4 Walking at World’s End: Not Stopping to Make Sense of César Aira’s La villa

Una ocupación voluntaria de Maxi era ayudar a los cartoneros del barrio a transporter sus cargas. De un gesto casual había pasado a ser con el correr de los días un trabajo que se tomaba muy en serio. Empezó siendo algo tan natural como aliviar a un niño, o a una mujer embarazada, de una carga que parecían no poder soportar (aunque en realidad sí podían). Al poco tiempo ya no hacía distinciones, y le daba lo mismo que fueran chicos o grandes, hombres o mujeres de cualquier modo él era más grande, más fuerte, y además lo hacía por gusto, sin que nadie se lo pidiera. Nunca se le ocurrió verlo como una tarea de caridad, o solidaridad, o cristianismo, o piedad, o lo que fueraÑ lo hacía, y basta. Era espontáneo como un pasatiemo: le habría costado explicarlo si lo interrogaban, con las enormes dificultades de expresión que tenía; ante sí mismo, ni siquiera intentaba justifacrlo. Con el tiempo se lo fue tomando en serio, y si un día, o mjero dicho una noche, no hubiera podido salir a hacer sus rondas por el barrio, habíra sentido agudamente que los cartoneros lo extrañaban, y se preguntaban “dónde estará?, ¿por qué no habrá venido?, ¿se habrá enojado con nosotros?”. Pero nunca flataba. No tenía otros compromisos que le impidieran salir a esa hora. (9–10)

[One way Maxi chose to spend his time was helping the local cardboard collectors to transport their loads. An act performed once, on the spur of the moment, had developed over time into a job that he took very seriously. It had begun with something as natural as relieving a child or a pregnant woman of a load that seemed too great for someone like that to bear (although the woman or the child was, in fact, bearing it). Before long he was indiscriminately helping children and adults, men and women: he was bigger and stronger than any of them, and anyway he did it because he wanted to, not because he was asked. It never occurred to him to see it as an act of charity or solidarity or Christian duty or pity or anything like that. It was something he did, that was all. It was spontaneous, like a hobby. Had anybody asked him why, he would have had trouble explaining, given how terribly hard it was for Maxi to express himself, and in his own mind he didn’t even try to justify what he was doing. As time went by, his dedication to the task increased, and if one day, or rather one night, he had been unable to do his rounds in the neighborhood, he would have had the uncomfortable feeling that the collectors were missing him and thinking, “Where can he be? Why hasn’t he come? Is he angry with us?” But he never missed a night. There were no other obligations from going out at that time.]

Our novel begins in the middle of a thought or perhaps, a mere observation: “Una ocupación voluntaria de Maxi” [One way Maxi chose to spend his time]. That observation belongs to an author presumably named Cesar Aira, per the book cover and title page. The majority of late-twentieth-century professors of literature would have argued that this author is at most implied. They explain that I, the reader, have no access via the text to the flesh-and-blood Aira. What he actually believes—this Cesar Aira listed on the book jacket—is really quite immaterial to the matter at hand. Aira wrote a story in which he didn’t just invent a character but a narrative voice as well. That invented voice no longer belongs to Aira but to the reader. And it is certainly not him. Point taken.

And yet Aira—we’ll call him that—by only permitting me to begin at a point already beyond where his own thinking apparently began, forces me to consider him (even if I may know in theory that it’s not him) and not just the story he’s telling: “One way Maxi chose to spend his time.” Were there other ways he chose to spend his time?, I ask, and why did Maxi choose to spend it this way? Moreover, why doesn’t the person telling the story answer any of those obvious questions? The whole process drives me to ask, ultimately, whose voice this is that dives right in without warning and does so in such a way that makes me all too aware that he is so doing? What was he saying just before I walked in the room and then as I turned the page and began his novel? As a student of literature I may understand the concept of the death of the author, but, as Attridge has pointed out, as a reader I read for him, with him, and even against him: “the presupposition that the words we are reading are the product of a mental event” on the part of an author is the “precondition” for the reader finding a tale meaningful (101).

