The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  Felix had left all that behind several years earlier, and when he did, he felt he was simply facing the nature of his country. As such, it was not hard for him to adapt to that unusual morning. Now, that other time had fewer and fewer attributes. He was thinking not about his own past, which he’d lived once and for all, as he often liked to boast, but rather about the community’s past, the minutiae, limits, and traces of which also seemed impossible to explain, but which he saw as the sole proof of its rachitic survival, destined only to fade. He wondered if this might not be the case in all countries, for all people. At the same time, he could never tell if his thoughts were too mercurial or fleeting to merit further attention. He tried to get out of bed, but as soon as he threw back the blanket he felt a blast of cold that stopped his breath. He couldn’t move, but he didn’t want to cover himself again, either: he was afraid that any touch, even the slightest, would be unbearable. He had always thought of the weather as a series of mutable episodes that could sometimes be unfavorable, but which were ultimately defined by one’s experience and sensibility. Now he understood how wrong he had been: there was simply a reality beyond all measure or scale, and trying to escape it was both mad and futile. Sitting halfway up in bed, Felix analyzed his situation, not understanding how difficult it was to change; the air in his room that was making him shiver also deferred all movement, just as it did outdoors. Later he would remember that, atypically for him, he had barely been distracted during the entire ordeal. The perception of cold (the word, he thought, should be contemplation, or rather, communion, as if it were a spiritual unification), more despotic than any pain, chained him to a present without parallel time.

  This is what darkness is to night, he thought, when the deepest night reaches you. He imagined the broad path cut by the cold punishing the steppe and, immersed as he was in his delirium, found it strange that after having come such a long way it hadn’t yet passed. He followed this treacherous line of reasoning until he was startled by a noise at the door. Felix thought someone was about to enter, and his fear of being caught like that was more powerful than the cold. (Later, when he was in a position to look back, Felix would conclude that it was the Hotel Salgado itself that instilled fear.) Having nothing better in reach, he covered himself with the blanket, under the weight of which he could barely walk. Anyone who saw him dragging himself weakly toward the door would have thought of a person diminished in several different senses. Once there, Felix stopped to listen, adopting an attentive pose that might also have been an attitude of mortification resulting from the cold.

  Aside from the currents of air he believes he is on the verge of getting used to, which sound like an army of pigeons trained to produce in unison a fearsome coo amplified in turn by the empty spaces of the hotel through which it spreads without obstacle, Felix hears nothing unusual on the other side of the door. (Noise, he says, trying to discern anything else; it seems to come from a dark, uninhabitable sub-basement, whose enslaved residents emit, as the only evidence of their existence, a collective murmur like a litany of unsynchronized echoes.) Little by little he begins to hear regular percussions coming from the long, empty hallways (the hotel’s entrails, he thinks); they sound like footsteps falling in the same place, as if a powerless being, effectively immobilized, were trying in vain to move forward. So Felix leans the side of his body against the door and closes his eyes, and for a moment he doesn’t know where he is.

  He has pressed himself against the door to listen, but he can’t feel the wood against his skin. It occurs to him that, though it assumes different forms—like silence, murmurs, currents of air, banging, or desperation—panic is the sole language of the Hotel Salgado. Not everyone gets used to this language; some people never even come to understand it. (Felix is still unsure to which group he belongs.) These forms appear as portents, foundationless warnings that never amount to anything, due in large part to their inconsistency, and trace orbits like birds of prey. A current of air makes a cooing sound, the wind slams against a window, the empty walls exacerbate the cold, and so on. Felix feels cut off from the world. It also occurs to him that the Salgado would serve perfectly as a residence for outcasts, as a hospice for the terminally ill, or as a graveyard for the living dead. A little while later, he wants to return to bed and curses the dimensions of his room. His feet are numb and he can’t feel the hardness of the floor (at the mercy of his delirium, he thinks this is because it is made of liquid). Under the blanket, he begins to dress in bed, the first movements in a complex series of operations he plans to conclude with a trip to the bathroom. In this way, in just a few hours and without his really even noticing, the daily life of the Hotel Salgado has revealed itself to Felix with all its doubts, setbacks, surprises, and disappointments.

  I thought one morning that it probably would have been the same for someone else. What I mean is that, in Felix’s situation, someone else would have noticed the partially open door of the hotel’s logo and, just as Felix did, would also have written “The Hotel Salgado opened its doors to me.” This person would have gone on with their life, made decisions; but sooner or later that funny or clever phrase would reveal a bitter, premonitory quality that had previously remained hidden, and it would need to be translated differently: as the error into which the individual sinks each day and from which they have trouble emerging. I said something quite similar before: the phrase as a warning of the arbitrary danger to which the world subjects us. Now, I want to add that anyone in my position would worry about their friend just as I did upon receiving a note with that same comment. And so, just as Felix could have been someone else, an unfamiliar person, I could have been, too; I didn’t arrive at this conclusion through any crisis, let’s say, of subjectivity, but simply by viewing my actions as transferrable to others without any major change in their motivations or outcomes. Rarely have I been so sure of being just like everyone else, or at least of being someone whose experiences were far from unique.

