Текст книги "The Planets"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Soda water, said Sito abruptly, putting down his cup of coffee. It was because of soda siphons that he came to know more about M’s abduction. An old friend of his from school had showed him the siphons full of gasoline that he kept in his house. He led him into the kitchen and drew back a short floral curtain, with a flourish. A few plates embellished with gondolas, birds, and mountains rested on the cabinet. Sito did not count the bottles, nor did he try to verify any of it; instead he amused himself with the thought of the cloud of boats, feathers, ceramic, and water they would create if they exploded. Preparing the siphons required artisanal zeal. He remembered the care it took to prepare them and the naivety of his friend for showing them off. He could still see the innocent dedication that drove him; his idea of armed struggle, for which those explosives had been made, as something like a carnival, a pageant whose winner would be declared against a backdrop of exploding siphons. Sito remembered, at that moment, the last brigades to use carrier pigeons, whose devotion to their pets and to the virtues of their art led them to overlook the somewhat more decisive aspects of the war. World War II, to them, was a competition between legions of carrier pigeons. Speed, strength, adaptability, and intelligence were the qualities that would decide the victory; only, they were talking about pigeons. The same way that now, as Sito described in the café to which we had gone for a coffee, the strength, quality, and security of the siphons spilled over to the outcome of the struggle. That friend of mine ended up like M, Sito continued. One day he was absorbed in tightening a spout and didn’t hear the kidnappers knocking; I guess he imagined it didn’t seem like he was home. But what happened to M was different, since he didn’t do anything, right? Sito asked, fixing his eyes, as they say, on mine.

And so on that afternoon, months ago, as we drank our coffee I grasped the nature of Sito’s doubt. In his memory, the figure of M, who was always distracted to the point of appearing indifferent, retained an aura of innocence, even one of absence or ignorance; in this way, his disappearance represented not only a question about his fate, but also a mystery surrounding his past. M’s past, as Sito understood it, could have somehow caused the abduction – or, on the contrary, politics could have been completely foreign to it, which would make him the victim of a circumstance that was neither anticipated nor sought out. This might seem gratuitous; an abduction is, of course, an abduction under any circumstance, just as a murder is always a murder, regardless of the circumstance or place. Still, Sito believed that one’s behavior could influence one’s fortunes, the way his old classmate had encountered, in his kidnapping and death, the outcome of a process that began when he twisted the first spout on a bottle of soda water; he needed to know whether M was absolutely innocent, that is, according to his measure, an absolute victim. He was, I told him, by answering with a “right.”

He made a gesture of relief; he had not been able to ask anyone for such a long time, and now his years of waiting were crowned not only with certainty, but also with peace. That was what he had thought. M’s memory became more complete: the truth had elevated it. Sito recounted the utter confusion in which his other friend lived, the one with the siphons, who had once enthusiastically told him that, if he ever needed to flee from his home, the Born money (from that famous kidnapping) would be at his disposal for expenses. The idea that it would be like a paid vacation fit perfectly with the image of a war of soda siphons, Sito observed. The phrase “the Born money” was a symbol of power, albeit a trivial power; it crossed his lips all the time. It was that money that paid for the gasoline, paid the vendor for the siphons, and covered other necessary expenses. Sito recalled his friend saying, with a childish ironic flourish, that they sometimes just poured out the soda.

Later, we left the bar and walked to avenida Corrientes, where the sun occupied nearly the entire width of the street with an exemplary sunset, reclining against the west at an angle too steep for the city. I asked Sito if he had heard anything about M’s parents and brothers, of whom I had not had any news in years. According to him, things went badly for a time: not only badly, but worse. As I already knew, one of the brothers had left his studies in high school. Then there were the undertakings of the father, which rarely succeeded – on the contrary, sooner or later they always failed. I could imagine these projects, impossible to call businesses, which in practice left their success or failure utterly to chance: before, when M was alive, it could have been the wholesale of old-fashioned pantyhose, or the purchase of a batch of defective housewares. It wasn’t until five years after the kidnapping that they had any luck; they rented a storefront, filled it with refrigerators and used furniture, and set it up as a self-serve – it didn’t go out of business as far as I know, Sito clarified, since they had to move shortly thereafter. That was the last he heard. When he was taken, the group from the neighborhood stopped getting together, he continued: no more talking on the corner or walking together. They went back to being neighbors, exchanging greetings and the occasional joke.

