Текст книги "The Planets"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Sergio Chejfec
The Planets

For Graciela Montaldo

Of all invisible countries

the present is the most vast

ONE

Dream, nightmare, truth. To Grino, the series played itself out like a promise rather than a dream. Days earlier he had woken to a memory, at the time still unreal: Sela’s little legs, which suggested a future beauty and inspired a desire inappropriate for her age, ruined by her fall. But dreams were insatiable, they always demanded more; according to Grino it was not enough just to dream them, they also sought some other form, a complementary action to rescue them from the confusion of the night. It is not only the dream, then, that took on a new inflection; real incidents – in this case, Sela’s fall – were cast in a nocturnal light, revealing an enigmatic quality. It would be in keeping with the order of things for a ripe piece of fruit to fall to the ground under the force of its own weight, but the fact that the girl should tumble from the tree after he dreamt about her fall transposed the whole sequence of events, including the backdrop against which they took place, onto the realm of the fantastic: the causes outnumbered the effects. Grino often wondered about the power of his dreams: whether they simply reflected events or if, perhaps, they catalyzed them. A patio, a few flower pots, a fig tree, and typical tile flooring completed the scene; the bedrooms were off to the side, set back about three meters, and one meter further, half hidden by branches and cans containing the sprouts of future plants, a railing separated the patio itself from the area used for the clotheslines, the laundry room. Little by little, Grino had become accustomed to the details of this scene, in which the girl was only one element; he had decided to call her Sela as soon as he laid eyes on her on his first day of work. Sela could reach the top of the tree in just a few movements, but she climbed slowly, stretching her legs so wide that Grino was afraid that at any moment her delicate body might be torn apart. After a while, she would disappear into the dense foliage, only to reappear further up, perched on a swaying branch. She would sit there for hours, like a sentry. The scene reminded Grino of a photo of a girls’ swim team lined up along the edge of an indoor pool, their heads covered by their swim caps and their legs exposed, poised to kick off a government-sponsored competition with their first dive. He had seen these images in magazines as a young boy, had thought about them until they began to feel like part of him: pictures of a row of bodies against a murky, dark background in which one might imagine people, but where there might only have been bleachers, or perhaps nothing at all. Since the water, too, was invisible, the swimmers appeared to be performing some sort of ritual, their joined hands pointing downwards as though invoking a submerged deity. The caption of the photo read “The girls are grateful for their healthy development.” Watching Sela climb the tree, Grino would think: She climbs like a swimmer. Her legs reminded him of the bodies of the girls in the picture, but were endowed with all the darkness, danger, and urgency that the others, due to his youth and the nature of photography, had lacked.

Something happens and the scene is transformed. The explosion is right on time. One can imagine the din of shattered stones, broken branches, the shifting of the earth that ends only when, paradoxically, it becomes clear that nothing is as it had been. Changes in nature often seem impermanent; they might be violent, even cataclysmic, but their effects spill out quickly as they fold themselves into the landscape and soon all is quiet again, which means it is time to begin anew. Nonetheless, years ago, when the news reported an explosion out in the countryside, beyond the city limits, I sensed that some aspect of those changes – not a before or an after, but a who, a how, and a how much – would prove to be more intractable, though less perceptible, than the changes in the landscape.

It was an impassive plain, interchangeable: there is infinite countryside just like it. Only in the minds of its inhabitants and in the memory of the animals and that great expanse of dirt, stones, plants, water, and little else did the blast hover like a noise waiting to trail off. Few things seem more gratuitous than setting off an explosion in the middle of nowhere, but in this case the macabre disguised itself as meaningless or innocent, a banality, supplanting the true face of terror. (This turned the danger into something irrational, not because it was too much to comprehend, but because it made itself known by unfolding according to an unfamiliar order.) The article talked about remains scattered over a vast area. There is a word that describes it well: sprayed. Appendages sprayed, spread out in concentric circles from an unequivocal center, the site of the explosion. No matter which direction one went, one would run into remains for hundreds of meters, remnants that had become no more than mute symbols fit only for an epilogue: bodies broken after having suffered, been torn to pieces and dispersed.

