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Автор Сесар Айра

Annotation

César is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, César’s bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes. A comic science fiction fantasy of the first order, The Literary Conference is the perfect vehicle for César Aira’s take over of literature in the 21st century.

César Aira

Part I. The Macuto Line

Part II. The Conference

III

VII

VIII

César Aira

The Literary Conference

Part I. The Macuto Line

ON A RECENT trip to Venezuela I had the opportunity to admire the famous “Hilo de Macuto” or “The Macuto Line,” one of the wonders of the New World — a legacy left by anonymous pirates, a tourist attraction, and an unsolved enigma. A strange monument to human ingenuity that remained a mystery for centuries and, in the process, became an integral part of a Nature that at those latitudes is as rich as all the innovations to which She gives rise. Macuto itself is one of several coastal towns spread out at the foot of Caracas and adjacent to Maiquetía, where the airport I landed in is situated. They put me up temporarily at Las Quince Letras, the modern hotel built on the beach in front of the bar and restaurant of the same name. My room faced the sea, the enormous yet intimate Caribbean Sea, blue and brilliant. The “Line” passed a hundred yards in front of the hotel; I caught a glimpse of it from my window, then went out to take a closer look.

Throughout my childhood, I, like every child of the Americas, indulged in vain speculations about the Macuto Line, a living relic through which the fictional world of pirates became real and tangible. Encyclopedias — mine was A Childhood Treasury, which didn’t deserve its name except in those pages — contained diagrams and photographs, which I reproduced in my notebooks. And in my games I would untie the knot, reveal the secret. . Much later, I watched documentaries about the Line on television; I bought books on the subject and came across it many times during my studies of Venezuelan and Caribbean literature, where it appears as a leitmotif. I also followed, along with everyone else (though without any special interest), newspaper articles about new theories, new attempts to solve the enigma. . The fact that new ones were continually cropping up was a clear indication that the previous ones had failed.

According to the age-old legend, the Line was devised to recover a treasure from the deep sea, a haul of immense value placed there by pirates. One of the pirates (none of the chronicles and archives used in the research identified him by name) must have been an artistic-scientific genius of the first order, a shipboard Leonardo, to have invented such a marvelous instrument that could both hide and recover the loot.