Ghosts by César Aira Page B

at altitude most of the time, wasn’t so sure about that.
Anyway, if it was true, and if there was a gradual increase, the difference
between one floor and the next should have been perceptible, at least for
someone with a sensitive enough ear, a musician, for example, listening in
reverse, as it were. As she went from the fourth to the fifth floor, she felt
the silence thicken, but that didn’t prove anything, because the data of
reality, as she had observed in the past, were produced by chance, or rather by
an inextricable accumulation of chances. Also, since it’s well known that sounds
rise (which must be because “they’re lighter than air,” as the saying goes, or a
lighter kind of air), you should hear more noise as you go up; it should be
quiet on the ground. True, sounds fade progressively as they rise, because
height is a kind of distance. But under normal circumstances, human beings are
at or near ground level. If a man were placed at a great height, and he looked
down, somewhere near halfway he would see two corresponding limits, floating
like magnetized Cartesian divers: the limit of the sound as it passed into
imperceptibility, and that of his own hearing range. But those
divers.... men floating in the air.... she
knew what that was about. And
speaking of noise (and magnetism too, come to think of it), the most clamorous
and disturbing noises she had heard in her months on the site had been made by
cats. The neighborhood was populated by strays. Their survival and proliferation
were favored by the gardens of the Theological University, the car bodies that
the police left permanently parked all along in front of the station, the square
a hundred yards away, the convent school’s enormous park (the size of a whole
block) with its luxuriant foliage, and, above all, the empty buildings, each
with its clientele of old witches who came twice a day to put out milk and
hamburger steak. The way the cats howled was beyond belief. At first she had
thought they were children gone crazy. But that wouldn’t have been so bad. The
inhumanity of the cats’ screams gave them something extra. And their speed,
because those sounds were produced in the course of races and escapes, as
opposed to the karateka’s shout, which issues from a still body. (Patri had
taken karate lessons in Chile, on the advice of her stepfather. For various
reasons, including her innate distaste for perfection, she had neglected to sit
the exam which would have given her a blue belt. Even though blue was her
favorite color.) The astonishing activity of the cats, obscene as it was,
reminded her of the ghosts, who manifested themselves as the opposite of
obscenity, as a kind of innocence.
    In fact, they were manifesting themselves at that very moment. They
were emerging from the light, from transparency: they were opaque, definitely
opaque, but because of the whiteness of the cement dust, they were hard to
distinguish from the light. Where could their covering have come from? It was
true that everything was dusty on the building site, but the strange thing about
the ghosts was how evenly covered they were with that white dust, every square
inch of them. And there was quite a lot to cover because they were tall like
Argentineans, and solidly built, even chubby. Although well proportioned in
general, some of them, the majority in fact, had big bellies. Even their lips
were powdered; even the soles of their feet! Only at odd moments, from certain
points of view, could you see the foreskin at the tips of their penises parting
to reveal a tiny circle of bright red, moist skin. It was the only touch of
color on their bodies. Even birds fluttering around in ashes don’t achieve such
a uniform result. Patri traversed the air through which they had flowed,
unworried by the thought of her breath mixing with theirs. She was walking on
the ground. What a destiny: unwittingly, unwillingly thrust into the midst of a
nudist colony.
    Tired and annoyed, she paid