Текст книги "My Two Worlds"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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The shaded path I was following would soon yield me its first surprise, something like a second aid in forgetting all about the city I’d left behind me a few meters back. The path opened onto a fairly large clearing, roughly fifty meters wide, where there was a labyrinth (the name I prefer to give it) of greenery, or a circular garden, formed by dwarf hedges, barely knee-high, that delineated narrow, sinuous paths and the odd allée, itself interspersed with flowering shrubs, probably rose bushes, proportionally spaced. Across from me, on the path that encircled the garden, were two bougainvilleas near-bursting with vivid purple blooms. I remember it because their brilliant color stood out from the light green of the stand of trees and the dark green of the hedges. The garden also contained several main paths with a few granite benches, very low to the ground, where visitors could presumably rest.

When I emerged from the darkened path, the light was so dazzling I had to squint. At first the garden seemed deserted, and the silence, because it related to an open space, suggested an absence, I could say an emptiness, or rather, time entirely undefined. Gradually the idea took hold of me to avoid encountering anyone, a thought that occurs to me more and more frequently of late. I stood still and looked at the garden; I wanted to familiarize myself with it, to enjoy the perspective, I don’t know, to enjoy the experience of one of those suspended moments associated with picturesque landscapes, apparently definitive in their composition, or at least conclusive because of the idea of harmony, no matter natural or artificial, that they meant to convey; so I found myself standing attentive and motionless to one side of the labyrinth, when all of a sudden something happened: a few meters away from me a shadow materialized that I hadn’t noticed until that moment. Some thing or being was hiding in one of the central walks; I couldn’t see it clearly at all because of the glaring light, but also because the bench where “that something” was installed was so close to the ground that even the dwarf hedges blocked my view. At first I thought it was a parcel, or more precisely a bundle of forgotten clothes, or some strange animal, asleep and dressed in human clothes, or all three at once. But the next instant I saw it move again; the shape suddenly stood up and walked off, as if unaware of my presence. I couldn’t, however, be sure.

I imagined it might be a student from the nearby university, since the figure’s backpack, which was pretty large, seemed to hold books or notebooks. What I had taken to be a flattened bundle may well have been the figure’s back, or his prone body: he had very likely been reading, or sleeping, or maybe he was weeping or cursing, there was no way to know, or was feeling crushed, or simply bitter and hopeless.

It’s happened to me in different circumstances: I believe I’m alone, in a deserted place and completely isolated and on my own, when an unexpected motion or careless glance will suddenly make me realize, alarmed, that somebody else is present. I don’t care for those visitors or witnesses who have arrived beforehand and are slow to make themselves known. Even if they did come first, and thus have certain prerogatives – which ones, I don’t know – I eye them warily, as if they’d burst in upon my peace, interlopers or nuisances spoiling my contemplation or enjoyment, if indeed that exists. Conversely, I keep an open mind toward those who arrive after I have, because they make me feel like an explorer who for a brief moment is accompanied before taking up his path once more.

As I watched the student receding into the distance, I felt somewhat perplexed, or almost frustrated. At first I thought it was due to the manner in which I’d encountered him, to its abruptness, or to my surprise, etc., but then, when he disappeared from sight, my discomfiture turned to befuddlement and I began to doubt his very existence. The memory was fresh: first, the indiscernible shape, the dark clothes, the quick stretch of the limbs, before he presumably returned to classes or went home, surely necessary after such a long rest; I had seen all of that, and nonetheless couldn’t verify that it had happened. Because the truth is that, just as I’ve described, on several occasions I’ve been present at a similar scene, as an “intruder-host,” and it’s also happened that at other times I’ve had the experience of sighting ghosts, amphibious or spectral beings – erratic figures, fleeting or lazy, that arrive, are present or pass by, but always ignore me.

