César Aira - Birthday

Recently I turned fifty, and in the leadsup to the big day I began to have great expectations, but not because I was really hoping to take stock of my life up to that point; I saw it more as a chance for renewal, a fresh start, a change of habits. In fact, I didnt even consider taking stock, or weighing up the half century gone by. My gaze was fixed on the future. I was thinking of the birthday exclusively as a point of departure, and although I hadnt worked out anything in detail or made any concrete plans, I had very bright hopes, if not of starting over entirely, at least of using that milestone to shed some of my old defects, the worst of which is precisely procrastination, the way I keep breaking my promises to change. It wasnt so preposterous. After all, it was entirely up to me. It was more reasonable than the hopes and fears pinned on the year 2000, because turning fifty is less arbitrary than a date in the almanac. In a reversal of the usual scenario, the hopes, however poorly grounded, were working in my favor, because they could sustain a self-fulfilling prophecy. And everything suggested that they would, or so I felt.

And yet nothing happened. My birthday came and went. The tasks to be completed, the chores to be done and the force of routine which is so powerful by the age of fifty vied with each other to ensure that the day went by like any other. It was my fault, of course: if I wanted there to be a change, I should have made it happen myself, but instead I trusted to the magic of the event, I took it easy and went on being the same old me. What else could I expect, in practical terms, if I had no intention of getting divorced, or moving house, or starting a new job, or doing anything special? In the end, I took it philosophically and went on living, which is no mean feat.

The mistake, if there was one, lay in not realizing that changes come from the most unexpected directions, which is what makes them genuine changes. Its a fundamental law of reality. What changes is something else, not what you were expecting. Otherwise, it would be business as usual. Its not really a failure of planning or foresight, or even a lack of imagination, because even imagination has its limits. Expectations of change develop around a particular subject, but change always changes the subject. I should have known that from my experience as a novelist. But I had to wait for events to bring it home to me.

A few months later, one beautiful autumn morning, I was walking along the street with Liliana. I looked up, breathing the cold, bracing air. The sky was clear, a luminous blue; up there, to my left, the moon, half-full, with that porous white color it has in the daylight; to the right, hidden from us by the buildings, the sun, still low. I was feeling euphoric, not unusually (its my natural state): buoyant and optimistic. I was chatting away about something, and then, with the vague intention of cracking some kind of joke, I said:

It cant be true that the phases of the moon are produced by the earths shadow when it comes between the moon and the sun, because the sun and the moon are both in the sky now, the earth isnt between them at all, but the moon isnt full. Theyve been fooling us! Hehehe. The phases of the moon must be caused by something else, and theyre telling us its the shadow of the earth! Hehe. Its garbage!

My wife, who doesnt always appreciate my sense of humor, looked up too, in puzzlement, and asked me:

But who said the phases of the moon were caused by the earths shadow? Where did you get that from?

Thats what I was taught in Pringles, I said, lying.

It cant be. No one could have come up with that sort of nonsense.

But how does it work then?

Theres no shadow. The sun illuminates the moon, but only half of it, the way it is with any light source illuminating a spherical body. Depending on the relative position of the earth, we see a portion of the illuminated half; it grows until were seeing it all, and thats when theres a full moon; then it shrinks down to nothing. Simple.

Are you serious? So I was the only one getting it wrong all this time? Hehe!

We left it there, in a comic haze, one of the many I generate in the course of a day. All you have to do is say its a bad joke, and no one bothers to look for its meaning. Except that I didnt forget this joke, and little by little the monstrosity of my ignorance dawned on me. I had indeed been getting it wrong, and it wasnt as if, in this case, it was something obscure that anyone might be excused for misunderstanding. On the contrary, it was almost the model of the obvious and the visible. The fact that I considered myself an intellectual, an educated, curious, intelligent man, made the joke all the funnier. The moon is always suspended there in full view, lit up and conspicuous, each and every night, punctually running through the cycle of its phases twelve times a year. And the sun like a spotlight and the earth with its days and nights, the whole rotating system... Any eight-year-old with a modicum of intelligence could have reached the correct conclusions. Or a savage, a primitive, the first man making a first attempt at thought.