The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  With the confusion at its height, we started off again on our walk; after a few blocks, we were surprised by the sound of a gunshot. We had been walking and talking about rape in general; M’s father was telling a story about a rape that, as far as he knew, had taken place on the train tracks a few meters from his house, when all of a sudden, off to our left, we heard the blast (the shot).

  THE FIRST STORY TOLD BY M’S FATHER

  Shielded by the darkness of the train tracks, a rapist committed a rape. Then he arranged to meet the victim the following night. “Same time tomorrow,” he declared as he zipped up his pants, convinced of the fear or the desire this might provoke. The victim did not intend to go. The rapist knew this, but he could not think of a way to prolong the possession, the feeling of power, other than by offering her the freedom to return, regardless of whether she did so or not. (That is what orders are for.) The next day he waited for five hours in the dark, feeling his way along or sitting on the rails with vermin scurrying around him in the underbrush. Her delay undermined his authority and wounded his pride, although, in the hope of restoring them, he was inclined to return to the scene day after day. The following night afforded him proof of the intermittent nature of cold, as opposed to heat, which is constant. They say that waiting softens emotions (an aggravated person will quiet down, an anxious person will show restraint, et cetera) but, in the case of his excessive temperament, it would end up dispelling them completely. The anger of the second night dissipated until it became a vulgar idealization of the first; that which began as an unrestrained desire for dominance ended as a simple exercise in nostalgia. He was falling in love with the memory. He even said, in one of the soliloquies with which he would distract himself, “If she came back, I could forgive her.” Moments later, aroused and picturing the liberties he would take, he imagined the details of a struggle rewarded in the end with the violence of possession. He thought of roughness as the most perfect form of forgiveness, in that it was its portent. He talked to himself during the day, as well, trying to understand the force that made him a captive of that place.

  In the meantime, the neighborhood had begun to see him as just another resident of the tracks, one of the individuals who set themselves up there, candidates for the voluntary ostracism of the vagabond. Along the stretch of those few kilometers, delimited by the storehouses erected near Palermo Station, on one side, and the shops of La Paternal on the other, his wanderings would achieve, for him at least, a global scale; the space, though limited, could have an infinite scope. The depth upon which he stumbled from time to time, as he committed a rape, mingled with his instinctive knowledge of the place: he knew all its invisible coordinates, both temporal and spatial; what is more, he felt them as part of his body, a perception independent of the senses. At night, or with his eyes closed, he could predict the approach of a train in the distance; a faint buzzing in his ears told him that someone, hidden behind the walls of their house, was about to turn on the faucet and take a bath; a twitch in his eyelid alerted him that he was being watched; he could predict the weather with just a glance. This connection with his surroundings was so evident that it suggested—if not in its scope, at least in its intensity—a precise understanding of the world. This world existed behind the mask of the visual, allowing only its besieged surface—striated, perforated, mutilated, halting—to be seen. The landscape of the tracks, the sight of the storehouses with the cargo containers scattered off to the side; all this remained as a portrait of minute differences. Things rarely changed; at the most, a man might enter his field of vision, cross it, and leave it again on the other side at exactly the same pace. These minute differences also included the vegetation: the length and shade of the grass, the indeterminate height of the stalks and their color, a pale green due to lack of care. Neglect had arrived and would remain, though this formulation is not entirely accurate, as it was clear that it had been there for some time. It all seemed to be consuming itself in an unusual series of death throes, imperceptible because of their pervasiveness. The train cars, like the rest of the picture, continued to wait with tireless resolve. The inveterate rapist could not have asked for anything more: an expansive, almost infinite, space that was invisible to the rest of the city. To occupy those places unseen by others is to conquer privacy, he repeated to himself, not understanding the full meaning of his words.