These unreliable and of course unpredictable beings I see from time to time follow a regime that I’d describe as floating. They seem available, open to establishing contact, or at least within one’s reach, and capable of sensing our approach, but they float or are soft: when we draw near they move away, pushed by the ripples of air our movements create. They’re unstable, not so much in their fleetingness as in their haphazardness; seemingly dominated by forces beyond them, one moment they’re close, then far away the next, or suddenly gone. I don’t know whether they sink or rise, or whether they hover in place before passing through the next wall or acquiring another shape.

As I say, I can’t rule out the possibility that my impressions have been caused by weariness, built up over a long day of walking, but the ghosts have had a lasting, if indeed ephemeral, presence in what I more or less conventionally call my life, a presence that continues to this day and will no doubt extend into the future. Most often, I don’t need to see them to know they’re around, or at least to bear them in mind and notice their throbbing presence. They appear according to their own mysterious schedule and settle in an indefinite place for varying lengths of time. From my point of view, they’re witnesses, but from theirs, I imagine, they’re the protagonists. Still, I’ve never seen them depart from their script of passivity, nor am I certain that they’re contemplative. To my mind, they’re hollow, vacated characters, like wandering souls searching for a time or substance that can contain them. Apart from this, I lack Gothic proclivities: the ghosts who accompany me from time to time have never proposed anything, no one is channeling through them, and their productivity is zero. These same deficiencies predispose them to anything at all, as if they were always ready for any sublimation. In an ever-narrowing world with fewer and fewer embellishments, they too have thinned out, I believe.

Today they are fog and shadow, or the blurry speck of a furtive presence. Despite their apparent uselessness, the ghosts have served to rekindle my desire to wander. All too frequently, as I’ve said, I feel walking lacks a purpose, when I’m confused by my surroundings I forget the reason for my walk, but the ghosts rescue me, they wake me up because in their uncertain presence I’m transported elsewhere to a place, I’m not sure what to call it, where parallel events occur. Then the walk turns into an invented affair, which can unfold as a drama or comedy and, in that way, offer some lesson, though probably a diffuse one. This doesn’t always happen, only on the infrequent occasions that my thoughts begin to stray, and it lets me keep walking as I had planned.

I then thought about the apparition of the student. That had no hidden meaning for me, and as I said, the only feeling or aftertaste was one of irritation, first because of my uncertainty about its true condition and, second, because it had taken me by surprise. I took a few steps toward the heart of the circular garden; I felt like a lumbering giant, out-of-scale with the place. Though I needed only to lift my leg slightly to step over the hedges and shorten the way, I obediently kept to the paths. On the central allée I found the bench, looking more like a gravestone, where the ghost had been and, around it, traces of recent use that delighted my archaeological eye, at least that’s what I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. The earth disturbed near the bench, for instance, which suggested that the character had scuffed his feet against the ground while seated. I could easily imagine a ghost doing the same, I myself would have done so: a typical act in solitude, when one is sleeping in a park, or is feeling desperate, or when one hopes to attract the attention of someone in the future. And when this student had achieved that, he could leave; his intention was to give me something to think about. It was odd that I hadn’t seen him at first; and that now, when he was no longer there, I focused on these traces as if impelled to recreate his presence. It’s something a walker always does, though nothing seems certain. This afternoon I was facing no solemn or imposing landscape, nor was its physical layout transcendent; it was, as I said, a deserted garden, circular in shape, that if not for the bougainvilleas would have presented a decidedly dejected appearance.

I now realize that almost everything in this city has looked that way to me because of the pale, half-dejected light. Perhaps it’s the latitude, so far south. Several scenes and vistas reminded me of other cities located on southern rivers, I don’t know the best word for them. One can describe cities in many ways, but in their case I’d use the word “quiet.” Cities in repose, quiet cities where the waits are always long and must be endured by all. .

After leaving the labyrinth, or the flower garden, whatever it was, I went on further into the park. I headed down a straight path into which smaller paths converged every now and then. At some of these intersections there were small buildings, painted antique yellow and rounded in shape, resembling guardhouses or observation points, or indeed tiny astronomical observatories, each with its dome, its arched doorway and its narrow window that let in a small amount of light, designed in what appeared to be the Rationalist style. Their harmony of form caught my attention, as did the special care that was devoted, no doubt in the past, to such ancillary structures in what now seem out-of-the-way places.

