Though we might be inclined to talk about it as something common, it is always startling to see the effect displacement has on the organization of space. Scale and trajectory, the tools necessary to organize a route, depend on movement rather than geography; speed is the determining factor. When one walks, one moves within an environment on a tremendous scale; when one travels by train or car, the environment is reduced to a moderate scale; the airplane, on the other hand, belongs to the small scale. To cross half a continent in a few hours, or to walk on both shores of an ocean in the same day, not only contradicts anyone skeptical of movement, but also means the compression of a seemingly impossible distance. Forced by the theft to walk day after day with a double purpose, M’s father would discover a parallel essence in the suburbs, supplementary to the one he had observed from his car. The deferred realm of the large-scale, paradoxically, individualized the streets and multiplied the businesses. In this way, he experienced—or rather relived, since this is, as I recall, a characteristic of children—a communion with the minor and the microscopic: fleeting moments, brief interruptions, a limited radius; murmurs and exclamations, as well as small businesses, kiosks, garages, and vestibules.
In the course of this intensive labor, there was no place he did not visit; grocery shops seemed to be born and develop as an effect of his passing. If the neighborhood had been the unit of measure when he had the car, now it was the block. After a few weeks of walking, he understood the contradiction between these two aims; selling and searching were mutually exclusive, particularly because a sale meant coming back—it would have been foolish to lose a good client—and coming back, after all, meant going to the same place over again. It is true that the car was not necessarily always parked; there was also a chance, albeit a minimal one, of seeing it pass by, although considering this possibility would have meant accepting its ultimate implication: that all they had to do was stand on the corner and wait, though obviously the car might just as easily never pass by. As such, he would dedicate certain days to sales and others to the search. On those mornings, before setting out on his expedition, he would choose the perfect epicenter as our starting point, one that would ensure the fewest obstacles given the enormous distance that we would cover. Once there, we would begin to walk in a spiral, inevitably deferring to the shape of the blocks. When, after a few hours, we found ourselves forced to walk in a straight line for several blocks before being able to turn, the notion of progress and expansion left us and we were humbled by a sense of linearity. The loop took on such a wide arc that it ceased to be such; we thought we were simply headed forward, not realizing that we were actually only two blocks to the right or the left of where we had passed, distracted, just a little while earlier. The father was in charge of the turns, and from time to time consulted a street map that was bound like a book—it often forced him to flip back or skip ahead several pages, even when it was only a matter of crossing a street or turning a corner. Finding our location on a map means seeing ourselves from the outside; it has a greater impact on us than looking at old photographs, in which we are caught off guard by a discolored, outdated figure, the memory and foundation of the present, which is recovered as soon as we lean over the portrait. A reality at once uncomplicated and global seems to be present in a map, in such a way that when we coincide, occupying the point observed with our bodies, the only requirement remaining for the map to become truth—that is, ourselves—has been met.
When the three of us stopped to look at the atlas, trying to anticipate natural obstacles—gullies, dead ends, factories, barracks, and the like—to the orderly progress of our spiral trajectory, a deliberation that overlooked the actual object of the walk nearly always occurred: interests and preferences would emerge, the desire to see a certain place or neighborhood based fundamentally on its name. Atlases do not describe anything: they only list streets, ways, and plazas, and public or private facilities that are considered especially large. It would be difficult to imagine their saying much more than that, but in any case our hunger for adventure sought to compensate for this silence by visiting them. It was, precisely, a matter of visiting a name: indistinguishable places and streets marked only by their denomination that added nothing to the landscape, apart from their presence. The vastness was multiplied geographically, but also nominally. Repetitions immediately made the differences between the street in the capital and the homonym on which we stood appear obvious. Others lacked a counterpart in the city, but when one of these, generally named after national heroes or mere dates, so much as suggested an association with a similar name or date, it seemed to be the echo of another street or plaza, and served only as a vague recollection in the topological memory of the people.
We looked like tourists. And, as happens to tourists, when I look back on those walks a surreal nostalgia and a confused feeling of abundance colors their very existence with a sense of ambiguity. Though it may be redundant, it is worth noting the essential scenic value that the landscape, geography, had in the consolidation and development of our friendship. The words scenery or scenic sometimes tend to be taken as a sign of vain ornamentation having little impact on the mysterious series of circumstances that is life; yet scenery is practically everything, and nothing could be less ornamental. I do not mean to say that life is theatrical but rather that, as we pass through it, we erect a stage for its scenes; this is represented by geography. The constellations that M and I believed we formed throughout the day as we connected our individual trajectories needed the space of the city to be understood as such, as the orbit of planets whose course is influenced by the relative effects of mass, force, gravity, and things like that, which define the breadth and depth of their impact as complex equations and reciprocal equilibrium; in this same way, the two of us seemed to bear the weight of the city on the transparent lines that connected our bodies in movement.