  Several months later, a chance encounter disrupted this harmony late one misty afternoon: on the corner of Corrientes and calle Bonpland, the rapist raised his eyes from a pair of feet that were blocking his way and recognized the face of his victim. The long, feverish wait did not give way to surprise, but rather reverted to bitterness; rapists tend to think they can mitigate their crime by reacting to it in a sentimental way. And so he did: “You didn’t come,” he said dejectedly, barely hiding his agitation. The victim looked at him, not understanding. “You must have me mistaken for someone else,” she said eventually, and walked away.

  The shot extinguished its own sound. The fact that, at the end of the day, silence can be chimerical, but that one will nonetheless be surprised by the exceptional weakness of certain noises, is another of the exemplary truths of Greater Buenos Aires. The three believed they were witnessing the first moments after an exodus, when decay begins its impassive conquest. Noises were not only muffled by the time they reached them, they also took the form of forgetting; of a void, even. And yet those slight hollows, those surfaces extending without end, were still occupied—very much so—although some sort of acoustic reticence or a singular effect of the air on the structures made them appear deserted. The scene with the rapist was behind them. When they heard the blast, the three were passing in front of a house typical of the area (there, almost everything seemed typical). It was low to the ground and had a sparse, dejected-looking garden out front. The shot, they imagined, was a kind of void, the mechanism by which matter was stirred and made to vanish. For a moment, they looked at the street as though it were made of nothingness (paradoxically, it was similar to the sensation caused by an abstract silence); this forced them to pause. They did not think of the danger; they were aware only of the din that had sought to dominate the calm of the afternoon. All of a sudden a man appeared, crossing the garden from the depths of the house, his body thrust forward with an urgency that might have seemed theatrical but which proved to be real: agony and trajectory. The last of his strength could take him no further; the simple act of opening the front door had defeated him, and he collapsed. The body that had pulsed with life moments ago was nothing more than a weight drawn toward the earth. There he stayed, slumped over the gate, which held him up like one of those impassive horses in the movies. At that moment, the three all had the same thought: the man that someone had just, as they say, sent into the next life, had made it to the threshold by his own means. (The scene thus had a greater symbolic density: gate and agony, the instruments and disposition par excellence of the threshold coming together in a way that coincidence rendered particularly elegant.) It is not every day that reality unfolds according to chance in such a way that proves how a world plagued by insipid—and unconnected—events can organize itself along the lines of coincidence.

  This idea had just taken shape when they heard a scream: a woman coming from the house. When she saw the man, she turned her expression of shock on M, his father, and the other, then ran to embrace the motionless body. And so the three saw a second person cross the garden at full speed. The woman beat at his back as though she wanted to wake him from a dream, restore him to life, re-animate the indifferent matter hanging from the gate like ballast. They, for their part, did not know how to react. One spends one’s life waiting for something to happen, and then when it finally does, confusion clouds the mind. On top of this, the chain of events was of such a flexible simplicity that it was rendered abstract: they were not events but rather seemed like the actions of a tragedy, a drama enacted in real time and space. The idea of chance in general and the belief that, around there, ch
ance had a logic all its own—the laws of which had been ignored, or at least unknown, until that moment—set before them an inconceivable scene, with neither neighbors or onlookers to free them from the obligation of approaching. Yet it would be a mistake to think that their hesitancy was grounded in fear; it was instead due to the distance with which some events are perceived. People die, but rarely in front of us; people kill, but there are rarely many witnesses. When there are many onlookers, all can approach without worry, but when there is no one else there, one would prefer not to be there, either, or at least to escape quickly, to evaporate.

  There is no need to spell out what happened next: the chaos of emergencies, threats, demands, and mistrust. The nature of what had transpired was completely clear and yet, for many, anything at all could have occurred. No one believed M, his father, or the other, each time accepting as true the complete opposite of what they had said. None of it was worth a thing; the situation, though real, was weighed down by a hypothetical significance that preceded the truth of any one of its elements. So reasonable were the reservations of the skeptics that even the three, despite being privileged witnesses to the events, began to question what had happened, though it had been as clear to their eyes as the air.

