Текст книги "The Planets"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

There was a convergence. A few blocks past the café, M and I said our goodbyes: each was headed a different way. I remember walking along treeless streets that were startlingly quiet, and ending up in a park that seemed to go on forever. I wandered deep into a neighborhood filled with workshops and enormous warehouses, where labor was something certain, tangible. I felt a foolish emotion, as has happened on other occasions, when I saw the rolling cobblestones of a few of its streets, their crests and folds like the workings of geology on a human scale, the effect of the tireless passage of trucks. I kept walking, thinking of things I no longer remember, when, on a corner of avenida Caseros, I unexpectedly ran into M. We stood there, amazed and confused, fearing that the other might have a secret. For a moment, we surrendered to the most painful anxiety. Could there be something to confess? we wondered, for a fraction of a second. Something similar had happened on another occasion, as I mentioned, when we backed into each other a few meters from a newsstand, but the coincidence was greater in this instance, because it had happened again. And unlike before, neither of us was able to justify his presence. Neither was lost, though we realized that each had an urgent engagement somewhere far away at that moment. Guided by mysterious forces, we had wandered for hours and hours until we ended up meeting on a forgettable corner, next to a mailbox. These forces, we saw, formed a point of convergence to which we gravitated, always.

This power brought us together almost every time, protecting us against distance. On other occasions it prevented convergences as though it exerted a negative force, impeding encounters – when it was a matter of bodies – and agreement – when it was a matter of consciousness. In those cases, shared feelings would vanish, as would convictions; the idea of having something in common seemed unthinkable, outside the realm of possibility. M’s hope, then, his desire to assign the photos – his or mine, in this case – a power that evaded and yet transcended the affective, is understandable. I have sometimes thought about how the magic of photos, according to M, is not contained by their visual aspect, their ability to provoke genuine surprise in the people who adopt a position of innocence to look at them, even when they know them and what they are of. The magic of photos was that they restored a rudimentary human faculty, though one that may have been forgotten: the inclination to endow an object, its interior or its future hidden by the very materiality of its mass, a logic that transcends all mysteries. “Why would someone hold on to his grandfather’s lighter or his father’s hat?” Not only because these objects bring them to mind and because the memory is permeated by a bittersweet emotion, but also because a protective energy emanates from them, though it may never prove its efficacy, one which relies on our belief in order to make us feel secure against the evil that threatens us always. This supernatural power, as such, is independent of our conscious mind and our will, and operates without our knowledge. As a result, we can disregard these objects and throw them into a bottom drawer where we never look for anything because they represent those responsible for our misfortune; we can indignantly renounce the things they touched, yet the benign force they exert will continue its work.

On our walk that night, before dawn on the 21 ^stof July, once the topic of virginity had been exhausted and the man who had lost his way looking for the Ezeiza airfields, where he thought Perón would be appearing the following day, was the memory of a fleeting anomaly, M and I ran into Sito. He came from the direction of Ciudadela. Much of avenida Juan B. Justo was still paved with colored cobblestones, and it was there, on one of those sidewalks, that we heard a loud whistle behind us. We turned at the same time – for a moment, M and I must have formed a strange, symmetrical figure – and we saw him coming up the middle of the street, signaling us with his arms. There was a block between us, but Sito did not hurry; he knew that we would wait for him (this sort of assumption inspires friendship). As he approached, I asked M, “How’s the mother doing?” “What mother?” he asked. “Sito’s mother, how is she doing?” “How is she doing what?” “You know… she drank, didn’t she?” “Oh. She’s the same.” As I remembered, she had given up drinking and gone back to it several times, in cycles that were always both drastic and drawn out. So I asked M, “The same as when?” “The same as always. She gives up drinking and then goes back to it.” “But how is she now? What is she doing?” I insisted. “Oh, now. I don’t know. Let’s ask Sito.” We had to wait a while before he joined us. The people he had gone to visit had not let him go during the day because of the violence; eventually, after he alluded to the anxiety his mother must certainly have been feeling, he had been allowed to leave. On days like those, and those that followed, danger returned the original sense of uneasiness to the geography of the city, its breadth. Just as in the past, setting out from Ciudadela for another place meant the risk of crossing hostile territory, giving people the sensation of going on a journey when they were only traveling between neighborhoods; movement was once again classified according to the risks it presented.

