The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  In that moment I noticed a different facet of M’s absence. It may sound self-absorbed and inopportune, but his absence, I said to myself as I neared the curb on Rodríguez Peña, is not only a loss, but also a threat. All these years I thought that the danger had been dissipating bit by bit, and yet, despite the illusion of normalcy derived from the periodic arrival of the 37 and the 150, it was clear that, precisely because nothing made mention of it, no mark or sign or notch in stone or metal that could resist the passage of time in an abiding way, M’s absence, the mystery and the silence surrounding his torture and horrible end, remained before our eyes, on the lids, as a threat: the likely blow, shove, or jolt that awaits us tomorrow, on the other side of the page or as we turn a corner. This, the evil that weighs upon us, is a singular truth.

  At that moment I also noticed how the slightest setback—if someone spoke to me the wrong way, I stumbled over something, or a car did not let me pass—would be enough to make me feel that everything, the world, was falling apart. I felt myself oscillate between plenitude and nothingness; I ceased being and was again, quick as a heartbeat. M and I spoke of this often: being, identity, and truth come into view and linger only intermittently; they are never permanent or constant. We would find examples of this fluctuation in synagogues, in the repeated rocking of the worshipers. Most of them were old; the movement might represent submission, disagreement, or rebuttal. It was also an intermittent retreat from mystery. Immobility was more pointless than it was impossible: being needed to travel and faith needed to move. We sometimes went to religious services, for example, on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, either at the synagogue on calle Acevedo or the one on Murillo or, every now and then, at the one on calle Paso. People prayed and many chatted, as has been the case as long as synagogues have existed, and M and I felt like the last representatives, not of a culture—since everyone is always the last and every culture is on the verge of disintegration—but rather of a time that was coming undone, with too many doubts for enthusiasm or resignation. Something told us that, pointless or tragic, or both, the processes of organic continuity would pass us over, that our bodies were unlikely to give rise to new bodies, but also that our walks, conversations, and voyages, during which we could not tell one from the other, were the tacit proof of an alternate form of longevity. During the service, after listening to the prayers of the rabbi and the redemptive call of the ram’s horn, after observing the rites, an imperious reminiscence whose proofs are preserved in a reliquary, a sound forged by pure archaism, a primal gesture able to remain intact due to the brevity of its execution; after observing these ceremonies, M and I would talk about the mistrust that the start of a new year inherently deserved, about the different meanings of fasting, and, of course, about the implications of absolution.

  I asked myself, on the corner of Rodríguez Peña, off to one side of the Education Library, how it could be that, having managed to find my justification and having garnered some degree of support, I would abandon the endeavor and want to forget about the whole thing. This might all be highly paradoxical, but faced with the real possibility of changing my name, I became aware of my own fear—not of what might happen to me, since, as is well known and easy to imagine, one never knows what is going to happen; the future is a true unknown, and it is precisely because of this that one resigns oneself to its mystery and actually prefers it—not of what might happen to me, but of what might happen to the memory of M that I held inside me. And so it becomes clear why one sometimes chooses inaction over change, though there are risks—the degeneration into futility, in this case—things dwindle and come to an end; it happens to everything.

  And so, with the passage of time and the unavoidable changes to people and things, it was inevitable that I began to lose track of the traces left by M. Fewer and fewer things remind me of him. They remain only as memories, but there comes a time we can no longer be sure of the real value of what we retain because, just as we can mean so many things when we say forgetting, many of which are contradictory and some of which are complementary, it is also true that we should not be overly credulous when we say things like recollection, memory, or simply evocation: there, too, a cave of shadows lies hidden. At the time, as I have mentioned, my encounter with Sito snapped me into the present. But the flash caused by that impact illuminated the impossible; the truth is, there comes a time when the recovery of memories becomes a path riddled with obstacles.

  I recently began walking along avenida Dorrego again, the way I did right after the abduction. Sometimes I would start out from Corrientes and other times from Warnes, or Martínez Rozas. I’ve even stopped by his block, where, as Sito would say, time has stood still. Each time I sensed a waning nostalgia, the echo of an increasingly tenuous presence. The walls might remain the same, as is the case on his street, but the heat or the cold we felt as we leaned against them, the sideways glances we used to cast at them, the way they absorbed the sweat of our bodies year after year, the thickness of our voices and the meaning behind our looks: all that has faded away. It exists only in the form of traces that grow more and more faint. If this is the future of all things, if this is the future of the past, to mingle with the many forms of forgetting, distort recollections until we wear away the very traces we leave and are left on us, the ones that keep us on our feet, I can’t help but wonder what our role really is. I am not complaining about the withdrawal or disintegration of bodies or memories, of ourselves and of the part of us that lives in others; these are operations to which we all are condemned and there is no reason to address them. Still, it seems to me that if this all belongs to the natural order of things, as it appears to, it should be challenged by means of a new position, different proofs, and another kind of action.

