The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  Later, he continued, it occurred to him that he should tell his friends, but there was nothing left to show them; he had destroyed the evidence. So he began to look for its mate: if he found one eye, he thought, he should be able to find the other. He inspected the stones again. The railroad ties, especially that day, were dead trees that could not exist in any form but as railroad ties. He looked up and saw the rails extending toward the center of the horizon, cutting the city in two. He could sense, to the right and the left of him, the world spreading out symmetrically on either side of the tracks, just as the Red Sea parted before Moses. “The planet divided by the San Martín line, who would have believed it?” he asked that frozen morning before heading into school, amusing himself with his witticism before the sun had yet warmed the space we occupied on the very planet he was talking about. “Why should anyone believe it?” I responded. “Believe what?” he asked. I looked at him without understanding. “What you’re saying, that the tracks divide the planet.” “No one has to believe it; they only have to understand it. You don’t know why I said that?” he asked. “Since when do I ever know what you’re trying to say?” I retorted. As an answer, he regarded me silently. Our conversations were occasionally that mangled.

  M was lost in his thoughts about endless train tracks when he heard the whimper of a dog coming from the vegetation. The machines faded away; he forgot the impassive advance of the day, just as he had noticed it a moment earlier. It was not a pitiful howl like that of most dogs, but a feeble wail. Orienting himself by the sound, he advanced with caution. He saw a white head and a grey back in the tangle of vegetation; he went a little closer. The dog had its back to him. M had a sudden and devastating intuition: that was where the eye came from, he thought, that poor animal must have just lost it. To confirm this he would have to get it to turn around. He yelled, throwing stones at it, but in vain. The dog drew further into the vegetation, probably lamenting the bitter fate that had imposed the hostility of a child upon it. M was happy with the solution to the mystery. Finding the owner of the eye explained the discovery and therefore made it more real. But the irritation with which he had crushed the eye returned, only this time it was directed at the animal as a whole, as though there were an unfinished task he needed to complete. Meanwhile, the dog was moving away. “I could accept it if it runs away,” said M, “but not if it ignored me.” He quickened his pace and, when he got close enough, grabbed its tail and pulled, hard. This time the animal would react: it forgot the reason for its whimpers and let out a howl, forceful this time, as it turned its head to defend itself. Then M could see both eyes, which fixed on his for a moment.

  He got out of there immediately; this time he was the one that fled. He climbed up toward the tracks as though he were returning to a brightly lit summit, to clear skies, from a place of nightmares and dreams. He didn’t know which of the two things (the eye or the dog) affected him more, but he could not imagine what use knowing would be, anyway. Perhaps affected was not the right word. They were two mysteries from which he should have retreated, even as a means of solving them. But by acting he had revealed them and, in his weakness, had found himself. He did not know what to do: he had been walking for the past few hours to kill time, and now, in the middle of the day, he was overwhelmed once more by boredom. The secret of the bored is that things always begin over for them. The sun loomed above him once again, he asserted, unlike a few moments earlier—as though it ever could have done anything else. Again he walked along one of the rails, balancing without trying to do anything in particular. Bewildered and receptive, he went along like someone calling forth on his return the same path he had traveled on the way, remembering details as suggestions that could finally be confirmed. Yesterday morning, M commented, ideas, discoveries, and impressions had a knack for turning back on themselves. Interest turned into apathy, fear into recklessness, audacity into caution, enthusiasm into tedium, and plenitude into nothingness. The very geography of the tracks confirmed the disposition of the place (because the place did have a disposition, there was no question of that): the events of the night, described by the neighbors with shock and fascination, extended through the air like the rays of a fable until they were diluted by the even light of day; the noises, extraordinarily loud, ceased a few meters further, defeated by the silence. The intense vapors, an attribute of the area, dissipated in the neutral air (in the scent of the air itself). Yet at the same time, as anything could become its opposite, this combination of things hinted at a menacing atmosphere whose violence sometimes manifested itself without warning when, within this more or less menacing and more or less peaceful environment, the sound of an approaching train could be heard, that calamitous disruption that plunged oblivion and serenity into a convulsive state of disorder with its din and its vibrations.

  “As soon as I left the tracks I wondered if the eye had been real.” In the street, in the shade of the trees—M continued, using other words—I felt relieved that I had gotten out of the glaring sun. The eye seemed like something illusory, even false. The dog, too. Still, he had no reason to be surprised. “I had no reason to be surprised,” he explained, being so used to hearing stories about mutilated bodies on the tracks. It was rare for a week to go by without something turning up, but now, as the protagonist of one of these discoveries, M simply could not believe it. Things were always being found—it could be a limb, part of a limb, organs, et cetera—but now that it was his turn, he simply could not believe it. Nonetheless, it would not have been an exaggeration for him to say that he had already forgotten it by the time he stepped into his house (insofar as exaggeration means little when it comes to forgetting, as is well known). As soon as he left the tracks and stepped back onto the sidewalk, he was beset by doubt (not the garden-variety doubt suggested by the word beset; it was a dynamic sort of doubt) as to whether the eye had existed or not. A neighbor was repairing his car, his head, arms, and torso hidden under the hood; before reaching him, M noticed the frenzy of hammering, which sounded as though he were trying to break it to pieces. It was not the first time he had seen someone destroy his car. Surprisingly, the further away he got, the more clearly he could hear the banging.

