Текст книги "The Planets"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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THREE

The story about the pair of nomads absorbed me just as much as the one about the eye. Unlike me, who was unable to describe the events of the previous day except in the most confused terms, M abounded in stories and anecdotes that not only concerned him directly, relating to his own experience like the episode of the eye, but also encompassed broader, more diffuse – and therefore more debatable and controversial – material, which reached him from who knows where to adopt a new form through his voice. This is why it is clear to me that, were he still alive, he would have been the writer, the novelist. (The surrogate that I believe myself to be at times does not represent a fault; I do not see it as such. I cannot say, “I failed,” I am not myself, et cetera.) On the other hand, writing is the order best suited to take up error and even simulation, converting them first into chance and then into fortune; I can hardly mistrust my affinity for replacement and substitution, as I have been convinced for years that if there were something to be said in my – particular – language, not the words or the facts, but rather the morals behind some and the value of others, it would be dictated in some way by the memory of M.

A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write. At times I have thought that with this work I abandon myself, submit myself to an unclear condition in which personal feelings and the ideas derived from them are mixed together. Yet it is also true, I believe, that there are few things as amorphous as identity, in terms of both depth and breadth, and that it is therefore pointless to wonder about its limits. I am here right now, but suddenly I cease to be; I am another, or simply less. Imagine the strain of someone trying to be himself all the time. M taught me to recognize the moments in which our identity appears, becomes a category, emits energy, and then subsides into a lethargic state of anticipation that lasts who knows how long. In less than five minutes we are able to oscillate among an infinite number of states, from abundance to saturation to emptiness. It is also true that we are not aware of whenwe are; those around us notice this when our signs become visible to them. Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle? M and I achieved solidarity, a bond through which our own intermittence was able to develop with neither pressure nor strain, but with a sense of union. If there were a dominant state (climate) in my memory of the friendship, it would be that of harmony and serenity, a nucleus of emotions, from the bosom of which emerged the certainty of creating something unconditional and everlasting, the loss of which I have never overcome.

The real illusion that is space, or, more accurately, the confined, familiar city in which our reciprocal identity manifested itself, disappeared in M’s absence. There was no sense trying to recapture it through intermittent, inevitably anonymous, and more or less melancholy visits to his neighborhood or the places we used to go because, unlike objects – which, like photos, can at any moment become talismans or relics – space has its own ephemeral hierarchy. Space is silent, it says nothing to us; it has no surface and yet, paradoxically, it is the most lasting of times. Armed with this proof, after circling the blocks around his house in the months that followed the abduction and returning every day empty-handed, as tends to happen, I understood the bewilderment of the two drifters who were dazzled by their surroundings but were blind to its successive manifestations. An event unfolds before our eyes; we attempt to uncover it, but cannot because it has taken the form of a landscape. There will always be an element of disappointment, just as happens with noises, which are always too loud or too soft for our consciousness. This frequent disappointment was the force that pushed the pair to want more countryside, more space, horizon, views; through the innocent – in that it was derived from their own movement – succession of these, their fantasy of the journey was returned to them. This fantasy shaped the pliable material of which they were made. The vast territory they crossed over the years was, and is, legendary, but their vague sense of distraction failed to take in these legends, which touched upon them in one way or another nonetheless. Occupation, conquest, camping, residence, property: these words were foreign not only to them, but also to nature. They were satisfied simply to cross. In this way, at the mercy of their indecision and to the rhythm of their footfall, a reciprocal being and identity grew to their own measure in the form of outbursts and lulls that flared and languished with fits of clarity and withdrawals into opacity. Similar oscillations between geography and consciousness would shape our friendship, as well.

