Текст книги "The Planets"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

One night he has a dream in which he sees the girl climbing a tree. Grino is in the storehouse, watching her. Try as he might, he can’t help but notice that the way she stretches her legs has a specific, hardly innocent, beauty to it. Suddenly the girl makes a wrong move and falls; her back collides with a branch before she hits the ground. Grino is alone and does not know what to do, and this makes him feel somehow responsible. He has lived with his impotence his whole life, only now it seems inappropriate, out of place. He is aware of the risk of paralysis: that kind of injury can be dangerous. He does not attempt to revive her precisely because of his fear that she will not respond. He feels his world falling apart. Whatever happens, whichever of the two awakens, he knows that he will be blamed and will lose his job. When he wakes up in the morning, a diffuse sense of guilt keeps him from getting out of bed. Unlike what usually happens, in this case a dream broke the spell of reality. And so began his time out on the tracks.

The driver pulls out of a garage next to a house with yellow doors. The back fender appears first, then the rest of the car. Once he has it out on the curb, the owner gets out of the car and closes the garage door. This action, so often repeated, is almost like doing nothing at all; M, his father, and the other agree that it seems like an invisible operation. At the same point on the opposite curb there is a grey car, somewhat protected from the sun by the shade of a young ash tree. The man closes the garage door as though he were wrestling with a corpse; it is unwieldy, with old ironwork and worn down tracks. He goes back to the car. He seems more absorbed than distracted, as though he were thinking about something other than what he was doing. This is only natural, observe the three, when one repeats something they have done so many times before. They are a few meters away, and are not thinking of anything in particular, either. The three, this trio in search of a microscopic blue car – a metallic sphere the size of a single point lost in a sea of metal – that submits itself to the work of chance; these three realize that something extraordinary is happening (or, rather, that something strange is about to happen). Though nothing had occurred, the stage had been set. The tension of the surroundings collects around the grey car, forgotten in the shade, and makes the street seem inhospitable. And so they – absorbed by the sense of danger and forgetting all else, even themselves – bore witness to the sovereignty of physics when, against all expectations, the driver hit the parked car as he pulled away from the curb. It is remarkable the way reality occasionally makes its own decisions. The collision was slow, unspectacular, and not particularly loud, but it was enough to open the trunk of the grey car at the exact moment the three passed alongside it.

An open door rarely fails to attract the attention of a passer-by lost in thought, awakening in him a curiosity that sometimes ends in horror, as in this instance. As soon as they looked into the trunk they jumped back, their arms raised like the devout. They had come across a nest of rats struggling to escape their confinement. The driver walked over until he was standing just behind them; thus protected, he spoke, or rather yelled, in a nervous voice – a voice that, under other circumstances, would have sounded weary and monotone, but was now terrified – asking them to close it. None of them felt up to anything of the sort, not as long as a frantic rat might jump out at his face. As always, they were at a loss for what to do; the man urged them on with words that were far too imperious for the occasion. In this fact they found their excuse to postpone their action. They turned around. It would have been better if they had not; they would be left speechless by the new terror that had been waiting at their backs.

The other would never discuss this with M, but he knows that the three, as they turned their heads to look behind them that afternoon, thought back on fantastic parts of children’s stories in which animals have human attributes – clothes, language, feelings – or, conversely, in which the characters have the traits of animals. They were looking at a man whose face had been transformed. This change had nothing to do with the passage of time or with evolution – or, at least, not as it is commonly understood, as aging – the change was related to surprise, mystery, or magic. In the most literal sense, the man had the face of a rat. His features were not approximate, they did not share common traits – the way some say, “He looks like a dog,” or, “He looks like a monkey.” Instead, each detail of his face combined with the others to compose another countenance, that of a rat. Under different circumstances, this would not have surprised them at all; they might not even have noticed it. But there, with the car turned into a swarm, this face not only confirmed the apparition, it also endowed it with a sense of mystery and menace. “Close the trunk. I can’t stand the sight of rats,” he begged. For a moment, they thought of turning around and going on their way, leaving him there to face the teeming mass with which he had so much in common and yet rejected. But they did not; in the end, the rule of chance sometimes proves stronger than the will and, fearing that this was one of those occasions, the trio did not want to defy it with their actions.

