The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  This made Felix think that the figurine could be one of the masses thronging the cold streets illuminated by snow; not as a person like any other, given that it was obviously a fabricated being, but instead as an imitation, the facsimile of a person that, as such, asserted—perhaps even beyond its own desire and the intentions of its creators—the existence of a passive, displaced life. It didn’t matter that this existence was also hidden, the essential part was that it be somewhat visible. Felix questions the meaning of life, since it is a thing so easy to represent. (Those figurines, which probably outnumber living beings, including all the different species and types of organisms, assert with their silence that life could be like them.) He imagines himself as part of a community of people made from plastic, wood, or any number of other materials; being the only living member of the group, he enjoys, let’s say, an obvious mandate. This all begins on the first of the year, when everyone is still a bit disoriented and unsure of the ground they tread on; as happens in animal fables, there is no way to have the figurines express themselves except by means of human ideas and phrases. Felix realizes this right away and, in his optimism, assigns the figurines names and qualities related to their morphology. They say complexity is unlikely in recently formed communities, so he reverts to a superficial system of classification. For example, he calls the figurine made of wood “the hard worker,” while “the strong one” is made of iron (or another metal), and the one made of cloth is “the soft one.” The most enigmatic moniker goes to the figurine made of plastic, who becomes “the artificial one.”

  Felix tries to make life in the community as real as possible, but by the fifteenth of January he already understands that the only true thing about it is the illusion of cohabitation, which is so close to fiction and for which he is almost entirely responsible. He imagines his room in the Hotel Salgado, where the figurines also sleep, having assumed the role of travelers passing through. In this he finds a justification for the extra beds, and he is surprised by the agility with which some of them can clamber up to the sill of the higher window. Sometimes he is awakened in the middle of the night by the footsteps of someone headed down the hallway to use the telephone, trusting that the time difference will mean their relatives will already be up. This makes Felix think about objects in general, like the telephone, or the beds, and how their artificiality—insofar as they are man-made objects and therefore subject to invention, first, and then fabrication—has more in common with the hyper-artificial condition of figurines than it does with humanity. They are beings that know nothing of delirium or nightmares; through their silence, because they only express themselves if Felix arranges it, they reveal a trace of life that eludes life itself. This vestige is reminiscence: even if none of them has existed in reality, there is a real model behind each one, thinks Felix, that could appear at any moment but remains latent in the meantime, waiting for some human confluence to wake it. This is the fascinating thing about dolls, he thinks during a night of insomnia, there is no trickery or complex operation; they always seem ready to take on life and movement.

  And so, during that sleepless night, he remembers a photography exhibition. Felix has arrived at an old, dilapidated home with high walls that smells of stale air, dust, and moisture, as if the restoration, or demolition, had been interrupted by the end of the workday. It has been night for several hours and through the silence he hears his own breath as a sustained sigh of resignation. He had been walking all afternoon, he’d breathed the sickly air downtown in that city facing the ocean, and eventually found that mansion from another time with its simple poster, lit by a single spotlight in the dark night, announcing a documentary exhibition about the era of political violence.

  As he walks from one room to the next, he gets the unhappy sensation of visiting misery. What is being exhibited is something at once familiar to him and unknown; both things, what he knows and what he does not, overwhelm him. He has a general base of information that is not entirely useless, but still is not sufficient to help him fill in the images. The result is weariness and detachment, as well as a feeling of having betrayed the intentions of the exhibit and, to a certain extent, the memory or lesson it wants to communicate. He had seen few people on the street before entering, and not a single car during his entire walk along the avenue that skirts the coast. The city seemed empty, as if a disaster had occurred but left no trace; as he walked, it occurred to Felix that he seemed to be playing one of those eccentric individuals who remains completely unaware they are in the middle of a catastrophe. Perhaps due to this, and to the stillness he encounters in each room, he thinks he is the only visitor (and the last, as always). He also assumes that the exhibition’s guards are still conversing quietly among the shadows outside the entrance, having chosen the breeze off the water over the atmosphere indoors, as they were when he arrived, the darkness under the trees obscuring the embroidery and ornamentation of their uniforms, which, vaguely evoking a policeman’s, are meant to make them seem more important than they are.

  Felix thinks about the images hanging on the walls, about what they are meant to represent, and remarks to himself that he never felt so confused anywhere else. A gentle breeze filters in through the cracks in the dilapidated walls and rustles the photographs like a ghost; it is in this moment that he is startled to notice that someone has materialized at his side: a woman with Asian features stares at the photo in front of her, unmoved. Her body is covered by a single article of clothing, a long raincoat that skims the ground. Felix runs his eyes across the floor and sees something like a surface of dirt mixed with or concealed by little pieces of different things, probably remnants of the residence’s masonry or its old flooring, and realizes this was the reason he hadn’t heard her approach. They exchange a surprised or apologetic smile, which my friend can’t sustain because when he turns back to the photographs he sees two corpses tossed haphazardly onto a farm wagon.

