An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

Peaks of mica kept watch over their long marches. How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanoes gave the sky interiors. Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence; air-shafts voluminous as oceans.

Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.

the air had turned a lead-grey color. he had never seen such light. it was a see-through darkness. the clouds had descended further still, and now he could hear the intimate rumbling of the thunder. "at least it will cool off," he said to himself, and those trivial words marked the end of a phase in his life; with them he formulated the last coherent thought of his youth.

And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself in its primal nakedness. […] What the world was saying was the world.

Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a "flight forward" (fuga hacia adelante) to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others (such as the Argentine-Parisian cartoonist and comic novelist Copi), the "continuum" (el continuo) of a constant momentum in the fictional narrative. As a result his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and "subliterary" genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas. He frequently refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended.

Were all the storytellers to fall silent, nothing would be lost, since the present generation, or those of the future, could experience the events of the past without needing to be told about them, simply by recombining or yielding to the available facts, although, in either case, such action could only be born of a deliberate resolution. And it was even possible that the repetition would be more authentic in the absence of stories. The purpose of storytelling could be better fulfilled by handing down, instead, a set of “tools,” which would enable mankind to reinvent what had happened in the past, with the innocent spontaneity of action. Humanity’s finest accomplishments, everything that deserved to happen again. And the tools would be stylistic. Art was more useful than discourse.

They saw gaudy flowers open, large and small, some with paws, others with rounded kidneys of apple flesh.

There at El Tampo, they were happening, and yet it was as if they were inventing themselves, as if they were flowing from the udders of the black cows.

His face occupied the compartments of the night. Was the moon illuminating his face or was it the other way around?

Besides, there was no time to talk, since they were already riding, just the two of them, not towards the ranch but into the forest, drawn into the twisting funnels and bottlenecks, the horses clattering like bronze octopuses, southwards, towards the unknown, guided by the painter’s facial compass.

They once published the papers from a small interdisciplinary conference about that novel: there was a historian, an art critic, and a doctor who pointed out to me the errors in my description of that nerve that had become encapsulated after the accident but that, after worsening, had gotten entangled in some center of the frontal lobe, causing the painter to suffer terrible migraines. I didn’t read the whole book but I did read that chapter because I wanted to see to what extent my ideas about human physiology were based on fantasy.