The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  The houses, whose façades constituted the exterior, were—according to M—pure reality, the backdrop of private experience and real life that nonetheless depended on the street to define itself as such. Safe within their homes, people entered a realm of shadow day after day, like the planets; here, however, shadow was a rhetorical quirk that meant isolation. And light meant the presence of others, of witnesses, in the street.

  THREE

  The story about the pair of nomads absorbed me just as much as the one about the eye. Unlike me, who was unable to describe the events of the previous day except in the most confused terms, M abounded in stories and anecdotes that not only concerned him directly, relating to his own experience like the episode of the eye, but also encompassed broader, more diffuse—and therefore more debatable and controversial—material, which reached him from who knows where to adopt a new form through his voice. This is why it is clear to me that, were he still alive, he would have been the writer, the novelist. (The surrogate that I believe myself to be at times does not represent a fault; I do not see it as such. I cannot say, “I failed,” I am not myself, et cetera.) On the other hand, writing is the order best suited to take up error and even simulation, converting them first into chance and then into fortune; I can hardly mistrust my affinity for replacement and substitution, as I have been convinced for years that if there were something to be said in my—particular—language, not the words or the facts, but rather the morals behind some and the value of others, it would be dictated in some way by the memory of M.

  A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write. At times I have thought that with this work I abandon myself, submit myself to an unclear condition in which personal feelings and the ideas derived from them are mixed together. Yet it is also true, I believe, that there are few things as amorphous as identity, in terms of both depth and breadth, and that it is therefore pointless to wonder about its limits. I am here right now, but suddenly I cease to be; I am another, or simply less. Imagine the strain of someone trying to be himself all the time. M taught me to recognize the moments in which our identity appears, becomes a category, emits energy, and then subsides into a lethargic state of anticipation that lasts who knows how long. In less than five minutes we are able to oscillate among an infinite number of states, from abundance to saturation to emptiness. It is also true that we are not aware of when we are; those around us notice this when our signs become visible to them. Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle? M and I achieved solidarity, a bond through which our own intermittence was able to develop with neither pressure nor strain, but with a sense of union. If there were a dominant state (climate) in my memory of the friendship, it would be that of harmony and serenity, a nucleus of emotions, from the bosom of which emerged the certainty of creating something unconditional and everlasting, the loss of which I have never overcome.

  The real illusion that is space, or, more accurately, the confined, familiar city in which our reciprocal identity manifested itself, disappeared in M’s absence. There was no sense trying to recapture it through intermittent, inevitably anonymous, and more or less melancholy visits to his neighborhood or the places we used to go because, unlike objects—which, like photos, can at any moment become talismans or relics—space has its own ephemeral hierarchy. Space is silent, it says nothing to us; it has no surface and yet, paradoxically, it is the most lasting of times. Armed with this proof, after circling the blocks around his house in the months that followed the abduction and returning every day empty-handed, as tends to happen, I understood the bewilderment of the two drifters who were dazzled by their surroundings but were blind to its successive manifestations. An event unfolds before our eyes; we attempt to uncover it, but cannot because it has taken the form of a landscape. There will always be an element of disappointment, just as happens with noises, which are always too loud or too soft for our consciousness. This frequent disappointment was the force that pushed the pair to want more countryside, more space, horizon, views; through the innocent—in that it was derived from their own movement—succession of these, their fantasy of the journey was returned to them. This fantasy shaped the pliable material of which they were made. The vast territory they crossed over the years was, and is, legendary, but their vague sense of distraction failed to take in these legends, which touched upon them in one way or another nonetheless. Occupation, conquest, camping, residence, property: these words were foreign not only to them, but also to nature. They were satisfied simply to cross. In this way, at the mercy of their indecision and to the rhythm of their footfall, a reciprocal being and identity grew to their own measure in the form of outbursts and lulls that flared and languished with fits of clarity and withdrawals into opacity. Similar oscillations between geography and consciousness would shape our friendship, as well.