We walked along Corrientes toward the Obelisk for a while, talking about his children and about childhood in general. Sito commented that one never stops being a child – an opinion shared by many. For me, I said, childhood was the most forgettable part; I only sensed the continuity of my character when I left it behind, in a moment that coincided with my finding M. Childhood, that dynamic, foreign land. A broad, ascending stroke illuminated at the far end, in the west, by the sun – that was Corrientes. We were only a few blocks and a few minutes from watching, projected on the pavement, the shadow of the Obelisk grow longer and longer. Sito asked what I did, where I worked. I’m an executive now, I lied. I’m running an Argentine transnational. He was not inclined to believe me. “Yeah, and I’m a millionaire,” he said. Had I told him the truth from the start he might not have questioned it, but when I told him that I was a writer he warned me to stop jerking him around. To be honest, I hadn’t really believed that he worked in a café; now, with his vacillation, each individual deceit gave itself over to mutual distrust.

Anyone familiar with the weather in Buenos Aires, a fairly predictable climate that adds to the melancholy, indolent air of the city, could both marvel at and question what I am about to say, but it really happened. After going back and forth with Sito about our real or imagined occupations for a few blocks, he ended up saying that he was a mattress salesman; he had a little shop that sold foam rubber. It was what mattresses, pillows, and stuffed animals were made of, he said, but I don’t believe he was telling the truth about that, either. I, for my part, indicated that I had been living abroad, as though I were still trying to overcome his mistrust. And so, while we were going back and forth about our occupations and things of that nature, the sky was covered over with a cloud so dense that night seemed to fall in a moment. A metallic truss, at once subtle and impenetrable, settled over Corrientes. It was easy to predict an imminent deluge, yet everyone knew it was not going to rain. That sky, in the particular way it organized itself – a way that, despite its fleeting nature, gave us the full sense of the extraordinary force behind it – seemed to render all other climatic phenomena, all other states, obsolete. In that moment, all believed that they were looking at a vanished past, recovered only by some unusual combination of chance events: it was a phenomenon to be marveled at, if not immediately associated with the miraculous. Still, it lasted no more than thirty seconds. Sito and I discussed this; he reacted with similar surprise. “What a fog!” he exclaimed several times, looking upward. (This surprised me, and I thought back on that special class about the climate.) A few moments later, the sky cleared up and the afternoon continued its serene progress. We had agreed earlier to walk together to the Obelisk, and now that we were there we realized the conversation was coming to an end; we were forced to scour our imaginations in the hope that some new topic might arise. And so the encounter with Sito drew to a close. It was a farewell with neither a particular focus nor a future, like when one closes the wardrobe of someone who has died knowing that happenstance, and nothing else, will be the reason it is opened next. This is why we pretended to be so unsettled by the weather: in order to avoid having to go over it all again and say something formulaic befitting the occasion. And also why, as the darkness suddenly lifted, Sito and I rushed to say our goodbyes.

