One tends to define both the location and the nature of limits; it is no different with cities. They were captivated by the idea of Buenos Aires as a never-ending city, but this trait was, in fact, disproven by its periphery: the proof of its supposed proliferation and, at the same time, of its limits could be found in the expansion of the suburbs, a complex built on contiguity that did not necessarily correspond to the city, and which changed it into something else. There are parts of the so-called suburbs that turn out to be just as incomprehensible as an unfamiliar, unknown city—so incomprehensible, in fact, that they defy comparison—but in general, passing through them, one acknowledges that their inhabitants live partially in our city and partially in another; in a border zone in which difference sometimes appears as a distortion, a substitution, or a replica. There exists a collective scene that this dissonance calls into question, though it rarely contests and sometimes even reinforces it. Because of this, at least in part, M and the other always walked around Greater Buenos Aires with a vague feeling of curiosity, adventure, anxiety, abandon, pleasure, freedom, and compassion. It was a difference that returned to them the sense that the familiar was both certain and decisive.
Sometimes, I recalled that night in Constitución station, M and I would make fun of Sito. One day, I remember it well, while we were talking about the tragic state his mother was in, M let slip a pobre Sito. We found this particularly funny, despite the seriousness of the subject. The association of his name with the grammatical diminutive never caused him any problems, I thought as I stood on the sidewalk; on the contrary, if often made things easier for him. Like Ada—or Sita—it was a name whose merits anyone could acknowledge or infer. Sito did not appear to be wealthy, nor did he seem down on his luck. To pay for the coffees he had taken out a wad of money that was so thick I found it hard to conceal my surprise. He could barely hold it in one hand; however, it was made up of small bills. “Today’s tips,” he explained. He had been one of the ones who believed the story about the eye—I remembered M saying that Monday before we went in to school. I had asked him, incredulously, if anyone had believed him, and he told me that, yes, Sito was the least hesitant. That same Sunday afternoon, before the end of the day, he decided to leave his room and headed out into the street. A few hours of sleep had been enough to recover from his collapse and to go back over the meaning of the day’s events, M told me the next morning (“if the events had any meaning”). Near the tracks at the end of the block, leaning against the rails of one of their circuitous walkways, the neighborhood assembly was in session. He went over and told them. No one seemed surprised, though several might have thought it inconsistent; they did not object to the discovery, they simply did not believe it had happened, given that the evidence rested precisely on the absence of proof, on the fact that M had not brought the eye back to show them. A conversation without anything special or relevant to it, M observed as we entered the school. Just one of the many that advanced impassively as a way to pass the time as the afternoon advanced and the trees grew darker, that is, until it occurred to Sito to suggest a test of veracity: if M could repeat, in the exact same words, the story about the eye, that would mean that he was not lying. They looked at him blankly and were quiet for a long time; they could not see the point of something so gratuitous, so ridiculous. Eventually a few of them saw the need to voice their objections: “You can make something up, and then repeat it.” That ended the discussion, or so it seemed. “No one can repeat a made-up story,” Sito countered. Everyone, including M, looked at him cautiously; the argument seemed solid. At that point Sito started rubbing his eye, as he sometimes did.
After that Monday morning—once inside the school, we stopped talking—though it may seem strange, we never spoke of the matter again. Now, as I watched an empty train pull into an abandoned platform, I regretted not having remembered the story that afternoon, so I could have asked Sito how he had come up with that line of reasoning. Not only that, I thought, standing in Constitución, Sito might have been able to explain things to me that I still didn’t know or understand. But I didn’t ask him anything, I said to myself, which was an error and a gaffe. We spent most of the afternoon in a café; at his invitation we had two coffees each, we even made small talk, as they say, and I was incapable of asking a thing about M. Standing there in the station, I honestly could not believe it. As I said, it is true that Sito did not ask any questions, either, but it was certainly I who should have made the first move, as corresponded to his invitation. He must have been thinking, with all assurance, as he walked away along Carlos Pellegrini and later, when he stopped at the kiosk and waved to me, “What a cretin. Talking all afternoon and never once bringing up the memory of his friend.” Evidently, if this was what he was thinking, he was not wrong. I thought I had seen a condescending smile in that long-distance greeting, though at the time I had considered it an effect of the caramel he was eating. Now, on a platform in Constitución station, where I had walked for no reason in particular other than to watch the trains come and go, the gesture seemed both completely reasonable and unmistakably lucid.
FOUR
For those who give themselves over to a territorial friendship, time—even space—is an excuse, secondary to a single, essential element: the indirect path, often sinuous and always arbitrary, along which the traces and labors of distance accumulate as silt does beneath water. It is paradoxical that territory, a spatial concept, should see its own condition dispelled as it grows unfathomable and manifests itself in the form of a delay or of an often irrecoverable past, a lapsed apogee or a liberated present able to change form and occupy another place at any moment, under any circumstance. Sometimes on our walks, the day—despite its clumsy and forced evolution—would not progress. The light, the weather, or the set of sensorial tools one uses to locate oneself within the jumble might change, but there was a residue that literally stopped the passage of time; one felt one might remain there forever. At those moments it was as though we were in a painting over which a faint vapor hovered, or was perceived: some sort of shadow or mist at the horizon, a mix of light and color—or cold and heat—through which an imprecise form, probably that of trees or houses, could just barely be discerned.