  Though nothing kept him from leaving the hotel, nothing compelled him to do so, either. Felix guessed that the same thing could have happened to him in any other place, but he was less sure it would be possible at any other moment. Anyway, the day would eventually come when, after making his usual rounds through the city, he would start packing his bag, ready to move on. In this, too, he was not unlike the other guests. He imagined himself gently closing the front door to the hotel with his right hand and taking his first steps into the uninhabited morning. His luggage, lighter from all the things one inevitably forgets, will hang from his left shoulder for the rest of the day. On this final stroll, this village neighborhood of Moscow and the surrounding area, which Felix would come to know quite well, would seem mysterious to him for the first time in a long while, as if both were reverting to their original nature in order to protect themselves from danger. He imagined those blocks, streets, big houses, and buildings; he pictured himself walking tirelessly, as he always did. All the components of this landscape appeared scrambled and disjointed, lost in a concentric funneling. This was his filmic notion of travel: the dissolution and confusion of elements.

  As I learned more about Felix’s travels and Masha’s adventures, I found that both behaved in a limited or partial way, as if the space, say, of events and situations from which they drew their practical, everyday experience and, in broader terms, their sense of reality, as if that space were incomplete and also changed day after day, sometimes auspiciously but always mysteriously, adopting a new form with different themes, people, and contrivances in general. In this way, it became a new “zone,” just as accidental as the one before and with many shared elements, but always mutilated and abridged, and always just a bit stranger than before. It seemed to me that something was being withheld from both of them; something that was, on one hand, permanent—wholeness, let’s say, a normal life—and on the other hand, the opposite of this: variation, the fragmentation of life itself, which is arbitrary but also universal. Perhaps it would be the same for any of the trav
elers or maids in the Hotel Salgado, but I have no way of knowing.

  The intimate relationship that Masha and Felix had, respectively, established with the building, each with different foundations and with their own particular story behind it, reminded me of certain old books, perhaps the appropriate term would be “classics,” in which a house, a city, a basement, any kind of lodging, or even a street could serve as the frame within which a life unfolds, without any real difficulty, while—in an clearly perceptible way—the scenery turns into an object, the evidence into causes, and the enigma into a representation. In these books, then, the story would be a projection of the place. Like an emblem, this place should constantly transmit meanings, because otherwise it is hard to establish continuities over time. These meanings could be more or less opposing variations (for example, it would be possible to have more than one version about the same place, stories that emphasize different meanings, and so on); nonetheless, the idea of the account as, let’s say, a territorial metaphor should be retained. This explains why characters sometimes become hostages of the space they inhabit, to the extent that they are expected to assume an exemplary function. In the end, they sometimes turn into something resembling the protagonists of a fable, though that was never anyone’s intention.

  Anyway, this convoluted preamble is just to say that when I learned about the Hotel Salgado from my childhood friend, named Felix, whom I haven’t seen in decades, and about the woman apparently in charge of the establishment, named Masha, and when I observed the little or much that each did, their varied or meager reactions, and how they cohabitated with that singular building, assigning it an autonomous life; when I saw them act on that stage, it seemed to be the most fitting, and also the most accessible, illustration of how certain people inhabit a given country. But, of course, no aspect of the Hotel Salgado is unique, and similar examples can easily be found. This was also the way I received Felix’s postcards and notes: like scenes whose purpose, aside from communicating a memory or itinerary, was to propose some key to, or interpretation of, something that he—caught up in his own observations and experiencing different circumstances—had not noticed, but of which he was nonetheless, I imagine, aware.

  On the rare occasions Masha left the hotel, it was to go to the market. She did this at regular intervals and considered the task an unavoidable part of her obligations. She had always preferred to go out as little and as briefly as possible; as a result, when the moment arrived for her to take on more responsibilities, she decided to make a fixed list of items and stick to it, to avoid delays and indecision while shopping. She was proud of this list, which she recited with great concentration as she walked; it had proven its worth from the very beginning, allowing her to go from one trip to the market to the next without any pressing needs or surpluses. As tends to happen, Masha suspected that in the hotel, by means of clandestine operations, or, at least, operations that were invisible to her and had secret motivations, adjustments were made so the purchases would last. There was a time when this had bothered her because it diminished the value of her calculations, and she went about trying to control every detail even more; in the end, though, she gave in to the first idea, that is, that either directly or artificially, the only foresight she had ever shown was still proving to be precise.