Hence I proceed fully cognizant of being led along by a voice endowed with thoughts and a life all its own, and certainly separate from mine even if it temporarily invites me into its confidence on this particular narrative journey. Reading is a social activity, even when done in solitude. Perhaps it is particularly so in such cases. To be sure, we shy bookworms seek respite from madding crowds in the solitude of lengthy novels. But at the same time, we do so in anticipation of solidarity with one we perceive as understanding more clearly. With such a disposition we open ourselves and our world to that superior vision. The difference in Aira’s novel is that we’re awakened from the novel’s opening words to that superior vision as more than mere vision. It’s alive, as it were, with thoughts and desires beyond the typical responsibility of telling us a well-crafted story. And so, as we read Aira’s La villa, there are in a sense two stories under development: that of Maxi’s strange habit of aiding the cardboard collectors and that of our whimsical narrator telling us a tale in a not so straightforward manner.

But first, the tale of Aira’s character, Maxi: Maxi is the most accidental of heroes and the hero of his most accidental of adventures. A middle class teenager just out of high school, Maxi lives with his parents and sister on the fifth floor of a residential apartment block on Calle Bonorino in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A poor student with few ambitions, to say nothing of big ideas or deep thoughts, Maxi’s life consists of waking early, pumping iron for hours in a local gym, sharing a midday meal with his family, sleeping a long siesta, and at the end of the day roaming local streets to burn off yet more of the excess energy stored in his massive physical form. He speaks to few and he plans nothing. He simply moves about and responds to what he sees. He is what his name suggests, a massive physical form encasing a simple but gentle soul. Maxi.

Ironically, Maxi’s simplicity, combined with his habit of walking, gets him into trouble. But such is prone to occur when you live in precarious times, times when global economic forces plunge nations into periods of hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and the collapse of so many of the public and private institutions that once upon a time kept the working class working and the wolf from the door. In such times, people demand answers. Where these aren’t readily available, people turn to conspiracies, conspirators, and scapegoats.

These are the times of Aira’s novel. While Aira never includes specific dates, for readers familiar with contemporary Argentine history, Maxi’s adventure clearly plays out on the streets of Buenos Aires during the era that has been called Argentina’s great depression—the same described more acutely in El cantor de tangos—a period between 1998 and 2002, when Argentine society reeled from the consequences of economic collapse that stemmed from deals gone bad between the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Argentina’s central bankers. The result was massive national debt, runaway inflation, skyrocketing unemployment, the devaluation of the national currency, and the disappearance of the savings of large swaths of the middle and working classes. By the end of this period nearly half of Argentines lived below the poverty line with unemployment more than doubling from a decade earlier. Perhaps the most visible consequence of the economic disaster was the proliferation of slums, what Argentines refer to as villas miseria or simply villas. Between 2001, the apex of the disaster, and 2006, the number of villa neighborhoods in Argentina increased from approximately four hundred to one thousand, with the number of actual shantytown residences spiking from 639,000 to 1.14 million (Auyero 24).

In such a milieu, returning to the novel, Maxi is a fish out of water. While Argentine society is gripped by fear at the growth of crime and violence—and by the anger and suspicion that arises from so much economic and social decline—Maxi wanders the streets of his hometown without a care in the world. He lets his feet take him where they will and responds in the moment to what he sees whenever and wherever he sees it. And what Maxi sees above all is, not surprisingly, the proliferation of poverty-stricken trash pickers—of cartoneros and chapistas (cardboard and scrap-metal collectors, respectively)—rummaging every evening through the castaways of their still-employed compatriots in search of the sustenance that will see them through at least to tomorrow’s pickings. As Micah McKay has pointed out in his reading of Aira’s novel, trash functions as a powerful symbol of the neoliberal condition, “inextricably linked to activities of consumption and circulation in market economies,” and is the literal “trickle-down” of an economic philosophy championing the gradual rising economic tide that will raise all boats (597, 601).

These, of course, aren’t Maxi’s thoughts. What he sees rather is that it is the collectors themselves—too impoverished to afford engines or animals—who transport the materials on carts they fill and draw by the force of their already emaciated bodies. Seeing a need, blessed with the energy of mass and youth to burn, and lacking the intellectual faculties to render any kind of complex judgment on their condition, Maxi devotes his evenings to responding simply and directly to their obvious need. Without a word, Maxi picks up one wagon, then another, and still another, transporting them back to the shanty homes of the gatherers. In a short amount of time, Maxi becomes a familiar face among the pickers, the evening pack animal for whatever lucky family he happens upon.