On the opaque, corroded wall of one of these structures I saw a mark or legend that I couldn’t understand, in an unknown alphabet, neither sophisticated nor rudimentary. For a time I tried to decipher it, a single character at least, and as I did so I kept stepping backward and forward, or approaching the wall from different angles. Before giving up, I took a photo, which I’ve kept, that unintentionally included part of the window, which now, by a trick of photography, resembles an arrow pointing to the incomprehensible script. Someday, I thought, a future walker will be able to understand what the walker from the past left here; he or she will be able to know if it was a warning, an instruction or a private message. And the same applies to the photo I have before me, I think now. Though who can tell what the future holds for a photo that hides beneath its file name on the computer screen – minimized as they say – for the most part dormant. When I click on it, the image unfurls like an apparition, at once sudden and controlled, and seemingly always available, as is everything in my private archive. Nonetheless, its future is known, much as one might wish to ignore it: the photo will live briefly in somebody’s memory, and then become dormant once again – that is, in no one’s active memory – and after that it will hibernate in some electronic corner of the world for a long time before disappearing for good. In the other photo, which I took so as to capture the entire building from the ground up, you can make out, on the eave or cornice above the doorframe, several patches of peeling paint.

After taking the photo and resuming my walk, I soon came to a shady crossing where several paths converged. It seemed sunk in one of those silences that are supposedly constant yet are called deep, a silence that at first seems perpetual but in fact is made up of many noises. There, under the shade of several giant trees, you could forget the city, or if it came to mind, believe you were outside it, many kilometers away. I took a few tentative steps, fairly surprised by the peace and calm of the place, as if it had been especially designed to confuse, a possible trap, and discovered that the shadows were due not only to the stand of trees and the dense foliage, but also to enormous aviaries, that is, high-ceilinged cages with black-painted bars, which stood in groups of three or four on a wide stretch of the land. The section of the aviary was surrounded by a wire fence. You could see the cages through this fence, at any rate those of them that faced outward, and the birds in captivity were visible within, along with smaller birds who had entered to eat.

I followed the fence until I found the gate, also made of wire and closed with a padlock, where there was a sign saying that on Mondays – that day – it was closed. I looked inside the cages closest to me, which held birds of prey. The cages held two or three birds, each bird well-separated from the others, as if they belonged to different or feuding families, though none were easy to distinguish, perhaps because of the dim light, or their statue-like immobility, which concealed them in the gloom. My eyes picked them out in the shadows, and the first thing I saw were their immense beaks, often in vivid colors and outlandishly shaped, disproportionately large in relation to their heads, though fairly insignificant compared with their bodies, as is generally the case with birds.

These large birds appeared to be asleep or to keep a vigil composed of stoicism and waiting, while they tolerated the visits of individuals lower down the scale who stole in between the bars to eat the food. I was surprised to see a number of sparrows bobbing themselves eagerly over low mounds of ground meat, or meat that had been chopped mechanically into small pieces and spread on long trays. The large birds looked on, unperturbed, at least that was what I supposed, because it was impossible to verify that they were looking at anything in particular. And something else that surprised me was the fact that the sparrows, despite their small build, which would have allowed them to avoid obstacles and fly comfortably between the bars into the cages, crept in slowly, as if they wanted to remain unnoticed, and so make their giant relatives think they belonged to a different species.

The labels with the names of the birds were green with small white letters. The scientific names had a certain morphological resonance for me, but I found the popular names more picturesque, for these were indigenous, or half-adapted, names, which in my imagination recalled divinities or characters from the native mythology, lore that still resonated for the inhabitants of the deep jungles and the great savannas, or had once done so. The only vivid colors to be seen in the darkness were, as I said, the beaks of the raptors and the piles of meat, the former red as well, for the most part, so that one’s gaze fell involuntarily and every so often on those two points.