I waited at the corner of Corrientes and Carlos Pellegrini as Sito walked away. I wanted to see his back, the labored mechanics that moved that enormous body. He seemed relaxed; he even stopped a few times to look at the shop windows he passed. It had not been two minutes since we parted – that is, some particularly brief period of time; barring the absurd, let’s assume one can go two minutes without breathing – and it was obvious that Sito had already forgotten the encounter. I disdained and – though it may seem excessive – detested the passive, brutish availability that submitted to my appearance as a way of passing a few afternoon hours. There was no question that both M and I were far from Sito’s mind. The effects of apathy could be seen on his body the same way I had heard the indolence in his voice. His mother was still alive, that much was obvious; he had lied to me about that, too, without any restraint or fear. He stopped at a kiosk, and I watched him buy a pack of caramels. How perfect, I thought. Sito likes candy. He unwrapped one and raised it to his lips as he walked. He was pretty far away, which may be why I was tempted to follow him. But all of a sudden, doubtless prompted by my own nerves, he turned around to look for me in the crowd that filled the length of the block. He eventually saw me and raised an arm. In spite of his exceptional height, he stood on his tiptoes to wave to me, holding the candy wrapper between his fingers like some kind of semaphore. This good-natured gesture dispelled my mistrust: no one could turn and wave like that, in such a casual way, without also being a simple, transparent individual. I did my part, in turn; I moved my arm back and forth two or three times until he went on his way. And that was my encounter with Sito: so serendipitous it seemed like a dream, which made it obvious that M had been involved. The Obelisk finally stretched out its shadow, which glided along the sidewalk where I stood, still trying to make out a head – Sito’s – despite the distance. As night began to fall, this time unmistakably, I crossed Corrientes and followed Carlos Pellegrini south.

Earlier I said that Sito’s intervention was decisive in my writing all this. Now I see that Sito was important, even beyond his words, in that he paid for our coffee. It might seem ridiculous or inappropriate – for a number of reasons – but Sito’s gesture served to make me feel that something good could come from M that did not necessarily have to belong to the past. This is why I recount it from time to time: the invitation did not correspond to any mundane sense of courtesy, but was rather a protective gesture, a backward-looking nod of support.

Night arrived quickly: in the city, the sun knows neither patience nor lassitude. It’s strange, when I think of those streets I remember the width of the sidewalks, the façades of the buildings and the breadth of the avenue, all of it punctuated by trees, yet that is not what I saw as I walked. At the time I was focused on the people around me and above all the parking lots, which the press was saying were in contract for millions; I have long since forgotten the details and circumstances of these things. Despite how long it had been since last we saw one another, and the slow pace of the conversation that was kept alive, at times, only through halting and painstaking effort, I had the feeling that we had not remembered M. Hours spent talking with Sito, and at no point did we speak of him fully, I realized, astonished. What kept us from evoking his voice, the way he walked, his kindness? How could we not have talked about his intelligence, his modesty, his generosity? M was completely theatrical: the faces he made could signal both happiness and oblivion, distraction and enchantment; M had a knowing sense of humor that inspired reflection, but Sito and I didn’t talk about that, either. At Belgrano I thought about the cruel memory those who survive keep of those who did not, not because it eventually fades away, as they all do, but because it is distorted; changing things with this transformation, abandoning them before their time. This fact, which is simply the mechanics of memory and is seen all the time, took on a dramatic, doubly cruel, twist in M’s case, in that we had nowhere to assign his presence, that is, his body – we know how important place is in the adoption of customs and the interpretation of events, as evidenced by my absolute certainty of M’s intervention in the encounter with Sito (as though he were capable of being anywhere).

Later, as I crossed calle Chile, I realized something else: the reason for our silence could be found in the excessive nature of M’s disappearance. I will illustrate this with an example. We sigh in different ways, according to different circumstances. We know many different types of sighs, most of which are recognizable: sighs of fatigue, impatience, pleasure, boredom, languor, surprise, and even of terror, but never of excess (in that case what is produced is a silence: people fall quiet before the excessive – this is the silence of excess). Shock or fear can leave us at a loss for words, but excess takes away our ability to speak: we don’t want to scream, but rather vanish, disappear, die. Neither Sito nor I, I said to myself as I crossed Chile, was ready to know what had happened to M, and so the facts left a wake behind them that was dense, lasting, and difficult to assimilate. If the fatefulness of his absence exaggerated what had happened, the lack of a space, a site, as I said, made it incomprehensible. It might have been a matter of just one person, as was the case, but it was infinite in scope. Paradoxically, it was so excessive that it became something simple and absolute, the way one might say something is both childish and appalling. In this way, we did not give ourselves over to silence, which would have been a pointless and gratuitous gesture; instead, silence chose us, enveloping us from within.