But why? Crisis minds want to know. Readers’ minds as well. And yet, therein the enigma. Returning to the rather lengthy quote that opened this essay, we note the reasons—or rather, the lack thereof. Maxi’s service is a consequence of “una ocupación voluntaria.” It begins with “un gesto casual.” The narrator, focalizing through Maxi, describes it as simply a “natural” thing to do. His actions aren’t premeditated nor does he reflect on them afterward: “Lo hacía y basta.” In one sense, such phrases paint Maxi’s behavior as heroic, a spontaneous champion of the tired and poor, a classic accidental hero whose unplanned actions would suggest a noble soul.

On the other hand, how heroic can something be that is responded to as one would “a hobby”? In later passages the narrator describes Maxi’s service as mere exercise: lift weights all morning, lift carts all night (7). As a friend explains at one point, addressing Maxi’s approach to the world in general: “Vos pasás de nosotros sin vernos” [You walk right past, you don’t even see us] (104). Many of the same passages that note Maxi’s apparently charitable acts also reveal a young man disturbingly ignorant of the station of the people he serves and unable to distinguish them as anything but a faceless impoverished mass. Moreover, such inability doesn’t appear to trouble him (9, 12). On the rare occasion that he expends mental energy considering their circumstances, he ends up idealizing their unique skills at rummaging around garbage piles, their sense of solidarity, and the “particular beauty” of each individual trash collector’s cart (9, 21, 28). In one rather jarring passage—jarring because at the point of its apparition we readers are beginning to see Maxi as some kind of hero to the working class—we find our protagonist romanticizing the shantytown on his initial arrival there. Our narrator reports Maxi’s experience thus: ““La villa era extrañamente iluminada…casi radiante, coronada de un halo que se dibujaba en la niebla. Era casi como ver visiones” [The shantytown was strangely illuminated, almost radiant, crowned with a halo that shone in the fog. It was almost like seeing a vision] (20). On another early visit he views the place as an “reino encantado donde no escatimaba la luz” [enchanted kingdom of unstinting light] (30). Annelies Oeyen has argued that such description plus the solidarity displayed by the shanty’s inhabitants over the course of the novel cast this typically denigrated urban space in a surprisingly positive light, making Aira’s novel a kind of vindication of this abject space (76).

At the same time, Maxi’s observations don’t suggest he is so naive as to imagine the poor he helps as living in some kind of magical wonderland of simplicity and solidarity. He understands they live in “sordidez y desesperación” [squalor and deprivation] (30). These are places that Patrick Dove, in his reading of Aira’s novel, has described as locating “the shadowy existence of those who remain unaccounted for in the prevailing calculus of the social in postdictatorial Argentina” (9). We know this. As does Maxi. His magical observations, instead, underscore simply that the shantytown is a place to which he has given some thought, however hastily. Thus he responds immediately, almost innocently, but not in utter naivete, to the shapes and forms of what he sees as a wonderfully illuminated space. Maxi sees what he sees and doesn’t think too far beyond it though he is not ignorant to its basic meaning. In this light, Maxi is neither a soldier for social justice nor some privileged class enemy. He is neither morally superior nor a social pariah, not a hero nor a villain. Rather he is simply one who walks, sees, and responds.

Such directness ingratiates him to the local poor who at the moment need a hand much more than they need any deep political or economic comprehension. Thus, they quickly embrace his aid and soon open to him their shantytown, where they prepare sleeping quarters for him in anticipation of the day when his massive physical form collapses from the exhaustion of a long evening of cart hauling. As we read, we, like the cartoneros, understand ultimately that, whatever the reasons, whether good or evil, Maxi does what is necessary. Nothing more, nothing less.