It does not matter whether it seems possible for Buenos Aires to exist beyond our influence; what was essential could be found in the diagrams we etched into the territory, which conferred an additional valence upon the known plan of the city, turning it into more space, another surface, while still remaining itself. The universe would continue to exist if the solar system disappeared, but the solar system would not be the solar system without the universe. The universe is preeminent in appearance only, because the solar system is a category separate from it: without the universe, there would be no solar system, but without the solar system, the universe would be different, other. Something similar could be said about our friendship. The city was crisscrossed by the imaginary lines of our bodies in movement, patterns and designs that became part of the geography; these would not have existed without Buenos Aires—nor, apparently, would our friendship. (Now, and for years, these are also what has been missing.)
As I have already written, a recurring subject of the digressions with which we passed the time was to hypothesize about the essential differences between the city and the suburbs: distinctions whose existence could not be questioned. There is no point in repeating our ideas on the matter, many of which were the belated aftereffects of those walks we took while searching for the car, and which had simply been rescued, or rather salvaged, from the depths of M’s consciousness months or even years after the fact. Impressions like the vague recollections being expressed now, in any event. There is no need to clarify that these pages constitute a belated and almost unexpected aftereffect of situations and memories. Compared with the years retained by the average memory, or the span represented by the coming millennium, the choice to recount the few events of this story, not quite two decades after they occurred, might seem a bit hurried. Neither of us would have imagined that, years later, these events would be written down on paper. If we had foreseen this, we would have acted differently, guiding our steps according to our idea of posterity; fortunately, we did not. (This foreseeing should be clarified, however, given that if M knew the reasons why I would end up writing these pages, he certainly would have don
e what was needed to avoid his abduction, though, in fact, he did nothing at all to cause it. They say that one could avoid innumerable problems, mistakes, and catastrophes if one knew how things were going to turn out, but this is an impossible dream. The most extreme example of this is that we are all certain of death—and even, expanding things a bit, about the decline of civilization, the destruction of the environment, and the inevitable ostracism of the sun—but are still unable to avoid the end. What keeps us from losing hope in the face of this inescapable truth? A belief in the interim, in the fact that, in the meantime, things happen that are worth experiencing.)
No one imagined that, years later, those walks would end up this way, taking the form of words on paper. Still, our steps—as firm and as weightless as the mornings in those days—shone with their own light, without assistance. Those walks through Greater Buenos Aires were predictable, probably boring, and perhaps too speculative. The truth is that very little happened, almost nothing; it was like sailing with a course but no destination. Whoever believes in destiny expects, at the very least, that things should happen; though it might be a mistake, just as no one thinks of tedium as a property of action, no one considers passivity to be the work of destiny, when actually it is. So minor and insubstantial were the events we stumbled upon that the idea of living at the mercy of chance would only have provoked incredulity in M and me. We were contemplative. When not overwhelmed by the desert, travelers see mirages; they expect this, make nothing of it, and carry on accordingly. But to us, saturated by the landscape of the suburbs, the absence of action was intoxicating. We wandered like planets, our orbits well outside the sphere of activity. Events did not affect us; they belonged to an order that was not only absent, but had been effaced, dissipating just a few meters before we reached them.
It was always like that during the time of our walks, one morning after another. And yet one day—which seemed to have been marked to produce, in the space of a few hours, something that had not happened for months on end—would be the exception. We were at the middle of one of those typical suburban blocks with little traffic and unused sidewalks. Because our surroundings kept us from any practical sort of trance, our only option, apart from walking and looking, was to talk. We made bets on finding the car. The father calculated fifteen days, M bet thirty, and I—so as not to discourage them—said a week, when I really thought it would either take more than four months or was simply impossible. Since finding the car depended, at the end of the day, on coincidence, anyone could see that these calculations were just another topic of conversation. The father would say, “In fifteen days we will have covered more than 5,000 blocks, which, added to the 12,000 we had already done, make 17,000,” though he did not specify why that was the number required. M, for his part, doubled the figure, perhaps thinking that twice as many opportunities might present themselves that way—as though we might find two cars, or the same car two times. He would take a deep breath and say, “We walk 11,000 blocks every month, plus the 12,000 we’ve done already makes 23,000. With that many, nothing could get by us.” His father would get annoyed and cast him a sidelong glance. “I’d have to be crazy to walk that.” Our conversations were of that nature. In my case, I thought we still had something like 44,000 blocks to go—four months, plus the 12,000 that, according to M and his father, we had already covered, or it might even have been that we needed a total of 100,000 blocks, or eight months. But since I did not think it opportune to be honest, I only said, “I think it will all be settled in a week, with the car waiting for us on X as though nothing had happened. I don’t think we have more than 2,500 blocks to go.” X was the street where M lived. They listened to me as though a divinity were speaking. “From your lips to God’s ears,” the father said.