Enveloping us from within. Sito had used those words a little earlier but, strangely, only now as I repeated them was I able to remember them and ask myself what they might mean. He said them in the café where we had gone for a cup of coffee, on his invitation, as he described a fishing trip he had taken with a friend to a lake in the country.

By that point, Sito had gone back to his circumlocutions: There are few things more eerie than spending a night beside a lake, he assured me: a noiseless sea, a river that makes no sound and has no opposite shore. The gentle lapping of the water seems to announce that someone is out there, emerging from the silence to attack us. Even if one believes that no danger is going to come from the depths, one immediately realizes that it is across the surface, of the land, that is, where it could appear. This certainty, so strange in its way, creates a greater sense of anxiety than that experienced by someone who spends a night out in the country, with neither sea nor lake nearby. In the country, Sito explained, the attack could come from any angle of the imaginary circle formed around one’s body: 360 degrees suitable to aggression. At the water’s edge, however, if one admits that nothing bad will come from that direction, the angle of exposure is noticeably reduced, generally to between 120 and 180 degrees. The security that follows this calculation is misleading, because though there is less possibility of aggression, the likelihood of its effectiveness, given the reduced radius, is much greater. So: the combination of the decreased probability and increased effectiveness of the attack, the motive of which would no doubt be ascertained once the aggressors end our lives, produces great anxiety and fear.

In any event, none of that matters, Sito asserted; not as much as an episode that took place the next morning, as one might expect, at the water’s edge. The sunrise promised a picture-perfect morning. The slow and tenuous illumination of the dawn, far from the tropic, flattened colors and textures, just as it did to the elements around us: the water was less like water, the mud less like mud. The moisture from the dew began to evaporate, spreading jumbled and vaguely agreeable vegetal smells; as the nascent morning advanced, the uneasy sounds of the night faded away like the unpleasant memory of a forced silence. We stuck our heads out of our sleeping bags, Sito continued, to make sure that nature had given us the gift of another perfect day, but a reflection sparked our concern: a few meters ahead of us, at the water’s edge, a shapeless mass was moving, or trembling, too cautiously to be anything natural. Sito and his friend were afraid the lucky star that had kept them through the night was about to run out right at the break of dawn, and they did not risk saying a word for fear of rousing the monster. Half upright, partially reclined, leaned a little to one side, expectant, their position was unusual and, what is worse, it was uncomfortable. They felt a sharp pain in their necks and yet they could not give up their observation. The fact that the morning mist, which – contrary to the way things should have been – was getting denser as the minutes passed, didn’t help things, either. Once more they proved that paying complete attention to one thing detracts from the senses and impedes one’s ability to notice other things; the morning and the place were stripped of their positive attributes and recoiled in the face of the threat. They stayed like that for an indefinite period: not long, the sky did not lighten all the way, but not a short time, either, because they were left with the memory of an endless vigil. All of a sudden they saw new shadows emerging, rapidly, from the underbrush to join the pulsating mass in the lake; this, together with the articulation of the forms they had been able to make out despite the confusion and the speed with which they moved, made them suspect that they might be looking at a group of people.