  Of the many types of contact between things, a car crash is the most jarring. It has been said that nothing in the area deserved the name of transportation; it is likely that nothing there deserved known names or words. Though it may seem redundant, things seemed as if they were there for the first time. It should be said that everything appeared to be continually reborn, beginning and beginning with an inexhaustible rhythm. Of that constant peacefulness, the cyclical days on the streets of Greater Buenos Aires—not only on those which he spent walking with M and his father, but also the many others experienced every day, and forever—of that tranquility, the other remembers the people of the neighborhood sitting by their front doors and the surprise that would lift their heads, their eyes captivated by that rare apparition: a car. How movement captivates. They turned their heads less rapidly at cyclists and neighbors; on the lowest tier, there were pedestrians—the three of them, for example—and animals, like stray dogs or horses pulling carts. Those required such a slow rotation of the head that it was barely a movement at all: the perfect state for enjoying a bit of fresh air. This general sense of calm was interrupted by the collision: a car backing out of a garage hit another one, which was parked on the street. It was a stupid accident, but one with unforeseeable consequences. One could walk for blocks on end without seeing a car, yet the only two around gravitated toward one another with the innocence of magnets. They could not believe it: they approached as the car backed up. It was a familiar maneuver that, under other circumstances, would have been completely predictable; circumstances other than these, in which the driver forgot to brake—another idea ran through their minds: the driver might be blind, or drunk, or maybe he was just distracted. In any case, he was unable to anticipate the danger. The collision had not yet occurred (this “yet” means that it was inevitable); shortly thereafter, M’s father would tell the brief, though only partial, story of an alcoholic.

  THE SECOND STORY TOLD BY M’S FATHER

  The man had been out of work for years. The routine of a job is one that is sorely missed; it is also the most obvious and invisible of all. This is because the routine of a job imposes itself upon that of thinking, taking its form and adopting its syntax. People think when they work; outside of work they do not think. This is the nature of the mental drama of the unemployed, on top of all the others. When the man thought of this, the fear of losing his job would send him into a panic before he experienced the loss itself. For some time now, he had adopted the search as a supplementary routine, a substitute, the sort of activity that might rescue him from the blankness of his mind. But it was no use: there was nothing out there to free him from the tedium. Looking for work was a simulacrum that suited the beliefs of the others, but not his own; it was also directed at them. It meant resorting to an exercise in probability until the moment someone appeared who would pay closer attention, would take an interest and ultimately believe the simulacrum, that is, someone who would take it as an expression of truth. In that moment, he would leave the ranks of the unemployed; that person would give him a job and the theater of the mundane would be turned into work. Now, this simulacrum had the same problem as all other games: sooner or later it would find itself subjected to the rule of temporality. It was an order that, though it aspired to symbolic autonomy, had the insurmountable limits of a beginning and an end, moments in which a temporal norm both ceded and imposed itself: the return to normalcy.

  It was difficult to fall into step with this simulacrum, precisely because it imposed a false routine; as such, the man wanted to cut it short in any way he could, which meant finding work as quickly as possible. To this end, he promised to change his behavior, even his thoughts. Every morning, each new sacrifice he had been prepared to make in exchange for work seemed trivial and so, at night, alone and without anything to show for it, he doubled his promises. A restricted diet, a fast, self-imposed penance, a vague sense of discipline, et cetera; an entire series of ascetic states was considered. He decided to spend a few nights in the plazas, on the wood or hard stone of the park benches and at the mercy of the police. These gestures of penitence were intended to set a price—that was really what it was all about: paying, compensating for a hypothetical job located hypothetically in the future. In order for the mechanism to function correctly and for the man to remain as one with the simulacrum, these payments had to be intangible. “You don’t understand—at least, you can’t imagine it,” the father explained. Being pinned against the wall with no way out, the streets turning into a space that is not only external and foreign but also, and above all, inimical. That’s how it was for Grino until he found a job. Just as the three did now, he would walk around during the day, hoping that something would appear, that someone would believe the simulacrum; they were squalid walks from which he would return at nightfall, overwhelmed by discouragement. He went out every morning without a destination, wandering without a plan but with a great deal of anxiety, and returned in a daze, unable to differentiate that day’s travels with those of the day before. A routine, but one that impeded thought. His house lost all the qualities of a house, and turned into something else: a joint, or a hole. It no longer represented a place of his own, but rather the wait before his walk the following morning; it no longer housed a person, but rather someone who, like an animal, traversed the same space day after day, looking for the same prey along different paths. First, his house was no longer a house, then Grino gradually found himself abandoned by the idea of house. (And an idea, once it is gone, cannot be recovered; its new place exceeds the word forgetting.)