One day, something very strange happened, something that would have a double effect, lasting into the future and decisive with regard to our shared past. M and I were walking through a neighborhood where the streets, as full of Tipa trees as a park and as bright and as wide as avenues, seemed to want to hide their double excess by tending toward a categorical magnitude. We had come to prepare something like a class project on the climate. We had to choose two phenomena. Far from the chilly snow or the malevolent hurricane, and negating any misplaced inclination toward exoticism, our preference tended toward the fog and the mist. Two phenomena that were both diurnal and nocturnal – the former less so than the latter – and were as common, though not as frequent, as the breeze. We were supposed to produce charts to adorn the walls of our classroom: this was the “special” part of the class and the artifice that made the exercise “didactic.” Aside from graphs of isobars, isohumes, isotherms, other diagrams and charts, et cetera, we set ourselves the task of representing the mist and the fog. Wanting to elevate their mystery – the common trait of all atmospheric phenomena – we tended toward exaggeration: the mist looked like a downpour; the fog, like a dense sponge stuck to the ground that blocked out the light. There was no violence to this enterprise: the drawing belonged to the field of interpretation. Carefully considered, the fact that mist was not a deluge and fog was not a dense cloud was only a matter of scale. “To an ant, a drop of dew is enough to cover his head and a light mist can seem like an impenetrable fog,” M argued innocently. A light mist or a drop of dew could be as devastating as a tropical storm; how, then, could the real nature of the mist and the fog not give one pause? Added to this were connections that presented alternatives to those of global topographies: maps organized according to intangible affinities, such as variations in climate, revealed a living network of relations that exceeded their expectations. El tiempo, in the most ambiguous and enigmatic of the word’s dual meanings of time and weather – that is, as it refers to the weather – evinced not only an extreme relativism by positing various parallel systems, all integrated with reality, but also offered us the possibility of presenting these as both simultaneous and verifiable. And so we walked along, making absentminded comments about the climate and the atmosphere. (Those dialogues, I believe, were the most complete testament to our friendship; I have never had one like them in spirit or, for that matter, in substance, with anyone else.)

The meaning of those long, conversational walks may have been figurative, but that would not make them any less substantial – quite the opposite, because it was to the rhythm of these steps and these words that M and the other grew together, learning how to think, even how to converse; one could also say that they learned how to walk, in the broadest sense. For various reasons they both lacked adults, parents, who could pass down to them an image, a formation in the true sense of the word. Though it may seem like an overstatement, it is likely that if they had not met, they would not have been able to draw from themselves that which was discarded and contested by their elders. The lines of the isotherms, juxtaposed with those of the continents, indicated that the truth was comprised of many maps at once, enveloping reality like a delicate sheath. Everything that moves, thought M, everything that loses or gains heat, leaves its indelible mark. “If the routes we take through the city, together or apart, were to be written out, they would make an incredible picture: each one coming together to form an orderly tangle,” said M. Sometimes they would be far apart, other times not; they would be near one another or even on the verge of collision, without knowing it. Other times they would be somewhat distant, neither really far nor particularly close. But the figure itself, or at least the nature of the changes and movements, would remain forever.

It might also happen that they would be close while thinking they were far apart, or vice versa, in which case the direction of the wind, as with noise, or the layout of the streets or tracks, as with the trains, would either indicate actual distances and degrees of separation or, on the contrary, simply confuse them. In a city, M continued, distance did not mean separation (“we surrender ourselves to obstacles”); in the countryside, either, though it is different there because of irregularities in the terrain. But at sea, it does. At one point they stopped, and M turned halfway around, saying, “Let’s look back along the street, straight through the trees. The sidewalk looks like a tunnel carved out of the ground, the houses, and the branches.” They had walked the length of the tunnel, from a distant point upon which they now set their gaze, but there was no trace of their passing. Footsteps don’t leave a mark, he added. Is there a place where our trajectories can speak for us, without our intervention? The other did not respond. If it does exist, we don’t know where it is; if it doesn’t, we should invent it.

We saw a couple kissing; a little while later, a man switched his ring from one finger to another; not long after, a bus with only a few passengers aboard stopped at a corner. These sorts of things were signs of the journey’s progress. The bus slowly pulled away from the curb, the man studied his finger, now bare; the couple embraced, ignoring the presence of their clothes. We registered it all with detachment (almost boredom). A train could be heard in the distance; this, strangely, was not cause for comment. Perhaps it was the place, so luminous and calm, or the topics that arose according to the autonomous manner of these walks, or perhaps it was, as I said earlier, that formative afternoon as a whole, during which we came to feel unique for the very first time, to feel like ourselves in an obvious and decisive sense, without fear of error. We might have known all this before, without being aware of it. For a long time, we assume we know who we are, until the moment we fully realize who that is; in that moment, identity is no longer predictable, but rather takes the form of a truth that, like any other, can become a sentence with no more than a change of perspective. We are condemned to the truth and, as such, are subject to its rule – to me, the most tangible evidence of this is precisely M and his absence. I’ll describe the strange event.

