The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  An example of these stories: H, a maid who has worked for the hotel for more than twenty years. She has a husband and a son, and she lives with them in a large room that has been converted into an apartment on the fifth floor of an old, stately mansion. H is a typical character, if that means anything. When she leaves the hotel, she goes to the market to buy fish and a few onions for dinner; its stalls are nearly empty and the streets set up inside it seem deserted. Then she goes straight home, with her purchases in one hand and the small bag containing her change purse and her uniform, which she will wash before going to bed, in the other. This is the best part of her day, the intermission between the two orders that govern her life, and thanks to which she finds a simple escape: walking, looking, thinking. It sometimes happens that she gets confused and arrives home convinced that she left the hotel the day before, or the day before that, rather than moments earlier; and yet when she lays eyes on her narrow kitchen, the screen of boards and furniture that sets her son’s room off from the rest of the space, and especially when she sees those incredibly high ceilings condemning her and her neighbors to eternal smallness; when all this settles in, she feels as if she hasn’t left her home in years. She leaves the groceries on the table, hangs the laundry on a chair dedicated to that purpose, and sits on the bed to loosen her clothes and remove a few layers. Sometimes she pauses on her way back, when she reaches a corner where magazines and used books are displayed in the windows of a darkened shop. H lingers for a few moments, observing the titles and covers, then goes on her way. Later, as she removes her clothes without ever getting fully undressed, she will try to memorize what she has seen. Her feeling of amnesia, of a temporal rift that has turned the present into a time isolated from the immediate past, is probably due to this simple pause on the sidewalk, though there will always be some doubt about this, particularly because she doesn’t stop to look every day.

  By chance or destiny, H finds money twice in one day. Everyone says these discoveries are connected to the mysterious guest, but this is not as obvious to her, as she remains unconvinced that she has seen a real, though dubious, presence rather than a deceptive shadow of her own fabrication. The morning is already several hours old and one can imagine the entire country at work; nonetheless, the bustle of the city only reaches its outer limits as sporadic and weak replicas: a few passengers arriving on public transportation, vehicles dispersed at intervals. If you look closely, at some point you get the feeling of having traveled to another, any other, city and, consequently, of being in another country. H gets distracted by this idea: living somewhere else, being led into a world she knows nothing about, even if only for a little while. The first discovery occurs during this daydream. H is imagining herself in another country and is about to clean a bathroom, but as she passes through the doorway she pauses: she feels a violent breeze penetrate her skin. It is the best description she can come up with, though at first it seems inaccurate: violent breeze. What H means is a gust; the air slams against her back before passing through her body. A glimmer of light turns her around—she wants to see the tangible cause of this breeze, and in that instant the sensation abruptly ends: she only manages to catch a glimpse of a blurred figure whose human outline seemed unfinished, or about to dissolve, tackling a curve at the end of the hall as if it were vanishing under the force of its own velocity.

  Though she knows little about religion, H has a deeply religious sensibility; her mind immediately turns to angels and mystical rapture, but this terrain seems a bit strenuous for her, and she finds it unlikely that any important event, no matter how surprising, would involve her. So she dismisses the episode and tackles the bathroom, focusing on her work. On the shelf to one side of the lavatory, a weathered board attached to the wall with hooks misshapen by time, where a row of open or broken soap containers left there by guests endows the room, as if this were possible, with an even greater air of neglect, H finds a bundle of currency that appears to have just come from the bank. The paper band wrapped around it, the beige color of which evokes generic memories of purchases wrapped in the market, bears two or three partially blurred stamps and a long signature written on the diagonal, as otherwise it certainly wouldn’t fit. H gives the money just enough of a nudge to make it fall like a ripe piece of fruit into the cradle of her apron pocket. The bundle is not particularly heavy, but she immediately feels it as a weight that influences her movements and doubles her over. One can get used to anything, and she quickly grows accustomed to the idea of the money belonging to her: she imagines it belonged to someone else, before, but behind that before rests a long—and, in any event, unspecified—time, which turns the idea into a laborious and, above all, abstract thought, like those objects found in the sea whose provenance there is no point in establishing. For H, then, the discovery does not represent a mystery or, come to think of it, an opportunity; she approaches it with the same passivity as her survey of the covers of magazines and books on her walk home, dedicating them a tiny fraction of her mind.

  Hours of silent labor follow; H and the few other employees of the hotel go about their work in different parts of the building, ignoring one another when they cross paths in the hallways, afraid, perhaps, that Salgado might catch them doing something inopportune. H’s mind is still on the morning’s discovery; she notices that she has adapted to her apron’s new weight without realizing it. No one has ever, she tells herself, no one has ever returned to claim lost money, and that puts her mind at ease. She is still unaware, as she opens the door to one of the hotel’s typical rooms a while later, that she is about to find a second bundle of currency. There is the bed pushed against the far wall, submerged in the shadows of the half-light, and the nightstand, which is neither big nor small, some unspecified number of chairs, a monumental wardrobe, a table. The size of this room, which resembles an unused lounge, leaves an impression, though more impressive is the arrangement of the furniture, which seems to be fixed in place wherever someone decided long ago, permanently but without much of a plan, creating an indifferent, accidental order that nonetheless exudes a certain solidity, or the invisible hallmark of age, which is perhaps also subject to the same passage of time. The rest of the room seems vaguely impersonal—in this it is like most hotels—and suggests negligence, or in any case desertion, surely an effect of the relation between size and precariousness presented by the Hotel Salgado.