For months we walked around different parts of the suburbs almost every day. Both before and after that time—a period in which we were searching for something, something that would become a symbol of salvation, as I will explain in a moment—both before and after that time we walked around intermittently, almost always casually and often without any particular reason but, as I have said, with the same feeling of recklessness and the same excitement, the same combination of abundance and delirium. At that time, when we would go on the walks I am about to describe, it was still four years before M would disappear. If I say now that the future to come would have seemed unreal, unthinkable in that moment, I am truly not exaggerating. No one thinks about the future; we are ignorant of what is to come and abandon ourselves to the void of its mystery. It is also true that, while no one can see the future, we attempt in vain to anticipate it. Those with foresight think about what is to come, those without it think about the moment. At the end of the day, everyone belongs to one of these two groups; yet the idea that M would disappear within a few years would have sounded far-fetched to anyone. As a concept, we expect nothing of the future, which is a good thing, but we expect everything of the moment and of what is to come. (This everything has a literal value here: I mean that “everything” includes the word change, as well.)
Something about the city brings us to accept transformations; this thing becomes familiar, and in that moment we acknowledge, or rather, embrace it. Change, novelty—despite being beyond our grasp because, in the city, things happen without our knowledge—are the proofs offered to us by the present in an unremitting stream. The proliferation of events, the propagation of signs, those forms in which the city expresses itself are the language used by the present to renew itself and, in this way, construct its simul
acrum of the future. How else would the future manifest itself, if not in the image of the contemporary? And what is the contemporary, par excellence, if not life in the city? City, future, proliferation, truth: the four ends of an equilateral cross, at the top of which figures the word “city.” The other three are interchangeable.
Just as the geography of the city conditions us to accept change or novelty despite the fact that change and novelty are rarely within our grasp, assigning to the present the fantastic ability to contain infinite occurrences, people feel compelled to make their predictions: the city as an innumerable series of events that take place within a defined space, and what is to come as a hypothetical realm in which occurrences proliferate at the heart of a hidden moment, impossible but nonetheless concrete, similar to those that occur all the time on the streets of distant neighborhoods. Even this seemingly forced metaphor between the future and the city allows for the idea of proximity and its effects: nearness and immediacy—essential relations for those anxious about what is to come. On the other hand, the city offers validation to those who do not make predictions: change, the bustle that grows more or less feverish depending on the hour and the circumstance, which can be represented—and contemplated—from a single point. This observation often takes place from a café table or—in the neighborhood—from chairs set up on the sidewalk, open windows, et cetera. The city is not only simultaneous—we know that at any moment, in any place, there are always a number of different things happening—but also spontaneous: events unfold without reason or accord, which makes them appear autonomous and random. Those who live in the moment find, in this exercise, the natural model for their lack of foresight. The same thing happens with noise: noises do not fade into the distance, die out, or grow, they simply stop or are drowned out by another, stronger one. Yet the city—which, if one must define it, could be said to be the place in which the greatest number of obstacles comes together—finds its promise of privacy eradicated by sound. M’s meticulous observations about the clamor of the trains and the cheers coming from the soccer stadium on Sundays are definitive proof of this. From bombs to the clap of thunder, via the drip of a faucet or the crackling sound of cars inching forward on the wet pavement—these noises moderate the inevitability of its construction. Geography is an art of vision; it is in its profound independence from geography, which is condemned to absorb it, that the difficulty of sound resides. Sound is equivalent to the future: that which one cannot see. This is why the first thing we forget about a person is their voice. M and I used to listen for sounds and reflect on this dubious philosophy, usually on our walks without a set destination—or with a destination that was so unknown that it ceased to be such—while we thought of ourselves as planets. It seems to me today that Buenos Aires had, at the time, a certain essential quality; it was a crystalline city. Now, though, its inhabitants are made of liquid.