A little while later, we ran into each other. We had said goodbye earlier on, and I still remember the way we turned away from one another at the same time, heading in opposite directions. But then, a half hour later, we practically collided in front of a corner newsstand. Neither of us wanted to admit that he had taken a wrong turn; M insisted with a conviction matched only by his disorientation, while I tried to explain to him that he was lost, without really being able to see it clearly myself. I also remember how, for a moment (a moment marked by a peculiar sensation that would linger on), that encounter – at once real, because we were face to face, and impossible – disoriented me and was able to temporarily disrupt geography. That one street should come after the next, that a few blocks past any avenue, there would always be another, was a truth that was bound to outlive us (as proven by the fact that this already happened to M). Yet at the time, as I wondered how it could have happened, I did not sense one but rather many distortions, a generalized disorder: the streets no longer appeared as a succession, as streets, and could be bunched together within the same confines. Another example: west was an idea that was exiled from reality, a repudiated notion. And there we were, standing calmly beside a kiosk looking at the magazines, receiving signs of a disaster in the form of a coincidence. What a strange thing to have happened, said M. Sometimes I think that we move through the city like planets, following our individual trajectories while we maintain our relative positions and trace out uniform patterns. But the planets don’t move that way – I corrected him – it would have to be “stars” or “astral bodies.” (M wasn’t listening.) And so the apparent movement of what is found in the heavens and which we generally call stars became, by pure coincidence, the key and emblem of our bond: despite the gaps and distances that might emerge, there would ultimately and always be, between the two of us, a reciprocal influence marked by the simple tenets of balance and compensation – the fundamental law of our walks and trajectories, which were, at the same time, shaped by the organizing principle of solidarity.

I sometimes wonder whether this solidarity might still exert its force. External space, for instance, is acted upon by processes and forces of uncertain origin, impossible to attribute to any one body, as though the existential proof of all things were not in their mass, but in the indirect effects of their mysterious operations: that which we call an organizing principle, or reality, among other things. Bodies, then, belong to an essentially negative existential category, defined by consequences or signs rather than by materiality. As such, influence would be invisible, but effective; because, as is well known, every force or effect has a cause, we are haunted by the notion that perhaps we just don’t not know how to look. Perhaps we live in a world that is evident to all beings – animal, vegetable, and mineral – but us.

A few months ago, while looking for an address near the intersection of Tucumán and Reconquista, I heard someone calling to me. There are always so many people and so much noise on that corner that I thought the shouting could not possibly have been directed at me. But that was a mistake: it was. Someone was trying to signal me as he approached the top of the incline, but he could not go any faster. I remembered his name when he was practically right in front of me, when his vacillation between extending a hand and stepping forward to embrace me became obvious. It was Sito, a friend of M’s from the neighborhood. “Hey, how are you, how are you,” we said, exchanging similar greetings. Since he had to catch his breath—“This hill gets steeper every day”—it was up to me to speak. I remarked how exceptional it was that we should run into each other, not only because of how many years it had been, but because it was completely by chance that I was there at all; aside from that, with all the cars and all the people it was almost impossible to notice anyone in particular, and yet he had. A minute earlier or a minute later and everything would have been different, I added, no one would have seen me or called to me and perhaps we would not have another chance to meet for years, as many years as had passed since the last time we had seen one another. He said yes, it was remarkable, not only had fate intervened to bring us both to that place, but also to point his gaze in my direction and allow him to recognize me almost immediately; he had always had very good eyesight and an impeccable memory for physiognomy, he added – and I agreed.

As he spoke, I remembered things about Sito. An only child, he lived with his mother long ago, in the days of M. His father had died, or left, before being able to leave a tangible or lasting impression on him, just after his first birthday. Despite having no siblings and being practically an orphan, as a child he found, in his mother, a repository for his cruelty, a deep-seated bitterness that he would cast onto her in the form of arrogance, deception, and even disdain, as though he were trying to make himself disappear. This translated into a pronounced dominance. He lacked the resources of the spoiled child; instead, he made use of a power that anticipated that of an adult, only saturated with innocence, which made it all the more ruthless. Every time his mother would come out into the street to look for him – having to call out “Sito” again and again even though he had not only heard her the first time but had also, like every child, sensed her physical presence – you could hear an abject tone in her voice that belied her wisdom; her entire being was submitted to the ignorant rule of the boy, to his innocent and brutal authority.