  The tracks, the eye—none of it mattered to him anymore; he just wanted to return to the peace of his room. The memories, despite their immediacy, seemed unreliable; later they would be untrue. He did not know how to explain where he had been. He said, “I saw an eye, and then a dog, which I followed,” and could not believe it; as a thought, it had an eloquent simplicity to it. Consequently, it was soon lost to him as a memory. It doesn’t seem like you’ve forgotten it, given the way you just told the story, I reasoned. At this point M began a long explanation, a rationale of the varied, contradictory, and often tyrannical forms of forgetting, finally concluding, “I only remembered at night, when I told everyone about it and no one believed me; no one but Sito. For the rest of the afternoon, though, I didn’t remember anything.” Wasted Sundays, he declared; mornings lost in the sun and afternoons locked up inside. Just like at dawn, when everything enters my perception at once as I sit up—the creaking of the bed and the striated light in the doorway—noise and light enter without warning, as though they had been waiting outside the whole time, readying the machinery of oblivion.

  The first time I went to his house, I noticed that his room matched the simple eccentricity of its owner. There was nothing particularly unusual about the correspondence—it was, after all, where he slept—but the truth was that, as I later observed, both room and inhabitant maintained an unawareness of one another, which is what allowed for their harmonious coexistence. M thought of his room as a private, even confidential, backdrop upon which his image could be reflected without the tiresome and obedient passivity of a mirror (and without its eloquence). In contrast, the room—in which there was neither a desk nor any sort of table, and which accommodated only a bed, two chairs, and a crooked wardrobe whose doors could only be opened by pushing up on one side—put up obstinate
resistance, as compensation for its simplicity. As I mentioned before, the room was up high; accessible only by a narrow iron staircase. This was not particularly unusual, either. At the end of the day, an infinite number of houses had rooms built into their attics; the strange thing was that, instead of being above his own house, it was built above his neighbor’s. You went up the stairs and the wall that originally divided the two served as a landing, which meant that by walking into M’s room you were standing, irrefutably, on top of the house next door. This displacement was, I believe, the reason for the sense of resistance coming from the walls, from which an invisible and foreign substance seemed to flow. Although nothing looked out of the ordinary, you could always sense a presence not yet realized, as happens when we know the words that will be spoken to us before they are uttered. In this way, by passing through the door to his room I felt myself transported to a new expanse that was peaceful and yet enigmatic, foreign and welcoming. The most clearly discernible smells, for example, were those that came from the other house, and if a human presence could be felt nearby, it was usually that of the neighbors, not of M’s family. In this way, the very idea of contiguity—as he would explain, in different words—was challenged, since the house next door was actually his own, and vice versa; the room belonged to the neighbor’s house, though it was actually part of his own. You could still see the traces of a door that had been covered over, the frame of the original aperture half-hidden by plaster and paint, at the foot of which was a worn-down wooden sill that seemed unusual now, in front of a wall. Over on the other side of the wall, M explained, the first stairway—the original one—still led up to the door that had been sealed over.

  His room offered other surprises, and not necessarily topological ones. I remember how, one morning when we had off from school, we were working on a project when my pencil fell from my hand, and, strangely, it rolled all the way across the floor. It is true that the room only appeared to be level; in any case, whether it had been caused by force or an incline, the accident resulted in a singular discovery. I crouched down to pick up the pencil and saw four or five plates and several sets of cutlery, all used, stacked precariously under the bed. He would forget to bring them down, and no one came up to collect them until their absence was noticed in the kitchen. I asked M about them, wanting to know what they were doing there. “What can I do? I forget to bring them down,” he said, smiling. Today I would assign it another name but, at the time, this recklessness—though I would not quite call it recklessness, just as I did not then—was extraordinary to me. Later, as time passed, how often I would eat there and feel myself taken over by a sense of urgency and uncomplicated happiness at the possibility of being the first to put his plate under the bed and look up at the walls with an air of defiance (evidently this possibility was nothing special to M; it belonged to the inventory of actions he performed day after day).

  In this way, M possessed a unique autonomy that allowed him to arrange his room as though it were a separate residence. The organization of the space was in his favor, in this regard. It is necessary to exercise autonomy in order to determine its limits: sometimes it proves illusory, sometimes too limited. We never encounter a sense of autonomy radical enough to separate us from the world, apart from death. Even the stars and celestial bodies we often discussed, trying to excuse our ignorance with our enthusiastic veneration, which seem to travel through space with liberated precision millions of kilometers from our precarious influence, are actually subject to a complex network of forces that is always at work upon them, such that their movements are easily anticipated. Consequently, doubt and disillusionment about autonomy are understandable. Instead of being one, his room—because of its two entryways, the first closed off and the other in use—was two at once. This was the value of the scene—so far from ornamental and yet, at the risk of being redundant, so scenic—which endowed it with a combination of real, concrete elements, so long as no one stepped beyond the limits of the room.

