The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  This might lend existence an inexact and, above all, a symbolic quality—depending on the moment, the situation, and the need—but did not strip it of its ineffable reality. A balance like this hardly seems compatible with everyday life, but M maintained it, partially because his beliefs had always been hypothetical, stopping just on the verge of certainty. The absolute meant destruction: the absolute collapsed under its own weight. It was his deepest conviction that forests should never be too dense or plains entirely flat, that peaks could never be too steep or days utterly bright; nature always maintained an excess: nothing was completely anything, there was always something more that could be added. This was the circumstance, this absence, that kept dissolution at bay. For this reason, and much like the time he found an eye, he paid uneven attention to, and was perhaps even a little negligent of, the signs and symbols handed down to him by reality.

  One Sunday morning, the embankment seemed like a surface expanding. (The embankment is bigger on Sunday mornings, M would repeat before describing his walks along the train tracks.) Perhaps the light, sharp under clear skies, was the cause of this amplitude. An invisible tunnel saturated with silence and transparency rose up from the sides of the embankment; it was an illusory radius, but it was almost palpable. M walked along the tracks, lengthening his steps, trying to make them match the railroad ties. He was focused on the shapes on the track—thin oil stains—and the industrious plants along the rails, and was halfway attentive to the murmurs emitted by his surroundings. The boredom that, according to him, had driven him from his house moments before had evolved into calmness, hope, but not eagerness. Four walls, he said, would have driven him crazy; on the other hand, the open countryside would have crushed him—too much space for just one person, as he used to say. What he meant was that the parallel glint of the rails, and the houses so low they seemed crushed against the ground, created an ideal frame for contemplation and thought. Generally, he did not stray far from his house, although he did not stay very close, either; sometimes, because of the curves, he was closer—along a straight line—than the distance created by the tracks.

  That morning, the tall grass, bent slightly by the breeze and a bit more by its own weight, caught the light, and from time to time the late call of a rooster could be heard from some nearby property or another. “What a morning!” thought M. “Such a hypnotic intelligence to it.” Clarity, air, silence; light. Walking along the tracks stimulates thought. I’m in my room and notice the time, I can hear the sounds of cleaning—my mother and the neighbors—I hear a television—nothing irritates me more than the sound of a television in the morning—and with all of Sunday ahead of me, I feel a sense of terror at the monotony to come: I am bored in advance. So I get up and go for a walk. One imagines that things reach a limit at the tracks, even go beyond it, particularly at night, but that all signs are erased by the morning. Everything that has occurred either belongs to the obscurity of oblivion or was once harmonious (but that never happens). Being young, M believed that at night evil—pure horror, according to his imagination—occupied space in such a way as to saturate it without leaving a trace; the disruption of the landscape was so great that not even the most patient efforts of man would be enough to restore it, and yet every day the morning set about its reconstruction and, in fact, did so without any help at all. Partial measures would have been no match for evil’s absolute power of devastation. Terror nested there at night, but nonetheless during the day it inspired the calm confidence of a well-maintained park.

  Dying cats and dogs come to the tracks, he continued, to lie down in the vegetation and wait; other times people bring them there, already lifeless. Dead bodies. Someone is walking along and he catches a scent, heavy and sweet, that quickly turns into the undeniable smell of decomposition. As he gets closer, discerning the body and being overtaken by its intolerable stench are one and the same thing. He needs to quicken his pace and get past the critical area, to cross through the field of odor and feel as though he’s gone back to the beginning, the sweet air as an advance toward normalcy. A strange feeling because, even as he keeps moving forward, the return down the scale of odor makes it seem as though he were going back the way he came. But, as also happens with noise, the direction of the wind has an effect.

  That morning there was no wind or any dead animals, or at least none that stank. At the most, a faint breeze rustled the vegetation. What a prodigious morning, what extraordinary light, he repeated. The thought that a train might approach seemed unrealistic, not because it was impossible—in fact, one must have been headed that way—but because the tumult of vibrations, noise, and air, the rupture, however fleeting, of the peace of that morning, would have seemed like something from another world. M paused to listen more closely and without realizing it looked up into the sky, as though he were expressing gratitude to a god, then back down at a jumble of weeds that looked as though they had been embedded in the soil by a giant fist. Curved against the blue sky, they wavered just slightly under their own weight, an effect distributed along the line. Further down, the wind could not so much as stir the leaves on the trees; any agitation, like that of the grass, should have shown its cause; otherwise, it would not have been perceived at all. Meanwhile, deafening noises emanated from the houses. On Sundays the neighborhood turned industrial; workshops became factories, there were storehouses where lathes and grinders, if not power saws and sanders, were kept running all day. Mechanics revved motors just to see what they could do. “Shut off” was not part of their vocabulary: the entire neighborhood seemed to have its generators going. You could even hear the sound of hammers on metal. The clamor of machinery was concentrated near the plateau of the tracks and spread upward from there. The silence was an illusion, but the noise, being so frenetic, also turned out to be illusory, like those Sunday afternoons when the stadium seemed to roar.

