Текст книги "The Planets"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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THE FIRST STORY TOLD BY M

Two boys, classmates, decide one afternoon to play a trick on their parents: upon leaving school each would take the road to the other’s house, go in, and greet everyone as though it were their own. They finalized the details as they left the building and, anticipating the illusion they had dreamt up, both laughed happily as they traded names: Sergio called Miguel Sergio, Miguel called Sergio Miguel. Until they arrived, neither wanted to give up their role; the routine of the journey home, coupled with the novelty of the route and particularly the new identity, intensified both impressions and thoughts. It was a kind of emotional tourism; similar to, though the opposite of, the way children imagine their own death and actually feel afflicted. They got their first surprise when the mothers welcomed them naturally, as though they really were their sons and had been at school since the morning. The second setback was encountering the same attitude in the fathers when they got home from work later on. In the meantime, everything seemed at once strange and familiar because, even though they had been over innumerable times before – their parents were also friends – they realized that they knew nothing beyond the superficial. One generally associates the unknown with terror, especially during childhood: silence, darkness, or being around strangers produces a singular sense of anxiety that is immediately dissipated by turning on a light, hearing familiar sounds, seeing familiar faces. This was something similar, though not exactly the same, given that experiencing the extraordinary in the company of people close to them – and the fact that those very people would be the primary actors in the nightmare – allowed them to deliberately immerse themselves in confusion and represented a kind of ironic terror. Both boys spoke little while they ate, but the parents did not stop talking; they even seemed more talkative than normal – though, of course, they were comparing these parents with their real ones. The boys were asked the usual questions about their time at school, their assignments, and the material they might have learned, then they all talked about their days: work, acquaintances, the neighborhood, politics, whatever came to mind, until the conversation turned to the coming weekend and the many choices of things to do, as they said. In one case, they were leaning toward the rose gardens in Palermo, and in the other, toward La Boca and the Costanera Sur preserve. Miguel and Sergio realized the persuasive power their words had over the other, as well as the influence of their real parents over the other ones, since those had been their own excursions the week before. Now they were faced with the prospect of repeating them, after having spoken enthusiastically about the activities of the other.

Later that night, in the solitude of the other’s room, each grew more uneasy with every passing hour; they felt the unchecked growth of something that, despite their having initiated it, was strange to them. They could make no sense of it. Just a few hours earlier they had still been themselves, but now a simple, innocent event threatened to become the soft crackling that announces the onset of an avalanche. Due to the strange nature of catastrophes, they, who had pushed the stone and had been full of delighted anticipation at the prospect of watching the complex effects of their joke from the side of the cliff, suddenly understood that not only would the avalanche exceed their plans and permanently distort the landscape, but that they would be buried up there, on the mountain, contrary to the laws of physics. But these fears seemed premature and too bleak to keep worrying about, and the next morning they awoke with a new hypothesis: they decided that they were being taught a lesson, that it was a tacit form of punishment. Nonetheless, they would have been closer to the truth if they had stayed with the theory about the avalanche, as they would discover later when fate stepped in to prove it.

Meanwhile, the thought of punishment or lessons did not even occur to their parents, who were even more lost within their naivety than their sons: they simply did not notice the change. The anguish of that first night, born of the certainty that only terror can produce, brought Miguel and Sergio close to the truth, though it also made them retreat from it in favor of a more comfortable – albeit false – theory: that of punishment. And so, as tends to be the case, the more exhilarating the start – that unfortunate act of trading names – the closer they would get to the truth, from which they would in turn distance themselves the further they got from that inaugural rite. Meanwhile, the following night would be torturous for both of them. They missed their parents. They wanted to sit on the floor of their houses and never get up again, to breathe in the natural scent of home. Dinner on the third day found them quiet and depressed; not sullen – they lacked the confidence to be rude; at the end of the day, they saw themselves as guests – but solemn.

