The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira Read Online Free PDF Page A

There’s nothing
to be done!”
    In spite of their pessimism, they worked like the devil,
shouting at each other, even swearing, all in an attack of hysteria. They
applied electric paddles to the poor man, who was turning blue, seizing,
writhing. The odor of strange chemical substances made it impossible to breathe.
At the same time, the huge nurse stepped on the gas, as if he’d also been
infected, and shouted incoherent orders over the siren’s loudspeakers. Even the
dog was going nuts. In the midst of this indescribable chaos, Ferreyra turned to
him and shouted:
    “Dr. Aira, this is our last chance. Do something! Save a
life!”
    “No, no . . . I have never . . . ”
    “Do something! We’re losing him!”
    He was groping behind him for the door handle. He had
decided to throw himself out the door, if necessary while still in motion. Again
they changed tactics. Suddenly, all the screens went blank, and everybody calmed
down, as if by magic.
    “We’ll take you home, don’t worry. The patient has
died.”
    “You’re going to have to sign a form . . . ”
    “No.”
    “ . . . to explain the use of the ambulance.”
    “I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
    “Okay, good-bye.”
    They had stopped. They opened the door. As he was getting
out, the dead man said:
    “Jackass.”
    He could have sworn it was Actyn’s voice, which he’d only
ever heard on television. He stepped onto the sidewalk and looked around. The
dog had disappeared, and the ambulance had already taken off, accelerating
loudly. It was only at that moment that he felt a wave of adrenaline washing
over his insides. This lag, like jet lag, had rendered him ineffectual, for the
chance to beat the hell out of those charlatans had already passed. The same
thing always happened to him: his indignation, which was torturous, came
afterwards when he was alone, when he couldn’t fight with anybody but himself.
Always the same concatenation between time and blunders. A civilized person like
him couldn’t lament not having engaged in a knock-down-drag-out, but there
remained a question about whether he was a Real Man or a scurrying rat. He was
two blocks away from his house. He looked at the trees, the large banana trees
along José Bonifacio Street, and it occurred to him that they were machines
designed to crush the world until the atoms were released. That’s how he felt,
and this was the natural effect of theater. Who said that lies lead to the
truth, that fiction flows into reality? Theater’s misfortune was this definitive
and irreversible dissolution. That was also its gravity, above and beyond the
iridescent lightness of fiction.
    At least he’d come out of it unscathed. His morning
adventure was over. Once again, Dr. Aira had escaped from the clutches of his
relentless archenemy and could continue (but for how much longer?) his program
of Miracle Cures.

II
    That winter, freed from the material necessities of life through a stroke of good fortune
(he’d received a sum of money that had allowed him to take ten months off from
his income-producing activities), Dr. Aira dedicated himself fully to the
writing and publication of his works. His worry-free state could only be
temporary because once the money ran out he would have to again find ways to get
more; but for once in his life he wanted to give himself the chance to be fully
absorbed in his intellectual work, like some kind of monk or wise man detached
from the practical aspects of existence. If he didn’t do it now, at fifty, he
never would.
    One effect of his age was that he had lately begun to
appreciate in all its magnitude the responsibility incumbent upon him as a
creator of symbolic material (and who isn’t creating this, in one way or
another, all the time?). Because this material was virtually eternal: it
traveled through time and shaped future thoughts. And not only thoughts but also
everything that would be born from them. The future itself, the block of the
future, was nothing