At least this is what the cartoneros and we readers understand. Beyond this world of immediate necessity, however, there is little tolerance for innocence, simplicity, and good deeds. In a society scrambling to understand economic collapse and political chaos, Maxi’s apparently self-abnegating service defies logic and so demands explanation. Enter our antagonist, Inspector Cabezas. Cabezas is a local mid-rank police official hell-bent on taking down a neighborhood crime syndicate trafficking in a drug called proxidine, a synthetic substance described as “la madre de la droga” [the mother of all drugs] (169). Cabezas, as the name suggests, is Maxi’s polar opposite. If Maxi is all brawn, Cabezas’s weapon is his brain. The inspector wants to understand all, to discover explanations that might point to solutions to every problem, what Patrick Dove has identified as a modern-day take on Eric Lonnrot, protagonist of Borges’s “Death and the Compass” (12). As in the case of Lonnrott, Cabezas’s steel-trap mind is a weapon that misfires, though with Cabezas the effects are more absurd than tragic. In contrast to Maxi, drawing almost zero conclusions from months of daily toil in the streets of his corner of Buenos Aires, Cabezas develops grand theories from single sightings that “llevó al máximo su interés” [inflamed his curiosity] and “Lo puso a pensar seriamente” [plunged him deep in thought] (33, 39). For Cabezas, “Nada debía quedar inexplicado, y una explicación debía engancharse con otras, hasta formar un complejo, el cual a su vez debía articularse con los otros, hasta que toda la sociedad quedara cubierta” [Nothing could be left unexplained, and each explanation would be linked to others, to form a system, which in turn would have to be connected to other systems, until the whole of society was covered] (39). Because Maxi’s behavior is unexpected and because that behavior takes Maxi daily from upper-middle-class apartment blocks to the heart of theoretically dangerous and inaccessible shantytowns, in the mind of Cabezas he becomes the key to unravelling the inner workings of the proxidine cartel that, Cabezas figures, can only be operating out of the space of greatest local poverty, the neighborhood shantytown. For the inspector, there can be no other explanation for Maxi’s association with trash collectors, just as there can be no other site of origin for illegal narcotics. Maxi is a middle-class adolescent, while shantytowns are places where drugs are sold. Little more need be said. Maxi is the key.

At least for Cabezas. Our narrator, or Aira—and here we return to our earlier observations on the death and life of the author—has other interests. Whereas a typical narrator would carefully curate his story, the narrative vision in Aira’s novel wanders as if as equally undisciplined, purposeless, and distracted as his protagonist. Though not at first. For, if Aira’s casual, off-the-cuff introduction to Maxi on the novel’s first page suggested a rather undisciplined narrative mind, the narrative technique itself is fairly traditional for the first two chapters. The narrator recounts in the third person the adventures of Maxi, as he, the narrator, marches, as it were, in lockstep with his protagonist, describing the world from a position as if just over the shoulder of his protagonist. His is the voice; Maxi’s is the vision.

Consequently, the reader is slightly surprised when with the appearance of Cabezas, the narrator suddenly abandons Maxi for the inspector’s point of view. While shifts from character to character may be typical of third-person omniscient narrators, where a certain narrative bird’s-eye-view remains constant, the complete shift in the positioning of a more limited narrator startles us. From total focus on Maxi we suddenly, as it were, enter into another, if related, story. The shift underscores that active, elusive, unpredictable presence that feels from the novel’s opening lines more like a real person than a carefully curated and curating narrator. It reminds us of what Argentine critic Josefina Ludmer has called the “postautonomous novel” of the twenty-first century—novels that don’t know nor necessarily even care whether or not they’re literature. Indeed, throughout Aira’s novel, the narrator feels more alive than we might expect. He is resistant to fulfilling mere narrative functions, awake to his own undisciplined curiosities, as if a real person more than a linguistic function, as if Aira’s alter ego rather than Aira’s device.