I looked up from the newspaper and toward the street. A taxi slowed, affectedly, neither coming to a stop nor advancing. I tried to formulate a thought: This is how we go through time, I said to myself, just barely moving forward. Aside from the lessons that could be culled from it, the taxi’s sluggish pace was meant, primarily, to give its passenger a moment. The man was eventually ready to pay, and the driver turned completely around to accept his fare in a gesture that seemed, if not overly obliging, at the very least contrived. Certain insights could be drawn from this, too, I thought. What I mean is that life proliferated itself through these events, while the text of the newspaper was something static, something that speaks of a seemingly inevitable past, a realm in which hope is extinguished, et cetera. While life and time marched forward in unison, branching out into infinite possibilities and consequences, the news stories that effaced the past and left us without hope were like a cynical grimace announcing what was to come, for example, that what once was light was about to fall into darkness.

Like many others, probably, I believed that I knew things the newspaper did not mention. In my case, the explosion had a painful history, which began with the abduction of M (M for Miguel, or Mauricio; it could also be M for Daniel since, as we know, any name at all can reside behind letters). Several days passed between the abduction and its announcement, a length of time I do not dare try to calculate, partly because I am not sure that I could: those days were not days at all – they were a single, interminable mass of time, at once ephemeral and able to reproduce itself without end; in a cruel twist of fate, as they sometimes say, the pages of that newspaper offered the only possibility of an ending, if not in the form of a conclusion then at least as a cessation, a way of giving shape to that mass and thereby opening it up to an after.

I should say that I lacked then, as I do now, any proof that M was in that explosion. But I was not, I am not, in a position to ignore the possibility. Imagining him among the dead served little purpose; in fact, it served no purpose at all. Nevertheless, it was a thought that insinuated itself time and again through association: what once pulsed with life, its own form of abundance, that is, his body, a combination of liquids, nerves or whatever all of that could be called (a typical presence to which the world has grown accustomed and is widely taken for granted, the habit of leaving life unspoken); the thought of something that had been inexhaustibly alive until that moment, the organic life of a body now emptied of its substance, took the shape of an idea marked by necessity, perhaps even by fate.

The pit opened by the memory of M was slowly covered over – days, then weeks and years – by the desolation left in the wake of barbarity. Unlike those of other transgressions, the effects of this crime do not fade immediately, in the short or long term, or ever. A deathly patina covers the faces of the living, their features become a shield against unsuitable gestures, emblems or examples of absent faces; these grimaces are eloquent precisely because the living, overwhelmed by the evidence before them, chose lassitude and dissimilation. (Now I will speak of my country.) I have always had the feeling, when walking anywhere in Argentina, but particularly in Buenos Aires, that I was doing so among people who, surprised by the intimacy of their relationship with death, choose cynicism as their form of atonement (when sincere repentance is such a simple act).

As a result, what follows is a story without an end. Perhaps within the sphere of evil there is a need to complete unfinished stories. When I say the sphere of evil, I am not referring to some sort of absolute complicity, but rather to the fact that its victims, though they belong to the realm of good, have been cast into another – the dominion of evil – by virtue of being victims. Since we know that good may be limitless, perhaps within the sphere of evil the need to bring stories to their conclusion becomes urgent. Maybe this is why I thought of M’s abduction when I read the news of the explosion. The time between those two events was an exercise in panic during which I imagined the cruelties he suffered, prior to the moment of that equalizing blast, which ended both life and horror. Looking at the newspaper I imagined that, after those interminable days, reason – though it was a childish and abominable sort of reason – had finally prevailed: his annihilation, of which the abduction was only part, had been fully realized.

