel. Evoking Juan Moreira, a folkloric knife-fighting hero of the Argentine Pampas, the book narrates a gauchoesque pantomime, shot through with philosophical allusions and oneiric images. In Moreira, one can already recognize the multifaceted and frenetically imaginative style for which Aira would later be known. But the Airean machine still seems to just be getting started: There’s a heavy self-consciousness, an anxiety of the metafictional wink, that is absent from the books that follow. In these later works, his prose is limpid and inviting. Here is the start of El mago (The Magician), published almost exactly 20 years after Moreira:
In March this year, the Argentine magician Hans Chans (his real name was Pedro María Gregorini) participated in a convention of illusionists in Panamá; the event, just as the invitation and promotional leaflet described, was a regional meeting of prestigious professionals, a preparation for the great world congress the following year, which was celebrated every ten years and this time would take place in Hong Kong. The previous one had been in Chicago, and he had not gone. Now he planned not only to participate, but also to establish himself as Best Magician in the World. The idea was not crazy or megalomaniacal. It had a foundation as reasonable as it was curious: Hans Chans was a genuine magician.
Aira takes this magical premise seriously, drawing from the dilemma a tale both comic and — in its exploration of the complex relations between being and seeming — densely philosophical. Hans Chans has the gift to be an illusionist, but not the vocation. He is too self-indulgent to dedicate himself to the profession. The narrator writes: “Maybe, paradoxically, the advantage he had played against him and condemned him to mediocrity.” Without patience for the theater of magic, Chans limits himself to drawing handkerchiefs from wine glasses, and things of the sort.
When I asked Aira if he was edited nowadays, first he said that “nobody revises anything.”
It would not be unfair to read El mago as an allegory for the career of Aira himself: of someone who has the gift of writing but for whom the most deeply rooted conventions of the profession seem meaningless. Just like Hans Chans, the author is aware of his gift. Aira is affable and courteous, but he is far from being modest. (Modesty, faked or not, is another convention of the profession.) About the manuscript he asked back from Galerna in 1969, he said, “It was better than anything else that was published at the time.”
He has never been afraid to throw darts at other writers. When we spoke, he was disdainful of Roberto Bolaño, saying he had read a single novel by the Chilean author, which he found “terrible.” Aira also said that the great Argentine novelist Juan José Saer had once warmed to him, when he was young and starting out, but then became envious when Aira started getting more attention. In 1981, shortly before Moreira was finally published, Aira wrote an essay titled “Novela argentina: nada más que una idea” (The Argentine novel: nothing but an idea), which mounts a general attack on literature of the period. The essay begins:
The current Argentine novel, beyond a doubt, is a stunted, ill-fated species. In general terms, what defines a poor novelistic product is the poor use, crude and opportunistic, of the available mythical-social material. In other words, the meanings that dictate how a society lives at a given historical moment. But the literary transposition of a reality demands the existence of a very exact passion: that of literature. And a rapid, provisional survey, not at all exhaustive, of Argentine novelists reveals that they have not read deeply, and show a complete absence of that passion along with its epiphenomenon, talent.
Aira, who had not even published a novel at that time, sticks his scalpel swiftly and mercilessly into a series of authors — names like Luisa Valenzuela, Carlos Arcidiácono, Ramón Plaza — most of whom have been more or less forgotten. The essay, though, is remembered these days for Aira’s attack on Ricardo Piglia, who, until his death in 2017, was a kind of public rival to Aira, at least in terms of the very different literary forms they espoused.
Pauls linked Aira’s attacks at the start of his career to his ambition to reconfigure the Argentine novel. “When he emerges in the literary environment, he knows perfectly well the writers he has to tussle with,” he said. For Pauls, Aira disturbed the paradigm of a certain progressive Argentine literature, a literature of the left, very masculine and politically committed. “Something that literary school could not stand, for example, was a certain kind of work with frivolity, with the banal, with the superficial,” Pauls said.
Aira’s style crystallized very early on. Even if Moreira is not at the level of his next books, there is no clear sense of progression in Aira’s trajectory. Maybe for that reason, none of the readers I talked with could point to a favorite work. All of them defended themselves against the question, as if they ran the risk of being failed on an exam.
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Aira told me he’ll have two new novelitas ready soon. He said he plans to give one to Ríos and the other to Garamona. “And now I’ve been thinking, because one of them came out better than the other, more imaginative — who will I give that one to?” he said, laughing.
Aira rejects great theorizations about his decision to give away books for free or publish the majority with small publishing houses. “His form of publishing is part of his poetics, his resistance to editorial capitalism, his punk attitude,” Gaeb said.
Contreras classified the hyperproduction of little books for small publishers as an aesthetic decision. “Something like: It’s enough for a tale to be imagined to make it necessary to publish,” she said. “There is also a fascination for the book as a unique object.”
Pauls said he interprets this decision as an avant-garde way of thinking: “If the kind of literature I make is never going to have hundreds of thousands of readers, what happens if I inundate the market with books?”
When I asked Aira if he was edited nowadays, first he said that “nobody revises anything.” Then he conceded that Ríos sometimes makes one comment or another. Ríos corroborated the story but found it hard to define the exact nature of his comments, and he made it clear that they weren’t about anything structural. Contreras said that in her day, she at most corrected some error of typing.