The next day, in school, each saw his own desperation reflected in the face of the other. They thought they were dreaming, but their reciprocal experiences confirmed the simple, very real nature of what was happening. During recess they went over a number of strategies; by the time they said their goodbyes in the street, they had already decided to do something drastic in the hope of bringing things back to normal: they were going to admit to the prank. If the adults wanted their humiliation, they would have it. That afternoon they could hardly sit still. They had decided to broach the topic that night, so that was what they did. Decisive moments tended to come at night, during dinner: this was yet another of these important changes. They talked, confessed, admitted; they even considered an appropriate punishment for the offense. But nothing happened. There was no reaction at all. The parents looked at them in wonder, taking in what they thought to be a completely imagined account, an almost mystical illusion too fantastic to be taken seriously and too unbelievable to be understood. Miguel and Sergio insisted, swearing that they were not themselves, but the other, and that the people they were talking to were not their parents, but their friend’s. One pair or the other, when confronted with these flights of fancy, laughed in their faces; as mentioned, the couples were joined by a close friendship and felt flattered by the amusing fantasy of the little ones, which in some way held them as equals in their affections. But the boys insisted and, as might have been expected, the night ended badly: they cried, they begged, and fixated on the idea of going home to their real parents, until one set of parents or the other ended up dragging them to their beds, where they nearly needed to be restrained as a result of their intense nervous state. The fifth day was nostalgia and despair: they just couldn’t understand it. The future seemed uncertain and they asked each other about their parents, the smells of the house, the floors, meaningless details, and about the boxes in which they hid prized objects, amulets, and talismans. The sixth day brought envy: the beauty and intelligence of the mothers was directed at the wrong person, just like the strength and the sympathy of the fathers.

From that time on, whenever the families would visit one another, Miguel and Sergio would feel joined again in brotherhood, although every time it was their despair that brought them together. They saw themselves as victims of a cruel conspiracy that, if not the product of nature, was all the more cruel for being their parents’ idea. It goes without saying that the moment arrived when their names seemed unreal to them, both the previous (Miguel and Sergio) and current ones (Sergio and Miguel). When they heard them, they saw only an equivocal extension of the other and not of themselves. But the problem was also that the extension was evident; the evidence was right there in the names. At the same time, the friendship between their parents revealed its own ambiguities: for example, Miguel and Sergio were able to see, one night when the two families got together, how the ex-father of the first – making an elaborate effort to conceal the gesture, which only highlighted the transgression – grabbed the waist of the boy’s current mother as he asked her to let him pass, despite the fact that he had the whole width of the house at his disposal. After a few bottles of wine the conversation turned to the mysteries of romantic affinities and how, when they fizzle out, they tend to redirect themselves toward a person of the same social circle as a means of staying faithful, if only to some basic and primordial sense of community without which we all would feel lost, orphaned in the void. They were, evidently, talking about themselves and their own crossed desires, which had been aroused by the alcohol: as though they belonged to a shared but unknown past, they longed for a galaxy in which those affinities could be realized. It was then that the four, without the prompting of anything concrete, looked over at their children, who were watching them in silence. In this way, Miguel and Sergio sensed, without fully comprehending, that they were the manifestations of their parents’ desire. Not so much as people, bodies – that seemed obvious – but as subjects whose identity constituted a relative and unverifiable gift, conferred or withdrawn according to circumstance or the emotional state of the adults. The friendship that once could have joined them had been eclipsed by domestic ambiguity; at the same time, this confusion would seem redundant to anyone who understood that it was simply a friendship.

One might say that time passed and the friends grew up, but even something as straightforward as that would be complicated by the circumstances: time did not pass and they did not grow up, in the true sense of the word, despite the fact that the years advanced and before they knew it they were adults. The misunderstanding they created had opened the gates to a darker nature, with its own rules and conditions (just as natural as any others, but different). This fact, their being at the mercy of something and knowing what it meant but not what it was or how it worked, led them to wander around in a state of absolute confusion, impervious, despite their physical maturity, to events and experiences. One was the origin of the other, the source of his identity and the proof of a deviation. They were sensible enough to admit how deeply they relied on their mutual friendship and did all they could to maintain it, but were slow to notice the mystery that, though created by them, existed independent of their feelings, their will, and their intelligence, and threatened to make them indistinguishable from one another. They were tired of being themselves, but also of being each other. Identity – which, as they both knew, was one of the most difficult things to discover, obey, preserve, and understand – pulsed erratically within them, moving from one body to the other, shuffled in among names, memories, and beliefs: a commingling only heightened by the friendship. They were equivalents. Sergio, for example, meant one and the other at the same time; so did Miguel. Experience was shared. The four parents, relegated to a diabolical world by the adult memories of their children, became increasingly diffuse, distant, and imprecise figures. Had they existed? On the other hand, both – each imperceptibly puritanical – had their own theories and conclusions about certain memories of family get-togethers.

