C\u00e9sar Aira doesn\u2019t like to be called \u201cprolific.\u201d He has, however, published more than eighty works of fiction and nonfiction. Last month, \u201c Ema, the Captive ,\u201d which was first published in Spanish, in 1978, became the thirteenth of his novels available in English. (He\u2019s been translated into seven other languages as well.) Aira, who was born in Argentina, in 1949, has spent most of his life in Buenos Aires. In \u201cEma,\u201d which is set in the nineteenth century, soldiers take a young woman prisoner and, after a journey marked by baroque violence, bring her to \u201cthe edge of the world,\u201d Argentina\u2019s southern frontier. \u201cEma\u201d is as inventive and aphoristic as Aira\u2019s best works. It also includes depictions of \u201cIndians\u201d that can come across as exoticizing, which may have been intentional; some of Aira\u2019s other fiction deploys the trope of Western colonizers smothering reality with prefabricated forms. In \u201cEma,\u201d he mentions \u201cDarwin\u2019s sketches of the Indians, crude vignettes that always show them about to mount a skinny horse with a human face.\u201d
When I met with Aira, a little more than a year ago, in Buenos Aires, we talked less about his writing than his habits of reading. Aira\u2019s day is as punctuated by reading as it is by meals: periodicals in the morning, prose in the afternoon, and, in the evening, poetry. Every night at 9:30 P. M. , he takes a whiskey. (After that, he said, laughing, it\u2019s harder to follow prose.) We spoke twice, in caf\u00e9s in an area of the Palermo neighborhood known as Villa Freud, for its density of psychologists. Per Argentinian custom, we were served delicate cookies with our coffees. Gracious and mannerly, Aira picked me up before our first meeting and later walked me home, stopping, at one point, to give a stranger directions. His hair is graying and he wore dark-rimmed glasses, with a light jacket for the early spring cold.
Aira laughs often and speaks deliberately, in a smoky baritone. He\u2019s a translator, including from English; we talked in my language, rather than his. Decades ago, when translation was his livelihood, he specialized in \u201cbad literature,\u201d he said: it took less time to translate but paid just as well. The story of \u201cEma, the Captive\u201d was modelled on the plot of one such book, he told me. He transported the narrative from Australia to Argentina, and gave Ema pheasants instead of sheep to raise. (\u201cSheeps are cheap,\u201d he said.)
Our second interview took place on a brisk Saturday morning at the Velvet caf\u00e9 on Plaza G\u00fcemes, across from the Romanesque Bas\u00edlica del Espiritu Santo. The caf\u00e9, which has big windows and high ceilings dotted with track lights, was nearly empty when we arrived, but it soon filled. It was October 17th, Loyalty Day, which commemorates the date in 1945, four years before Aira was born, when large popular demonstrations erupted to protest the imprisonment of a young Colonel Juan Per\u00f3n. \u201cAnd that was the beginning of the end of Argentina,\u201d Aira said. The next year, Per\u00f3n won the Presidential election, and he soon established an oppressive, isolationist regime. He was deposed in a revolutionary coup, in 1955.
Aira remembers the revolution vividly. He was six when fighting broke out at a naval base near Bah\u00eda Blanca, roughly eighty miles from Aira\u2019s home town. At the time, he and his family were staying at a great-aunt\u2019s house. Then the bombing began. \u201cIt was lights, all the lights,\u201d Aira said. \u201cAnd then\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. silence.\u201d The bombs fell not in the town proper but into the river nearby. Nonetheless, he remembers soldiers and stretchers. \u201cAnd all the rest of my childhood I went with a bicycle there to see the\u201d\u2014and here he paused, and laughed, as he often did, even when recalling dark memories\u2014\u201cthe corpses. Like a movie.\u201d
Aira first saw the name when he was twelve or thirteen. It kept showing up in the paper\u2014\u201cBorges, Borges, Borges,\u201d he recalled\u2014and he became curious. He located Borges\u2019s publisher and wrote the firm a letter, asking if he could buy Borges\u2019s books. Just send a check, the publisher replied. Aira\u2019s father did so, and books by Borges soon arrived in the mail. \u201cThat changed my life,\u201d Aira said.
Aira saw Borges many times, at the old National Library, which Borges then directed; at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught literature; and at conferences. \u201cBut I never talked with him,\u201d Aira said. \u201cThat was bad luck for me, because many of my colleagues have made a career out of having talked for five minutes with Borges.\u201d These writers, he joked, \u201cspend their life repeating, \u2018Borges told me, Borges told me.\u2019\u00a0\u201d I asked if Borges\u2019s presence had been very strong in Buenos Aires when Aira first arrived as a young man. \u201cYes, of course,\u201d he said, suddenly serious. \u201cOf course. He was an immense presence.\u201d When Borges died, in 1986, he said, \u201ca light was gone.\u201d
Later, I made the mistake of asking if Aira was especially moved by any of Borges\u2019s characters. He seemed nonplussed. \u201cBorges characters are not exactly human characters,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re literary characters.\u201d Elaborating, he offered a small link to his own work. \u201cCharacters are not important,\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s the play, the literary play. And characters, in what I write, they\u2019re necessary to advance the story.\u201d But it\u2019s the story that matters.
Many readers think of Aira\u2019s work, like that of Borges before him, as sui generis. When I asked Aira if he agrees, or if he feels that Borges has influenced his writing, he responded, \u201cI am thinking now that maybe.\u00a0.\u00a0. maybe all my work is a footnote to Borges.\u201d I was a little surprised by this, and Aira sounded surprised, too, as if he were testing the idea\u2019s truth. Borges was famously a fan of footnotes; a footnote to a body of footnoted works seems like a devious sort of tribute, almost Lex Luthor-like.
But Aira may not be in the best position to judge if his writing shows traces of Borges: one author whom Aira doesn\u2019t read is himself. When we met, the translation of \u201cEma, the Captive\u201d was under way, and Aira\u2019s translator had been sending him queries. As he\u2019d written the book thirty-seven years before, Aira\u2019s recall of its finer points wasn\u2019t perfect. \u201cBut I did not want to go to the book,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I invented the answers.\u201d<\/p>\n