  M, absorbed in his thoughts, might hear nothing for a long stretch, and then, out of nowhere, he would hear everything a few steps later—not just the sum of the noises, but each of them, at full volume. Always inclined to frustrate desires, the trains had refused to run for hours, he told me, perplexed. At the dead ends he stopped to look left and right at the other tunnels of shadow formed by the branches of the trees that met several meters above the street. The absence of trains amplified the brightness of the tracks to the point that it made them seem impractical: the train could be eliminated and the rails would go on gleaming for all time; two long, straight, silver lanterns, M added. It was this gleam and nothing else that made the trains run, but it also frightened them (another of his theories). “I went alone, the boys from the block didn’t come with me” (I remember his voice, like that of an adult, and which I struggle to hold on to, saying that childish phrase I doubt belonged to him; nonetheless, he said it). He thought about the weight of the trains relative to the width of the tracks, about how strange it was that, on other vehicles, the widest were the most light. What I am trying to say with these examples is that M proceeded through the transparent dust of the tracks, lost in his thoughts but in some way already aware of what would soon catch his attention, when he stopped with the intuition of having seen something a few meters ahead, something he had not yet made out, but which would—once he had covered a considerable distance—come to the forefront of his perception. It was the eye. From that moment on, though he would not understand it, he would be at the mercy of the search.

  The layer of dust left by the trains, the invisible shavings that come loose with the friction, the organic remnants the wind has torn from the trees; these were and are the only things on the tracks, and they’re incapable of rousing anyone’s interest. Nonetheless, M was interested. Very. His steps seemed to be driven by something outside himself, but it was actually something internal. The gravel, covered by a waxy grey that announced its own passivity, played a prominent role. Prominent and undeserved. M retraced his steps without knowing what he was looking for, leaning forward as though he had lost something. He could
n’t help but feel ridiculous and embarrassed. Someone, hidden in the shadows of one of the many attic rooms around him, might have been laughing at his every move as he bent pathetically over a stretch of land that could never hold anything worth looking for. Ever since he was a child, he said, as though he were no longer one, he had known how to choose at first glance the perfect stone for whatever game he was going to play; this knowledge, like all others, is not easily lost. At most it is forgotten, but it is always recovered. Now, however, those same stones refused to take on any particular shape, or rather, they organized themselves according to an unexpected order, taking on a quality beyond any classification or meaning. He stumbled twice. There was no question that they were stones, but the fact that he did not know what he was looking at, or for, meant that they could have been anything at all while still remaining themselves. After a few meters it finally appeared, close to one of the rails and on top of a small mound: nestled alongside two pebbles as though it were a third, there was the eye, looking out toward the horizon.

  M told this story one Monday morning before class, and I still have my doubts about it. At the time I didn’t believe him—how could I? It was so strange: the absolute solitude, the radiant day, the discovery, which seemed so outlandish. Then I thought the opposite: Why not? I said to myself. What is the difference between an eye and a stone? (Discoveries of any kind are always somewhat exceptional.) Later it was the rest of it, everything surrounding the eye, that seemed unconvincing: finding an eye might not be that unusual, but filling the scene with a combination of primordial elements like the weather, the light, the noises, and the smells—all fairly vague and only halfway comprehensible—seemed a bit gratuitous and tenuous. The eye to which M wanted to call attention was invisible; it was hidden in a chasm of nature. For this reason, I didn’t listen to him at the time; I thought about other things while M went over the minute details, for example, the morning light on translucent leaves, the struggle between the sun and the raised branches of the trees; this scene of harmony and natural tranquility seemed more unrealistic than the discovery itself. A scene that did not actually end up being harmonious because the machines thundered on continually, the distorted voices of the neighbors splintered the air, and the tumult of the clouds, their urgency, was palpable; three or four times during his walk, M watched the sky darken, the light fade, and a storm almost erupt. If all these things remained on the verge of happening, even those that would have been by all counts mutually exclusive, without any of them actually taking place, it was natural to think that the eye itself had a limited, if not shadowy, existence.