  THE SECOND STORY TOLD BY M

  In the end, the pair from Formosa endowed their memories with a greater freedom than the modest one offered, even involuntarily, by life itself. They had come to wear the label of drifters affixed to their bodies, a mark found nowhere yet which nonetheless spoke volumes; they were stigmatized and the people around them acted accordingly. Their transitory routine (walking, being rejected more or less explicitly, which in turn pushed them not to linger) proliferated, not so much in events as in reminiscences more painful than any actual episode. And this made them withdraw, impervious to their surroundings. We are used to thinking about individual memories, but fall silent in the face of shared ones. Thrown out of their home, they traveled the city without looking for a place to stay; they returned to the old custom that, as they understood it, belonged to the natural realm alone. The vague intuition that they were in the wrong place did not discourage them, nor did it prevent them from enjoying the simple, portable pleasure of memories.

  A neurasthenic juxtaposition of cornices, innumerable focal points within fragmented space: that was Buenos Aires. And that wasn’t the half of it: reliefs could be counted by the hundreds, planes, by the thousands. Just as when they had wandered through the provinces, and unlike their time spent in confinement, the streets, buildings, and spaces now amplified—in the sense that they multiplied—experience. Walking for half a day along an avenue might be more exhausting than, but was definitely equivalent to, spending a week anywhere in the countryside among the simple and isolated scenery of the interior. Yet they were not able to draw anything palpable from this urban plenitude, because it was deceptive: experience in the city might be more varied and abundant, but it was always less significant. There was no room for imagination (or the other way around: they could not find the imagination necessary for places that had already been defined and categorized). They did not find it necessary, as they had in the country, to compress either time or space: events unfolded at a normal rhythm, the time spent on a block blended with its length. Life in the city occurred on a grand scale ample enough to contain, without threat of disintegration, the geography in which events took place—streets and blocks—while dividing time to an extreme. They remembered their excitement at the promise of becoming someone else with each new town they visited, a desire to which they always surrendered; this memory consoled them when the fiction was interrupted by their arrival in Buenos Aires, where they were always the same. Marta, Sela, Mirta, Lesa, or whoever she really was, could have existed under any other name, but to them—though she took on various forms and images—she was a unique symbol.

  The story begins like this: Unsettled by the lack of activity in the furthest reaches of their native province, they were driven by a shared passion for itinerancy. Back issues of any magazine, any fuzzy photograph, could become a promise of the oft-postponed odyssey, especially when the stories were about exotic lands. The photos, better than nature itself, preserved their hope and aroused their desire. According to these, leaving the city meant finding oneself at the edge of a dense African jungle, a few meters from pyramids of yellow sand, or in the land of the kangaroo. Distance was not overcome but was, rather, ignored; the clearest examples of this were the reports from visiting travelers who arrived in the country as though they had simply made a little detour, were just passing by, as they say. In magazines of the region, Argentina, the continent, seemed the place prescribed for little detours, where anything that could happen would, and to which all visitors from the exterior arrived as a result of absentminded and persistent displacements. This fact, which might seem mundane, made both the visits and the desire to travel even more real.

  In Formosa, as in the rest of the world, there was unanimous agreement on the benefits of settling down in one place; yet some are not satisfied by this coziness, and these two were among them. Their bodies occupied such a small space compared to the one promised by travel that, from the virtual epicenter they represented, nature could not help but be an expanse tha
t offered no resistance. The moment arrived one morning after months of preparation that was more verbal than practical: feverish conversations that seemed to exhaust the very experiences they were hoping to have. One morning the cardinal points extended in subtle combinations to form a range of real possibilities, and they departed.

  Formosa, a land without a sea, offered no obstacles to its crossing. They avoided unnecessary goodbyes and headed north, following the widespread belief that things would be closer at hand. In those days few things mitigated the hostility of the roads, one of these being that, because they were so bad, a day’s travel was forcibly reduced. But since the two were not trying to get anywhere in particular, their days always lasted the same amount of time; weariness was their only limitation. Public transportation did not exist; every now and then a sympathetic truck would bring them a little closer. Under these conditions, hardship and danger were commonplace. When faced with adversity, they would look at one another and immediately recover the spark of that first day when they left the city, which they thought they could see in the eyes of the other like a faint line on the horizon, out beyond the suburbs. In this way, they overcame weakness. They rarely ran into other travelers, but if someone asked them where they were going, they would lift their eyes toward the clouds and sigh uncomprehendingly. Such an infinite range of possibilities rendered specific goals irrelevant—and also unnecessary. It seemed as though they had been driven mad by their pursuit. In reality, they desired neither to go anywhere nor simply to wander around. The journey, paradoxically, consisted of a sort of tranquility that sought to adapt itself, with the least amount of movement possible, to the gradual shifts in perspective of which walking was the principal effect. They were not proud, but they were envious of wealth; particularly the kind which, being poor, they associated with variations in the landscape.