From this point forward, this narrator-as-author (or author-as-narrator, as the case may be) skips about from character to character over the course of the novel almost haphazardly, like Maxi out for one of his purposeless evening walks. While the shift from Maxi to Cabezas at least occurs at a chapter break, the next shifts hit us in mid-narration. Cabezas’s drive to decipher Maxi’s movements and to smash the local proxidine cartel introduces the indomitable narrator to Maxi’s sister Vanessa. When Cabezas stakes out, nabs, and then interrogates this new character, the narrator utterly abandons the inspector, preferring to pursue the frazzled thoughts and actions of a frantic teenage girl. For the next ten pages the narrator hovers exclusively about Vanessa as she, terrified of Cabezas and his threats, sets out to provide the police inspector the information on her brother Cabezas demands, despite actually knowing nothing. Our time with Vanessa is cut short, however, when her frantic pursuit of something—anything to please Cabezas—brings the narrator into contact with a neighbor friend, Jessica. Vanessa believes Jessica might have connections to people who live in the shantytown who, in turn, might provide information to Cabezas that would get him off her back. And so the narrator abruptly abandons Vanessa to spend another dozen or so pages with Jessica. After a chapter break the narrator at last turns back to Maxi—again, without explanation. And so it goes, our narrator shifting around from character to character over the course of the novel, wandering without any apparent strategy. We go where the unruly narrator goes. And he goes wherever the action takes him, with little apparent interest in structure, balance, or poetry. He just wants to know in the same way Maxi wants to help.

As a result, we now read torn between what we might call two competing narrative desires, those of the Maxi and the Cabezas within each of us, between wanderlust and the need to know. To a certain degree, this is the case with any experience of imaginative fiction. I pick up Aira’s La villa, as I would any novel, with the expectation both to be entertained and to gain insight, to learn something of the lives of those inhabiting Argentina’s shantytowns and to enjoy an aesthetic experience along the way—to revel in the images evoked by the text, if not the language of the text itself. This combination of desires induces in me, the reader, a willing suspension of disbelief. Within the experience of reading fiction I am apt to accept just about any position a talented narrator throws my way. I will empathize and even sympathize with adulterers and axe murderers. I will believe in ghosts, witchcraft, and wizardry. I will pull for those on one side of a conflict and then turn around the next day with the next novel and find myself pulling for those on the other. My head will carry me just about anywhere a talented author wills. I read in search of explanation.

In La villa, however, this traditional division between knowing and enjoying is exaggerated by our initial identification with Maxi and then foregrounded by way of the Maxi-Cabezas opposition. The narration of the first two chapters forges a first-identification with a character who defies explanation and who, in his meanderings doesn’t appear to be taking us as readers anywhere meaningful. Thanks to this character’s innate bigheartedness and the noble, if accidental, deeds that flow from it, that first-identification becomes our primary connection. Our identification with that hero—a hero who merely wanders—demands our own wandering (and the wandering of our narrator) away from our desire for explanation that Cabezas grants. At the same time, our time with Cabezas awakens us to the possibility of understanding if not to deeper meaning. Then again, Cabezas’s methods, ironically, proceed along their own meandering path—the one that leads from Cabezas’s story to Vanessa’s and then to Jessica’s—even if the inspector wouldn’t choose to see it that way. In fact, his insistence on finding connections, against the background of Maxi’s and the narrator’s approach, ultimately foregrounds the artificial, perhaps absurd, but certainly constructed nature of the quest to make sense, of the obsession to know. Even as we readers continue turning page after page hoping to make our own sense of this wandering tale, that very search repeatedly brings us face-to-face with moments that foreground its futility and even absurdity.

It is appropriate, then, that when our narrator finds his way back to Maxi after his wanderings alongside Cabezas, Vanessa, and Jessica, our previously diffident protagonist has suddenly become, himself, in yet another ironic twist, his own mini-Cabezas. It turns out that another thing Maxi does—something the narrator had failed to inform us of in his earlier description of our protagonist’s puzzling life—is take morning strolls as he makes his way to the local gym to pump iron. On one of these Maxi literally stumbles upon a homeless adolescent sleeping in a small vacant lot. For whatever reason (reasons are not Maxi’s strong suit and so how would our narrator, restricted to focalizing through Maxi’s less-than-airtight-mind, be able to offer us one?) our protagonist takes an interest in the youth. Speculating to himself on the boy’s background, his reasons for sleeping there under newspapers in a vacant lot ditch under a bridge, Maxi becomes convinced—though he provides no explanation—that he needs to introduce the boy to a local girl. But Maxi doesn’t actually know the girl. He only sees her through his window every morning as she works as a maid in an apartment across Calle Bonarino. It turns out—though again we are offered no explanation for the coincidence—that she just happens to be a servant in the home of Vanessa, the friend of Maxi’s sister Jessica, the same who is now, alongside her friend, being used by Inspector Cabezas in his quest to break up the proxidine cartel. But Maxi doesn’t know this. He doesn’t really even know the girl. It’s all intuition and a bit of extreme Cabezas-like scheming. He’s only trying to help.

