Текст книги "My Two Worlds"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

An old man was coming slowly toward where I sat, and only when he paused a short distance off did I realize he was going to sit down beside me without saying a word. No empty benches seemed to be left in the shade; and he was leaving the vast sun-scorched area as if emerging from a danger zone, with halting step, but content to have reached safety. His approach displeased me, as did his very materialization, which I took for a sign of hostility or, at the very least, an interruption. I realized immediately, however, that the intruder was most probably myself, and that this man in all likelihood walked every afternoon to a spot he now saw occupied by me. It wouldn’t be the first time, I thought. I remembered other situations, of course, minor reversals of fortune lying dormant in the recesses of my memory. For instance, I was once, briefly, in a European city known for its splendid lake and venerable canals. I happened to be, quite literally, admiring the lake and strolling along the adjacent park. One of those German cities bombed in the Second World War, destroyed and then, with obsessive attention to detail, rebuilt to be just as they once had been.

A while back I met a woman who, alongside her mother, took part in that rebuilding as a child; she told me about the women’s brigades, made up of women of all ages, who’d worked on it. In particular, she remembered her work assignment: she had to move the remains of bricks from one corner – or what was left of it – to another, so as to sort the bricks that were still useful, and set aside the pieces too small to be usable. The few men who were present gave directions to the older women in accordance with some oversized specs and blueprints they were incessantly opening their arms wide to consult. Anyhow, this city now seemed far too impeccable to me, as on the whole German cities do; it proclaimed that there had never been a war, much less such widespread devastation. I recalled the stories of that long-ago little girl as I walked through the park. It was just past noon, and from where I stood I could observe the busy avenue and the orderly flow of cars. Some swans from the colony that had settled on the lake – the only visible fauna, as far as I know, besides the underwater variety – swam up to anyone who approached the water’s edge, doubtless hoping for something to eat. And when they received nothing they would bury their heads and the full length of their long necks in the water, to hide their failure, I suppose, or to look for something in its depths.

A friend who was living in the city at the time had warned me that the swans devoured anything they came across, even the most rotten and foul-smelling stuff. In his view, the birds’ voraciousness contradicted the bucolic image the lake was intended to project. When I saw the swans anxiously courting me, never letting me out of their sight, I recalled his remark. Because of it I found them so unpleasant that I had to retreat to a path several dozen meters away that led to an avenue that encircled the lake. From that point on the path, one saw the surface of the water as a great metallic expanse. People who passed by this spot were either taking a short cut to a nearby railway station, which at that midday hour didn’t attract many passengers, or were headed downtown and would have to go around the station on their way. Having nothing better to do, I sat on a bench and gazed at the skyline beyond the lake. I held the book I’d brought along for the day, which, as usual, didn’t interest me, and which therefore I had no desire to open. I preferred to admire, as I said, the metallic expanse of the lake, despite its failure to glisten.

From that distance one could recognize the swans only by their sinuous necks, like ghostly shapes whose blurred silhouette concealed a secret or a promise to be revealed in the future, or in the present if the circumstances were different. All the time, though, my thoughts kept returning to an object I’d seen that morning in a shop near my friend’s home. While I awaited him for our early breakfast, as we had arranged, I walked along the avenue browsing in shop windows. A wristwatch in one of the windows instantly caught my eye. Its case was black and its face white, this in itself didn’t distinguish the watch from the rest; but what was unique was that it ran in reverse: the hands moved counterclockwise. This oddity, which I otherwise would have deemed irrelevant, since it turned the watch into a kind of toy or curiosity, became in this instance a coincidence charged with meaning. For various reasons, my visit to this German city confronted me with a particular point in time; it was a journey to the past, and in part, to a form of the past that indirectly belonged to me. On one hand, a good number of years had passed since I’d seen my friend, and being in his company now was causing me to relive, unexpectedly, and with who knew what outcome, several memories from an era we both had left well behind us; and on the other, ever since the train crossed the Belgian border, my apprehensions regarding this country, Germany, connected with the elimination of a good part of my family during the Holocaust, had been barely palpable, and still worse, were on the contrary being transmuted into a dulled sensation of guilt and frustration.