They looked back over the past and found only one essential moment. By baptizing themselves in jest, by exclaiming in the sharp and unwitting voice of a child, Ciao, Sergioand Ciao, Miguelas they left the schoolhouse, a ritual whose outcome their immature minds were unable to grasp, Miguel and Sergio did nothing less than create themselves. Everything that followed would be secondary to this. Yesterday, when everything was positive, black and white, didn’t matter; what mattered was today, the invisible present in which differences were erased and everything seemed unreal. Like those charmed lives which were able to mitigate failures and thereby free themselves from a precipitous downfall, Miguel and Sergio held on to the hope of restoring the plenitude they had lost in the prehistory of their youth. But they were unable to resist the slow collapse – the true operation of time – that added a sense of ambiguity to their mutual indistinguishability.

In the end they took to walking. They would choose a street and follow it from one end to the other, navigating changes in its name, and even changes to the street (if the one they had chosen came to an end, they would follow the nearest one that ran in the same direction). To return, they would cross the street and follow the same route all the way back. Seeing them together one would almost think they were siblings, yet something did not quite fit. In their movements, in the distance they kept between themselves, and in the monosyllables they used to communicate, one could sense an unfulfilled promise; a promise that sustained them, yet did not unite them completely. As though they were indeed siblings, but were brother and sister. That was their problem: a slight but radical difference. What could they do now to regain their autonomy? The streets offered no solution: it was only the truly desperate, those given over to the mercy of God, who searched for answers in the streets. Still, they had no choice. The solution was neither in their homes nor inside them, nor could it be found in the past; in fact, that was where the drama began.

Sad, bewildered, and powerless against their luck, as they walked along avenida Garay one day waiting for the afternoon to end, they would come across a beggar resting against a wall that surrounded a municipal building. From far away he looked like a bundle of clothes; drawing nearer, he appeared to be asleep. It was only from within a few meters that his alert stillness became visible. Before, in the past, the human form used to be more clearly defined, thought Miguel and Sergio; heaps like that were never thought to be anything but people, due in part to the fact that one didn’t tend to find bundles of clothing or fabric left out in the street. (The mass of cloth only appeared to be defenseless, within it breathed a life on guard within its nest.) It was an old man with pale skin and thick eyebrows, into the shadow of which his eyes, gazing out as though from the greatest depths, seemed to recede. Miguel and Sergio froze at the sight of his face, which was veiled by short, sparse stubble discolored by tiny flecks of silver that caught the light. One of them realized that he was not asleep and immediately thought that it was not only poverty or indigence that had put the old man in their path. This old man was one of those whose age is concentrated in their eyes, suggesting a wisdom that transcends experience. He might have had poor vision; perhaps this was the reason for the intensity of his gaze, but the eyes themselves were enough: they would have been wise at any time or in any circumstance. He looked at them, they stopped. A casual remark about a distant street and a bitter one about the state of his back did the rest; they served as a pretext to start a conversation with Miguel and Sergio who, as tends to happen, found themselves under his spell before they knew it.