I read the story three times, then found myself transfixed by its title. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was thinking about something, but I was not thinking about nothing, either. If there is a moment that precedes the formation of a thought – a moment in which one’s consciousness tries to make way for an idea but is impeded by the sheer number of details involved, a moment in which a future thought takes the form of a dream, an involuntary impulse – if such a moment does exist, I experienced it for an inordinately long time. So long that I jumped when the waiter came by to empty my ashtray, startling him. The title read: “Explosion in P.” I stared at it without taking in the words, the paper covered with disorganized blotches of ink, like when one stands in front of a mirror and sees the glass instead of one’s reflection. The newspaper said that, for a few hours, the locals had heard trucks speeding up and then stopping; unusual noises that somehow failed to draw anyone’s attention. (If it had happened during the day they would have seen the whole thing, but since it was night, everything appeared to be in order; night is the embodiment of the clandestine, which in this case allowed many to turn a blind eye.) It had seemed like some sort of public project, roadwork, maybe. Engines running at capacity, something heavy rocking back and forth, banging against metal. Sometimes the trucks could be heard dumping their loads of rubble, the stones flowing out of them like a solid, dissonant stream. Then the activity began to subside, and little by little the noise tapered off until at some point in the middle of the night everything seemed to return to its indifferent state of normalcy. And yet, as would be proven shortly, the process had already been set in motion and was gaining momentum. Having forgotten the trucks, all were shocked by the explosion. Silence spread among them until the following night. (The silence itself was a sign; expressed physically it would have been a grimace, an acknowledgment of the lack of explanations and also a means of excusing the violence. The people’s faces.)

A silence less enigmatic and drawn out than the one adopted by M’s parents. Despite its eloquence, which did not deign to utter a word, it was a silence composed of gestures as emphatic as blows with a stick. I never fully grasped the meaning of this silence, though I tried in vain several times to understand it. One could say that the absence of the child produced an emptiness in the parents, who lived their lives inside a sphere of glass bombarded by signs from the outside world. Because of the transparency of their enclosure, its interior was visible to all, despite the fact that M’s parents felt and acted as though they were living on the dark side of a planet composed of their own pain. They were comfortable in their anguish and consoled by their own desperation. The outside, generally defined as “others,” “things,” or just “the world,” which had always seemed somewhat adverse, revealed itself, after what happened to M, to be openly hostile. As a form of self-defense in the face of so much adversity, they chose to fade away, to become transparent. But the truth was that they were still being observed, perhaps more than ever.

I admired the fact that a drama so intense would, for them, be silent. It was not the hermetic isolation that usually imposes itself after a tragedy, the form of autism adopted by the victim, or the open display of fear and self-pity exhibited by friends. More tangibly, it was the melancholy silence behind which his family would hide, as though each of them were fulfilling a predetermined and accepted religious role that originated in the distant past. But this obedience, because it was born not only of personal conviction but also of their very nature, unfolded against a backdrop of confusion. In this way, even though they did not hear it, the explosion that ended their son’s life was still a shock to them, I thought as I sat in a café—a pizzeria, rather – on what was then avenida Canning. It shocked them still. Like stones in a pond, the waves of the explosion reached M’s family, actually gaining force as they traveled rather than tapering off, as they would have under other circumstances. Of all the dangers involved in going near M’s house, one of the most painful was confessing to his parents and his siblings, without actually saying anything, that chance had been on our side, that of his friends, and not on his. This arbitrary act of evil grieved us as though we were his kin and left us in his debt. M was our martyr, not because his sacrifice was intended to bring about our salvation, but because we were marked by his death. This is why some days I think of him as though he were divine, assigning to him impossible powers, worshipping his memory. Though his existence is slowly slipping away from me, becoming abstract, it continues to be the most vibrant, certain, and immediate thing I know.

