The Planets (18 page)

As I have already written, a recurring subject of the digressions with which we passed the time was to hypothesize about the essential differences between the city and the suburbs: distinctions whose existence could not be questioned. There is no point in repeating our ideas on the matter, many of which were the belated aftereffects of those walks we took while searching for the car, and which had simply been rescued, or rather salvaged, from the depths of M’s consciousness months or even years after the fact. Impressions like the vague recollections being expressed now, in any event. There is no need to clarify that these pages constitute a belated and almost unexpected aftereffect of situations and memories. Compared with the years retained by the average memory, or the span represented by the coming millennium, the choice to recount the few events of this story, not quite two decades after they occurred, might seem a bit hurried. Neither of us would have imagined that, years later, these events would be written down on paper. If we had foreseen this, we would have acted differently, guiding our steps according to our idea of posterity; fortunately, we did not. (This foreseeing should be clarified, however, given that if M knew the reasons why I would end up writing these pages, he certainly would have done what was needed to avoid his abduction, though, in fact, he did nothing at all to cause it. They say that one could avoid innumerable problems, mistakes, and catastrophes if one knew how things were going to turn out, but this is an impossible dream. The most extreme example of this is that we are all certain of death—and even, expanding things a bit, about the decline of civilization, the destruction of the environment, and the inevitable ostracism of the sun—but are still unable to avoid the end. What keeps us from losing hope in the face of this inescapable truth? A belief in the interim, in the fact that, in the meantime, things happen that are worth experiencing.)

No one imagined that, years later, those walks would end up this way, taking the form of words on paper. Still, our steps—as firm and as weightless as the mornings in those days—shone with their own light, without assistance. Those walks through Greater Buenos Aires were predictable, probably boring, and perhaps too speculative. The truth is that very little happened, almost nothing; it was like sailing with a course but no destination. Whoever believes in destiny expects, at the very least, that things should happen; though it might be a mistake, just as no one thinks of tedium as a property of action, no one considers passivity to be the work of destiny, when actually it is. So minor and insubstantial were the events we stumbled upon that the idea of living at the mercy of chance would only have provoked incredulity in M and me. We were contemplative. When not overwhelmed by the desert, travelers see mirages; they expect this, make nothing of it, and carry on accordingly. But to us, saturated by the landscape of the suburbs, the absence of action was intoxicating. We wandered like planets, our orbits well outside the sphere of activity. Events did not affect us; they belonged to an order that was not only absent, but had been effaced, dissipating just a few meters before we reached them.

It was always like that during the time of our walks, one morning after another. And yet one day—which seemed to have been marked to produce, in the space of a few hours, something that had not happened for months on end—would be the exception. We were at the middle of one of those typical suburban blocks with little traffic and unused sidewalks. Because our surroundings kept us from any practical sort of trance, our only option, apart from walking and looking, was to talk. We made bets on finding the car. The father calculated fifteen days, M bet thirty, and I—so as not to discourage them—said a week, when I really thought it would either take more than four months or was simply impossible. Since finding the car depended, at the end of the day, on coincidence, anyone could see that these calculations were just another topic of conversation. The father would say, “In fifteen days we will have covered more than 5,000 blocks, which, added to the 12,000 we had already done, make 17,000,” though he did not specify why that was the number required. M, for his part, doubled the figure, perhaps thinking that twice as many opportunities might present themselves that way—as though we might find two cars, or the same car two times. He would take a deep breath and say, “We walk 11,000 blocks every month, plus the 12,000 we’ve done already makes 23,000. With that many, nothing could get by us.” His father would get annoyed and cast him a sidelong glance. “I’d have to be crazy to walk that.” Our conversations were of that nature. In my case, I thought we still had something like 44,000 blocks to go—four months, plus the 12,000 that, according to M and his father, we had already covered, or it might even have been that we needed a total of 100,000 blocks, or eight months. But since I did not think it opportune to be honest, I only said, “I think it will all be settled in a week, with the car waiting for us on X as though nothing had happened. I don’t think we have more than 2,500 blocks to go.” X was the street where M lived. They listened to me as though a divinity were speaking. “From your lips to God’s ears,” the father said.

