The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  They wanted to know where all this had happened. Marta remembered nothing, except that she had been walking all day. She was still lost, but was no longer running away: now she was walking in order to find her parents. She felt strange in her own skin, as though a new—but not necessarily strange—body had taken over parts of her own. At the same time, everything seemed so recent: the anxiety, the memories of the night before. She thought about her name. There was something about it that she could not quite define, but which seemed not to fit: she did not know why, but she was convinced that “Marta,” as a sign, as a verbal substitute for her person, was hardly the right word. The name belonged to a recent past, that much was true, but a past that was also remote, before she ran away and before her fall; maybe her name was Mirta. The two regarded her in silence. They were about to correct the error of their previous encounter, when they did not invite her to join them, but their intuition held them back yet again. Something had made Marta unrecognizable, though not on a superficial, or even a deep, level; it was something essential. They noticed it in the tone of her voice, and also in a change in her gaze and the way she walked. This transformation, though unclear, manifested itself in Marta with a touch of innocence, even beatitude. They vacillated between baptizing her and convincing her that her name should be something else—Lesa, for example—or, the other way around: convincing her first and baptizing her later. Either way, they said, they should keep her with them. Who, except someone trying to start a cult, would baptize a person only to abandon them?

  They immediately reconsidered. They were prepared to venerate Marta, but could not live with either Mirta or Lesa. And if they were going to venerate, they preferred their memory of the Girl a thousand times over. With this conviction, they sank into an uncomfortable silence and, again, deep into regret. They didn’t want to seem insensitive but, at the same time, could not make that mistake knowingly. Meanwhile, the girl waited longingly for some sign, even the most ambiguous, even part of a word; she could have waited there for hours and at the slightest hint of an invitation would have said yes, she would love to join them. The two, for their part, knew that they would never see her again. They no longer had the will to console her, aside from telling her how worried her family was. Then they wished her luck. Forgetting that both their lives and the landscape contradicted the excuse of haste, they said their goodbyes in a rush: it was urgent; they had to get going right away. And so, once again, they left a little girl alone in the middle of nature. But, just like the word urgent, the word left rang hollow to them, as drifters. Both words, against the desolate backdrop of nature that surrounded them, took on a hue of irrelevance—though they were familiar with the word abandon. Still, since they had certainly never possessed Marta, they did not know which sense to adopt. Mirta, Sela, or whoever she would be from then on, would hold a special place in their hearts. How perfect it would have been had things gone differently: if Marta had woken up in a way that would have allowed them to adopt her. But nothing ever happens according to plan.

  They continued down the road. Sometimes they would come across train tracks and follow them for weeks, stopping to cook on the crossties and spending the night off to one side. Life went on as usual, which is why they did not notice how long it had been that any image of a girl—a photo, a drawing, any portrait on any surface—would bring the oval of Marta’s face back to them. Every morning they woke up not knowing where they were. This happened to both of them. They had been sharing feelings for some time; these almost certainly passed through their skin and were transmitted through the air. Sometimes they surprised themselves by thinking the same thing; other times one noticed that the other’s thought was not new to him, but was rather the memory of another, similar one. They never quarreled, never separated. Yet even recognizing that few other unions could be as harmonious, the memory of Marta proved to them that no relationship could ever be intense enough, profound enough. Her memory reproduced itself on an industrial scale. Photos of schoolgirls, illustrations of small female athletes, simple and anonymous charcoal portraits: any image of a girl produced a passionate feeling of devotion and kindness. Yet, strangely, they were impervious to girls of flesh and bone. This detail caught their attention right away—they interpreted it as yet another aspect of their own eccentricity—then, little by little, it took on a menacing air. The fact that Marta was not called into presence by the living and corporeal, a person, but rather by these images, made them wonder whether the world of travel that they had chosen might not also belong to a secondary order, a reflection or shadow of the real one. A world built by the imagination might be limitless, of this there was extensive proof, their own inexhaustible, intense experiences included; yet in order to last it needed the calm of the other world—the real, tangible one—because when it erupts, whether under the sign of condemnation or redemption, the other surface of the planet—the hemisphere of the imagination—becomes the substance of that breach, the fuel for the fire. Sometimes truth and imagination seemed like two fairly harmonious hemispheres, other times they could seem like different moments in the cycle of the same one; yet the fall of one always meant the rise of the other, as they consumed one another. This was the amorphous substance of which their vague intuitions were formed.

