Grotesque and fantastic twists punctuate this fairytale-like memoir of childhood
César Aira is one of the most significant Latin American authors writing today. He has penned more than 80 books, but so far only a handful have been translated into English. The Lime Tree (beautifully translated by Chris Andrews) is the third to appear from publisher And Other Stories in the past 12 months (preceded by The Little Buddhist Monk and The Proof, as well as The Seamstress and the Wind the year before). I mention this because it’s not uncommon for readers to find themselves quickly hooked, desperately searching for their next Aira fix. That said, The Lime Tree isn’t a typical Aira offering. In the way he combines the thoughtfulness of philosophical musings with the rich eccentricities of magical realism, his writing owes much to that of Jorge Luis Borges. On this occasion, however, both these defining elements are largely absent from the text; instead The Lime Tree is a fictional memoir.
Set in the Argentine town of Coronel Pringles in the 1950s, the book opens with a description of the lime trees that flanked the Plaza. Ten thousand normal ones – “small, elegant” trees with “slender” trunks – and one giant, referred to by the narrator as The Monster Lime Tree, a “strange quirk of Nature, one that had grown to an enormous size; it looked ancient, with its twisted trunk and impenetrable crown” (this being the first of a series of descriptions and images threaded through the story, that although aren’t in any way explicit, hint at the fantastical).
From this first evocative memory – the narrator’s insomniac father used the trees’ blossoms to make tea, which he believed had calming properties – the rest of the narrator’s childhood world gently unfurls like its own beautiful flower, petal after delicate petal expanding towards the light. “One thing opened out into another [that’s the beauty of memory],” the narrator explains.
Although not strictly written as a series of vignettes, but rather a selfsustaining, complete piece of prose, because Aira flits between memories, images and scenes, the book takes on a captivating episodic quality.
The narrator tells us he was born in 1949, “at the climax of the Peronist regime”. His father was a “staunch Peronist from way back... for him, as for so many Argentinians of modest means, it paid off: in his case, not just via the labour laws, the social benefits and the hope of betterment that spread throughout society, but individually too, because his loyalty was rewarded with a lucrative council job”. He’s in charge of the electrical systems that light the streets and public buildings. He’s a loyal citizen, but he’s also an outsider – strikingly beautiful, all the more so since his skin and hair are so dark he’s described as “black”, a colour “associated... with poverty, servitude, ignorance and the ranches”. Presumably he has some Indian ancestry, but the father is a closed book when it comes to his heritage.
The narrator’s mother, meanwhile, holds the privileged position of being the daughter of European immigrants, but she’s of “rather grotesque appearance” – so short, she looks like a dwarf, but with a small head that’s “covered in grey down instead of hair”, and she wears glasses, the lenses of which are so thick they look like marbles.
Although not veering into the realm of magical realism in the way of Aira’s novels, the sense here is of characters who’ve wandered in from a fairy tale, not least because their happiness is an “against the odds” love match. The narrator describes his father as having had “the courage to marry – for love – a woman who wasn’t normal. And not only that, he had dared to procreate, to assume ‘the charge’ of a child. Anything could have emerged from my mother’s womb: a monster, for example.”
Again, the tendrils of something slightly magical and otherworldly creep into the narrator’s description of his family’s choice of living arrangements. The three inhabit a single room in a large, once-grand house. The building is huge, and they’re the only residents, but they never stray from their one room – “the real house was hidden in the heart of the house… as a seed lies hidden within a forest”. It is enough for them, and doesn’t seem unusually cramped since all the narrator’s friends and their families live in similarly small spaces.
As tumultuous as the time is that the narrator and his family are living in – glimpses of which we’re given through sentences referencing the “years of instability, difficult and chaotic, with frequent changes in government, military rumblings and interventions” – The Lime Tree is not so much concerned with “the whirlwind of history”, but rather details of life as seen through “the marvelling eyes of a child”.