At that moment we reached a corner. We saw, due east, a sun that cast no shadow on the pavement on either side of the street. On the next block, M and I thought about the religious implications, for both of our beliefs, of the words “From your lips to God’s ears,” though they might have been nothing more than another way of saying, “Let’s hope,” as one might do several times a day. Just as we were crossing the street, we heard a scream, a mix of panic and grief trailing off into a wail; it came from behind the line of doors. To get closer we needed only to keep walking, but we stopped instead of advancing; the surprise held us paralyzed in the middle of the street. Another scream, and someone came running out at full speed, though not in our direction. The man’s pants were open and he was having a hard time holding them up. One could see, in his movements, the clumsy syntax of escape: the fear that drew his feet in search of a safe place to hide and the contradictory, apparently mutually exclusive, movement of his body, which froze for a moment with each new scream. The man had raped, but the rape had not reached its conclusion; perhaps this was the cause of the tension between urgency and interruption. People who lived nearby peered out through their windows, others flooded into the street.
Overturned bicycles appeared on the street: people were coming over to watch. It is strange that when something happens, very often something terrible and unexpected, one’s first reaction is to wait, as though only another event could bear the tragedy out. People crowded around like ants, circling, exchanging information. And so a somewhat brief period elapsed in which no one noticed the passage of time, all were so absorbed by the gathering. Once it had its fill of words, the tribe regained its disquiet. It wanted facts. A statement, more obvious than novel, was made: The police were slow in coming, and should hurry. It was not hard to gather the details of the story, a familiar series of sordid scenes. The girl or young woman—they mentioned her by name, which left her age unclear—was a victim of the jealousy of her mother, who shut her inside the house whenever she went out, locking all the doors and leaving her without keys. This maternal jealousy had come to be projected through the throat of the daughter, in the form of screams and nervous fits, an echo of itself. That which was sown by one was reaped by the other, it seemed. The lecher, for his part, had fallen back on an old technique—entering through the roof; when he realized he was in danger, he tested the efficacy of another, also old—a leap from a window. Nonetheless, between one event and the next, there was a mystery that was difficult to resolve; at first the lecher thought it was danger he sensed, a threat inscribed in the scream of the girl, but he immediately realized it was a weariness subject to something far deeper, something fairly complex and difficult to gauge. It was the weariness of the limit; it is always exhausting to exist at a limit. It was something related not to time, to the prolongation of a condition, but rather to the intensity—or depth—of that state. To be on the verge of flight, on the verge of invasion: frontiers that, when mentioned in this way, may seem trivial or as light as a cloud, but which weighed the shoulders down with a load that became increasingly difficult to bear, especially when they arose unexpectedly. This weight bent a body in two and leaned over its waist, grabbing on to its hips; and in the midst of it all, there was the urgency of escape. This could last unbearably long.
The women who lived nearby were left at the mercy of fear and consternation, and yet several were less indignant at the incident than at the detestable publicity that had been afforded a private act. Children were running around; every now and then a few would shoot off after receiving an order from the adults. There was also talk that the father, who had been separated from the family for some time, had taken his revenge on the mother through the body of their daughter. Within five minutes everything was possible, even true. There were more hypotheses: that the mother had instigated it, leaving the house at the most opportune moment in order to destroy both husband (or ex-husband) and daughter, for whom she felt no love; this was why she ordered the girl to sleep in her bed, so the father would mistake her for the mother (that is, for her) and both would find damnation through sex. It could also have been that the mother, allied with the father against their daughter, had planned the rape. Many described the house as a living hell: at
night, the screams could be heard along the entire street, the neighborhood falling asleep to the recent memory of profanities. They preferred not to talk about the victim, draping over her a veil of suspicion more cruel than even the most aberrant accusation; it was a silence whose fissures gave way to complaints, disdain, slander, and eventually condemnation. Several acknowledged wearily that they had seen her on the corner well into the night, sitting on the sidewalk with boys from outside the neighborhood.
M and I looked at one another; without saying anything, we agreed that if these were the things that had to transpire so that something would happen on our walks, it was better that nothing at all occur. We were not only disillusioned by the situation, empirically speaking, but also by the tenor of the comments. It was disappointing that, in a land as slow, as luminous and, in its way, as elastic as the suburbs, common sense would reign as resoundingly as it did everywhere else, even in the capital. Is the world the same all over? we would ask ourselves later, as we remembered the scene and compared it with others, which were always the same though they occurred in different places.
The Planets Page 14