Captives of geography, our past is shaped by the city. That earlier city is still our doorstep. A multicolored fabric of extraordinary vastness, woven of shortcuts and straight lines intersecting at outrageous angles, imposed itself as the backdrop of our sojourns. But its surface, known conventionally as the real and as resistant as a scab of asphalt and cement, lost something in M’s absence; it was reduced to belated shadows and reflections projected onto that other city, the one etched into the past. The true present faded into the distance, and the city itself, built from substances designed to withstand the effects of time, dissolved into a nucleus of disorder. This degeneration of the city, which spared only the traces of the two of us, making M’s absence even more pronounced, devastated me and left me silent for months. It was another who could speak, not I. For weeks on end, the days refused to pass; as I walked I could feel the presence of some remote power, older than time, that kept me from knowing my own destination. It happened in all sorts of situations. And yet the city was not empty; it was full of people who were able to carry on as though nothing had happened. Things like “the 100 neighborhoods of Buenos Aires” and “the Queen of the Río de la Plata” would still come out of their mouths. To me, these phrases revealed, just as more explicit ones did, the spread of misinformation and falsehoods. Nothing escaped, nothing was spared; they even afforded the dead a part in this scene, if only to turn their backs on them. It was a jumble of words in which the memory of its inhabitants was invoked only to be decimated.

He met M when the two had just grown out of childhood. Several years before the abduction, they sealed the friendship with a classic rite of communion: they exchanged portraits. (It was more than a fad, but not as deeply rooted as a custom; the youth of the time were of a particular sentimentality that combined emotional impulses with a nonconformist – and often heterodox – attitude. Although this could be said of adolescents in general, at the time this energy was directed toward the unification of tastes, opinions, and ideas. They often spoke of whether they could be considered to be under the influence of the masses; they were young, but they were also foreign; they were amphibians. Inhabitants of a secondary nature, they adopted beliefs in a way that immediately exposed them as inauthentic, or mildly or profoundly out of place – depending.) M’s portrait was an enlargement of part of another photo, taken on calle Humberto I, in the neighborhood of San Telmo. The magnification of his face blurs his features and the rough grain of the photographic paper lends him a dramatic, if somewhat less than spontaneous, expression; his open mouth reveals his distinguishing feature: the hollow of a missing incisor. Partly because of the enlargement process, and partly due to his expression, his face seems on the verge of forming a grimace; almost, but not quite, due to the very circumstance that produced the effect: the false proximity of the camera.

Before giving it to me, M wrote the phrase “buffeted by the wind” like a title or an emblem on the back. I turned the photo over and saw him: he was standing on a fence and holding on to the railing, precisely as though he were being buffeted by the wind. In the interest of simulation, someone else might have pretended that he were leaning out over a precipice or some other thing one might expect to find on the wrong side of a fence, but M had chosen the least likely option: a vague idea of questionable representability. Of all the scenarios he could have depicted, his expression hinted at the violence of imagined gusts of wind and his grip on the bars, which were barely visible, spoke of its incredible force.

The day we exchanged pictures, M declared, “I don’t believe in photographs.” He did not say this to detract from the exchange, but simply to express that, in his opinion, photos did not have any documentary value whatsoever, and for that reason he doubted that they could carry a complementary emotion. As was often the case when he spoke, his words were aimed at refutation rather than persuasion – nevertheless, I was persuaded. I looked at him without understanding: where, if not toward the traces of our lives, private or shared, could we direct our emotions, apart from other people, I silently wondered. M did not hear me, but went on speaking as though he were responding to my question: Photographs are evidence of a momentary reality, inherently archaic and out of place, he repeated (in different words); but for this very reason they are also useless as documentary records. Relics as soon as they are processed, they are mute, a bridge between the past – the circumstance depicted in the photo – and the present – the moment of its viewing. And what is there between the past and the present? he asked, raising his voice. Nothing, just a chasm open at your feet; if we believe photos to be auxiliary truths, either truth itself is nonexistent or reality needs no proof. As we know, there was no wind and that fence is just a collection of posts so thick you can barely tell what they are. The weather that day no longer exists, and the noises we heard have long since faded. We’ll keep these photos as talismans, but not as proofs. “Let’s keep these photos as talismans, but not as proofs,” I repeated, as though the words were a prayer or a line of verse, trying harder to convince myself than the occasion demanded. I could sense, in this insistence and excess, a religious undertone of guardianship. Something between protection and adoration, at least; if the figure in the photo no longer existed, and neither did the sounds of the street or that particular palette of light, as is the case in any place and time, that afternoon the secret value of the image, the photo, lay in its power of conservation rather than in the representation of an origin. Years later, my photo would lack the protective qualities he had tried to assign to both. But “my photo” was not my portrait, but M’s. Just like “his” was not his, but mine. Which of the four photos retained that power? His in his possession, mine in my own hands, the picture of me that he held on to, or his in my possession (which I still have)?