Curiously—perhaps appropriately—it is with this single attempt to identify and then solve a problem that Maxi’s world suddenly collapses around him (even if he forever ignores the fact) in a climactic evening of misinformation and mishap. Maxi has arranged for the homeless boy and servant girl to meet at the shantytown entrance after another evening of Maxi’s aiding the cartoneros. Cabezas has, however, identified this same evening as his moment to nab Maxi and smash the cartel once and for all. Because our narrator follows his single thread so closely—and is currently back to following Maxi—we readers have no idea why Cabezas has chosen this night. Nor do we understand why Jessica and Vanessa happen to be out on the street at the same time. But they are and so Cabezas grabs them and tosses them into his squad car, apparently—for we’re always in a bit of a fog—hoping to use them to nab Maxi

The series of coincidences only grows as Cabezas’s appearance at the entrance to the shantytown coincides with that of a man known as the Pastor. The Pastor, readers recall, just so happens to have had earlier contact with the servant girl scheduled to arrive soon at the shantytown. But he is also suspected by Cabezas of playing a key role in the proxidine cartel. At the same time that all of this is playing out, the skies have clouded over, and steady rains and strong winds have grown into a torrential downpour of apocalyptic proportions. Readers, accustomed to suspending disbelief, are typically happy to forgive sudden storms. They are the stuff of which so much fiction is made. But here our narrator’s tight focus on his own particular narrative thread (we are now following the path of Cabezas with the two girls into the shantytown) prevents the edification of the contextual evidence that might explain such factors. Hence the growing ferocity of the storm aligning with a sudden convergence of all major characters at the mouth of the shantytown feels simultaneously comical and cosmic. As absurd as the coincidences seem, our primary identification with the wandering Maxi and his serendipitous behavior, combined with our Cabezas-like obsession to know, has prepared us to give this story one final benefit of the doubt. We’re willing, even eager, to see this storm—narrative and story—through to its conclusion.

What follows next doesn’t disappoint. Cabezas, with the horrified Jessica and Vanessa looking on, shoots the Pastor point blank. The Pastor falls lifeless into the rising waters fast engulfing the shantytown, while Cabezas drops Jessica and Vanessa off at a local pizzeria where they join another couple seeking similar refuge from the storm. The couple, we realize, are the homeless adolescent and the servant girl, who the narrator informs us, as if in passing, had been together before a misunderstanding surrounding the proxidine crisis left the boy homeless and the couple separated. Finally we witness, first through the television set in the pizzeria as viewed by Jessica and Vanessa and then through the eyes and thoughts of Cabezas (Maxi has once more vanished from the narrator’s horizon of interest), how a massive police presence descends on the shantytown, surrounding it by land, air, and—thanks to the now Biblical flood—sea in order to, like Cabezas but completely disconnected from his idiosyncratic efforts, break up the proxidine cartel once and for all (or perhaps to simply respond to the shooting of the Pastor [like so much else, it’s never fully explained]). And, of course, the massive police presence is added upon by a sudden massive media presence, news helicopters illuminating the streets of the labyrinthine shantytown, their shifting lights exaggerating the effects of the whirling, windblown storm lashing out at the huts and hovels even as their television cameras broadcast the action live to a nation of eager consumers.

This might appear at first glance to be a moment to reflect on the distorting lense of media in a postmodern world or the complicity of media in the neoliberal economic and political order that has coincided with the proliferation of shantytowns across the Buenos Aires cityscape. But as Dove has brilliantly argued in a study of the mass-media presence in Aira’s novel, and as we see in the buildup to the sudden appearance of the TV cameras at the shantytown, there is too much chaos—both at the level of content and of narrative—to single out mass-mediated technics for special critique (Dove 21–22).