  One imagines that when the hotel was still something else, but already held the promise of what it would eventually be, and when that part of the city was similarly forecasting something other than what it would become, as an unequivocal symbol of the moment several people rushed in and deposited this furniture in the first place that occurred to them. Changes along these lines were probably made just as impulsively later on, consolidating and manifesting those actions: a chair dragged over to reach the top of another piece of furniture, the table moved to one side to take advantage of the meager light, and so on. H starts her cleaning, blind and indifferent to everything around her, accompanied by the formation of her thoughts. She walks over to the bed and prepares to make it by lifting the jumble of blankets; this is when she finds the new bundle of currency hidden in their folds, wrapped in, though a more accurate term would be cinched by, a wide strip of paper in a pale sky-blue, from which the ends of the bills spread outward, freed from its pressure. Unmade beds had stopped leaving an impression on her long before. She still viewed them as the petrification of someone’s private space, a precise and inopportune photographic facsimile revealed for her alone; but unlike her reactions in the past when faced with a sordid and revealing spectacle that presented itself to her, sometimes quite violently, she didn’t see them that way at all now; the sheets revealed nothing, or rather, they revealed the obvious—nocturnal episodes that H had stopped resisting, not because she knew them so well, say, from having lived them, but rather from the fatigue of running through that catalog of secrets on a daily basis. There were guests who could be recognized by the way they used th
e sheets; some were so unique and consistent in their behavior that it would take H only a quick glance at the bed as she entered a room to realize they had returned to the hotel after a prolonged absence.

  A strange thought had occured to H as she’d pushed open the door to the room. She wondered which terms a book might use to describe her. She imagined a surreptitious foray into the bookstore: sneaking in on tiptoe and, with the help of the darkness from the street, grabbing the first book that catches her eye. Then later, as she went on to imagine, reading at the table until very late while her husband and son slept. The words would have to be unprecedented, extravagant (she was far too common as a subject to enter a book without violence). She began to think and realized she had no answer: What was it about her? How did she make herself seen? She imagined a few phrases to describe her actions, but found none of them convincing. For example: “She had barely entered the room before she sensed that something strange was happening there. She approached the bed slowly, still not understanding that the unusual silence was motive enough for suspicion. When she did, that is, when she finally perceived the complete and uninterrupted silence, she thought of a fabricated solitude; she told herself that some being had hidden itself in the room, and its caution (remaining alert in its hiding place, moving without calling attention to itself) was absorbing every normal sound, even those that came from outside.”

  So strange was the impact of that phrase, the shortcomings of which did not stop it from accurately describing what was going on, that H relived her experience from that morning, when an unknown being, as I was saying, passed through her; a strange mechanism of her mind led her to immediately imagine that she herself was someone else observing the adventures of the real H, who had no idea she was being watched. She compared the money, including the bundle found that morning, with her salary. The difference seemed outrageous. The exact amount she had found didn’t matter, she had no idea how much it was, only that it was more; her pay would always be insignificant. Her salary had become so informal that nothing was left of it but vague references, translated into something concrete only on rare occasions, like this one, which involved a comparison that was, in any event, impossible. H could only say it was a greater quantity of cash, more, without knowing what that might represent. She touched the sky-blue band with the tips of her fingers, unsure, perhaps, of its material existence, and with a swift movement slipped it into the pocket of her apron. Without ever having made a decision, then, she had decided to take the new bundle of money. And so, even though on this second occasion she didn’t see a shadow and no ghostly traveler or mysterious guest cut a path through her body, she knew this new discovery was connected to him.

  Masha remembered that H had tried to explain this to the other maids the next morning, while they prepared the samovars and got breakfast ready. For her, the Hotel Salgado took shape through stories like this one, just like Salgado himself and everything that would later become her life; from that moment on, Masha will know the caution (fear, and of course veiled bitterness) with which each woman spoke about the Owner, as many of them called Salgado. H explains how she had tried to go about her business as usual the afternoon before. She had walked to the market with her purse dangling from her arm, with the same things inside it as always, that is, practically nothing except for the new visitors, that is, the bundles of money; as she walked the long blocks, her mind was on the part of the hotel where she had found them. As always, for everyone, that area seemed unreal to her, like a final frontier where things happened that would be impossible elsewhere; this influenced her understanding of the events, which, by having occurred there, not only freed her from all obligations and responsibility, but also grew indefinite and miraculous. Things could be unverifiable, even in the presence of signs or indications, and even if those things seemed clearly defined. She had placed the money on the table as soon as she arrived home, before loosening her clothes and hanging a few of them on the chair; later, she thought about her day, which might prove to be decisive in several ways. The bundles of currency stayed in their place throughout the paltry dinner that brought together husband, wife, and son. They didn’t ask her a single question, and she offered no explanations. The husband had a few things that he treasured (a pair of tall leather boots, marble binoculars, the delicate but useless pin of an antique silver brooch, and so on); some of these things had already been promised to the son. Every so often he would take these objects out to shine them, and as he did, he would extol their virtues out loud and repeat the chain of events and coincidences that brought them into his hands. (The family bore witness to these ceremonies; for all three, it was something like voluntarily abandoning time until the father put his treasures away again.) But no one had shown any sign of noticing H’s bundles of money on the table, and so no comment had been made. This is why H wondered, in the company of her friends and co-workers the following morning, whether the money had really existed, or if its nebulous origins might have relegated it to a murky existence, alive to a few (like her, for example, who had witnessed its appearance and taken it) but inert to the vast majority, who might see it without realizing what it was.