As he approached us, Sito noticed that we were talking about him; how could he not have, given the unexpected nature of the encounter and the fact that we were waiting for him. But he also knew that we were talking about his mother, despite the fact that we were too far away for him to possibly hear us, Sito confided in me the day we had a coffee after running into each other on Reconquista and Tucumán, as I have mentioned. He told me that he knew right away, that night as he walked toward us after whistling, when he saw us with our hands in our pockets, taking short steps almost in place, practically walking in circles without knowing it, that I was asking M about his mother. Hell is more predictable than heaven, said Sito, and living with her was a disaster, a perfect hell. Not only did he become accustomed to predicting her blows, her seclusions, her delirium, her tears, anguish, and complaints, Sito also grew accustomed to reading, in the faces of others, the appearance of his mother in the form of a question, pity, or disdain.

People made life with her more difficult, he continued. Sometimes he would get distracted and spend hours dreaming of a world in which he would never have to see anyone: he would busy himself only with caring for his mother, not with explanations. In that case, he thought, the alcohol would be less of an affliction than a hobby, since it was the others who saw it as a stigma, not the one who drank. It’s always the outside world that ruins family relations; were it not for their contact with the outside world, he and his mother would have enjoyed a tight and lasting, happy bond limited only by the length of their lives. In the same way, his marriage would be absolute heaven if the two of them never had to see or speak with anyone; the same goes for the children. But this is obviously impossible, admitted Sito, and so life turned into a hell. Something in the air told him when someone was thinking of his mother, which created a pressure behind his eyelids that felt as though his eyes were forcing their way forward. It left an impression on him when he was a boy, he continued, the way she would look first at the bottle, then at the glass, right before she took a drink. As though her eyes wanted to leave their sockets, to anticipate the materiality of the drink, pressed on by anxiousness.

Sito learned to monitor his eyelids when daily life suggested that the effect would be repeated. He conserved the reflex after the death of his mother, though it had been stripped of its original attributes. In her absence, this sixth sense had no purpose; but the eyelid, true to character, continued alerting him to other dangers: the change of tone in a conversation, defects in an elevator, someone lying in wait. Just now, I remember the gesture Sito made, of pressing or closing his eye with one hand, when I persisted in questioning his occupation with an attitude between grave and mocking. I don’t know why, but this reflex inspires a fear in me worthy of being expressed by one just like it; it seems like a dramatization of the unconscious, and for that very reason a sign that its master has embraced both innocence and cruelty, skirting both territories without exercising control. People like that are capable of the greatest malice, I thought of Sito’s tic, but not necessarily of him, as I walked along Bernardo de Irigoyen toward Constitución. We were talking when all of a sudden something went wrong; I don’t know what had happened, but I watched him smooth his eyelid with his fingertips every so often, following a convulsive movement of his arm that looked as though he were trying to shake something off. At one point, he knocked over a glass. In fact, he rubbed his eye throughout our whole conversation, and also while we walked down Reconquista and later along Corrientes toward the Obelisk. Sito may not have done anything else. I don’t know if I represented a danger, or if he told me that bit about the danger in order to explain a gesture that had no justification; the empty memory of his mother as she caressed the glass or bottle with the tips of her fingers, reading the worn label as though it were a means of understanding the true nature of the drink.