I’d heard so many stories about panic attacks, acute anguish, and nervous crises experienced by Jewish travelers upon arrival in Germany that it troubled my conscience not to feel what the post-Holocaust common sense now seemed to call for at the very least, that is, a kind of suppressed rage at all Germans, and every German, while at the same time at nobody in particular, at a community of people who’d supposedly settled into the most insulting indifference; and it frustrated me that the possibility of my experiencing a clear and direct emotion had been blocked – as was always the case, and still is, with me – an inhibition I’d believed would be overcome at a juncture so intimately fraught as my being in Germany. So the discovery of the watch stood out as a sign, or indeed, was a certain kind of symptom that had now materialized: I had found an object I related to the obstacles of my situation. In part my own, personal past, and in part that of my family, that unique zone where history was linked to a zone of my own identity, came together here. In the face of this, the reverse watch thus combined the ambiguity and the indifference with which reality speaks as it advances in its unbridled race toward the future. The watch epitomized the contradictory voice of objects, often more conspicuous and allusive than the human voice; it moved forward, like all instruments that measure time, and yet simultaneously said the opposite since it appeared to move backwards.

I imagined the watch on my wrist and thought of how long it would take to get used to reading the time that way, the questions I’d be asked, and so on. I especially imagined how others would react, that they’d regard the watch as yet another unequivocal sign of my tendency toward moderate extravagance, or, I should say, a mediocre extravagance, so timid as to hardly be verifiable. I also imagined my relatives after this trip to Germany, a sort of advance guard anxious for commentaries and impressions, for stories of panic attacks and scenes of ethnic or cultural shock; and I particularly imagined my nephew and niece, fascinated by the watch and eager to possess it, one of the few anachronistic talismans offered by the modern world, I thought. And lastly I imagined a certain moment in old age, a transcendent scene, the night of the legacy: I would give the reverse watch to my nephew or my niece, a sort of secret handshake marking my abstruse passage through the world, and he or she would keep it as a proof and a symbol, the side of me that would remain with them; the half-distant, fairly alien uncle who had once drawn near, almost at the end, believing it was forever, with that sentimental gesture and that odd device.

I have two prized objects to hand down: my grandfather’s cigarette lighter, and my father’s ivory binoculars. Besides these, nothing I own ever belonged to anyone else. I haven’t thought yet about whether I’ll give both objects to one of them or one to my nephew and the other to my niece. I’d have a problem if there were three of them: even if I tried, the share could never be equal. If I had bought that German watch – I doubt it would have been Chinese back then – I’d have something for a third. But at that moment, as I sat in the park beside the lake, I imagined myself having bought it, so that I had three gifts. The reverse watch pointed to the past, that would be the best legacy, a caveat that we should always look behind us so as to discover our own nature. And what’s the point of knowing our own nature, the nephew or niece might ask. To hide it, I’d reply; to subjugate it, which is impossible, and to hide it, so as to believe we’ve left it behind, etc. To delude ourselves, and move forward.

The watch, I mean, represented a course of action. I recall how its high price impressed me that morning, and I was unsure whether it was due to the watch’s quality or its rarity. Of course, if such an object was to be distinctive, it had also to be a bit expensive, because if it were cheap that would declare its uselessness. I could say a great deal more about the cigarette lighter and the binoculars, in particular I could say that they, unlike the watch, are objects that offer no lessons, despite being excellent heirlooms. A family such as mine, which came out of that void an ocean away, knowing nothing of its history beyond a few decades back, will suddenly in the future have tangible proof of an almost deep past, in objects that will condense the history of individuals and bodies. It could be amazing. And I thought, all thanks to these three objects. In my younger days as a smoker I used to use my grandfather’s cigarette lighter. From time to time, I still use my father’s binoculars, but mostly I periodically open the leather case, which over time has become so thin it’s like dried-out paper about to crumble. I take out the binoculars, heft them and inspect them, peer through them, turn the central wheel to focus, and finally stow them away in their case. Curiously, over time this inspection has turned into a ritual that has nonetheless forgotten its referent; I mean, my memories of my father are by now largely distant; I don’t think of him when I take out the binoculars, except as an idea. Not as a living person, with a voice and a certain warmth but, rather, as a figure that person has occupied ever since he abandoned, as they say, this world.