  As if it were a recent but hazy memory, he understands now that those bodies did not seem real to him at first: he took them for extravagant or outrageous subjects that silently changed temperature and, as they grew increasingly solid, dedicated themselves to achieving a stiffness similar to a human’s. He’d always thought that dolls should telegraph their condition as fabrications in order to be believable; now it seemed to him that those two bodies had managed to resemble their models by revealing their artificiality. Felix imagines two short, imprecise characters walking through the high altitude desert toward the farm wagon, obeying an imperious order they had not been able to resist, which was that they die—the greatest proof of its authority was this photo in which they appear, rigid: the photo of a deed done. Doubt insinuates itself only in their postures. Accustomed to seeing corpses in restful poses or funereal solemnity, whoever sees these bodies might wonder about their unnatural appearance. Indeed, Felix thinks that their poses seem forced, as if death found them in that exact place and they got stuck imitating dead weight—denied, let’s say, even posthumous physical relief. Meanwhile, the involuntary desire for a next breath is etched onto their faces like a living expression. One of the victims has almond-shaped eyes, like the woman in the raincoat. Felix tries to see the man’s face in more detail, but the glint of the sun shining directly on it makes this impossible. It seems risky to turn around just then, he is afraid the woman will sense his thoughts; as a consolation, he recalls the image of one of the guards, who also had Asian features, responding to his greeting from the shadows as Felix entered the building. He isn’t sure whether to believe in the coincidence, rather, between the late hour and the dilapidated residence, he is not entirely sure where he is.

  In some of the rooms there are banners or placards on the walls: these are commentaries, explanations, or timelines. Perhaps without meaning to, they recall the tapestries and curtains that probably adorned the residence’s main rooms in its heyday, when it was the home and above all the quotidian space of a wealthy traditional family. (This, Felix now realizes, is another thing that o
ld estate overlooking the sea has in common with the Hotel Salgado and its past as a distinguished mansion that constantly made its presence felt, despite erstwhile frequent maintenance and extensions.) Extending the comparison, the photos exhibited that day would be the paintings from before, stripped of their ornamental frames and their aristocratic motifs. He has read in several advertisements, and also on the large and small posters he sees everywhere he goes, that the exhibition seeks to illustrate the political violence that descended on the country and lasted for decades, an experience that has not been fully processed and which tends to be erased from collective memory, though it remains as a trauma or as an unknown, or as both things at once, for much of the population. Felix thinks that this task, like so many others, is an impossible one: it would require an infinite archive disseminated without pause. He finds it unsettling that something as old as violence could have this new element, that is, being the object of observation and study; as if everyone needed to know they came from the era of the crime, from that sordid aspect of history, in order to understand some part of themselves for the first time, whether as victims, or not.

  Intentionally or otherwise, the images have an ambiguous effect. Some are brutally direct in the way they present the violence but, to Felix, these are dulled by their exhibition. The path through the show, the way it is divided thematically, the entire home filled with photographs, even the recorded voices of a few of its protagonists, characters who were deliberately murdered hours after saying something that is now repeated day and night in certain rooms like an eternal nightmare or a message from beyond the grave; the idea of offering violence up for contemplation or presenting it as a series of curated documents seems to Felix like a means of enduring it. On one hand, the aftermath is not part of the photos, its manifestation was more drastic; as such, the exhibition is a way of showing what happened, as if the images were trying to recover the events from the cloud of ignorance into which they had settled, to endow them with the presence they once had. On the other hand, the photos are stable images: they waited, there was time to select them and, later, to hang them on the walls, where now they wait for visitors’ eyes to fall on them. Felix takes short, cautious steps through the space, as if he were in a museum, the same way he supposes everyone else does.

  Sitting in his room, which happens to look a lot like the galleries in the exhibition, Felix remembers identifying two groups or types of photos. One showed events in progress, while the other showed the effects of what had happened; the distinction was hard to establish and at times could seem arbitrary or unnecessary. Some of the images, for example, consisted of razed plots of land and inert bodies, the general aftermath of destruction followed by neglect; others showed the episode as it was happening (ceremonies, requisitions, protests, confrontations, and so on). The photos in the first group were scenes of death or desolation, and Felix imagined the reactions of the other people who went to see the show (they probably tried to look away, sometimes without success). He was moved, however, not by the cruelty that these beings endured, but rather by the isolation and loneliness of the category that had been assigned to them: individuals from a bygone era, now under observation. (Not by denying their displacement and the autonomy, say, they’d achieved at the end of their lives, but rather through the crime, centered on their bodies and emphasized as an example, which perhaps inadvertently made them occupy an problematic space between redemption and scorn.) In contrast, the photos from the other group showed living subjects for the most part; Felix thought these seemed especially theatrical, performances designed to confirm the spontaneous apathy inspired by the dead, whose images appeared just a few meters away in every room. They were scenes that reflected another time. Felix found it paradoxical that the photos of corpses could still have such force, as if the bodies occupied a perpetual present and never stopped being models of death, while the images of the living, with their clothes, postures, and backdrops providing definitive marks of their vintage, were the ones that seemed to age.