They found that the words of the old man transcended their literal meaning. Colors, for example, became sharper when he spoke of them; they took on a shine that was able to stand out through the quality of his speech. At one point Miguel and Sergio felt the same shudder run through them both: it occurred to them that perhaps this old man could help them. And as though the air were condensing in an unusual way – unusual for the climate and circumstance, somewhat theatrical – they noticed a rough incandescence surrounding his shadowy figure (the nimbus of intelligence). And so they started to recount their whole misadventure from the beginning. The old man kept silent as he listened. Voices, saying more or less incomprehensible things, could occasionally be heard from the other side of the wall. When someone spoke really loudly, Miguel and Sergio would stop talking and look up to see that the wall was only a bit taller than they were, and that there was probably an expanse on the other side, an enclosed area, perhaps a garden, where the voices and the people to whom they belonged could walk around. Seen from the street, Miguel and Sergio probably seemed to be talking to a pile of clothes; whoever came a bit closer would think that they were conversing with someone who was asleep. They alone could see the attention with which the old man listened to them, deaf to all other voices and sounds. They went on like that for a long time. The encounter took on such meaning for them that Miguel and Sergio forgot that it might only be a coincidence; they imagined that someone or something – even they themselves, though they found it hard to believe – had guided their steps toward that place. When they finished their story, they waited for the old man’s verdict. The noise of the street returned, distant but vital. While the man reflected, they gave themselves over to the gradual diffusion of their surroundings: the plastic bags and bits of cloth, the dirty wall on which he leaned, the municipal building and its complex, the dilapidated neighborhood and the city as a whole, with all its flattened expanses, were held in suspense. But it was not that the scene was actually dissolving; it simply was not of interest. What mattered was the two of them, after so many years, finally being understood for the very first time. Perhaps the old man had the answer. After talking for a long time, mostly about a few strange moral episodes that he had experienced in own life, he made his decree: “Go to the river. If one of you catches something, come back right away, but if three hours go by without a bite, you won’t have anything to worry about anymore.” Miguel and Sergio looked at each other. They were disappointed by the enigmatic nature of the task; having expected a solution, even if only a bit of advice, they found themselves confronted with an order. They gathered from the words of their maestro that it would be preferable not to catch anything, so they chose to go at night, when they thought there would be less chance of landing a fish.

They arrived after midnight. The wind was blowing from the east, off the banks of the river, making the darkness even more still. Impassive, they supported the weight of their bodies on the rails of the jetty charged with protecting them from the abyss. Anyone would have realized that they were not fishermen and that, if they were fishing, they were doing so against their will. Gradually, they grew bored, observed the serenity of the air, the water lapping an unknown distance below, the unmatched depth of the darkness. A life of indeterminacy had emptied them of all interests, nothing really mattered; it had been a long time since the future held any tension for them. Five minutes were the same as two weeks, and two weeks the same as three years. But it was also true, as they had proven, that an essential element of friendship was tedium: knowing how to share it and how to tolerate it. This brought them back to the original problem, their mutual indistinguishability. And so, as they ruminated, they allowed themselves to be distracted by the lights they saw nearby: the wavering lanterns of the fishermen, and the ones further off that belonged to the ships.