After the abduction, I took refuge in the house of a friend who had the same name as M. I met my mother from time to time in a nearby café; she wanted me to leave, I didn’t respond. My mother would smooth her hair and ask how long I was going to go on like this. I remained silent. Then it would begin all over again; the same dialogue repeated two or three times in different words, followed by the same silence. Then, with a sudden movement, which in its swiftness conveyed both annoyance and concern, she would take out a little money and tell me that she would not be able to go on offering it for long. I am sure it was not easy for her to come by, but the supposed tact of calling “offering” what was so obviously “giving” seemed both unnecessary and inappropriate; it was the introduction of courtesy into a situation that rendered courtesy trivial, even insulting: the circumstance, as she herself acknowledged with her concern, simply did not allow for social graces or attempts at elegance. How, if not like alms or a tip, was that money handed over to me? I was in no position to turn it down, but she insisted on the word “offering” time and again; in a way, the care with which she tried to protect my supposed pride showed just how far apart we had grown, how divergent our paths had become. It was on one of those days – when I would walk from café to café, my mania fueled by fear, exhaustion, and boredom – after seeing my mother, that I read about the explosion in the newspaper.

M lived on a street that was divided in two by the railroad. Whoever wanted to cross the tracks had to do so by following its old-fashioned walkways in the form of an S, which would force them, precisely, to slow down. The house was thirty meters from the tracks; cars hardly ever drove down his block, which was lined with trees and façades so similar they seemed indistinguishable, interchangeable. To get to M’s house, one had to walk down a long hallway that extended almost to the middle of the block. Every few meters a door would appear on the right – these were not only similar, but in fact completely identical. His family lived behind the fourth. The door opened on to a patio, which was the nucleus of the house. There were a few plants and large flowerpots in it, which at first glance seemed to be scattered about at random. M’s room was reached by climbing a narrow staircase that rose up from the patio next to a large sink and doubled back above it (so closely you had to stoop over to do the wash). I remember my surprise looking down for the first time through the steps of iron grating, just like the ones found on countless railroad bridges. M should feel lucky to have his own room, I thought the first time I visited, especially one so isolated from the rest of the house.

The residence, which was nothing special in itself, took on an enigmatic quality the moment M’s family moved in. It was not just the building or the apartment, as I will explain later on, it was also its location. Even though it was in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, the house was in an area that was not considered as such. The proximity of the two, as is often the case, made the differences between them even more pronounced. The opposite can also occur, as it did with my family, which did not live in a Jewish neighborhood but drew little attention just the same. Invisible from the street, in an area that seemed strange to my inexperienced mind, M’s house was ensconced within the very heart of the block, surrounded on all sides by other houses and other families. This confinement, which shaped the family’s daily activities, proved that “confinement” was not really the right word for it; more accurately, it was an excessive form of cohabitation and a different sort of abundance, though it was foreign to me. It was the realm of the diverse, the disparate. I should say that the “geographic” oddity of the house represented only my first concern; a second arose when I met M’s parents, who spoke without any particular accent. I still remember my surprise at hearing his father speak; his language was unquestionably that of Buenos Aires, utterly porteñoin usage and intonation, and was, of course, more emphatic than my own. My admiration mingled with suspicion. I had always seen a foreign accent, especially a Yiddish one, as a perceptible mark; because of this, I viewed its absence as a profound ethnic limitation. The way I saw it, a foreigner displayed greater abundance than a local did through his speech, the outward sign of a nucleus that affirmed his identity.