  One day, something very strange happened, something that would have a double effect, lasting into the future and decisive with regard to our shared past. M and I were walking through a neighborhood where the streets, as full of Tipa trees as a park and as bright and as wide as avenues, seemed to want to hide their double excess by tending toward a categorical magnitude. We had come to prepare something like a class project on the climate. We had to choose two phenomena. Far from the chilly snow or the malevolent hurricane, and negating any misplaced inclination toward exoticism, our preference tended toward the fog and the mist. Two phenomena that were both diurnal and nocturnal—the former less so than the latter—and were as common, though not as frequent, as the breeze. We were supposed to produce charts to adorn the walls of our classroom: this was the “special” part of the class and the artifice that made the exercise “didactic.” Aside from graphs of isobars, isohumes, isotherms, other diagrams and charts, et cetera, we set ourselves the task of representing the mist and the fog. Wanting to elevate their mystery—the common trait of all atmospheric phenomena—we tended toward exaggeration: the mist looked like a downpour; the fog, like a dense sponge stuck to the ground that blocked out the light. There was no violence to this enterprise: the drawing belonged to the field of interpretation. Carefully considered, the fact that mist was not a deluge and fog was not a dense cloud was only a matter of scale. “To an ant, a drop of dew is enough to cover his head and a light mist can seem like an impenetrable fog,” M argued innocently. A light mist or a drop of dew could be as devastating as a tropical storm; how, then, could the real nature of the mist and the fog not give one pause? Added to this were connections that presented alternatives to those of global topographies: maps organized according to intangible affinities, such as variations in climate, revealed a living network of relations that exceeded their expectations. El tiempo, in the most ambiguous and enigmatic of the word’s dual meanings of time and weather—that is, as it refers to the weather—evinced not only an extreme relativism by positing various parallel systems, all integrated with reality, but also offered us the possibility of presenting these as both simultaneous and verifiable. And so we walked along, making absentminded comments about the climate and the atmosphere. (Those dialogues, I believe, were the most complete testament to our friendship; I have never had one like them in spirit or, for that matter, in substance, with anyone else.)

  The meaning of those long, conversational walks may have been figurative, but that would not make them any less substantial—quite the opposite, because it was to the rhythm of these steps and these words that M and the other grew together, learning how to think, even how to converse; one could also say that they learned how to walk, in the broadest sense. For various reasons they both lacked adults, parents, who could pass down to them an image, a formation in the true sense of the word. Though it may seem like an overstatement, it is likely that if they had not met, they would not have been able to draw
from themselves that which was discarded and contested by their elders. The lines of the isotherms, juxtaposed with those of the continents, indicated that the truth was comprised of many maps at once, enveloping reality like a delicate sheath. Everything that moves, thought M, everything that loses or gains heat, leaves its indelible mark. “If the routes we take through the city, together or apart, were to be written out, they would make an incredible picture: each one coming together to form an orderly tangle,” said M. Sometimes they would be far apart, other times not; they would be near one another or even on the verge of collision, without knowing it. Other times they would be somewhat distant, neither really far nor particularly close. But the figure itself, or at least the nature of the changes and movements, would remain forever.

  It might also happen that they would be close while thinking they were far apart, or vice versa, in which case the direction of the wind, as with noise, or the layout of the streets or tracks, as with the trains, would either indicate actual distances and degrees of separation or, on the contrary, simply confuse them. In a city, M continued, distance did not mean separation (“we surrender ourselves to obstacles”); in the countryside, either, though it is different there because of irregularities in the terrain. But at sea, it does. At one point they stopped, and M turned halfway around, saying, “Let’s look back along the street, straight through the trees. The sidewalk looks like a tunnel carved out of the ground, the houses, and the branches.” They had walked the length of the tunnel, from a distant point upon which they now set their gaze, but there was no trace of their passing. Footsteps don’t leave a mark, he added. Is there a place where our trajectories can speak for us, without our intervention? The other did not respond. If it does exist, we don’t know where it is; if it doesn’t, we should invent it.

  We saw a couple kissing; a little while later, a man switched his ring from one finger to another; not long after, a bus with only a few passengers aboard stopped at a corner. These sorts of things were signs of the journey’s progress. The bus slowly pulled away from the curb, the man studied his finger, now bare; the couple embraced, ignoring the presence of their clothes. We registered it all with detachment (almost boredom). A train could be heard in the distance; this, strangely, was not cause for comment. Perhaps it was the place, so luminous and calm, or the topics that arose according to the autonomous manner of these walks, or perhaps it was, as I said earlier, that formative afternoon as a whole, during which we came to feel unique for the very first time, to feel like ourselves in an obvious and decisive sense, without fear of error. We might have known all this before, without being aware of it. For a long time, we assume we know who we are, until the moment we fully realize who that is; in that moment, identity is no longer predictable, but rather takes the form of a truth that, like any other, can become a sentence with no more than a change of perspective. We are condemned to the truth and, as such, are subject to its rule—to me, the most tangible evidence of this is precisely M and his absence. I’ll describe the strange event.