At one point, an unexpected movement jerked Sergio’s line. He froze, unable to react. The silence and the darkness would have kept the secret, but the pressure on his finger would not allow him to ignore the situation. After a while he exhaled and said, shakily, “I think something bit.” “What do you mean, something?” Miguel asked, unsettled. “How should I know? Something, I don’t know.” “What is it doing?” “What is what doing?” “It, the thing you caught,” said Miguel, “it must be doing something.” “Nothing” replied Sergio, “it’s tugging.” They started to reel the line in slowly, hoping that their prey would break free; so slowly it did not seem like they were bringing anything in at all. The fish could have grown old and Sergio, in his anguish, would have offered it some of his own time – entire years, if it would have made a difference – for it not to appear. These lines seem short, he thought. They were both nervous; a profound shock heaved them out of the dark night they knew and into a darker one they did not. Miguel prayed that he would not have to take Sergio’s place although, in reality, it was actually Miguel who was reeling in and Sergio who was grateful he had not had a bite. They finally saw, tangled in the line, a rain boot. It was hard not to be disappointed by the climax. Having expected, though it would have complicated matters, a real fish, a real body thrashing about in a fight for its life, the river answered their hopes with a rubber boot filled with mud. They immediately began to analyze the nature of their trophy; while on one hand it could hardly be considered the spoils of fishing, it had, on the other hand, obviously come from the river. Fear, and the desire be free of their problems, as the maestro had predicted they would be if they failed to catch anything in three hours, impelled them to continue fishing. That was their mistake: they stayed there with their poles at the ready until – once the three hours had come to an end – a storm surged up along the river. The wind blew with an extraordinary force and the water turned rough, threatening to topple the jetty. The waves seemed to be reaching out for something: they broke high and scattered like horizontal rain. Miguel and Sergio wanted to leave, to go back to that which could be called “the city” (so different, under the circumstances, from the place they found themselves, which could not be named). But going back was the last thing they could do; the darkness had closed in around them so completely that the rain, the wind, and the howling of the storm cut them off from any spatial referent. Even the location of the river: it could have been at their backs, alongside, or even in front of them. And so it was that the water took over everything; by now the river was flooding. The two obeyed their mandate: they did not move, staying with their equipment until the last moment, but at the height of the storm a wave dragged them down to the riverbed. And so it was that Sergio and Miguel met their anonymous end, absorbed by a confusion not unlike the one to which they had exposed themselves as children, and which had perhaps marked them for a long time before that. With the boot, the wise old man would have solved the mystery for them: the one who was able to put it on and walk in it would be Miguel, since he had lost it in a previous life and it had later been thrown into the river by an angel so that one fateful night, if he passed the test, he would be able to recover it. But since this required the trust of both – they were still indistinguishable from one another – and such a thing did not exist, the two ended up being punished by an undefined, though evidently quite effective, authority. This authority may have been religious, or it may have been nature in general, their own desperation, or anything, really; the problem, if there was one, resided in the fact that it was both superfluous and inevitable, just like the lives of our two heroes.

The other listened to M with particular attention throughout the story. From time to time the bus would slow down, until the driver noticed the delay and drove at full speed for a few blocks, only to slow down again later. When M finished, the other reflected on the obvious: that he could not find any connection between the story and the matter of more or less authentic Jews. It’s strange that you don’t see it, said M. It’s not the story itself, but the insecurity about one’s own nature, one’s own identity. The Jews are like Sergio and Miguel, each believing he’s the other, before or after, less or more than himself; they pass through life in this indecision, some with faith and others in puzzlement. When they take steps to discover the truth, everything becomes distorted. The universe that brought them to question their condition is disturbed and they remain adrift, somewhere in the expanse, while fear goes to work inside them. The Jews were never certain of their origins, which is why they found themselves surrounded by insecurity: both that of the world they believed they were observing and to which, despite everything, they were certain they belonged, and that of a more palpable and menacing sort, the kind represented by hostility.

The Orthodox Jews had passed and their long coats were probably already being illuminated by a different light, but they were nonetheless still among us, summoned by the narrative and the conversation. M could make any number of arguments, including contradictory ones, in favor of the authentic nature of religious Jews, but I sensed something in everything he said that exceeded the literal: a desire for the words to become something else, to reach another level, an auxiliary plane on which they did not need any proof to assert their truth. The subaltern and equivocal character of his language, paradoxically, turned the moment into an absolute truth. It may seem mysterious, but the excess borne by that which accompanies the voice is the substance to which images, commentaries, and influence yield. In this way, more than for what he actually said, M was credible because of these intimations, despite that fact that one – in this case, me – was only in a position to judge what was actually heard. “It is the phrase,” he would say to the other on more than one occasion when they returned to the subject, “not the word, that establishes a prior truth” (understanding a phrase to be the combination of things that accompany the word).

The religious Jews could have been anywhere at that moment, but there was no question that an imagined pattern connected their bodies with ours, which were now walking down the wide sidewalks of Villa Urquiza along calle Altolaguirre, as though we – them and us – were figures, entities that were equally vital to this constellation. And so, he continued, even within time we are joined with them in solidarity as we define space. The story of Miguel and Sergio was not enigmatic because of its ending, but rather because of the way in which it unfolded, which has no end. And because of the old man, who puts his wisdom into practice at the same time he renounces it through the use of magic. A boot is, after all, a boot, and very few would be able to assign special powers to it or introduce it to the realm of the enchanted; that it should fit Miguel’s foot was not only a question of faith, it was also a matter of sacrificing the cause in order to give life to the effect.