For a long time, the other would feel the fingers of the man on his back, pushing him toward the car. The man urged them to close the trunk, yet he, barely any further away, was incapable of doing so. M and the other had spoken on several occasions about animals in the city, which were invariably incorporated into its landscape. They began by talking about the way dogs walked, then thought of other animals until they had compiled a long list. Each species could have its specific attributes, but each individual – the cat that only crossed the street on a diagonal, the sparrow that hops to the left before flying to the right – was a cipher unto itself, turning its back on its peers. The meaning consisted of this, of seeing each animal as the atypical emblem of a group. All toads, for example, behaved as though they were toads, yet none could hide the singular disposition that revealed them to be an exception to the species. M and the other thought that animals were too easily distracted, that they were excessively curious, that they often forgot themselves, that they could not measure danger, that they possessed a human sense of eagerness. Animals make selective use of their instinct, M and the other observed, thinking of all they concealed. Yet animals inhabited the city, rendering themselves transparent by living alongside people.

The father, M, and the other looked for a branch, a stick, a pipe – anything long that they could use to close the trunk from a distance. They did not find anything nearby, but a little further along, about fifty meters away, a pile of junk imposed itself on the sidewalk and on part of the street, the way rubble tends to be left in the suburbs. Maybe, thought the three without saying a word, they would find the magic rod in there. As in all triads, there were certain rules: there could not be a fifth element. As such, the fourth – the driver of the car – was erased from the minds of the three so that the stick, pipe, or whatever it was could occupy his place. Meanwhile, the man’s affliction continued to grow; he was being taken over by a violent anxiety. The three were infected by his nervous breathing: they heard its murmur, faintly; an articulation preceding a cry, like a dream or a spasm – the picture of reflexive fear. Not so much because of any danger presented by the rats – their sheer number rendered them abstract, and their lack of place made them seem clumsy – but due, rather, to the terror of the driver, their role as guardians became clear to them and they acted accordingly.

And so M, his father, and the other began a nervous dialogue filled with elided and half-spoken words, urgent gestures that were too quick and tense to actually communicate anything; they, too, had been left breathless. It was a matter of finding, in that pile of junk, the instrument of their salvation. M and his father resorted to a disjointed, but apparently effective, language. “Bugs and nails,” stammered the father, pondering the dangers of rooting around in there. He said it too late: M was already on his way, after replying – though he spoke first—“I’ll get.” His words, as sometimes happens, would hang in the air as he moved into the distance.

I found it surprising, under the circumstances – that mix of disquiet, hesitation, pressure and reserve brought about by the rats – that M would return, with those two words, to a domestic language lost who knows when by who knows whom. That “I’ll get” had its own, immediate, referents: in my own home there were those who said I’ll getseveral times a day. Between “I’ll get it” and “get going” or some other variant, those two words emerged, diluting the meaning by which the phrase was assumed to be conjugated, imprecisely but with eloquence: a paradigm of ambiguity. It was only a few minutes before dusk: the horizon was not yet ablaze but the process of the sunset was already set in motion, tinting the end of the street with a yellow that grew more and more intense, and would soon veer toward orange. M looked like a shadow cut out of that backdrop as he leaned over the mountain of junk, rummaging through it for the magical lance with the delicate movements of a rag and bone man.

In this way M, whose form was already slight, seemed to grow even more delicate from where we stood. The intensity of the light blotted out his silhouette, like those moths that grow even more transparent when they come to rest on a lamp. For a moment, we did not hear the rats, the man interrupted his litany, and M was endowed with a distinct plasticity in which magic, something ritual not unlike a dance, combined with beauty, drama, and surrender as we watched his body dissolve like a cloud against the light. His father and I watched as his silhouette, cut through by the line of the street, grew more and more narrow; his feet, restless atop the chaos of objects, tried to gain the balance that would allow him to continue his search, disappearing for fractions of a second at a time. It was then that he levitated before us, our impassive eyes filled with admiration. His father said, “He moves like a frog,” or something to that effect, alluding to his tentative movements and his transparency. I did not answer him; I understood the processes of the afternoon that were making M dissolve. Knowing this, however, did not reduce my fascination; on the contrary, it was enhanced because I was able to see this effect as essential, a legitimate confluence rather than something providential. As such, I was left in silent awe.

