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César Aira: El presidente [The President]

The president in question is indeed the president of Argentina though, when this book was published, the president of Argentina was a woman while in this book the president is a man, though known only by his title.

Aira starts off by teling us that this tale is like an oriental fable, replete with magic and mystery. While that is true to some extent, it seems to me that it is far more like an Aira tale.

However, I see why he says the opening scenario has an oriental flavour. The president lives alone. He is not married (and never has been). He slips out of the Casa Rosada (the Argentinian presidential residence) late at night and heads to the poorer neighbourhoods. As Aira says, this was not a political stunt, as it was a complete secret. He observed people who stayed up late, late night buses, pizzerias that stayed open late, young people doing drugs and poor people looking in dustbins for anything useful. Nobody recognised him as he did not look anything like his official portrait. Once a passer-by looked at him in astonishment but was not sure why. After all, who would expect a busy president to be out and about at night?

However what he did do was sing a tune he knew from childhood and, while no-one saw him, plenty of people heard him and soon the mysterious singer was known of throughout the city though no-one knew who it was.

The song has been taught to him by a childhood friend, Birrette. The future president came from a well-to-do middle class background while Birrette came from a poor background. Nevertheless the two were inseparable. The future president invited Birrette invited back to hus house but Birrette always declined as he was ashamed of his appearance, When he finally agreed he was made very welcome. However things went wrong though we only learn the details later.
There were two other key people in his life, both women. The first was Xenia the mystery woman. He would wonder whether she liked him for himself or because was president. Xenia was a very single-minded woman so much so that he thought she should be studied as her single-mindedness was something that other Argentinians could benefit from, particularly what he calls her inbuilt Practical Guide.

A local hospital had a special Presidential Unit, set up with the best doctors and equipment and he wanted her to be examined there to see whether they could determine what drives her and see if it could be of use to the Argentinian people. However there is a complication as the unit is only for presidents.

And then there is Rabina. As a child he had remained very close to the family home but, as he grew older he wanted to explore the wilder side of the country. His parents reluctantly agreed but hired a guide for him, Rabina. She had extraordinary powers, like all the women who came into his life. (The men, however, (e.g. Birrette) tended to be fragile. His mother also bought some kind of sophisticated tracker which did not work in the forest because of the radiation coming from Rabina’s head. He threw it away. When he became president he has people look for it but without success, though they did find a massive, previously unknown hotel underground.We learn little about the expedition eith Rabina.t

We learn that when president he had very little money as he gave his salary to help poor children. He was fed in the Casa Rosada but his clothes were getting tatty, so he opened a grocery shop run by Xenia.

And it gets weirder. Almost as an aside we learn that both Rabina and Xenia were kidnapped and held to ransom but he refused to pay, not least because it seems he was happy to be rid of both of them.

One thing he wonders is how people cope with life. He finds it difficult to cope with any problem but, as president, he has people to deal with problems.

He is out and about on one of his nocturnal strolls when he hears someone following him. Initially he can see no-one but then a woman appears and he recognises – he thinks – Rabina. However she does not seem to reorganise him and apologises for mistaking him for someone else and walks off. He decides to follow her, thinking – without any obvious reason for doing so – that she may be going to the place where she was held as hostage after being kidnapped. He follows her to a notorious area where gangs of criminals hang out and decides he will rescue her later. He comes up with a fanciful idea that somehow Xenia, Rabina and Birrete (who, we have previously learned, is dead)may all be connected, at least insofar as his role is concerned He is determined to put his normal procrastination behind and get all these problems sorted.

As always with Aira, it is not always clear what is going on and if you think you have a rough idea of what is going on, Aira will soon lead you down another path, a path which by normal standards seems somewhat odd, or illogical. But that is, of course his modus operandi – you are not going to get a conventional plot but a thoroughly strange one. I very much doubt that there has ever been an Argentinian president like this, who sneaks out at night, wanders the streets and returns in the early hours of the morning, sometimes forgetting his key so has to sneak in with the staff. Moreover, this president seems to have no contact with anyone at all while he is president – no contact with staff, other politicians, friends and so on except for his very brief contact with Xenia and Rabina-who-may-not-be-Rabina.

In short another typcal Aira novel.

h3>Publishing history

First published in 2019 byMansalva
No English translation
Published in French in 2022as Le président by Christian Bourgois
Translated by Christilla Vasserot