  Between all the doors, vestibules, antechambers, corridors, and the path indicated by red cardboard arrows hanging from the walls, the house unfolded like a labyrinth the visitor was meant to improvise a way through. As such, Felix was not surprised to find a new grand hall, two hours into his visit. He thought again how dances and social events must have been held there, in its heyday. Now, though, the walls revealed years of neglect through cracks, holes, and various layers of peeling paint. The ceiling, with its array of mutilated, unrecognizable ornaments, seemed more menacing because it was so high. That this room had retained its importance was evident in the fact that they had hung just two large photos on the side walls, which Felix imagined had been covered with mirrors in the old days. The photo on the left was of the short and narrow main street in a small town that could not accommodate all the people who had gathered there. It was hard to tell where the picture had been taken from, it was neither a particularly low angle nor a high one, and Felix imagines the photographer climbing up an electrical post. There are no women or children in the image, but it seems like the whole town is gathered. This might be due to the people’s faces, which—all looking in the same direction or intensely focused, absorbed in their thoughts as if trying to remember a script and waiting for whatever might happen next, things that give off an air of importance—give the sense of a neighborhood assembly.

  Each group (residents, protesters, policemen, dogs) is identifiable by its particular clothing or uniform (or, in the case of the dogs, by a complete lack of clothing) and because each acts as one might expect under the circumstances. There are also police vans and regular unmarked cars, and a line of small businesses on either side of the street, each one with its small or eye-catching sign. The political conflict is supposed to present itself in this world, which seems built for a different purpose and dedicated to other things. Despite the lack of space produced by the cars, each group has found its place. The protesters occupy one half of the block and are looking toward the police, who have taken the other half. Then there are the other residents, the onlookers, and the dogs, who watch both groups indiscriminately with their backs to the storefronts, though their gaze does seem attentive and in some cases quite specific. Given the content of some of the other photos, Felix finds this scene quaint and somehow innocent; however, he thinks there are—or, rather, he thinks he sees—strings extending upward from each individual, strings that most likely govern the actions of these beings and where they turn their eyes.

  Now, in the Hotel Salgado, he remembers this fact and realizes it did not catch his attention then, though he certainly found it difficult to understand. Felix imagined the townspeople convened in a narrow mountain valley as if it were a point isolated somewhere in the depths, visible only through a combination of chance and the world’s indifference. The strings left the photo and spread along the walls, mingling with the fissures and cracks, or maybe they sketched them, making themselves look like delicate, disguised trails of shadow stretched toward the ceiling, as if the individual townspeople had agreed to offer an alternate version of themselves: less willful and perhaps more fatalistic. This had nothing to do with ideology or political conflict, Felix thought, but rather with people’s need to ensure their survival, even if not everyone was aware in that moment what was happening to them (this fact might be clearest in the case of the dogs). Felix believes that in this locale, in the midst of this solitude and due to an unusual combination of circumstances, the hidden ability to temporarily reduce one’s being and present oneself according to an alternate nature revealed itself in the brief moment the photo was taken; people so overwhelmed by their considerable or meager free will that they need to rest, to delegate, to become someone or something else.

  Felix feels he is in the uncomfortable position of needing to decipher the obvious. The photo on the opposite wall shows another scene: a desert with stony summits in the distance and lower peaks in front of them. The white line of a highway can occasionally
be seen, crossing and dividing the mountains, as if their upper reaches belonged to an alternate, inaccessible world. Subtle variations in light and color, shadow and depth, create a series of interconnected visual planes that, thinks Felix, exist in perpetual conflict. Despite the sharp angles of the terrain, with its daunting precipices, ledges, and ravines that in some cases look impassable, the view is presented from a distance under the friendly rubric of an orderly landscape. A few places on the peaks are hidden from sight, and it is possible to imagine something like rural strongholds there, tiny fields resembling yards or vegetable gardens. There is no trace of animal life.

  In that house built a few meters from the ocean, Felix sees the images of those people left naked and dead, each in a different pose, numb and rigid, occupying the imposing wall assigned to them. The bodies are scattered according to no apparent logic, but they have all been tossed from a vehicle driving in a straight line, its wheels leaving two pale strips of earth behind them. This produces the contradictory sensation of disarray and deliberateness, as if a new layer of ordered forms had added itself to the silence. The third or fourth figure is a half-buried man in a strange, almost vertical, position with his head and one arm raised, like a swimmer mid-stroke. Neutral elements that might go unnoticed but are still relevant surround this scene: the uniform gray of the sky, the desert landscape described above, the irregular peaks and vast stretches of rocky terrain. Of all the bodies—the opaque nakedness of their skin contrasting the pallor of the rocks; the thick mounds of hair between their legs, under their arms, and on their heads like appliqués made of wool or cloth stuck there to make their presence more vivid—the half-buried man is the most enigmatic and the only one that inspires, through his action, a sense of life. Nonetheless, this extravagant activity makes him less believable; Felix thinks that he has chosen simulation, which is what separates him from fabricated beings. Perhaps this is due to the artificiality of his position, which one tends to associate with acting. Beyond what the photo’s description says, he thinks, this excessive detail renders the whole scene somewhat theatrical, and this theatricality is practically the only trace of human behavior.