So as the world—and we readers—look on, Cabezas rushes into the shantytown, blindly determined to locate its center, where he expects to find the cartel headquarters and, of course, Maxi. The massive police force follows in hot pursuit, believing Cabezas to be a corrupt officer involved, himself, in the proxidine business (even as the media miscast him as the father of a victim of the narcotics crisis). The shantytown dwellers, meanwhile, dedicate themselves to an elaborate game of hide and seek, not in hopes of protecting any illegal enterprise, but simply to protect the sleep of their friend Maxi, who that night, after aiding yet another family with their load of newly collected refuse, slumbers peacefully in his specially prepared hut at the shanty’s center. Their game consists in rotating different patterned lights from street to street of the slum, which it turns out is circular, its streets concentrically spinning inward toward an empty center. Such an arrangement creates an image that Cristina Guiñazu has called a giant wheel of fortune, and produces, for the reader, a general sense of this urban space as what Oeyen has called a magical labyrinth (no page number; 81). The movement of the lights throws off Cabezas, who at last understands the deception only moments before an equally confused police force sprays his body with bullets. That force itself, we learn in the novel’s concluding pages, is directed by none other than Buenos Aires’s great celebrity magistrate, Judge Plaza, determined now more than ever to eliminate Cabezas because, as the television crews dramatically reveal to their audiences, the Pastor, who Cabezas had killed only an hour or so earlier was none other than the judge’s own son, doing undercover work on the same proxidine case.

And so the novel concludes as the judge takes the microphone and, before the nation’s live cameras and her astonished, adoring masses, declares:

Los medios de comunicación masiva tienen el deber irrenunciable de hacerle comprender a la sociedad que no la alcanzarán nunca. Todo lo que se haga en esa dirección es inútil… Ustedes han dicho hasa el cansancio que es un “camino de ida”, y no es una metáfora, porque elefecto de la proxidina sobre el usuario es hacer literalmente infinito el trayecto. A la “madre” no hay que buscarla fuera del éxtasis porque está implícita en él, y durante el camino que se emprende con el consumo se va transformand y toma todas la formas posbiles del mundo, en una sucesión incoherente e irresponsable que lo extravía tanto como está extraviada la mente de un soñador. (169–70)

[The mass media have a categorical duty to make it clear to society as a whole that the “mother” cannot be reached. All efforts in that direction are futile.… You and your colleagues have repeated over and over that it is a “one-way street,” and that is not a metaphor, because proxidine’s effect on the user is to make the trajectory literally infinite. There is no point searching for the “mother” outside ecstasy for she is within it, implicitly, and all along the path of drug use she changes, taking on every conceivable form, in an incoherent and irresponsible succession, which leads the user astray as dreams abuse the sleeping mind.]

With these words the novel ends. Much, we recognize, as it began. For if Judge Plaza’s declaration has all the trappings of a final, concluding statement, it, like so much supposedly key information in the novel, comes at the reader without the contextual structures we typically rely upon. Her final statement addresses a proxidine epidemic, not the machinations of Cabezas, nor the serendipitous meandering of Maxi, to say nothing of explaining the suffering of the shanty dwellers or the chronic political corruption and economic incompetence that has so long plagued Argentina.

Rather, in the same spirit with which the novel commenced, our wandering narration brings front and center an issue that was to this point peripheral to the plot. While Plaza’s speech is perfectly consistent with the little we understand of the judge’s character (a crime fighter as bent on crushing the proxidine cartel as Cabezas, but more adept at leveraging media and popular culture to her purposes), the placement of the speech makes little narratological sense, confusing our sense of story at the very moment when we expect resolution. What do we care about the effects of proxidine? Not only has it, until this point, appeared to be more a narrative device than an element central to the plot, but even if it were more than the latter, the information provided in the judge’s speech does little to further our understanding of the drug, of what it is and why it matters. It feels, instead, as if our narrator is concluding—if that’s what we can call it—this little novelistic adventure with his reader in the same way he began—in medias res, almost as if we just missed Judge Plaza’s opening phrase, “Another way that proxidine is bad…” Thus, the novel that began with a casual observation ends with another. It will not, as Guiñazu signals in her reading of the novel, explain the shantytown (no page number). The narrator-author has apparently moved on. But this time not to another character but to another story, another Aira novel, as it were. Our walk with him today has reached its end.