For reasons of chronology, the cigarette lighter has been with me far longer. And, compared with the binoculars, it has offered a greater range of useful possibilities, at least in my case; and so, as I said, in my days as a smoker I used it quite a bit. I always marveled at its mechanism, which for want of a better word I called automatic; it was my fear of breaking this mechanism by my heavy use that finally persuaded me to stop using it. For years it’s been stored in the depths of a cardboard box, along with old bus tickets and souvenirs that were essential in their day. Now the only important thing in the box is this lighter. Its mechanism consists of a button on the upper-left-hand side; that is, it’s made for right-handed people. Cradling the lighter in your hand, you press the button with your thumb and the top part, a lid in the shape of a cylindrical tube, suddenly flips up. As the lid opens, a cogwheel connected to the hinge strikes the flint, creating a spark that lights the wick. A left-hander could use it, of course, but he or she would have to get used to the inconvenience of the flame igniting inward, not outward, or would have to hold the lighter gingerly and press the button in a rather awkward position.

As I said, for years I took a ridiculous pride in this oddity; from an early age, though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, I was half-aware that it was an object to be handed down. My grandfather was notorious for smoking like a chimney, as they used to say. Every morning the local tobacco shop would deliver a carton of filterless cigarettes. I was in first grade, and could verify that the carton was almost the same size as the 100-piece boxes of chalk I sometimes saw at school. One Saturday, I recall, I was present during a conversation between my grandmother and the owner of the tobacco shop, who pressed her not to allow my grandfather to smoke at such a rate. Either my grandmother was incapable of controlling him, or was so unconcerned that it made no difference to her. But that’s another story; in the end my grandfather continued to get hold of his cigarettes and to smoke in a sort of domestic exile in which, I suppose, as is frequently the case, the tobacco kept him company.

The surface of both sides of the lighter was uniformly striped, with an elegance that to me recalled Art Deco. I’ve seen pewter or perhaps silver-plated cigarette cases with a similar scoring on their cover, a motif, I’ve always thought, that seeks to imitate the futuristic cladding of the early twentieth-century. Down the center of the same side of the lighter as the button, you can see a small rectangular plate, obviously intended to be engraved as one pleases: with a name, initials, or a date. Inevitably for someone as hazy as its former owner, the plate on this lighter is blank. A missing inscription that accentuated the lighter’s availability, or its mysteriousness in any case, because as is true for nearly all manufactured objects, a simple change of hands can send a supposedly well-planned transfer awry, leaving nearly no trace.

I don’t want to generalize, but that is the true condition all objects force on us, not only manufactured ones: that of concealing the history they have witnessed, in complete silence. With some effort on one’s part, they can be made to speak; an entire industry has sprung up around making what’s silent speak. For a time I thought that was why literature existed, books in general, or indeed, the written word itself in any form: the written word confronts what exists so as to get it down. Afterward I stopped attaching so much importance to the matter, which I recall from time to time, on occasions like this, when I’m reconstructing my relationship to some object.

Such were my thoughts in that great German city. I was thinking more about myself, obviously, than about the number of things in all likelihood buried beneath that urban perfection. As long as these weren’t visible, they didn’t matter to me. I thought of the reverse watch and of the valuable lesson it would provide a niece or nephew, and one of their children, and so on through subsequent generations. The perennial lesson of looking behind you, and the irrefutable proof of coming from a specific place. I was sitting on a bench gazing every now and then at the lake, where I could make out the swans in profile as they prowled the lake’s edge, fishing – probably, as I said – for something to eat, and every so often I looked out at the distant avenue besides which the aforementioned railway station stood. I was absorbed in thoughts that had no resolution and were somewhat brief, mere formulations. For instance, I thought: “So far from home. . I would have never imagined being here”; and it also occured to me: “At night, when they turn on the ornamental lights and the rest of the water jets in the lake, everything will look different”; etc. The unceasing jets at the lake’s center signaled, in that sense, the continuity both of one’s thoughts and of the water, like two inseparable elements. .