Sito’s silences were always unique, always his own. He had learned to live with drama early on, hence the combination of reserve and surliness that emanated from him, particularly from his eyes, when he fell silent. There was a reason that Sito had not stopped talking during our entire encounter; he had even found a way to correct those inevitable silences, when one thinks back or before going on, by coughing or making noise with something or another. As a boy he had been completely withdrawn and his friends had experienced his mortal silence as a burden; he could remain mute and impassive, answering in sporadic monosyllables that only served to underscore his solitude, for hours at a time. But now, with the weight of memory threatening to crash down upon his truth, a moment’s hesitation alluded to those past silences, making a fraction of a second seem intolerable; it was in this delicate and simple net that Sito had been caught. As such, despite their difference from the earlier ones in both their duration – these were nonexistent compared to those others – and their nature, Sito found that the value of his silences remained the same: reality seemed to shrink and objects to stretch out as long as the silence lasted. Everything seemed more ominous, there was nowhere to conceal a secret, because everything was brought into focus with clarity and immediacy. (If it had been concealed in the depths before, the truth was now right out on the surface.) It seemed to me that Sito also possessed a mineral obstinacy that equaled his verbal compulsion. The quieter the person, the less stubborn they tend to be. Sito spent much of the afternoon insisting that he couldn’t believe I was a writer, until he ended up admitting that he had always thought that the writer would be M. This opinion was so common on the block that his mother – irritated by the silent reproach of her son, whose sadness did not stop her from adding to the growing mountain of empty bottles – would order him, as a way of getting him off her back and as a kind of insult, “Go, go see that writer of yours,” meaning M. Sito would go see him, though they would never so much as touch on the subject of writers, or anything related to them. M was never interested in anything of the sort and yet, from early on, he had a reputation as a writer: a partial recognition, of course, but an emphatic one. More recently, after they lost the bond of free time, when they ran into each other every day or nearly every day, as I have said, M and Sito would exchange a few words. Usually when Sito would take the empty bottles out to the tracks at night, to leave them for drifters and vagrants to pick up later.

When we reached calle Esmeralda, Sito asked me to wait; he had to pick something up nearby – it wouldn’t be more than two minutes, and then we could keep walking, he said. I stood on the corner, as he asked, and watched him walk toward Lavalle and go into a storefront that was both a hair salon and a candy shop where they also sold fountain pens, almost in the middle of the block. There was traffic on Esmeralda, and the cars took part in a game of patient waiting that could easily last hours; they seemed prepared for that. Thanks to the narrowness of the sidewalk, I could hear the conversation two women were having in the back of a taxi that had stopped in front of me. One said, “I swear, it didn’t turn up.” “It can’t be,” answered the other. “But it is. They looked for half an hour, and not a trace.” “But it was such a large ashtray, it couldn’t have just disappeared.” “It didn’t all disappear, only half.” “Which half?” “Half. It broke when it fell. They looked everywhere, and one half is missing.” “That’s not possible.” “It is. They put the half on the table and stared at it. No one notices an ashtray, but when half of one is missing, everyone is paralyzed with fear.” “Why fear?” “Because they didn’t see anything supernatural, only its effects.” “What effects are those?”

At that moment, Sito left the shop and the cars moved up a meter. He walked toward me with a piece of flimsy pink paper in his hand, on the center of which the number 435 had been quickly scribbled. “It’s my lucky number. I always play it, but only sometimes win,” he said. Then Sito surprised me further still: he turned the paper over and showed me another number, 733. He was radiant: “ El Pajaritoand el Uruguayo, and the two of us meeting, to boot. You’d better believe I’m going to win today!” As we crossed Esmeralda it occurred to me that Sito might be the cause of every bad thing that had happened, particularly and most obviously M’s death. It was a ridiculous idea, but I was surprised that nothing kept me from thinking it. Sito talked about the prime sales periods for mattresses; when they sell more, it’s not that the prices go up, but rather that there are no discounts. He said: It’s our policy. So I changed the subject; I asked him to imagine that he is in a café, having a coffee, when a false move knocks the glass ashtray off the table. He hears the noise – it has broken – but when he bends down he finds only half there on the floor; the other is gone. I asked Sito how he would react if, after looking again and again, he could not find the other half. “I wouldn’t believe it,” he answered. “But if that’s how it was – if you were there and the ashtray had fallen from your own hands,” I insisted. “In that case, I would think it had disappeared, but that the part I couldn’t see had to be somewhere – that it must still exist in one form or another, that there must be some reason for it.”