And so they were. In the light of day they would be able to perceive things little by little, eventually discerning a compact nucleus of bodies leaned over the water, as well as others that lay back against the shore, forming a protective arch. They wore coarse loincloths that barely covered their nakedness; many of them, the vast majority, were children. Their backs all had the same shape to them: square and broad at the shoulders, they proceeded straight down without tapering until they reached the waist, where a sudden stroke of reality seemed to remind them of the imminent expanse of the hips. Sito and his friend took care not to startle them; they approached cautiously, afraid they might be violent. They did not manage to avoid the former, Sito clarified, though thankfully they were mistaken about the latter; it was the others that panicked at what the two of them might do. What had appeared to be a protective human shield did not, in fact, do any protecting: it was a mass searching for warmth, which dispersed in a flurry of mud and barbaric exclamations. It was then that the two friends discovered the origin of the lapping they had attributed during the night to the swell of the lake: though they kept their mouths close to the surface, they drank with their hands, using them like little pitchers. It was their up and down motion, their splashing, that produced the melody. Once they reached the group, they realized something else that would surprise them: the water had mixed with the mud, which all were eating, as well. They approached someone who appeared to be the leader, who was about forty years old and wore a pair of pants tied at the waist, the holes in which revealed exceptionally pale skin. He stood up, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm to make it obvious that they were interrupting his breakfast, and greeted them. Sito and the other felt it was their right to ask questions – various measures indicated that they could consider themselves superior – and so they got right to the point. “Why do you eat mud?” they asked. “We’re very poor,” he said, adjusting the strap that held up his pants. Before that moment, Sito continued, he never would have believed it if someone had told him about gangs of the poor, but now he was face to face with one, and a big one at that. He and his friend had gone there to fish, which implied – as did their dinner the night before and the lunch they would have that day – that fish did exist there, though the others preferred the mud. Their organization was tribal. The leader said that they had been walking – and occasionally running – for three days without pause, not stopping to rest or to eat. They avoided towns, they only wanted to pass through; they had a savage industriousness to them that tended toward boring through hills and filling in gullies. As such, lakes were their favorite havens. They could stay there for a day or two, gather their strength, and relax. Their preference for mud was so obvious that it would be pointless to dwell on it, thought Sito, so they didn’t say anything else about it. Moments later, when the conversation lagged, they tried to pick it back up by asking his age. “Twenty,” he said, and in the difference between reality and appearance they saw the effects of hunger – or of mud. This was a good topic, and they took as much advantage as they could: they mentioned the strange combination of age and appearance, that though these are almost always linked, they rarely coincide, such that there are those who look somewhat younger than they are, others who look a lot younger or only a little. Still, they continued, there are also those who look somewhat or a little older than they are, and then there are those who look a lotolder. As they said this, they emphasized its significance by looking him straight in the eye. The chief made no effort to respond; his gaze seemed transparent. He probably did not catch the allusion, suggested Sito. On the other hand, aside from leaning over the water, it had probably been a long time since he had seen himself in a mirror. It might also have been that twenty just meant “old,” whether that be thirty-five, fifty, or seventy. But all he said, moments later, was, “The mud envelops us from within.” These words were a mystery to Sito for a long time, he remarked that afternoon in the café where we had gone for a chat, but a little while ago it became clear to him, and now it seemed both accurate and evident. The mud was a premise; it was the earth that, once they were dead and buried, would tighten around them from outside. Sito was not interested in making conjectures about their diet: whether it was a collective suicide or a hygienic routine, whether it was a premonition translated into action, the portent of a final truth, or whether it was the memory or the embryo of some ritual; all and none of these possibilities were of interest to him. But he was sure that, beyond its own meaning, it had many others that were equally true.

“The mud envelops us from within. It is enveloping us from within,” the leader of this indigenous or impoverished tribe, though maybe it was both, had said in his plain, coarse, and somewhat cryptic way beside the lake, offering Sito a justification for his diet. It was a phrase that seemed utterly appropriate, I thought as I stepped onto the curb on the far side of Chile, as the slogan of that place inside us that had been occupied by silence ever since we learned that M had been taken. What I mean is that the silence was, in the first place, self-fulfilling, like a promise that is kept in its making (“I promise to promise” or “I swear to swear”); second, it was descriptive: it was part of our – new or old – nature and, as such, we could not escape its influence. Third, because there is always a third, it was also prescient in that it spoke of the silence in which we would all end up sooner or later, indistinguishable from one another. Half a block from San Juan, I thought: It is likely that Sito neither works in a café nor sells foam rubber; his mother might not be dead and may never have touched a drink, in spite of my memories. Still, there is no question that he has been reached, and invaded by, a silence just like my own. The lack of place, I thought, the absence of a space where M’s poor body might be.