A little while after I met him, as he passed into adolescence, mother and son reversed roles: then it was she who was ruthless, Sito who was submissive. It should have been the other way around, but it was not. The mother accused him of being just like his father, when in reality it was she, who drank more and more, that best recreated his memory. Sito had to keep a small sideboard in the living room, which I saw on more than one occasion – closed, of course – well stocked. To this end, he would go out in search of cheap liquor, usually liters of vodka; his mother told him which brand. He would return slowly, doubled over by the weight of his purchases. I remember, on those rare occasions when the three of us were at his house, the silent disposition of that sideboard, as intimidating as a person lying in wait, a figure that at once concealed and signaled the drama of the household. We could have been talking or doing anything at all when that imperious voice would ring out from a tiny room in the attic. As though propelled by a sudden force, Sito would instantly jump to his feet and run up the stairs; it was nothing like the waiting he inflicted on her just a few years earlier. At one point we even saw him dodge his mother’s fists and struggle to hold her back; something kept him from using his full strength, which was obviously greater than hers, even simply to restrain her: it was as though her superiority was carried in her voice; shrieks and movement came together in the body of the mother to break down the defenses of the son.

Years later, as tends to happen and as they tend to say, I lost track of Sito; every now and then our paths would cross near his house and we would exchange a few jokes, then go our separate ways. As was now reflected in our mutual and confused discomfort, we had not seen each other since M’s disappearance. “I couldn’t get work until the war in the Falklands – it was only after I got married that I found something.” “With my father-in-law,” he added. He helped out in a bar off the turnpike, the Acesso Oeste, which also offered room and board (the Acesso Oeste just past Haedo, he explained). A few years later his father-in-law died, and they had to close it down because he had so many brothers-in-law. The experience had done him some good: since then he had been working as a waiter at a café in the area, on Reconquista; soon they would make him a manager. People passed by us in a rush, indifferent to the decisive encounter Sito and I were having there, on the sidewalk. He invited me to join him for a cup of coffee. “But not where you work,” I said. Who said anything about that? he responded, naturally. (To this day I can find no explanation for my awkwardness.) I asked about his mother. She had died, as well, but he was still living in the same place – now with a wife and children. Those blocks around the train tracks never change, it’s remarkable, he said. As he approached his house, he would try to find something that had changed, sighing with disappointment when he could not. He felt as though he were still in his childhood or youth: any change – the passage of time in general, his children – having no outward sign, seemed to exist only in his head; it became unreal to him. He said the following: Time moves so quickly that before I know it I’m a man, what they call an adult; my father did not reach the age I am now, and I think I’ve lasted longer than I deserve to or should have. I look at my children, he continued, and they seem like people, not children. I tend to my customers without seeing any trace of humanity in those I serve: they are just posts attached to the tables. The same thing happens to taxi drivers, he rationalized, many of them have said so. I agreed and looked away. His words sounded harsh; I couldn’t tell whether this was due to my presence, if they were trying to convey something beyond what they were saying, or whether this was an effect of his general nervousness, of which I could be a victim just like any other person in any other place. Perhaps it was both. Yet it was not only time – the effects of which he had such trouble perceiving when they were right in front of him – that separated us, no matter how long it had been since we had seen one another, but also the absence of M, so clearly omnipresent – in that he was, and continues to be, the reason that we know each other – that lent an air of sadness, distrust, and even inappropriateness to the encounter.

Just as had happened with M’s mother years earlier, that day after the abduction when the weight of his disappearance would have kept us on that sidewalk forever had it not been for her wisdom in acknowledging, in different words, that M was gone; just as had happened years earlier, Sito and I were playing a part that was not only unpleasant, but also unclear. Any change of tone, any word half-said or said with undue emphasis, and we might freeze up and remain there, at the corner of Tucumán and Reconquista, for all time – the preserved relics of an encounter immortalized in its impossibility. In light of the disappearance, his absence, every comment, even those not about M, took on a valence of inadequacy, incorrectness, as though some weight were keeping it from achieving any real significance. And yet Sito, with his chattiness and gestures of fatigue, which were actually just a product of his laziness, conveyed something of the image I had of M from those years, no doubt with the spontaneous assistance of memory. In a way, it is those feelings that I am trying to represent now. (Sito greatly influenced my decision to write this account; though the idea existed before, it was one of those vague promises, caught halfway between commitment and resignation. Our meeting was decisive in this regard. Sito was the final impetus.)