I was busy verifying these impressions when I saw an older, almost elderly woman who was approaching me from one side, presumably to tell me something. Her hair was graying and she wore loose-fitting clothes, as if she lived near the park and had only to put on a presentable bathrobe to visit. Nonetheless, she carried an elegant pocketbook and another object I can’t identify now, which at the time seemed like a flimsy parcel, made from used paper or plastic bags. When she reached me, she asked why the aviary was closed, she had made a special trip from home and now discovered that she couldn’t get in. I couldn’t think of an answer. My first reaction was to conceal the hand holding the map, because I was afraid she would realize I was a visitor and rule me out as a possible helper.

There was the sign in front of us showing the visiting hours and the day the aviary was closed, but since I was a stranger in town it occurred to me that the sign could be old or that there it was customary to ignore it, and that the neighborhood woman was asking me about something else, a more fundamental matter, or for some news that wasn’t immediately obvious. I was about to tell her I didn’t know, but instead pointed to the sign indicating the aviary was closed, or maybe told her at the same time that I didn’t know; in truth, I don’t remember all that well. Whatever the case, for a brief moment the two of us stood waiting for something to happen. Then, as it tends to occur, there was a screech of a bird from above, half-mixed with the revving of a distant motor. I began to think: the coincidence was too great for the sign to be incorrect; so despite its being my first time in the park and at this aviary, which I would be unable to visit any time soon, or maybe ever, since I planned to leave the city the following day, I once more relayed the first and probably last piece of information I’d acquired on this subject, and I told her that the place was closed on Mondays. By way of argument I pointed to the sign once more.

As has happened to me on other occasions, and continues happening to this day, the woman thought it reasonable to ignore me. Something about the way I speak must cause this; it’s probable that my lack of conviction in saying even the most obvious things, or the things I most believe in, works against me at times. Most likely, I thought, the parcel she’s carrying has food for the birds who spend their entire lives caged and eating nothing but the same old ground meat. She told me she knew it was closed on Mondays. To that I could only insist that today was a Monday. It was a fact I could be sure of despite being a stranger in town, because obviously it was Monday in all of Brazil and the rest of the continent. She stood there thinking, and I noticed how for a fraction of a second she was mentally transported to another place, or another time; she seemed to be taking inventory, and wiping the slate clean. She finally sighed, acknowledging her error, and told me she had made a mistake and would have to go home and come back the following day.

I was more or less convinced that she lived nearby, and from the way she described the operation (have to go home, come back the following day, etc.), it was clear that she treated these visits, which were no doubt frequent, or in any case regular, as events that required preparation and, above all, represented a high point in her daily routine: a duty, a regular habit. That suspicion, if that’s the right word, allowed me to glimpse the net weight of a normal life, of any life, to allude to it in a perhaps condescending manner. The skein of a person’s own acts, whether unnoticed, essential or absurd, which range from the unconfessable to the naïve, from the irrational to the repeated, each with its dose of fear and dignity. I imagined this lady walking through the fairly empty streets of the surrounding area; two blocks before arriving home, she would think about the best moment to take her keys from her pocketbook and clutch them in her fist until she reached the front door. Most likely, I thought, the spot is predetermined: when she passes a certain tree, or crosses at a corner, she looks for her keys, and when she’s found them she removes her hand from her pocketbook. The operation is unconscious, however, just like the “thought” she has before she decides to take out the keys. A thought that is definite and vague at the same time.

I don’t know if any of the birds could have noticed our brief conversation; in any case I’m certain no one saw us, because this area seemed separated from human time, as did nearly the entire park for that matter. On one afternoon quite some time ago, at the end of one of my long days of mechanical strolling, during a period of isolation in which I did nothing but read and walk, as two different and yet sadly related activities – I’d forgotten about work and about the world, which didn’t bother me a bit, though I’d suffer the consequences soon enough – one afternoon I collapsed in exhaustion at the end of one of my long walks, and for something to do I opened the first book that came to hand. Halfway down the page there was a description of a bird’s gaze; and I don’t know if it was due to exhaustion or surprise, to my situation in general or the particular eloquence of the story, but the fact is that I was immediately overwhelmed by suggestibility and fear. The impact was such that I had to stay in for several days, probably frightened I’d run across some bird, even at a distance. Since then I’ve been unable to look a bird in the eye without reliving, more than my fear, the terrifying memory of that moment. Because sometimes the memory of what one has read tempers the actual experience, and the experience itself becomes, more than something physical, the realization of the reading. .