It would be easy, now, to interpret these incidents like dreams and M’s powerful, though fleeting, luminous apogee as the prefiguration of his absence, but this story has been particularly redundant and there is no need for allusions. Just as consciousness registers what is easy, incorporating it in a more or less mysterious way into its workings, it also coexists with the difficult, even the unknown, in order to dispel the field of darkness against which its silhouette appears. Now I am more than twice as old – that is, as many years have passed since M’s disappearance as did, for either him or me, before his death – and I simply can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Despite the workings of time, which forces us, among other things, to give up our resistance and yield to its advance, and despite the fact that this “I can’t believe it” became, in some way, rhetorical as the years went by, over time this rhetoric acquired, or regained, the full measure of truth contained by the original words. It is against the backdrop of the shallow, dark pit formed by that conclusive reality, the deepest subjective manifestation of which is, after all, this “I can’t believe it,” that I float, repeating the words. Like all rhetoric, it alludes to a truth in and of itself, though with years of repetition I have distanced myself from the original mystery, from the root of that darkness, to construct another: the foundation of all the time that has passed without M. Event and disbelief are castled, changing places as though “I can’t believe it” were the event and M’s disappearance the verbal form that questioned it. Sometimes I catch my mind wandering, as everyone’s does, only to immediately return to this thought and, if the circumstances are right, repeat under my breath that I can’t believe I can’t believe it, when so much time has passed and nothing has filled the void of his absence.

One afternoon a few weeks ago I was walking north along an avenue. Sundays in Caracas, as in a good number of cities, are calm and quiet. The light was diffuse; it was somehow fragmented and visibly corpuscular as it was returned by the mountain, as though the sun at its height were not enough and a greater intensity were required, the reflection off the slope, to ignite the air. A trail of marks along the street registered the activity of the people: contradictory, almost always aggressive, marks that spoke of a lack of peace. All of a sudden, a signal blinded me from up on high: someone had probably raised their hand in the foothills and the light from the sun had bounced off the face of their watch. This lasted an instant – a moment more brief than an instant. I observed the slope and thought about how far that particular light had traveled to reach me, guided with greater precision by chance than any other that surrounded me in that moment or this one. That flash had crossed the orbit of planets, illuminated asteroids; it was also the energy that propelled the comets and which had apparently originated in the sun and expanded as light and solar wind before dazzling me. One final moment of concentration, its reflection in the face of that watch, delayed its ultimate dissolution as it fell to earth, promising to make it unique one last time in the form of a flash of light. I don’t know why, but that was enough to make M appear in my memory. A cloud floated just above where the reflection had originated, girding the mountain in silence. “From there, Caracas looks like the model of a city,” I recalled, and continued on my way.