  It was so easy and entertaining to formulate theories that a few years later, unaware of any danger, they were detained as vagrants outside Buenos Aires. They had not been arrested since Clorinda, nor had they spent much time in any one place. At first they were taken to the famous prison Villa Devoto. They would be moved often after that, though not as often as they would have liked. What is more, the places they were taken were increasingly unsubstantial; the last ones, little barracks scattered at random across a field zigzagged by barbed wire, barely sealed them off from the outside. Their time in prison was a time of stillness, of the lack of movement. This conclusion, obvious to anyone, held for them the inverse meaning, as well: that stillness was a prison. They had been locked up for two years more than they had spent on the road. They came to understand that if, in the country, the poor had a right to wander, in the city they had to follow a prescribed circuit; the rich, on the other hand, who stayed still in the country, were the ones who commanded the surface of the city, constantly moving from one place to the next. They could hear tango music all the time, no matter where they were inside the prison. It was better not to think in there; wide eyes wakefully dreaming and a blank mind made it possible for time to pass more quickly, for little to happen and, at the end of it all, to leave behind a lean life, with few things to remember. When they were finally released, it took them a long time to recognize themselves. They had to reconstruct the image from memory. They saw their own suffering in the eyes of the other; as consolation they walked away from the prison reliving the heights of their wanderings.

  Buenos Aires accomplished what Clorinda could not: it did not even occur to them to go back to their old life. They preferred to hold on to the memory of a countryside “of our own,” as they would say, that nonetheless was as neutral as the sea, as ephemeral as time and as undefined as Marta. When they moved into the house that would become their home, they were surprised at how young the trees on the block were. The train, whose tracks were just a few meters away, also embodied the ideas of travel, freedom, and migration: this was a comfort to them, as well. The first thing that happened to them was finding a large image of a certain virgin. They adopted it, as they had not done with Marta. There, from the living room, she would oversee the daily activities of the pair, who had gone from being perambulatory to being sedentary and, what is more, to being still. In a language so secret that it was never even expressed as sound, they called her “the colossal virgin” (or something like that): the lack of space, territory, and mobility lapsed into a pious devotion. They also lit candles to the memory of Marta, for whose presence they were able to find no better image than that of a girl about to dive into a pool, her hands folded together as though praying downwards, cut fr
om an old magazine of current events. Marta’s innocence became atemporal; even the vocabulary that described it changed, swelling with mysticism, something like a beatitude. If they had, up to a certain point, referred to their first encounter as her “arrival” and their second as her “return,” now they spoke of an enduring presence, albeit one that chose to manifest itself only occasionally. Marta had shown herself at one moment or another, though she had—since they had met her—always been present; she still was, only in absence.

  It was inconceivable to anyone who saw them that they had been consummate, slightly diffuse travelers (a passing difference). The hostile air of the city, which was intangible but nonetheless verifiable, forced them into their home, pressing them into its corners. They never went downtown, or anywhere too many people got together or too many things happened at once. They knew only the streetcars and buses that took them to work. They were not aware that the city was changing; had they known, they would not have cared. When they would think back on their glorious past, the whistle of a train would save them from sadness, transporting the imagination of both to the great open spaces of the North.

  As time went by and their religious life expanded, they would attract the attention of the neighborhood; first as two people unusually attached to their vigils, and then for their demeanor, which gradually grew more cautious and reserved. They wanted to be invisible but they could not, and so the care with which they moved and the way they directed their gaze recalled the behavior of certain animals. At a time when the city was filled with Paraguayans, they were unable to distinguish themselves as natives of Formosa; if they did manage to do so, it was only a little while before the simple and ruthless judgment of the people, which assigned nationality by association, would render the distinction irrelevant. Apparently, this situation reproduced the one in Clorinda. They were suspicious in the eyes of others, regardless of the situation. The fact that they retained, even after living in the city for years, the traits of vagrancy—an inability to distinguish between the fleeting and the permanent, a penchant for long periods of fasting, a tendency toward vacillation—would make things even worse. A cult was attributed to them that was much more exotic and, in its way, much more provocative than the innocent, private one that they practiced.

  The emptiness was palpable, with the exception of a few old-timers annoyed at having to walk all the way to church when there was a perfectly good altar nearby. There, in the tiny room that crowned the courtyard and was reached by a narrow flight of stairs with bowed slats, the habit of prayer and of honoring the memory of relics and beliefs they had shared throughout their life together created a unique sanctuary. What causes a cult to grow, to expand? It’s hard to say, exactly. The cult grew. When it was private, the room presented no problem; once it acquired a certain reputation, however, a window would have to be opened to air out the smoke from all the candles the people brought in. And that is how an individual, or dual, cult came to expand. The hosts, whose sense of hospitality at first led them to politely explain the images to which the place was dedicated—alluding to a divine intervention in the midst of their prolonged itinerancy, offering proof of Marta’s story—would later watch strangers arrive who were already initiated, in a wayward sense, in the details and events of the iconography. The cult took on a life of its own, as did the worship in the chapel; they said that three hundred was an ideal number of followers. Peering in from a landing on the stairs, the heads drew back as before a mystery: this was the reason they were there. But since that mystery also attracted them, it kept them from withdrawing enough to forget.