The bird should remain at rest and the observer, whoever it is, perhaps myself, should stand in front of the creature, at some distance or closer-up, but facing it straight on. This exercise is impractical with fidgety birds, in general the smaller ones. It is the larger birds, much higher up the scale, and a few medium-sized birds, or those slightly removed from the aerial world, roosters for example, that make a greater impression. When you look at them you receive a terrible shock, because it’s hard to avert your eyes. It’s much more complicated than looking at fire, of course, because while the flames elicit an innocent fascination, which lets you have thoughts that are distant in time and space, the gaze of a bird induces the most anguished stupor in the observer, such that the bird’s violent origin can be seen; that is, both poverty and delirium at the same time. Afterward, in my experience, and in that of others who have mentioned theirs, it’s advisable and with effort, possible to turn your eyes from the creature’s transparent gaze, but it’s impossible not to turn them back to it again. You may think you’ve broken free, but unawares you are once more unavoidably drawn to the same icy, never-ending stare.

I remained observing the aviary a little while longer. A few of the large birds had changed their places, and now a pale beam of sun lit up their beaks from above. And the spatial counterpoint their beaks created with the meat almost on the floor had intensified, so much so that for a moment I imagined that my eyes were the vertex of a rather large angle: one line represented my downward gaze at the birds’ red meat, while the other shot upward, where the beaks could be seen.

The shady path I had come along continued toward the park’s interior. I caught sight of a bright point toward the end of the path – the afternoon light, as it turned out. I headed in that direction, since I intended to keep strolling through the park and the idea of a slight change in scenery appealed to me. Before I left the canopy of trees that surrounded the aviary, I looked back several times, a habit of mine, and was struck by the color of the ground in the aviary and its environs. It seemed like another surface, not dirty but dirtied, though no stains or traces of garbage were visible. It had a different shade of color, most likely owing to the birds and their constant production of feathers, dust, and droppings, scattered in great part by the breeze. I wanted to study that color more closely, but meanwhile told myself that if anyone saw me stopping repeatedly to look back, he or she might think I’d been seized by a kind of fear of or obsession with birds. No matter where I am or what I do, I cannot free myself from the thought that I’m being observed and judged by others, nor from my frustrating inability to imagine the nature of their evaluations.

As I approached the open section of the park, which from my perspective promised to be fairly large, I could more clearly make out splotches of color that represented people in various postures and situations: they were sitting on benches, walking, or lying in the sun and under isolated trees. A large fountain in the center sprayed jets of water all around, creating a mist that blurred the surrounding space like a vaporous, unmoving cloud. When I reached the tree-lined mall and got closer to the fountain, I saw bougainvilleas again, purple like those in the circular garden, spread out here and there over a much greater space. As perhaps might be imagined, I instantly felt a bond with the few people walking there, since they were sharing in that halfheartedness, even lethargy, of mine toward walking in parks, which I referred to earlier as well.

So I began to think about how long I’ve been taking walks. Years, decades. And if I live significantly longer I could keep on adding, because one thing I’m sure of is that I’ll never stop. But despite this great amount of walking, however, no walk has provided me with any genuine revelation. In my case it’s not as it was in the past, when walkers felt reunited with something that was revealed only during the course of the walk, or believed they had discovered aspects of the world or relationships within nature that had been hidden until then. I never discovered anything, only a vague idea of what was new and different, and rather fleeting at that. I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia. Nostalgic anxiety would be a state of deprivation in which one has no chance for genuine nostalgia. There may be various reasons for the block. If I’m going to explain it, I have to tell the story of my borrowed ideas, which I’m full of – I say “borrowed,” but I’m not suggesting I don’t have full rights to them, on the contrary. .