Garamona laughed at the notion of editing or revising a text by the author. “He has written since he was a teenager without stopping, and has such a mastery of form and content that in the end there isn’t much left to do,” he said. “You just have to pick it up, make a good cover with a pretty design, correct two or three errata.”
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Los hombrecitos con sobretodo (The little men in overcoats) is the title of the novel Aira defined as the most imaginative of the two he recently finished. “What happens is that here in the neighborhood, two blocks away, where the fire station is located, men popu out at night,” he told me. “At midnight they come popping out of the ceiling. Little men suddenly appear like that, really tiny men, they all wear overcoats. And at night, I go watch them.”
He spoke as if he were beginning a fairy tale, and a parallel that had stalked my perception of him since we met for the first time came into focus. The low, tremulous voice transiting between fine irony and rapture; the sense of humor; the erudition; the sedentary life in a dark house in the neighborhood where he’d lived for decades, from which he generates cosmopolitan, compact stories full of metafictional layers — all of it reminded me a bit of Jorge Luis Borges.
For an Argentine, to say a great local writer seems like or is influenced by Borges must sound absurdly lazy. But both authors start their brief, densely packed books with literary anecdotes or memories written in crisp prose. In the works of both, there are frequent essayistic digressions. Both persistently turn to the literary technique of ekphrasis. There are metafictional and metaliterary games, references to other works.
The main difference is perhaps in the intensity and direction of the narrative swerves, and Aira’s greater comfort with pop culture and genre literature. Whereas a story by Borges might take up a lost 19th-century Persian manuscript, a novel by Aira might locate it behind the balcony of a McDonald’s in Flores, pored over by an adolescent with an acne problem.
Borges was almost infantile in his complete dedication as a reader, distant from the mundane hustle-bustle of the world. Nobody I interviewed had anything substantial to say about Aira’s private life either. “He likes to drink coffee and talk about literature,” Ríos said. Gaeb said that Aira sometimes seems to get along better with children. (In fact, the person about whom Aira spoke with the greatest passion, albeit briefly, was Arturito, his only grandson.)
Strafacce, his friend for over 20 years, said he found it easier to explain what Aira doesn’t talk about. “We’re used to not speaking about politics because I’m Trotskyist,” he said. “And César is not.”
It was the week of the second round of the presidential election. A few days later, the Peronist Sergio Massa, a member of the center-left governing coalition at the time, would be defeated by the far-right Javier Milei. “Milei is worse than Bolsonaro,” said Aira, in his only comment about politics.
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As I walked with Aira through Flores, I noticed a few excessively courteous smiles and furtive gazes. It was a disconcerting kind of attention, as if an expectation were in the air, the expectation of some magic à la Hans Chans. That day, before going to the café, we passed through the Flores Neighborhood Museum. Earlier, Aira had been irritated at a package from one of his foreign publishers: a box containing copies of one of his novels in Dutch translation. “They keep sending me those here,” he complained, as if sending books to the author himself were a kind of gaffe. Aira handles books with the avidity of a collector. He was mesmerized for a good while that afternoon by an edition of the French author Raymond Roussel, one of his surrealist idols, and he showed me a little purple box the size of a pack of cigarettes: a tiny special edition the Biblioteca Nacional had made of El ilustre mago (The Famous Magician), another novel of his. But for some reason, he wanted to rid himself of the box with the Dutch edition.
The Flores Neighborhood Museum does exactly what its name suggests, displaying all kinds of memorabilia — old calculators and radios, paintings, newspaper clippings, political propaganda — related in some way to famous inhabitants of the neighborhood. The definition of famous is broad, ranging from Perón — who lived there with his first wife — to the two preteen nieces of the museum’s director, who created a children’s library during the pandemic and appeared on the front page of the newspaper Clarín. Aira seemed at ease there. His name occupies one of the steps on the staircase by the front door. On the step above is the name of the great writer Roberto Arlt; on the one below, an advertisement for a real estate broker.
Aira left the box of books with an employee and continued with me through the museum. At one point he dwelled on a framed letter written by Pope Francis, another ex-inhabitant of the neighborhood. “Did you see how pretty the pope’s handwriting is?” he asked me, with a slight smile. “They don’t teach that in school anymore, no.” We went to another room, where there was a showcase with some of Aira’s books.
When we opened the door, there was a group of ladies sitting around a big table. A class was in session. They all smiled pleasantly, focusing their attention on the author. Only the instructor of the course seemed to be younger than 65.
“What is the name of the little plane that flies near the ground?” one of the ladies asked.
“The what?” said Aira.
“The little plane,” the lady repeated, with a certain impatience, lowering her open palm toward the floor. “The one that flies near the ground.”
For a while, everyone stared at Aira, waiting for an answer. “An unexpected question,” joked the instructor awkwardly.
Aira shrugged, and we went to the corner to look at his showcase.
[1] In Spanish, “El Pensamiento” can refer to both the abstract noun, and the village near where Aira was born and spent his childhood.
This is an edited translation of an article originally published in the Brazilian magazine Revista Piauí.