  For his part, faced with the prospect of endlessly wandering through the unfamiliar city, Felix decided to stay in the hotel. He had dedicated his first waking thought to the low temperature that day, though for moments he had trouble remembering where he was. His arrival in Moscow had coincided with one of those glacial fronts that occasionally descend on the region, forcing people into more limited lives for a while, periods of confinement and privation. He believed himself to be the protagonist of something special, a strange climatic event or the beginning of a singular time. Felix felt the air on his eyelids like a painful, heavy blanket of cold; his eyes were the only part of his body that was exposed. A faint glow filtered in through the window, a combination of light and darkness made it hard to discern the hour. (Felix would boast in the days that followed about how quickly he’d adjusted to this confusion.)

  He sensed he was in a new place, which he understood only partially and through contradictory evidence. He had a vague memory of the night before, just enough to produce a diffuse reminiscence. His eyes were watering and his fingers, which had emerged from under the covers moments earlier, were already frozen stiff; he wished it were all just a dream. Later, when he came to and looked around the room, he discovered a strange, useless corner, where the walls bent like the sides of a barrel, probably because of the ceiling, which angled down toward to one end of the room. From his bed, that space looked like part of something else: a secret passage leading to a sanctuary or a hideout, the closed mouth of an abyss, or, as often happens in buildings, the place where the room itself is called into question. Felix thought of the forces twisting those walls, and imagined that the floor and the ceiling were trying to meet somewhere outside the confines of the room. Then he had another, impossible, thought: that part of the room acted as the support for a staircase, and that the ceiling angled down as it did, deforming the walls, because the stairwell’s descent also increased with the passage of time.

  He thought back on children’s stories and imagined himself trapped in a plastic bubble, in a fairy-tale cottage, or in a cell without measure or scale, where adult society locked away foreigners or strangers in general. For him, remembering childhood meant thinking about the country where he grew up. Before a certain moment, he had assumed that his country was an eternal scene: habits, situations, forms, and places promised to go unchanged until the end of time, but now he looked back and let’s just say that whole picture seemed lost and obsolete. The most subjective part, that is, his memories and the traces left on his consciousness by the past, had aged best, and could be recovered at will and kept close at hand, while the other world, perceived in its moment as steady and unchanging, or at least as the condition or promise of continuity, had long ago turned contradictory and, ultimately, unrecognizable. There was a metaphysical element to the fact of belonging to a country; th
is was the element rooted in childhood. Another metaphysical element developed over time: that of individual memories. Felix thought it impossible that his compatriots reflected with any frequency on the meaning of their nationality; this vague premise, which was completely logical, but probably true of all nationalities, was nonetheless all he needed to intuit that he belonged to an increasingly undefined country. Like the colors of its flag, white and the sky-blue of a watercolor palette, the nation leaned toward transparency, able to encompass nearly everything without concealment or omission, and without ever fully showing it, either.

  According to Felix, this made it the nation of the future—and, in a certain sense, the ideal country. There was, for example, the theme of the void: every writer had given in to that one. Vast geographic expanses, solitude, youth. If they were all talking about it, thought Felix, there must be some truth to it. People became predicates of the same things, shared the same food and, insofar as his country was, in its way, nonexistent (that is, was ostensibly a space without content), this profusion of expanses became a measurable value: his compatriots were metaphysical, incomplete, or invisible beings insofar as they came from a land without qualities; “unmarked” individuals, you might say, that could remain in the limbo of geography as long as nothing woke them. A lethargic and indifferent people, energetic only when it came to inflicting cruelty. As a result, the notion of reality was generally quite elastic, or inconsistent, or too generic; and, therefore, constantly up for debate. It sometimes happened that reality was the event unfolding, but all eyes would be on the thing coming to an end. When the event that was unfolding became part of the past and its immediate consequences were, therefore, unlikely to change, that was when it drew attention, never before. Fleeting ideas took shape and convinced the majority, allowing people to inhabit their particular, vaguely solipsistic worlds without realizing they were moving through a void made more palatable by abstractions. And so the comfortable existence of all was maintained. Nightmares, pain, enthusiasm, delirium, and danger floated among the community, searching for individuals in whom they could take form.