As I have already said, Corrientes slowly took on a horizontal light, compressing all visual perspective. At the far end, in the west, the sun gradually set. The curves of the street hardly mattered; it was as though the rays of light were traveling straight through the buildings. Sito continued explaining, much more interested in his response than I was – I had immediately gotten distracted: I would look in all four directions, and if there was nothing to catch my attention, nothing that something could be hidden under, and if there was no one who could have hidden it or seen anything, then I would say to myself, it’s lost. It was an unobjectionable piece of common sense. As I walked a while later along Bernardo de Irigoyen toward Constitución, I would think about the different types of tragedy. Nothing stands in the way of taking the disappearance of half an ashtray as a sign, an omen, an effect, a cause, a proof, or a reminiscence. It might also be that the women, aware that someone was listening, had invented the dialogue in order to trick me, referring to a completely false event. But I was not interested in its degree of truth, only the scale of what I had heard. Perhaps it had not happened to either of them, but rather to someone who had then told them about it, or one of them might even have read it, or it might have been part of a movie. In that case, the enigma would be of a secondary nature, like the final echo produced by a clap of thunder, in whose resonance the singular moment of truth that generated it becomes unclear.

There I was, wondering about the nature of an impossible event and, not only that, trying to find some explanation for its appearance along my path. This might seem ridiculous – all of life’s events are certainly interruptions, providential obstacles eternalized later by the course of events itself, and we know that to wonder about chance is to deny the power of destiny. Yet there is something in life that accustoms us to looking for the hidden meaning in things. We see and we touch surfaces, until something suggests a truth oriented in a different way, one inclined to hide its meaning. Sito, for example, told me that he worked as a waiter and, another time, as a mattress salesman, offering proofs that inspired confidence in his being, or being able to be, both those things. Yet without being mutually exclusive, the two activities were incompatible in his case, though not for any reason other than that he had mentioned each as a unique proposition. This compulsive theatricality, I thought to myself as I walked along Bernardo de Irigoyen, seems to be a family curse. The alcoholic is a theatrical individual: he organizes his life around certain prototypical scenes, giving himself over to the habit and immersing himself in a realm of appearances and indirect intentions. Nonetheless, the mother played only one character – her own, though it suffered from great swings – unlike Sito, who felt called upon to play several at a time.

As I crossed plaza Constitución, I remembered a play M once told me about. In it, several characters were played by the same person, as was the case with Sito. It was a piece of Yiddish theater, in which one actor was sufficient to play several non-Jewish characters. Through this unique convention, they demonstrated the secondary nature of the Gentile world and also expressed a sense of superiority; or else it was a form of disdain, or a simple instance of symbolic justice. A certain young lady is promised to a man who is about to arrive in Argentina from Europe; Rosenfeld is from the same town in Galizia as the young woman’s father, named Rosemberg. Because everyone attests to his seriousness, and because the parents respect the savings with which, according to several acquaintances, Rosenfeld will be arriving after many years of work in Vienna, the marriage had been arranged months earlier. The girl expresses her enthusiasm with anxiousness and surrender. Rather than feeling unlucky at the thought of the difficult work of maintaining a home and the imminent daze of becoming a mother, it would have the virtue of keeping her from the difficult passage through adolescence, tedious years in which time seemed to have no meaning and days floated by in pure nothingness.