I was lost in these ruminations when all at once two women stopped in front of me and began waving their arms at me. I didn’t realize it at first, but they wanted me to leave the bench to them so that they could eat lunch. Each carried a paper-wrapped packet with her lunch, and one woman also carried two plastic forks. I imagined they were probably foreigners, like me but less so, though in any event from a different place. They didn’t speak to me in German – in truth they hardly spoke to me at all – but they managed to communicate everything with gestures. They wore clothes from another era, from which I gathered that they were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps not far away. Poland or Ukraine, who knows. And, as one often notices in cities, the difference was visible in their skin as well, because at first glance one saw in them the harsh weather of rural life. I can’t say that these women were brusque, but I do remember they were lacking in the often equivocal kindness one finds in European cities.

They were clear and concise. I could say nothing in defense of my sitting there in meditation, and so I sketched a bow of my head that would hide my embarrassment, by way of farewell, and walked away without looking back, blending in with pedestrians who were in a rush to cross at the green light. At times nowadays I look through the photos I took on that trip, and I see the magnificent lake, and there’s my friend, leaning his elbows on the balustrade of a bridge, and beyond him a group of swans near the shore. Several of them have buried their imposing bills and their heads in the water, taking up a position that seems precautionary, as if they preferred to hide and not have their picture taken. Further in the background, though, there’s a solitary swan that, more radically, is making its escape and is well into take-off. I see its half-spread wings, which seem to be coming apart at the joints, its neck stretched forward to the limit, and its feet touching the lake as if it were running on the surface. The creature leaves behind evidence of its steps, bursts of water that explode as waterdrops and turbulence which disappear little by little, as the photo shows: the initial splashes have dispersed and are about to vanish.

When I got to my feet and turned the bench over to the two women, neither conveyed any gratitude by word or gesture, nor even any acknowledgement, not even a glance; and so I felt vaguely annoyed at their shooing me away like a bothersome animal, a swan for instance. I guessed that they probably ate their lunch on that bench every day and always arrived at the same hour, getting together to meet and speak of their families and their memories of the East, and that I had played the role of a quickly remedied setback. Yet another of those visitors who occasionally erred and sat down on their bench. .

So I wondered whether the old man approaching me now, in flight from the sun with his last reserves of strength, wasn’t the customary occupant of the bench. In that case, I could say: in the south of Brazil there’s an old man who every afternoon sits on the same bench in the shade. Just before he took a seat, he greeted me with a nod that for a moment seemed dismissive, though it sufficed to make me forget my displeasure. And after he settled in as far away from me as possible, on the opposite end of the bench, he took a deep breath and began to untie his shoes. He didn’t take them off at first, but merely loosened them. Then he stretched his legs, rested his hands over his stomach, and appeared to sleep. A bit later, with a deft motion of his heels, he did what was necessary to take off his shoes. What with the muffled shouts that arrived from the distance, the trill of the birds, the constant hum of the bustling city and, in particular, the turbulent fountain with its endlessly spurting water, I was astonished to be able to hear my benchmate let out a sigh.

Early that same morning, shortly after leaving the hotel, I’d been strolling along the river, on the other side of town. The day was just getting started, and the traffic on the avenue next to the river seemed unusually sparse, so sparse that the timing of the traffic lights caused the few cars or buses to travel in herds, one after the other, as if they were families of vehicles. In the intervals a silence would fall, during which one could look at the water, at the opposite bank, sharply defined and wild, and cheer up on feeling that a moment from the past had been slipped into the present. It’s odd, I thought, how one abandons the future and seeks to recover the past. But recover wasn’t the word. I didn’t want much, barely a glimpse. Any trace I could discover would be a revelation to me, from the fragile, petrified branch of a fallen tree to a landscape remembered from childhood, though I might never have been there. As is perhaps becoming clear, everything in Brazil was pushing me into the past. Into a hazy past, pre-cerebral, which clouded my perceptions and affected my judgment, demolishing it.