It had grown dark by the time I reached Constitución; it was one of those summer nights that are cooler than usual thanks to the breeze coming off the river. From the morning we found out that M had been taken, from that moment on, we been invaded and silenced by excess. The confusion did not last long, the hesitation was brief; it was the lack of moderation that left us without words, just as M was left without a place. I forgot to ask Sito, I thought, whether he moved out of his house for a while after the abduction. But there was no need, I realized; it was obvious that he had not felt obliged to do so.

One is sometimes moved by the effects of time; while on one hand these promote continuity and endurance, often through the work of memory, on the other hand, they also induce forgetting. This forgetting is, after all, mundane and fairly banal, yet it is confusing, and sometimes disappointing, to acknowledge the particularities hidden in the past. We often speak of forgetting when we really mean to say distress, amnesia, mistrust, fear, indifference, distraction, doubt, weariness, omission. My mind oscillates within this narrow range of emotions when, on occasions like the evening after my encounter with Sito, despite the constant allusions in our conversation, which were largely indirect but were always concrete, I feel unable to attribute any tangible trait, even a trivial one, to M; a feature, a gesture or expression, a past, a family, affect, et cetera. A reflected image that has slowly given way to negation, to shadow. The effect is unreal, and this unreal effect makes his life seem not only improbable, but also incidental. Did M exist? Yes, I say. But what was his time on earth like? It is all conjecture, I reasoned, the more time passes, the less I know. This lack of knowledge has nothing to do with forgetting, though that is what we call it, nor with the length of his absence, but rather with its excess.

Constitución station, with its open platforms, its soaring ceiling, and its iron girders studded with colossal bolts, looked more like the hangar of a blimp. At that moment, all the train routes sounded far-fetched to me. Remedios de Escalada seemed just as distant as Bahía Blanca; beyond a certain point space began to dissolve, and that point was not far away. Concepts like near and far are derived from useless categories, I thought.

M and the other often had conflicting opinions about the differences between the capital and the suburbs. Though they took it for what it was, which was truly secondary, for ages this subject interested them more than other questions that were, from several points of view, more vital. Their discussions could last for weeks, with periods of greater emphasis and ones of apparent disinterest. And yet, though it was not mentioned, the subject was not cast aside: it followed its tortuous path without leaving them. M and the other were approaching an axis of coincidences that might seem fragile or weak, but which was useful as a foundation, like a moveable border, to propose new problems in response to a question – this was the basic implication, to which no one objected – that seemed to be both complex and impossible to resolve yet, at the same time, clear and simple. This question might seem pointless now, but the other would not be exaggerating if he said that, until a little while ago it was obvious to him as he passed from the suburbs into the capital, or vice versa, that he was passing into a contiguous order that was similar in appearance but was marked by difference (and certainly still is).

One tends to define both the location and the nature of limits; it is no different with cities. They were captivated by the idea of Buenos Aires as a never-ending city, but this trait was, in fact, disproven by its periphery: the proof of its supposed proliferation and, at the same time, of its limits could be found in the expansion of the suburbs, a complex built on contiguity that did not necessarily correspond to the city, and which changed it into something else. There are parts of the so-called suburbs that turn out to be just as incomprehensible as an unfamiliar, unknown city – so incomprehensible, in fact, that they defy comparison – but in general, passing through them, one acknowledges that their inhabitants live partially in our city and partially in another; in a border zone in which difference sometimes appears as a distortion, a substitution, or a replica. There exists a collective scene that this dissonance calls into question, though it rarely contests and sometimes even reinforces it. Because of this, at least in part, M and the other always walked around Greater Buenos Aires with a vague feeling of curiosity, adventure, anxiety, abandon, pleasure, freedom, and compassion. It was a difference that returned to them the sense that the familiar was both certain and decisive.