Today one might see in Sito – in his robust figure, his agitation as he approached, climbing the hill like some tired animal – M’s consent to divulge some aspect of his story, even if that were only his existence. This may seem like magic, or superstition, but it is also hard to refute. Before his death, I had never suspected that a person’s substance or spirit could manifest itself from time to time; this was the outcome of M’s leaving (I say that he left in the way someone might say I never saw him again, he died, et cetera). But at no moment since have I come so close to feeling M’s presence, perceiving it as a sign unto itself. While Sito spoke, I went over the chance nature of the encounter and was even more convinced of the direct intervention of M. Any witness would have said that two old acquaintances ran into each other, but the reality, as usual, turned out to be something less serendipitous and more lasting. A permission had been granted to me, almost a gift, the benefit of which depended on the way it was used. I realized this as Sito’s words followed their course, though I was still listening to him. There were two paths: the straight one of his words and the winding one of M’s intervention, which, despite its twists and turns, kept up with the other. This is why I believe that, whether irrational, fantastic, or serendipitous, the encounter was a sign. M’s presence showed itself to be fleeting and without gradation; one could say that, though perhaps he had always been present; only now, fleeting, did he choose to show himself.

If one can speak of a thing called candor, a virtue some people supposedly possess, I should say that Sito’s was somewhat questionable. I realized this when he chose a meandering route to recall that M had not been abducted from his house. Sito’s roundabout remarks had something ceremonial to them; in order to speak he resorted to preambles and clarifications whose meaning, if they had any purpose at all, had been lost in a memory overcrowded by time and the – often purely mental – reiterations to which he subjected his own story. (As is well known, repetition does not simplify; on the contrary, it distorts.) What Sito said was more or less this: A kidnapping on the block, with no witnesses. Like nearly everyone else, M lived somewhere: his house. But he was somewhere else, far from there, when he was taken. This meant that the significance of the event dissipated almost immediately; it was not easy to absorb something that had happened outside the neighborhood. Something as decisive as a man’s life had closed itself off within its own virtuality, without leaving a trace. His family, especially his parents, by not acting in any ostensible way, seemed to give themselves over to the lack of coincidence between event and geography. And so began the delayed reactions for which they would, gradually, become known; more absorbed than they usually were by the familial penchant for distraction, they were now so slow to turn when someone called to them, for example, that they were already being hailed for the second time when they finally did. Their thoughts and reactions, said Sito, appeared to reach them from the back of their heads, rather than the front. The neighbors gradually found out about the painstaking, short-lived inquiries – which were not worthy of the name and never met with any success – but Sito could not remember how, he said as we drank the coffee to which he had invited me, since no one in the family talked about it with anyone.

One day the father went to the police station. Wentsays too much: the truth was that he simply stepped inside. He was walking along an avenue when he crossed paths with a patrol officer. Something inspired in him a vague sense of duty; he could not pass by the authorities without asking about his son. Information, like life, is sometimes so random that it is impossible to know what path might lead to the truth. In the police station they misled him despicably. They made him wait for hours, saying that the person who could help him wasn’t in. All the while, the father watched people arrive who had been in an accident, or who came to report a noise, a theft, or a scam; people who came for a certificate of residence. Every now and then the police would mention a prisoner in the back, in the cells. Only just before he left did he discover that they were not prisoners, but detainees. It was strange; the word remained etched in his memory. Under the circumstances, there was little difference between one (prisoner) and the other (detainee), yet the second was more optimistic. From that moment on, he had the hope that M was a detainee. As long as that was all, he thought; detention can last years, decades, but it is always only temporary, as long as he is alive. The thought of seeing M appear at the far side of the station, from the third wing, as the police called it, excited him. It is so easy for one to believe that reality is directed at them. After a while a sharp pain in his chest made him lean his head against the cold wall. He left the police station at dawn, after another officer, who had just arrived and was supposedly the one assigned to help him, questioned him about everything, absolutely everything, and told him nothing at all; he simply ordered him to leave.

The neighbors, said Sito, offered to help with “anything they might need.” M’s parents thanked them evasively, as though they did not understand, or as though accepting any help would be to turn their backs on their son, to evade the guilt that had tormented them since the kidnapping and whose weight they felt obligated to bear. There was nothing they could have done, Sito pointed out, how could they have contributed anything more than what they already did anyway? Neighbors help one another with ordinary things, common to all, unless some catastrophe strikes. Nonetheless, there is no extraordinary assistance for extraordinary events; the help available was the usual, the neighborly: a supplemental solidarity that was, given its magnitude, rarely decisive. Half a year after the abduction, in the opposite season – that was how M and I used to break up annual cycles, according to opposing landmarks on a circle, the year – the father nearly died of another pain in his chest. The family’s accounts, always in terrible shape, collapsed irreparably. It seemed as though they had all been struck over the head, lost their bearings. They wandered aimlessly through the neighborhood day after day, always disoriented; that much was clear at first glance.