During one of the lulls in traffic, while I was leaning against the railing of a broken-down iron pier that jutted out over the river, I had a sort of revelation. The past, like myself an itinerant, acted like a meander, with no precise, let alone predetermined, direction, which could absorb all our free time, or might simply leave us cold. What’s more, like a sleepwalker who’s forgotten his dream and doesn’t know whether he’s awake. I was in the process of turning into one of its perhaps exemplary victims, and consequently ending up bogged down in sterility. I was just then presenting the first symptoms, I thought: the absence of a desire to know. I had the city at my back, each particle of it like a cell of an immense country, and nevertheless, there I was, stuck on the far end of the ruined pier trying to elicit anything at all from the dense, hazy bush on the opposite bank. This feeling, I can now state, wouldn’t leave me for the rest of that day, or on the ones that followed.

I left the old pier – I recall how the hanging structure trembled with each new footfall, as it had when I’d first stepped onto it – and set off along the path beside the river. Beyond the sidewalk, and before the avenue next to the river, was a spacious parking lot, most likely full on the weekends. In the distance you could make out a group of people, some fifty meters ahead, who seemed to be waiting for more people to arrive, though of course I couldn’t be sure; and behind me, maybe thirty meters back, I’d seen a married couple, or simply a couple, who were preparing to open their refreshment stand. I point this out because of what I’m about to explain; I mean, I saw no one at all in my immediate vicinity. Nonetheless, as I walked along I was able to hear, during one of the breaks in traffic, what sounded like a long, resonant slurp.

A familiar noise, for me: somebody could be drinking maté. I took a closer look and noticed, a few meters off and almost parallel to me, a shuttle bus, the kind used at airports, with its door half-open. From where I stood, I could see two bare feet in plastic flip-flops peeking out from beneath the door. I immediately backed away, as discreetly as I could, stepping a few paces away from the riverbank, so as to see the person hidden behind the door. I could be sure of attracting no one’s attention, but I moved with the caution of a spy, an indecisive voyeur. I then circled nonchalantly around and indeed found the driver, seated on a folding chair, drinking maté. Though I had no way of verifying it, I understood him to have spent the night in the bus, at least that’s how it seemed to me at first sight. From his position he could see only part of the river, in the lee of the tall chimney of an old utility plant that had once supplied power to the city.

I remembered that loud slurp as I thought about the old man’s sigh. The strange coincidence of having detected the two. My benchmate fell into an apparently deep sleep, threatened now and then by a nervous startle, something like a reflex action or an outright tic, or by sense-related incidents, it seemed to me, like swatting away an insect or flinching at a surprise or reacting to an unexpected gap in the continuous noise. I noticed we were sitting under a bougainvillea, similar to the ones you could see in the park’s open spaces; owing to the symmetry of that particular area – its broad esplanade flanked by a double file of benches and trees, and adorned with parterres that were small, taking into account the dimensions of the whole, composed of privet hedges and flowers laid out with a care for balance, to which must be added the fountain as the crowning glory and epicenter of the geometric endeavor – for a moment I thought that the two of us sat on the opposite side, beyond the fountain, under those other bougainvilleas, not this one.

The clouds of mist and water drops filling the air didn’t make for clear sight, but I was able to distinguish my own self, sitting with my legs crossed, the small backpack on my lap, and I saw the old man too, at the far end of the bench, to my left, resting or fast asleep, turning to good account the tranquility of the place and the afternoon. I could make out beyond us, some meters back, a group of people sitting on the grass, in what seemed a gathering of family or friends. From time to time one of them would get up to joke around with another, to tag him and then go running off, for instance, or to startle him, whatever. Now and again a man stretched his arms over his head, which caused him such evident pleasure that he decided to lie down on his back and pretend to be asleep. I could hear voices and bursts of laughter, at irregular intervals, of course. But what amazed me was that even though I could see them all on the far side of the fountain, beyond my companion and myself, I heard them as if their voices came from behind us, from where we were actually seated. Perhaps this was another effect of the place or, more precisely, of the mist created by the jets of water, which dissolved present time and distorted space; or it could have been a consequence of the symmetry. The present: until that afternoon I had rarely noticed the confused, and at times inconsistent, meaning of this word, to which we should add the sense of ambiguity it often possesses. .