  A little while later, we ran into each other. We had said goodbye earlier on, and I still remember the way we turned away from one another at the same time, heading in opposite directions. But then, a half hour later, we practically collided in front of a corner newsstand. Neither of us wanted to admit that he had taken a wrong turn; M insisted with a conviction matched only by his disorientation, while I tried to explain to him that he was lost, without really being able to see it clearly myself. I also remember how, for a moment (a moment marked by a peculiar sensation that would linger on), that encounter—at once real, because we were face to face, and impossible—disoriented me and was able to temporarily disrupt geography. That one street should come after the next, that a few blocks past any avenue, there would always be another, was a truth that was bound to outlive us (as proven by the fact that this already happened to M). Yet at the time, as I wondered how it could have happened, I did not sense one but rather many distortions, a generalized disorder: the streets no longer appeared as a succession, as streets, and could be bunched together within the same confines. Another example: west was an idea that was exiled from reality, a repudiated notion. And there we were, standing calmly beside a kiosk looking at the magazines, receiving signs of a disaster in the form of a coincidence. What a strange thing to have happened, said M. Sometimes I think that we move through the city like planets, following our individual trajectories while we maintain our relative positions and trace out uniform patterns. But the planets don’t move that way—I corrected him—it would have to be “stars” or “astral bodies.” (M wasn’t listening.) And so the apparent movement of what is found in the heavens and which we generally call stars became, by pure coincidence, the key and emblem of our bond: despite the gaps and distances that might emerge, there would ultimately and always be, between the two of us, a reciprocal influence marked by the simple tenets of balance and compensation—the fundamental law of our walks and trajectories, which were, at the same time, shaped by the organizing principle of solidarity.

  I sometimes wonder whether this solidarity might still exert its force. External space, for instance, is acted upon by processes and forces of uncertain origin, impossible to attribute to any one body, as though the existential proof of all things were not in their mass, but in the indirect effects of their mysterious operations: that which we call an organizing principle, or reality, among other things. Bodies, then, belong to an essentially negative existential category, defined by consequences or signs rather than by materiality. As such, influence would be invisible, but effective; because, as is well known, every force or effect has a cause, we are haunted by the notion that perhaps we just don’t not know how to look. Perhaps we live in a world that is evident to all beings—animal, vegetable, and mineral—but us.

  A few months ago, while looking for an address near the intersection of Tucumán and Reconquista, I heard someone calling to me. There are always so many people and so much noise on that corner that I thought the shouting could not possibly have been directed at me. But that was a mistake: it was. Someone was trying to signal me as he approached the top of the incline, but he could not go any faster. I remembered his name when he was practically right in front of me, when his vacillation between extending a hand and stepping forward to embrace me became obvious. It was Sito, a friend of M’s from the neighborhood. “Hey, how are you, how are you,” we said, exchanging similar greetings. Since he had to catch his breath—“This hill gets steeper every day”—it was up to me to speak. I remarked how exceptional it was that we should run into each other, not only because of how many years it had been, but because it was completely by chance that I was there at all; aside from that, with all the cars and all the people it was almost impossible to notice anyone in particular, and yet he had. A minute earlier or a minute later and everything would have been different, I added, no one would have seen me or called to me and perhaps we would not have another chance to meet for years, as many years as had passed since the last time we had seen one another. He said yes, it was remarkable, not only had fate intervened to bring us both to that place, but also to point his gaze in my direction and allow him to recognize me almost immediately; he had always had very good eyesight and an impeccable memory for physiognomy, he added—and I agreed.

  As he spoke, I remembered things about Sito. An only child, he lived with his mother long ago, in the days of M. His father had died, or left, before being able to leave a tangible or lasting impression on him, just after his first birthday. Despite having no siblings and being practically an orphan, as a child he found, in his mother, a repository for his cruelty, a deep-seated bitterness that he would cast onto her in the form of arrogance, deception, and even disdain, as though he were trying to make himself disappear. This translated into a pronounced dominance. He lacked the resources of the spoiled child; instead, he made use of a power that anticipated that of an adult, only saturated with innocence, which made it all the more ruthless. Every tim
e his mother would come out into the street to look for him—having to call out “Sito” again and again even though he had not only heard her the first time but had also, like every child, sensed her physical presence—you could hear an abject tone in her voice that belied her wisdom; her entire being was submitted to the ignorant rule of the boy, to his innocent and brutal authority.

  A little while after I met him, as he passed into adolescence, mother and son reversed roles: then it was she who was ruthless, Sito who was submissive. It should have been the other way around, but it was not. The mother accused him of being just like his father, when in reality it was she, who drank more and more, that best recreated his memory. Sito had to keep a small sideboard in the living room, which I saw on more than one occasion—closed, of course—well stocked. To this end, he would go out in search of cheap liquor, usually liters of vodka; his mother told him which brand. He would return slowly, doubled over by the weight of his purchases. I remember, on those rare occasions when the three of us were at his house, the silent disposition of that sideboard, as intimidating as a person lying in wait, a figure that at once concealed and signaled the drama of the household. We could have been talking or doing anything at all when that imperious voice would ring out from a tiny room in the attic. As though propelled by a sudden force, Sito would instantly jump to his feet and run up the stairs; it was nothing like the waiting he inflicted on her just a few years earlier. At one point we even saw him dodge his mother’s fists and struggle to hold her back; something kept him from using his full strength, which was obviously greater than hers, even simply to restrain her: it was as though her superiority was carried in her voice; shrieks and movement came together in the body of the mother to break down the defenses of the son.