  Being right so often about this, together with the power she consistently exercised over the hotel, led her to develop an inflated image of herself: she made much of very little, almost nothing, really; what I mean to say is that Masha lacked strong arguments to support her high self-esteem, but these meager qualities and reasons had organized themselves efficiently. Seeing her act when chance produced an encounter between them, or when he decided to observe her, Felix thought that Masha, as a character, was simply an imperfect being. This was probably the case with almost everyone; Felix thought that if he had the chance to work on a novel, that is, to represent himself and take a stance on an infinite number of subjective or general events, Masha would occupy the vacillating space of the incompletes—mysterious and cyclical people exiled to their lunar world. He imagined her as a fragile being, exposed to the elements and too partial, almost hindered for some unknown reason, to expose herself to fiction without risk. Despite this, she never left the fictions she encountered, and into which she immersed herself just as she was. This demanded Masha perform a labor of displacement; if she existed in real life as an incomplete, in the invented life, the one that was read, she attained a balanced symmetry. It’s not that she was different from one place to another, but rather that the two worlds sought to complement one another, which gave her comfort.

  Anyone who sees her walking to the market, lost in thought, probably assumes she is going over her list so as not to forget it. Later, each purchase will be an item checked off. But Masha is concerned with other things; the list is a permanent fixture she may never forget. She thinks, for example, about the infinite number of books like the one she found, about how people enter and exit them. The idea that they depend on the story’s author to make this happen seems so obvious it doesn’t explain anything, but the idea that they act according to their own will sounds impossible. Masha senses an explanation far removed from the other two: it is the people themselves who, once inserted into the books, give one another life and help care for one another, as a community of marginalized characters. She thinks, for example, about Felix, and what would become of him if she had not pulled him from the cold, black night when the whole city seemed to have turned its back on him. At the same time, she believes, individuals represent worlds sentenced to death, entire swaths of reality threatened and in the process of breaking apart.

  She remembers, for example, a remark Felix made one morning when, probably confused and thinking that Masha was asking about his origins (in fact, the opposite was true; few things interested her less), he suggested that he wasn’t entirely convinced that the country he came from existed. It wasn’t that the space had disappeared or that its inhabitants had given up their language; what he meant was that nothing specific held them together, like those social gatherings that lose their purpose due to unexpected circumstances, but have to be seen through anyway. It had been a long time since “the latest news” had happened in his country; it had immediately passed out of memory, not so much because it was unexpected (though, in a sense, everything is), but rather because of its ultimate condition, for being the beginning, say, of the denouement. Somehow this circumstance had confirmed for Felix that it was reasonable to adopt an errant lifestyle, the naïve notion of creating realities or people who, despite being incomplete, might at least be an echo, albeit a distorted one, of what he left behind. As a result, that morning Masha saw herself as being an offshoot of Felix, though she had believed the opposite was true.

  Markets and factories attract the footsteps of women at different hours of the day. Someone witnessing it from above would see a collective influx from the cardinal points and a gradual clustering along a few side streets, that is, along the streets adjacent to the points of concentration themselves, a waiting to be let in. These trips the women make to the market are immemorial, just like the trips the men make to work. With her gray and sometimes black clothing, which displays a broad range of both colors, surely due to the folds and additions to the different garments she wears, and outlined by the city’s weighty architecture projecting its scenery of shadow and threat, Masha’s silhouette seems to come from some unspecified moment in the past and to have been set in motion with its leaden gait at a moment determined by some erratic clock. One might think she is fleeing, when in fact she is in a rush; nonetheless, her pace is not particularly fast. It is this immemorial gait that imposes itself beyond Masha’s conscious mind, seeming to dictate how she walks and astonishing Felix with its vaguely rustic choreography, as if it were a reminiscence struggling to surface.

  Felix was sitting in a hidden spot off to one side of the hotel lobby, on a chair behind a flowering bush made of old wire and discolored paper that
sprouted from a pot filled with stones. It was a place where he would occasionally kill time, secluded from the gaze of others; since no one ever passed through, at a certain point he adopted it as a place he could remain as long as he wanted, staying there hours on end. That morning, he was trying to figure out something to do when he saw Masha appear suddenly in a doorway onto the interior of the hotel and head resolutely into the street, apparently late for something, without giving him a second glance. It was one of those rare days dedicated to shopping, so her thoughts were probably already at the market. She had wrapped herself in so many layers of clothing that she must have felt relegated to her own interior, a nucleus virtually hidden under that imposing crust. On the other side of the artificial foliage, Felix felt like a prowler; maybe this is why he decided, for no particular reason, perhaps overcome by boredom, to follow her. He stood, pushed aside a branch that was blocking his path, and headed for the door, satisfied with his plan for the day. Once in the street, he watched the sky quickly cloud over at a pace that promised to cut the day even shorter. He didn’t want to know where Masha was going, he just wanted to see her against a backdrop other than that of the hotel.