At that moment we reached a corner. We saw, due east, a sun that cast no shadow on the pavement on either side of the street. On the next block, M and I thought about the religious implications, for both of our beliefs, of the words “From your lips to God’s ears,” though they might have been nothing more than another way of saying, “Let’s hope,” as one might do several times a day. Just as we were crossing the street, we heard a scream, a mix of panic and grief trailing off into a wail; it came from behind the line of doors. To get closer we needed only to keep walking, but we stopped instead of advancing; the surprise held us paralyzed in the middle of the street. Another scream, and someone came running out at full speed, though not in our direction. The man’s pants were open and he was having a hard time holding them up. One could see, in his movements, the clumsy syntax of escape: the fear that drew his feet in search of a safe place to hide and the contradictory, apparently mutually exclusive, movement of his body, which froze for a moment with each new scream. The man had raped, but the rape had not reached its conclusion; perhaps this was the cause of the tension between urgency and interruption. People who lived nearby peered out through their windows, others flooded into the street.

Overturned bicycles appeared on the street: people were coming over to watch. It is strange that when something happens, very often something terrible and unexpected, one’s first reaction is to wait, as though only another event could bear the tragedy out. People crowded around like ants, circling, exchanging information. And so a somewhat brief period elapsed in which no one noticed the passage of time, all were so absorbed by the gathering. Once it had its fill of words, the tribe regained its disquiet. It wanted facts. A statement, more obvious than novel, was made: The police were slow in coming, and should hurry. It was not hard to gather the details of the story, a familiar series of sordid scenes. The girl or young woman—they mentioned her by name, which left her age unclear—was a victim of the jealousy of her mother, who shut her inside the house whenever she went out, locking all the doors and leaving her without keys. This maternal jealousy had come to be projected through the throat of the daughter, in the form of screams and nervous fits, an echo of itself. That which was sown by one was reaped by the other, it seemed. The lecher, for his part, had fallen back on an old technique—entering through the roof; when he realized he was in danger, he tested the efficacy of another, also old—a leap from a window. Nonetheless, between one event and the next, there was a mystery that was difficult to resolve; at first the lecher thought it was danger he sensed, a threat inscribed in the scream of the girl, but he immediately realized it was a weariness subject to something far deeper, something fairly complex and difficult to gauge. It was the weariness of the limit; it is always exhausting to exist at a limit. It was something related not to time, to the prolongation of a condition, but rather to the intensity—or depth—of that state. To be on the verge of flight, on the verge of invasion: frontiers that, when mentioned in this way, may seem trivial or as light as a cloud, but which weighed the shoulders down with a load that became increasingly difficult to bear, especially when they arose unexpectedly. This weight bent a body in two and leaned over its waist, grabbing on to its hips; and in the midst of it all, there was the urgency of escape. This could last unbearably long.

The women who lived nearby were left at the mercy of fear and consternation, and yet several were less indignant at the incident than at the detestable publicity that had been afforded a private act. Children were running around; every now and then a few would shoot off after receiving an order from the adults. There was also talk that the father, who had been separated from the family for some time, had taken his revenge on the mother through the body of their daughter. Within five minutes everything was possible, even true. There were more hypotheses: that the mother had instigated it, leaving the house at the most opportune moment in order to destroy both husband (or ex-husband) and daughter, for whom she felt no love; this was why she ordered the girl to sleep in her bed, so the father would mistake her for the mother (that is, for her) and both would find damnation through sex. It could also have been that the mother, allied with the father against their daughter, had planned the rape. Many described the house as a living hell: at night, the screams could be heard along the entire street, the neighborhood falling asleep to the recent memory of profanities. They preferred not to talk about the victim, draping over her a veil of suspicion more cruel than even the most aberrant accusation; it was a silence whose fissures gave way to complaints, disdain, slander, and eventually condemnation. Several acknowledged wearily that they had seen her on the corner well into the night, sitting on the sidewalk with boys from outside the neighborhood.

M and I looked at one another; without saying anything, we agreed that if these were the things that had to transpire so that something would happen on our walks, it was better that nothing at all occur. We were not only disillusioned by the situation, empirically speaking, but also by the tenor of the comments. It was disappointing that, in a land as slow, as luminous and, in its way, as elastic as the suburbs, common sense would reign as resoundingly as it did everywhere else, even in the capital. Is the world the same all over? we would ask ourselves later, as we remembered the scene and compared it with others, which were always the same though they occurred in different places.

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.