And yet, Cabezas remains. Like the shantytown itself with its multiple entrances multiplied on a nightly basis by chains of ever-shifting light patterns, all leading to a hollow, but inaccessible center, the novel, having linearly ended—its narrative thread having run its course—doesn’t go entirely away. It has drawn us into its center, however hollow it may turn out to be. For we readers are unavoidably Cabezas. We want to know. And so, despite the apparent nonsense of Judge Plaza’s antidrug diatribe, as we set the completed book down, we attempt to piece together the significance of proxidine, of its ecstatic force, of its capacity to concentrate human energies, to produce a sensation of enlightenment via proximation to a kind of nirvana. We review the connections and coincidences: how did Maxi intuit the relation between the homeless adolescent and the servant girl (how did he know?); how could Cabezas strike such fear into Vanessa and Jessica (what did they know?); how did it turn out that the Pastor was the judge’s son (and why didn’t Cabezas know?). And, finally, how is it that the judge mistakes Cabezas for another Cabezas who we thought we knew he wasn’t but the coincidence of which he had used throughout the novel to persuade people to do his bidding (how can we ever know?). Obviously (as the parentheticals illustrate), the deeper we dig, the more we come up against that final question: how can we ever know? As Guiñazu and others have pointed out, we readers are forced to grapple with the meaning of the shantytown on are own (no page number). We are Cabezas in a Maxi world. Or Maxi in a Cabezas world. Or perhaps better yet, Judge Plaza, possessing loads of power but not an iota of understanding.

So, assuming for a moment the position of news helicopters bird’s-eyeing the action from a thousand feet up, is there anything we can conclude? We can try. Aira’s narrator, like the hulking mass of a big-hearted human he has focused in on, has gone for a walk, and we have accompanied him. Well trained through years of experience as traditional readers, we joined in search of meaningful gossip, of big explanations, and of clear morals. Instead we have simply gone for a walk. Like Maxi grabbing hold of a cartoneros cart because it was there and needed lifting, the narrator-author has followed the story because it was there and appeared to merit telling. We have accompanied that telling. And now it is over and we are left holding the pieces.

Of course, we overly zealous readers will have our meaning one way or another. And so we write critical analyses—the fan fiction of the obsessed, the Cabezas. And we’ll decide that the failure of explanations is the only explanation, and that Maxi as accidental and circumstantial wandering hero is the only hero for a world at the end of the world or, as it were, at the end of its final narrative thread or, in other words, the kind of world where a nation in half a year runs through as many presidents as there are months and where all the world’s leading financial experts can’t understand, can’t explain, can’t contain, to say nothing of solve, a financial catastrophe driving tens of thousands, even entire neighborhoods, and seemingly entire nations into shantytowns.

What grand narratives can explain such a catastrophe? Is there anything more to do than to step outside and do the first clear, right thing that sets itself before you? Are we not all Maxis in the face of such moments, in the presence of such ends of times? What good are our educations, our explanations, our comfortable middle-class relations? Are we not equally bereft of deep thoughts and grand strategies? Do we not all misapprehend and misunderstand and misdiagnose, but too often forge ahead notwithstanding only to misstep, to plunge both feet-first and knee-deep into rising waters driving relentlessly toward a center where no center that will ever be evident to us awaits? Is it not death itself that will be the only clear, final answer to the Cabezas of this end-of-times order?

And so while the biblical floods inundate an apocalyptic world, we dream, as it were, alongside Maxi of a new, cleansed, post-proxidine, post-Cabezas Argentina. We image, even imagine to perceive, a new Grand Colombia or Republic of the South or global utopia rising pure and shining from the cleansing shower of the diluvial storms. But we understand ultimately that it is all but a dream. When we awake, there will be nothing but ourselves and our footsteps outside and the privilege and power and duty of our walk. Or the proxidine option. What will we do at the coming of the cartoneros?