  SEVEN

  “Of all invisible countries, the present is the most vast.” For some time, this statement seemed more accurate than misguided; then something changed and it seemed more clever than accurate. Now I have returned to my original opinion: Of all invisible countries, the present is the most vast. We cannot think about an idea without modifying it; though this is, in part, the essence of an opinion, I would like to distance myself from it. We inhabit different countries at the same time, lands of such crystalline transparency that they are invisible, all but the most luminous one. The present moment is the longest, the most lasting, sentence passed on us. Since M has been gone, not only I, but several others as well, have lived in a dimensionless present uncoupled from reality, within a territory whose borders, if they exist at all, are undefined and rely on our movements, yet within which stillness is the only viable option. Our place advances with progress and recedes with retreat. We cleave the air without moving, wrapped in our enclosure as by a skin. It has been impossible to free myself from this smooth and transparent time; I wander, I walk within it, remembering and sensing M as a figure fossilized by memory, transformed into a purely temporal substance, until I return to wakefulness and discover the mark of his body on mine. Then I see him, sitting up in bed. He has just woken up and is leaning on his hands, which are open behind him: tensed arms, ash-colored skin, a smooth chest, and a few drops of sweat on his forehead as he opens his eyes wide, not understanding his restlessness.

  The mark of his body on mine. A few nights ago I had a dream that we were on a train headed for Moreno. As nearly always happens, the closer we get to the end of the line, the fewer people there are; after Merlo, there is practically no one left in our car. Someone comes from up front, walking carefully because of the movements of the train, and sits four seats ahead of us. Immediately, someone comes from the back, walking carefully because of the movements of the train, and sits four seats behind us. M and I are sitting across from one another, but we have the impression that the same things are happening outside the window on his left that are happening outside of mine, though this is impossible; the houses are the same, the cars are the same, to say nothing of the streets. We have identical landscapes to our left. A while later, once we leave Pas
o del Rey behind us, someone comes from up front, walks past us, and sits three seats behind us; right away, someone comes from the back, passes by us, and sits three seats in front of us. After that, when someone walks past us toward the front, someone else immediately walks past us toward the back. M and I do not speak but, in the memory of the dream, this silence is the expression of a truth. With just a bit of imagination, one could infer that if reality as a whole were symmetrical for several meters around, with us at the center, there was no reason that the rest of the planet should not be symmetrical, too. This idea, which was certainly the culmination of many of our aspirations, insinuations, and beliefs, pleased us, because it allowed us to imagine that we were the same. The importance of this equality was not the establishment of an equivalency, but in the revelation of a new identity. For the short time it would take the train to go a few station—short compared to the normal span of a life—we would be conjoined in mutual indistinguishability.

  After a while, as the train slows before reaching Moreno station, the last on the route—the deceleration more obvious than at the ones before it, due, as M and I agreed, to the fact that the passengers all know it is the last stop and this makes it all seem more conclusive—the dream comes to an end. But Moreno is not Moreno. We are actually arriving at Palomar station. This confusion is not disconcerting in the least; there is no need to retreat from any mystery. It is El Palomar, under the name Moreno. As we approach we hear birds squawking in the trees near both platforms, even the one by the freight line, and from the thousands that surround the station; this masks the sound of the slow-moving train for a moment. Then, as soon as we come to a stop, once the motionless car has turned into the promise of the next journey, I look at his profile as he stares out the window and say, “This has been our greatest adventure.” At which M turns and answers, smiling, “Yes, our greatest adventure.”

  Caracas, July 1994

  Author Bio

  Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. His books have been translated into French, German, and Portuguese, and he teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at NYU. His novel, My Two Worlds, is also available from Open Letter in English translation.

  Translator Bio

  Heather Cleary is a translator of fiction, criticism, and poetry, whose work has appeared in journals including Two Lines, Habitus, and New York Tyrant, and in the edited volumes Revealing Mexico and The Film Edge. In 2005, she was awarded a Translation Fund grant from the PEN American Center for her work on Oliverio Girondo’s Persuasión de los días.

  About Open Letter

  Open Letter—the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.

  Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.

  Current and forthcoming titles from Open Letter include works from Bulgaria, Catalonia, China, Germany, Iceland, Poland, and many other countries.

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Sergio Chejfec

  Other Works by Sergio Chejfec

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Beginning

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  End

  Seven

  Author Bio

  Translator Bio

  About Open Letter