  He saw the sign one afternoon, hanging from a yellow iron gate. He stopped to read it and immediately felt as though he were looking in a mirror. The sign hung at a bit of a slant from a string attached to a hook. They were looking for a sereno, a guard. He muttered to himself, confirming his aptitude, that he was a serene person; it was the word that suited him best. He thought of his salvation and even promised that, if they would have him, he would make the ultimate sacrifice: giving up sex and the bottle. They took him, though it was to perform a task whose routine offered no chance of any real change. On the other hand, he thought almost immediately, nothing about it required him to give anything up, nor was anyone asking him to; later on, if the opportunity arose, he would think about it. It was a storehouse that served as a depot. Upon entering, one would have to wait for his eyes to adjust in order to make out the stacked boxes of food, hidden in the dark. On days when the sun was strong, a brutal heat would descend from the metal roof, while in the mornings that same structure was filled with the crispness of a hangar, to all appearances incapable of heating up. At first, they only stored noodles, in cases of twenty-five packets or in sixty-pound bags, to be sold by weight; later they expanded their scope
and began to carry tomatoes, grains, and canned goods.

  The calm would be interrupted on certain afternoons. In the midst of the silence, Grino would hear an unusually loud noise: an approaching truck. For a moment, the sound of the brakes would drown out the noise of the motor. The driver would get out, knock two times on a panel on the gate, and turn to face the street while he waited to be let in. Grino would slide the doors open and, when it was a big delivery, would help the driver back his truck in. Then they would slowly unload it all, carrying the cases to the back of the storehouse, where there was some space along the wall. They would pass each other halfway, one coming and the other going, but their eyes would not meet. Once they were done unloading, Grino would do the count—twice: once horizontally and once vertically. If the numbers matched, he was satisfied. Then they would climb into the cab and would have a cigarette while they looked forward, that is, at the street in front of them and the house across the way, through which—when the door was open—Grino could always see a girl climbing a tree. As soon as he put out his cigarette, the driver would start the engine; since Grino smoked more slowly, he would throw the butt out the window and sign a sheet of paper with the number of cases that had just been delivered. A busy day presented events like these, but this kind of bustle was uncommon: mostly, his days were spent waiting.

  He left at six, when the next shift arrived. At that hour, in the winter, the neighborhood was getting ready for nightfall. Despite the lack of activity, Grino never got bored: laying back against a mat tarp or a stack of boxes, or sitting in the only chair, opposite a small table where he would rest his mate and whatever undated magazine he was reading, he spent his days thinking about the same things, usually from the past; events or memories that did not necessarily belong to him, but which could have happened to his relatives, neighbors, acquaintances. There comes a time at which it becomes pointless to situate memories; later, it becomes impossible. Grino found that the clearest memories, those that offered the greatest promise of revelation and which ended up having the greatest eloquence, were the most unexpected ones; a scene, an image that secured its place among the clutter of his mind by virtue of patience and languor, until it emerged from the disorderly tangle of the past and imposed itself with concise simplicity. His memories were not separated from anyone else’s; though they did not share a common past, origins are so concealed by memory that the ownership, the origin, of one event or another represented only a trivial nuance. Sometimes he also wondered about the cases of noodles, which would sometimes arrive with one packet too many or one too few. It was a mystery that left him paralyzed—all possible explanations seemed hypothetical and unconvincing—but whose repetition, like the persistent unevenness of the table on which he leaned, signaled the existence of a message directed at him, and him alone.