  And yet that was not how it happened; the discovery was real. M was filled with panic, but he did not run. “I was scared,” I remember him saying, “but I didn’t run.” An eye silently calls out for its complements: the lid, the lashes, eyebrows, even the rest of the face (a face, in turn, would demand a head, and the head a body, the body a life, et cetera; something is always missing, in that moment). The solitude of the solitary eye keeps it from being an eye in the broad sense of the word: it is a lost eye, which is a different thing. M did not know what to do. Somewhere nearby, perhaps no more than a few meters away, was an empty socket. Up close, it was bigger than he would have imagined; it blended with its surroundings, seemed like another stone. Its solitary nature was useful in this respect. M studied the eye until another burst of silence drew his attention away. “I couldn’t hear a train, or any other noise, just like I couldn’t feel my tongue resting in the space where my tooth used to be.” The eye had him in its power, its sphere of influence extending for several meters in all directions, making no distinction between animals and minerals. M amused himself by imagining its perspective, which lacked a focal point; so much so that he got the idea of lying down and looking in the same direction: the rail, a steel fence, the ground, craggy with stones, and a sphere too high above him, the sky. Now, for example, if someone were to look over they would see M lying across the tracks, his face resting on the sharp pebbles, looking off to the side. He thinks about people who commit suicide: maybe the eye he is trying to imitate belonged to one of them. M remembers: He once saw a mother who was unable to commit suicide without her son. The child was trying to get away from her, but she held on to him, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the train. The two were behaving normally; they did not draw any attention. No one noticed them. Did the child know the mother’s intentions? There is no way for M to know. They were seated on a bench in the station, wearing long coats that covered their bodies. It was winter, and although M has no memory of the cold, he can still see the swollen and flushed faces of mother and child, the watery eyes, the lips pressed tightly together. He also sees the breath that the mother expels from her nostrils; the child does not give any off. It is strange that, even when faced with the elemental state that is suicide, people tend to behave according to habit. There was nothing unusual about the scene of a fussy child, restless for whatever reason, and the mother forcing him to stay near to her. In those moments, according to M, the mother forgot about suicide. What mattered to her was not drawing any attention to herself; to her, composure was a gift, not just a behavior—it was a deep-seated value that opened the door to other virtues. Whether or not it came naturally was secondary, it was a gift that must have been ingrained, a deep conviction. M saw then that people’s natural actions served as a pretense to conceal self-destruction. It is true that this is the definition of pretending, doing something without calling attention to it, but M was not sure that the mother was pretending at all: to her it was essential that the child behave himself. It was everyone else that was concealing something, the situation as a whole. The mother’s efforts brought several jokes to mind: for example, the one about the prisoner condemned to death who, as he steps up to the gallows, turns down a final cigarette because they are bad for the health. Still, it is understandable that she would want to die in full possession of her convictions, not just her faculties. There was also a practical concern: the child could escape just as the train was coming, which would have meant waiting for another. But did the child know the mother’s intentions? Could he sense the danger? M thinks not. Mother and child were unaware of each other, even though they were together; he was used to expecting the worst and she to giving it to him. The child’s gestures were those someone would make around an unfamiliar person, a stranger, even. The mother bored him, so he grew restless. For her part, the mother was filled with two intermingling desires: not dying alone and not being accused of leaving the child to fend for himself. Abandoning the child meant recognizing that she could have chosen life; taking him with her affirmed her decision, made it unequivocal. She had little to think about, then, as these desires clearly indicated what should be done. Still, M kept returning to one thought: there was something so natural about the mother’s impatience at the child’s fussiness that it suspended the notion of death. M demonstrated this by turning it around, suggesting that the emotions were the individuals and the individuals the emotions. On one had, the desire for suicide: on the other, childish agitation. The first is the mother of the second. Suicide is ashamed of the effects of agitation; it does not show itself as it is because in those moments the desire for suicide forgets itself, becomes more concerned with not making a scene and shows a hidden sense of maternal propriety, wanting agitation to behave itself, not to be rude. If we believe this, that these two states have taken on form and that mother and child—two beings only half protected from the cold—are no more than the vague ideas known as Suicide and Agitation that inhabit bodies of flesh and bone, what name can we give the remains scattered on the tracks once the train had passed? What do you call the torn overcoat, the lone shoe with a foot still inside it, the crimson scarf? The desire for suicide cannot put on a jacket, nor can childhood agitation carry sweets in its pocket. Laid out across the tracks, M thought about that day when the whole station froze in an expression of horror as it watched the mother run, clutching on to the child.

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sp; M stood up and observed the eye from above. If it came from a suicide, it had not stopped pretending, he thought, except that now it had chosen to be a stone. He thought for a moment about his missing tooth. Only for a moment, but it was enough: he picked up his foot and brought down the heel of his shoe on the eye, as hard as he could. The rite had reached its apex; the sacrifice was complete. A white liquid splattered his other foot with such force that it seemed to come from something living. The delicate resistance of the eye was, for a few chaotic instants, a vivid and lasting memory; stepping on something rarely has such a contradictory effect. He observed the colloidal remains, which were just as disquieting as they had been a moment earlier, even though their origin was, by then, difficult to discern; a new, undefined state. He was afraid. “I must have been afraid, I don’t know” he clarified; either way, he found it intolerable. The eye, that solitary presence, left the body that had served as its vessel and its protection exposed; far from establishing its autonomy, this produced only confusion. It was like the sudden jolt caused by the presence of an insect, only in this case it was not precipitous, but belated. With the eye smashed, a change had taken place. It was striking: though the morning was not yet over, M sensed the premature decline of the day; the light began to withdraw and shadows stretched languidly across the ground.