Beneath the circle of moisture, I imagined I could be the old man with his shoes off; and that thanks to this miraculous coincidence of time, place and circumstance, I was visiting myself from one extreme of the wide band called the present, to a still broader recess, vaguer and, as I put it before, more meandering, called the past. I had traveled to this park to call on myself, for instance, after having distributed my bequests. The worthy cigarette lighter, unengraved, to a nephew, the prized ivory binoculars to a niece, and the reverse wristwatch, to the youngest, a nephew, so that the lesson implicit in the mechanism would last the longest. At first I wasn’t struck by the incongruity of handing down a watch which had never belonged to me. And when I realized my error, I chalked it up to confusion or to the absentmindedness that can afflict an older person, like my benchmate.

My nephew reacted with some discomfort. The watch was outlandish, but he failed to understand the symbolic or pedagogical importance I had wanted to give it. I pressed it on him unemphatically, in my way, that is, half-indifferent and a bit complacent, so as not to completely frighten him off from an idea that he might in the future, on reconsideration, accept; my lackluster style of arguing, however, undermined a good part of my argument, and aside from that I argued without conviction, as is normal for me anytime and anyplace. He was the youngest and he was the best. How to put it. . the one who was most receptive and open, who wanted to know everything, to imbibe the world in every breath. The watch, in short, was a time machine that would allow him to connect to the past; not to visit it or glimpse it, just to connect. Not with the future, true; but who cares about the future if it arrives no matter what, I declared to a child for whom the past meant nothing. And to allay his distrust I offered him proof; it was so well-suited to connecting with the past that during a trip to the south of Brazil I happened to see myself in a park, taking a rest on a hot afternoon under a bougainvillea.

After I sat down on one end of a bench, I continued, I loosened my shoelaces, stretched my legs, and sighed in relaxation as I closed my eyes, ready to let myself be carried along for a time by the noises of the afternoon and the deep shade. A moment later I took off my shoes in the proper way, using my heels. And at that point I realized what was happening: the absentminded gentleman who was sitting on my bench, and who appeared to be thinking of nothing, was a representative from my past, a retrospective warning; that’s why his mind was completely blank, at most he was pondering the challenges presented by hunger and his need for food that night, because the idea of going into a restaurant or a café alone tortured him, put his painful shyness to the test, and took up an unspeakable amount of time, a continuous present. This was in part a result of his endless walks whenever he was visiting a city, because he was afraid of going into any given place and being identified as an impostor or, more realistically, simply being treated badly for no reason at all.

When I awoke, everything was in its place. The old man let out a barely audible snore, which at times stretched into a sort of languid and seemingly definitive exhalation. A woman strolled slowly past in front of us, accompanied by her small dog. In a bag she carried the maté kit I’d seen her using as she sat on one of the benches in the sun. She strolled by, as I said, and as she did so she proffered us a look of complicity, as if she sought to fraternize with the park’s habitués. That may have applied to the old man, but not to me. The dog cast a similar glance at us, with no need to check its owner’s expression first to see what she did. It’s hard to describe the sensation of a task well done that assailed me at that moment: I believed that I’d found the key to a certain inner life of the park. In a few hours of walking and contemplation, I achieved what I’d so rarely managed before, even in places I’d lived in for months or years: to be considered a denizen of the place. From my point of view, the sole reason this took place originated in one of the terrain’s most outstanding virtues: its natural division into specific areas, which led to one’s forgetting about the other areas entirely. It had happened to me in the aviary, in the labyrinth-garden, and it was happening to me now by the fountain on the alameda. Despite their lack of physical boundaries, these were well-circumscribed spaces, confined and self-sufficient, which had a world effect, though there must be a better term for it, an exemplary, hard-earned balance between landscape and atmosphere, with an obvious impact on people’s powers of perception.