There are, in life, passing moments and pivotal ones – some can be both at once, some, only one or the other. This lack of an accent was one of these: not passing, but pivotal. If the condition of being Jewish were a hollow meant to be filled with distinguishing attributes, in those years I considered flawed speech to be a fundamental element of the mix. We had been taught to set our sights on this, and it is well known that everyone else was doing the same. I sensed, in the lack of an accent among M’s family, a diffuse sort of danger, which did not attach itself to anyone or anything in particular; in the worst case, it suggested a threat, in the best, a mistake – the destruction of that which separated them from the rest of the world. The world thrives on difference; it is from this difference that we learn. In this way, language and geography came together in M, highlighting his enigmatic surroundings and forming a complement.

I’ll now mention another thing that was important to our friendship: the railroad. The tracks became our territory. To M and his friends, a stroll through the area was an exclusive activity; it meant walking, separately and guided by individual routine, along streets and homes that offered up their hidden corners without resistance. They killed time looking for oddly-shaped rocks, pulling weeds from the sides of the embankments, poking around the fences and walls at the furthest ends of the lot. Over the years, this place would become another shared emblem. I would take the train into Buenos Aires every day from the outskirts of the city, often traveling the same route along which M would walk. As I passed his house, I would stick my head out the window and look back at the short, tree-lined block, its cobblestones in perpetual shade. We spoke with great composure about the trains, not with a sense of admiration that could deteriorate into enthusiasm, nor from a desire to expand upon any meager technical knowledge of the subject, but rather paying particular attention to the details, which were often questionable, as all details are, in an attempt to understand them as part of a real – and apparently unattainable – whole: the one represented by trains of metal, glass, and leather that crisscrossed the city, more noisy than they were fast.

When the world is so dark that the truth seems beyond our reach, it is best to create an efficient, though illusory, system that allows us to represent it as though it were real. These topics of conversation, then, were assured their longevity not only by the fact that the trains were a part of both of our lives, but also by the monotony of those lives, a rut into which we gradually fell. I would mention things I had seen, M would describe others. He would tell me, for example, that the bells on the corner near his house had rung the whole afternoon, that there must have been something wrong with them. I, for my part, would listen, think about what he was saying, and remember, for example, that I had been delayed an hour near Ramos Mejía station. The car I was in – as always, the last – was blocking the street. I could see the frustration of the drivers as they looked out at the obstruction that was arbitrarily blocking their way; they must have thought that it would have made no difference to the train to have stopped a little further along. And maybe they were right, I said, the fact that the last car of the train was exactly as wide as the street made it seem like something that had been done deliberately, maliciously. M thought for a minute, and then asked if there were many people on the train. “On what train?” I replied. The train I said I was on, he explained. I answered him with a wave of my hand that signaled “like this,” when what I had wanted to convey was “you know” or “the usual,” meaning that I could only speak for the car I was in; as I described to him in detail, the car was about half full but many of the passengers, myself included, were standing, which allowed me a better view of the street. It was no problem for the people riding bicycles or traveling on foot, I continued, they went around the back of the train and crossed the tracks carefully. The drivers of the cars sighed as they watched people on foot pass them by; they were slaves to their vehicles, and they rested their arms on their steering wheels in a gesture, I repeated, of both resignation and impatience. Sometimes a few of them spoke; a pedestrian pointed into the distance.