But Rosenfeld, as soon as he appears, sows the seeds of a vague disquiet: two neighbors, Leike Rosenstein and Jaike Rosenbaum, comment secretly after seeing him pass that he has arrived from Europe after becoming a widower with no descendants – to all appearances, because of his own incapacity. As is well known, to arrange a marriage without being able to have children is to condemn the woman to the greatest misfortune. Raquel receives her betrothed with shyness and affection: her eyes sparkle more than usual, and her lips take the shape of a suppressed kiss. The father, Rosemberg, embraces Rosenfeld as though he were already his son, though in the play he is only five years older (in reality, the actor Rosenfeld is noticeably older than the actor Rosemberg). Behind Rosemberg’s affability, one can sense a deference to power, in this case to wealth, that he cannot contain. For his part, Rosenfeld behaves like someone aware of his own importance: he raises his voice without discretion, he addresses recent acquaintances with excessive familiarity (though it would be fair to say that these people feel flattered, and in some way protected, by Rosenfeld’s friendship), he demands details about the community and flaunts his worldliness, alluding constantly to Viennese customs. It is true that the many references to Vienna unsettle Rosemberg: more than the Parisians, who are already completely foreign to the restricted world of a Jew from the East, the Jews of Vienna embodied the height of assimilation and the loss of tradition. At the same time, it is also true that, for a poor Galizian family living in a tenement in Villa Crespo, hearing of Viennese customs meant glimpsing a part of Buenos Aires that they had just barely seen, only more.

The marriage ceremony was set for a few days later. As a sign of the change underway, one night the manager of the tenement comes to collect the rent and is surprised by the way Rosemberg pays him without curses or complaints. Raquel grows happier and more beautiful by the day, and is gradually making progress as she is instructed in the work of her mother; she is already able to prepare the most elaborate meals on her own, including the confections. Meanwhile, Rosenfeld entertains advice regarding possible investments of his money: certain friends recommend trade, others, industry. His interest in this stands in contrast to the indifference, even rudeness, with which he receives the wistful comments of his future father-in-law, who lists possible names for his grandchildren, acts out the games and sings the songs that he will teach them, and happily thanks God that they will not experience the privation his own family did. The audience also notices the haughtiness with which Rosenfeld treats Raquel, as though she were soon to be his property. He is satisfied with the quick sympathy felt toward any girl, and with his control over even the smallest – though for this reason, highly significant – details, but never displays the typical affect one feels toward one’s betrothed. In these moments, Raquel’s bitter, suppressed gestures disclose her melancholy premonitions. Of all social climbers, Rosenfeld is the worst sort because he is rich, though no one is able to pinpoint the source of their aversion and all see wealth as a virtue.

During the preparations for the ceremony, Rosenblum, a young baker from the market on calle Uriarte whom Rosenfeld contracted to prepare the food, on Rosemberg’s recommendation, appears. He is shown calculating the budget, indignantly defending his merchandise, being moved by Raquel’s innocence, and wishing happy tidings upon the couple. Rosenblum is endowed with many virtues: he is honorable, hardworking, observant of tradition; he even breaks out into irrepressible bouts of lyricism. Thanks to his songs, the members of the family are able to temporarily forget the vague sense of anxiety that is slowly taking them over, and they begin to dance. Yet Rosenfeld is blind to all this; toward Rosenblum he feels only disdain, for his poverty, and suspicion, for his goodness. A series of increasingly unusual events takes place, designed to add to the disquiet; even Raquel, at first so vivacious, charming, and happy, is now – like a defenseless animal that senses great danger in the slightest movement – unable to react even to the simplest of questions, bursting into tears for no reason at all. As a counterpoint, Rosenfeld, completely self-possessed, displays his bounty of ire and arrogance as though he owned everything and everyone there. An example: Rosemberg does not dare to come to the defense of his wife when Rosenfeld insults her cooking, dumping the contents of his plate onto the tablecloth. Raquel, also at the table, looks down and silently cries.