At first, and for a long time, M’s father did not understand what had happened when he turned his head to discover that his car was gone. He had just left a small grocery store in the suburbs (at the time he worked as a cookie wholesaler) and was going over the list of clients he still had to call on; he was startled to see nothing at the curb. He thought there had been a mistake, that he had left the car somewhere else, et cetera. He took stock, walked the few paces to the corner, and looked up and down the street. Each scan of the desolate block, however, brought him a little closer to the truth. Then he understood that he had been robbed. He went back into the store, to “let them know,” as he said, though in truth he didn’t know what to say. As he spoke, he felt that there was little, almost nothing, he could do. Then he saw that his world was falling apart and was so mortified that he began to cry. They comforted him at the store; later, as though they were revealing some great secret, they suggested that he report it to the police. In anticipation of his experience years later, they offered him no hope at the police station, so he went back to the office, where they comforted him even more and offered him something to eat. M’s father spoke angrily, but ate without any hurry. When he finished, he took a walk around the neighboring blocks, asking if anyone had seen his car. He was out there for hours, getting answers like, “I don’t know,” “Yes,” and “No.” At one point he gleaned that the people, surprised by the strength of his conviction, were actually answering at random—not with the first thing that came to their minds, but with the most statistically likely answer, the effect of probability; it was a pre-cerebral response. This realization did not lead him to abandon his inquiry, on the contrary, he told himself that if there were an order beyond experience that determined the answers he was getting, it was also likely that this was close to the truth; certainly, the order with which he was now coming into contact had been the one that dictated the moment his car was stolen. Though the light was beginning to dim, the afternoon seemed to him as though it were fading to white. He thought about that evening, about his return home and about going inside with the news, and told himself that he still had plenty of time, getting his hopes back up to continue the search. He had lingered a bit with the client, he conceded; since no one else was coming in, they had spoken for nearly two hours. When he got bored, he looked at his watch and feigned surprise at the time, but he already knew he had wasted half the morning. As he left he thought: I’ve been here two hours and not a soul has come into this poor guy’s shop. Then all of a sudden he became the poor guy, when he realized that he had left the car alone too long. That’s how it happened, M said to me the next day. He was late getting home; everyone was already at the table. “The car was stolen,” he managed to stammer as he crossed the floor toward his room.
M and I were in our third year of high school. The next morning, his father began to walk around the suburbs, swearing that he would not give up until he found it. He would abandon his dedication to the car a few years later, because of his son (in this sense I still remember the father, his figure, under a sign of mystery). M would go out with him some days, and on occasion I would accompany them. We were going out to wander around, according to the mother. Despite the lack of signs—or hope, for that matter—and the discouragement that brought down our spirits, especially those of the father, I still have a clear and, I would almost say, happy memory of those walks. In the first place, the likelihood that the search would succeed was so slight that, far from being a duty, it took on the quality of an adventure, of frivolity: there is nothing better than an unlikely objective to make a task that might appear important seem gratuitous. In the second place, I have never again had that feeling, except in memory, of setting in motion the proliferation of whitewashed houses and perfectly regular blocks that unfolded before us as we walked at a leisurely pace. Even poverty, which can often seem unexpected and overwhelming, as one might imagine, proved to be gradual in that territory. Entire blocks of indecision or timidity, and occasionally of cowardice or bashfulness, regulated any contrasts. As it was, the geography of Buenos Aires could not be thought of in terms of depth, but only of breadth—we had not actually entered into anything in particular, but were rather crossing a surface that lacked any real variation—these were poor areas in which the deterioration was so aligned with its medium that it seemed as though they might never end. Surface and poverty were two complementary echoes coming together to create a concrete reality, each multiplying the effect of the other. In the meantime, it seemed as though we—alert, attentive to the appearance of that blue car—were skirting the outer reaches of a territory, an ever-changing yet boundless country. I would not be exaggerating if I said that, despite the difficulty of the operation, we were able to take note of the balance of things, like that of our heads and our bodies as we moved, which was similar to the undulating line of the horizon discerned by a camel. As we advanced, I went over my doubts about the endeavor: it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, I had said to M, without any originality. Now, however, I had no regrets about joining the committee—“the investigative committee,” as the father woul
d joke; despite the growing concern that overwhelmed him, he was always at the ready to amuse the two of us, who were still boys in his mind. I had no regrets; on the contrary, I wanted more streets to walk down, and was happy to have the chance to wander without boundaries, as though Greater Buenos Aires were truly the territory of vastness.
Sometimes M’s father would plan our routes to coincide with stores where he could solicit orders. M and I would wait outside, hiding from the sun under a tree, silently surprised that not a soul would come down the street. Other times we would go in, and the father would introduce us to the owner in a way that seemed excessive, not so much because his remarks were particularly fawning, but for the profusion of details he used to describe us. Later, the shopkeepers would ask how the search was going. The father would answer reproachfully with an oath I have not been able to recall exactly for some time now, perhaps because of the jarring effect that it produced, swearing that he would wear out all his shoes before he gave up. Almost imperiously, he insisted that we go in with him when he made use of the walks to sign on new clients; our presence was a force that was hard for the owners of these businesses to overcome. They were flattered by the fact that three people were engaged in the effort to sell them a few little things; they were grateful for the service and, caught somewhere between confusion and pretension, ended up buying more than was expected. The father often used the phrase “poor guy,” and on more than one occasion said, “Everyone in Greater Buenos Aires is down on his luck,” usually without noticing my presence as I walked beside him through the vastness like one more of those, according to him, poor guys from the suburbs. When he did notice, too infrequently for my taste, he would improvise some gesture of surprise and excuse himself, patting me on the back. First he would say my name, and then add, “Nothing personal” (the order never changed).
The Planets Page 13