  Their worship could not be kept secret; little by little it would be rejected by the community and its churches. What did they get out of their cult? The freedom they had lost in the prison in Buenos Aires, the abstract pleasure found in the proliferation of the air and the landscape. Looking at the images that hung from delicate nails, they were able to breathe the rich and enigmatic aroma of nature once more. Standing before the photos of Marta and the pictures of the virgin, they caught their breath, began to dream again. Veneration, as both a credo and an experience, was the next best thing to itinerancy; the key to both was less a matter of continuity than it was of persistence.

  One day they had a dream: They were at the foot of a mountain. They looked up and were overwhelmed by the climb ahead of them. They turned and saw a peaceful valley, with lazy little foothills spilling over into a river, a narrow and sinuous strip that reminded them of a snake. The noise of beasts hidden in the underbrush filtered down along the dense face of the mountain; from the valley they could hear the whisper of the breeze, an anxious whistle. The plain stretched on and became a narrow crate that made the wind rear up in frustration. In the dream they remembered moments from real life. These moments no longer belonged to their past, but rather to that of the dream: they were planes superimposed upon one another, searching for a framework that could accommodate them all. In the meantime, they needed to decide. They didn’t have all day. Above them was the mountain, below them, the valley. The dream repeated this over and over, highlighting a difference that disconcerted them, first and foremost because it was so obvious, and secondarily because it revealed to them that they were nowhere. At first they thought that the moments of their shared past were coming from above and prepared themselves for the climb, but then they saw that they were coming from the river and started their descent. Every call they heard was followed by its opposite. All of a sudden, someone wearing a uniform came down—he looked like the agent or guard of something—someone who protected a good or goods. They thought maybe a forest ranger (but that was ridiculous, there were no forests). They asked him about the truth, but he turned away before he could say anything. And so they came to know a kind of terror not born of fear, but of confusion.

  The pressure grew; combined with the prevailing climate in the community, it would end up destroying the chapel. They had to lock it up and turn it over to the house next door for use as a bedroom. They sealed off the door and made another, facing the back and opening on to an empty space where a flight of stairs would soon be built from the neighboring courtyard. But it was not enough. Their persecution ended up consecrating the place, and a religious multitude chose it as the site of their gatherings. The story would end shortly thereafter when the two decided to run off in the middle of the night and were never heard from again. Some have said they’ve seen them off to the side of the train tracks with their packs, looking like vagrants; others say they’ve passed them walking up and down the avenues with a blank stare and an absorbed look on their faces, paying no attention to the world evolving around them. Either way, it is hard to imagine two more innocent souls.

  Unlike in nature, where everything is explicit and categorical, in the city, they remarked, the abstract imposes itself upon the concrete. In the city, mental operations come before facts. At the very least, said M, the streets are an entelechy, defined by what they are not. It is the space of withdrawal, the scene of mental operations. The names of the streets are the greatest proof of this misunderstanding and the origin of the most notable exercise in abstraction of all, M continued: the routes of public transportation, which arbitrarily unite remote points. One can imagine, in an instant, the slow trajectory of a bus—have its entire route in one’s mind. (“I wish I could do that,” said M. Make connections, establish confines not only in thought, but also in practice.) The way the line refers to a specific geography is just as arbitrary as the names of the streets, but of a greater complexity; if the former suggest a trajectory, the bus routes also assume the complication of obstacles, traffic regulations, unevenness in the terrain and in neural centers, which are also pathways. He would be overcome with excitement as he named a line for the other to translate. It could have been the 109 (Liniers-Luna Park), the 96 (San Justo-Constitución), the 53 (Boca-José C. Paz) or the 61/62; when he described the return route, he provoked outbursts of admiration from M, who would stare at him wide-eyed. The lines that had
been shut down remained as traces, as living furrows in memory, as did those that came before the ordinances that would transform them, the ones that had belonged to trolleys or streetcars. The various names of certain streets were also a source of mystery and happenstance; as tends to be the case, chance was obscured by reality. “Uruguay becomes San José,” they recited, “Cobo de Caseros, Yatay de Muñiz,” and so on.