The day of the ceremony, one sees only forced gestures. The threat is palpable, though no one is able to latch on to it and bring it out into the open. The syndrome that has infected the actors, the raising of one hand compulsively to tug at their left eyelid, is an indication of the spiritual chaos that dominates the characters: it is a confusion that can only really express itself through something as mechanical and immaterial as a tic. Eventually, after marches and countermarches, after impossible preparations and essential things forgotten, the moment of the ceremony arrives. Proof that something is not right appears in this moment: there is a stranger among the guests, somebody that everyone asks about, everyone but Rosenfeld, who knows him and watches him with animosity. He is aware that he cannot be the one to let loose the storm and that, in any event, he lacks the upper hand, so he remains silent. The guests try to act as though it were just another marriage ceremony, which does little to justify the martial movements of the actors. The air is filled with forced laughter, with repeated jokes, with sorrowful silences. Finally, at the climax of the ceremony, when Raquel and Rosenfeld are about to exchange rings, the stranger steps forward and, begging the guests’ pardon, says that he knows Rosenfeld and asks God not to allow their marriage. He, Rosenthal, the person on whom all eyes were set at the moment, had been the man’s father-in-law for many years, fifteen, until his daughter died without any descendents despite having been a healthy woman. Rosenfeld was not able to father a child, he was certain of it. With these words, Rosenthal would produce an unexpected stir, no less real for being spontaneous. Jaike and Leike began to whisper, as did their spouses. Raquel threw herself into her mother’s arms; Rosenblum stood paralyzed, with a tray on his arm; Rosemberg began to sweat; and Rosenfeld turned, screaming, toward Rosenthal, overcome with rage. My darling daughter visited doctors and rabbis, and all of them assured her that there was nothing keeping her from having a child, but that man never agreed to see anyone about it, Rosenthal accused, pointing his finger.

The marriage could not take place; everyone knew it, though no one said anything. Everyone – apart from Rosenfeld, that is – except Rosemberg who, surprisingly as pusillanimous as always, tried to be accommodating, saying that everything could be sorted out and that the ceremony should go on. Then Rosemberg’s wife spoke, saying that she would not allow it, for her only daughter never to give her grandchildren. The husband fell silent: it was not a comfortable situation for him. Everything was one generalized, collective murmur peppered with shouts here and there. That is, until Rosenfeld, pulling a thick bundle of papers from his pants with a flourish and a look in his eye that consolidated all the ire of which a person is capable, said that if the marriage was not celebrated, Rosemberg had to pay back all the promissory notes he owed. Raquel let out a shriek of terror; her mother fainted, Rosenbaum and Rosenstein would rather not have been there, but Rosenblum kept his calm and, consoling Raquel and attending to her mother, he found time to turn and curse Rosenfeld. This is how the scene ends.

The following morning, Rosenfeld turns up dead. There are so many people under suspicion that it does not occur to anyone that his death might have been a natural one. The manager of the tenement arrives to announce that the police are on their way. A little while later a patrolman walks in – the same actor, dressed in a uniform – who means well but has trouble understanding the situation. He writes in a notebook and says to leave Rosenfeld where he is, that he needs to notify the judge. When the judge arrives, it is the same person as the manager and the patrolman. He closes himself in an empty room in the house with each of the suspects and the guests at the gathering. The judge also means well, but he does not have trouble understanding. In the end he concludes that it is a complex case, and that they should know the cause of Rosenfeld’s death before coming to any decision. And so Rosenblum calls the most respected doctor in the community, Doctor Rosenblat, a man of simple yet distinguished stature, behind whose affability one could sense an extensive knowledge of both tenements and palaces, as well as a genuine interest in all Jews, even the most impoverished. When he arrives, Rosenblat greets Rosemberg – they actually know one another – and asks about Resie, his wife. “Resie is Resie,” Rosemberg says as an answer to all questions, and leads the doctor into the bedroom.

Rosenblat carefully examines Rosenfeld’s body; he asks Raquel, Rosemberg, and his wife, and especially Rosenblum, what he ate and drank the day before. Nothing out of the ordinary, they answered, nothing that they themselves had not eaten or drunk. Rosenthal intervenes once again. He knows a secret: a certain disease, slow and merciless, had been eating away at Rosenfeld for years. That explains the death, Rosenblat ventures; the effects of the illness could be seen on the corpse. Everyone looked at one another, relieved. The judge had the doctor sign the death certificate, wrote a few notes in his folio, and withdrew, though he was not able to resist a glass of honey wine offered to him by Raquel’s mother. Raquel and Rosenblum ran to each other and embraced: as the only two young people in the group, the violent tension had, naturally, brought them together. Rosenblum broke into song, Rosenbaum and Rosenstein immediately returned to the stage and all the actors began to dance with joy and contagious fervor.