One of these ideas, among the first I assimilated so thoroughly as to make it my own, was the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk. There must have been something wrong with me, because at the point at which I should have chosen a way of life for my future, I found nothing persuasive. From early on I’ve felt unequal to any kind of enthusiasm: incapable of believing in almost anything, or frankly, in anything at all; disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success; suspicious of the benevolence of charity and of self-improvement; oblivious of the benefits of procreation and the possibilities of biological continuity; oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle; unable to work up enthusiasm for any impracticable profession or scientific vocation; inept at arts or at crafts, at physical or manual labor, also intellectual; to sum up, useless for work in general; unfit for dreaming; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm; too shy or incompetent for an enthusiastic sex life; in short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.

To walk and nothing but. Not to walk without a destination, as modern characters have been pleased to do, attentive to the novelties of chance and the terrain, but instead to distant destinations, nearly unreachable or inaccessible ones, putting maps to the test. I laughed when someone would tell me a city was too large. And laughed as well if they told me it was too small. A city has one size, a fact known only to the person who walks it aimlessly, for all the world like a curious dog when it’s strayed and lost its bearings, but isn’t hungry or lonely yet. Here lies the blurry distinction between the cities’ homeless and walkers such as me. One peers into a world where few, but definitive, rules divide people according to their street conduct and how long they remain there. I would often think. . What do I want to find? A glimpse of the tramp’s life, made up of nothing but fear and instant opportunism; or some old Modernist ideal that posited the long walk as the basis for a new urban religion. It’s too confused and I’m not sure. . That’s why I’ve kept on walking, out of insecurity and a lack of convictions, as if walking were the ultimate experience I could offer to the ruined landscape I move through, with strength neither to overcome it nor destroy it.

As I said, the other walkers in the park – colleagues, as it were, in these adventures and private sorrows – had scattered themselves out across the greenswards and the vast, gleaming concrete esplanades, near-white with reflections from the bright sky, that dominated the alameda. The visitors, randomly grouped this way, seemed to accentuate the geometrical order of the area, rather than disrupt it. Despite the differences in their ages – they ranged from breastfeeding infants to the elderly infirm – each of them exuded that air I referred to earlier, at once absent and absorbed, self-abandoned, the sign, according to my criterion, of genuine familiarity with a park, and with all places generally. The young people were the most sociable, and a few solitary individuals carried their own maté kits, from which every so often, pensively, they’d take a long pull, at least that’s how it seemed to me, or perhaps they were merely keeping the straw between their lips and forgetting to take a sip.

As everyone knows, Brazilian maté gourds are large; they’d be difficult to conceal if anyone was inclined to do so. Most difficult to hide, though, is the thermos – essential to all those who use a maté gourd, large or small. I headed for a bench that stood next to the fountain. Let’s say that from the opposite side no one was able to see me through the jets of water and the cloud of mist mentioned earlier. Before taking a seat on the bench, I stood contemplating the panorama around me and all the while a fairly lengthy silence prevailed, unusual for that setting – even I noticed that – and I wondered if I were participating in a sort of collective trance, which included all the people and activity in the vicinity, or whether, on the contrary, I was suffering from a mental lapse, or was simply dreaming it. Whatever the case, I sat down, and a moment later took a deep breath; when I let it out, for an instant, and without knowing why, perhaps as a result of the cloud a very short distance away from where I sat, I briefly imagined I was invisible, or in hiding, and that an unaccustomed gift, or power, was allowing me to look without being seen. I put the map in my backpack, took out the book I had with me (it was a novel I’d been carrying around only a short while; I’d started reading it on the trip just before I arrived and hadn’t had either the chance or the desire to go on with it since then), and became so engrossed in contemplating the water and the spaces around it that I felt omnipotent, as if a random but well-intended force had bestowed a gift upon me: I myself was dissolved in the mist that surrounded the fountain and could verify that my sight adjusted, in this way, to any situation: it could discern the indiscernible, catalog the invisible, uncover the hidden. .