One day, he told me, he was sent out to buy a few things for dinner; he was given the exact amount of money needed. The grocer rang him up wrong and got confused giving him his change, so M ended up going home with his purchases and more money than he had when he left. His parents sent him back to return the money. At first, the grocer was surprised to see him again; later he understood what had happened, but badly. Leaning over the counter, he muttered his calculations as he scribbled on a piece of paper, as though it could talk back to him. M felt as though he was standing before a giant: broad, strong arms dense with hair, emerging from the creases of a white shirt. When he had finished his calculations, and ignoring M’s protestations, the grocer gave him part of the money he had brought with him. At home, his parents are so annoyed by his incompetence that they nearly refuse to let him in. They order him to go back to return it all. As in most humiliating situations, they ask him if he knows what the word “all” means. So he goes back, again. M walks the two blocks sensing that it is a ridiculous, foolish misunderstanding, but he does not dare to pursue the idea: the world of the adults is the only one there is, and as such it must be accepted as it presents itself. For his part, having nearly reached the end of his day, the grocer is occupied with cleaning his scale. He asks him to wait; it is a delicate operation. M carefully observes the scale, the weights marked out with short and long dashes, the numbers distributed among them, the red point of the needle, which is going wild at the moment as the grocer lifts and holds the tray over and over; he also reads the brand, written in five gleaming letters that form an arch across the top. Little by little it gets darker and the quiet stampede of cars on the cobblestones filters in from the street. Having finished his cleaning, the man, leaning on the counter as though it were a dividing wall, emphatically explains to M that the money does not belong to him – the grocer – and that he should go home immediately. M understands less and less, though he suspects that he will return several times more. As he is about to leave the store he hears the clicking of the grocer’s tongue; M notes that this is the way dogs are usually called, but turns around anyway. He sees the arm emerge from the creases of its sleeve, accompanied by a gesture that, from up high, invites him to come closer. Smiling, the grocer offers him a coin, saying that it is for him and that he should hold on to it. M feels an unprecedented sense of joy: the coin sparkles with its own light, like nothing else. “This is what it must feel like to touch heaven with both hands, as they say; I can feel it.” M feels as though he has been awarded an unknown prize – rather, what is unknown is the motivation behind the prize – not being able to explain it, he finds the situation all the more wondrous. Later on, the parents, somewhere between irritation and weariness, would discover that the boy had returned home with more money than he brought with him last time – even though he had taken the precaution of hiding his coin in the other pocket. And so, as he had anticipated, M must return to the grocery, where the man takes the money, performs a few other calculations and gives him back a greater sum. By now the amount is more than considerable; it is a small fortune, as though the money were multiplying on its own. The parents hesitate: every cent the child receives is a sum that must later be explained and returned, which means that it might be better not to send him and avoid his coming back with more money. They argue for a few minutes but in the end make their decision: there is no other choice – M has to return it all. Back at the shop, the grocer stretches a piece of paper out across the counter and does his calculations once more with a pencil; when he is done he hands M an even greater sum. The parents do not know what to do – they ask for an explanation but M tells them only what he has seen: the man speaks to the paper while he writes, then hands him the money. His father is indignant, but cannot resist voicing a paradoxical wish. “If only it were so easy to get rich,” he exclaims. They speak a bit more and send M back again, but with more money; this time they also add in, and not just a little: a good part of their savings. This goes on for two or three trips: M goes back and forth, carrying a fortune that might not be great but is not insignificant, his pockets bulging more and more each time, until on one of the trips the grocer, having finished his customary accounting, decides that he is satisfied: Yes, he says, you’re right, and he does not give back a cent. M returns home with nothing.

The parents cannot believe it; they have been swindled in the most absurd way imaginable. They get angry and blame the boy: suddenly, at the most innocent hour of the day, that moment between sunset and dinner when nothing ever happens, they have been reduced to nothing, to the most crushing poverty; they had lost years of work and were facing years of privation. The mother cries in silence and the father broods: this is what they get for being honest. The effects of poverty come quickly: the portions at dinner are immediately reduced. The future is different now; it is longer. M’s mother says that his father measures time by money: the less there is, the less frequent and longer lasting everything has to be – and there was no end in sight. The three of them are trying to find ways to get the most out of their food when someone knocks on the door. They all go to the entryway, but imagine their surprise when they see that the man standing there is a stranger. He is not the grocer, though he is to M: that’s the person who had been helping him from across the counter all afternoon, he insists. The man, before launching into the explanation that all were eager to receive, asks if they would be so kind as to offer him a drink. The parents tell M to fetch the bottle of honey wine and three glasses while they get settled. When he comes back, M realizes that the grocer is already telling his story. The mother serves the wine; they toast, take a quick sip and the other continues: He is a millionaire who amassed a fortune that would take five people more than a year to calculate, but he has made so many mistakes – he calls them errorsand hopes to have time to recount them one by one and thereby repent them anew – after so many mistakes and being unable to make peace with his conscience, God, through an angel, promised to absolve him if he distributed his fortune among poor and honest families. Saying this, he takes a bag full of money out from behind him and puts it on the table, on the one condition that they set a place for him at the table that night. And so, while the father and the man drink and converse, the mother sets about preparing a meal, the likes of which they had not seen for a long time. Off in a corner, M empties his pocket and watches his coin – as big, heavy, and brilliant as a talisman – spin.