The Planets (26 page)

SIX

It was like a solar eclipse, but in reverse. He pictured the night turned to day without prologue or intervention, the urgent din of the animals and then the return of darkness. This is what it would be like not to wake up, to fall asleep like on any other day, but with the knowledge that there would be no dawn. Bad thoughts are replaced by worse ones, he ventured, resting the empty bottle on the floor. Face down on his mattress, his arms hanging to either side, Grino selected from among the few “scenes of abundance” that helped him tolerate his unfortunate situation. It was the sea, the far end of an elongated bay flanked on both sides by mountains that were higher and more uneven on the right than on the left. According to his memory of the photographs, waves appeared like uniform reproductions of the horizon, that remarkable plane from which they emerged, by virtue of a complex mechanism of constant repositioning. They were spread evenly apart and their height was the same; their crests, crowned with airy foam, seemed more like embellishments than crests. Thanks to the photo, the natural world—there is nothing more natural than the sea, with its unchanging horizon—showed its artificial, even mechanical, condition. To Grino’s mind, this was the source of the bewildering abundance of the scene. Simple people like him cannot help but feel overwhelmed by nature; yet in a strange, compensatory turn of intelligence and perception, the supernatural appears straightforward to them. This is how the urge to travel that torments so many begins, thought Grino, pinned to the bed by the weight of his bottle of rum and the semen he had freed earlier, caught somewhere between confusion and sleep. Despite the difficulties, he was someone who felt capable of getting up at any moment and setting out on foot in search of that photographic landscape, though in reality it might be impossible to find. Anyone could see that, just as the photo was a partial—and, in its way, false—depiction of an imprecise model, the sea, too, and the waves and the beach that bordered the water like a ring of ash, were nothing more than metaphors of freedom. It is in this second or supplementary nature that, paradoxically, simple souls find their proof, the landscape: anything able to bear multiplication and use, like waves and especially photos, holds a truth that transcends the simple and mundane deep within it. And so, Grino understood, his devotions converged in relocation and religion. The machine that moved the waves was the same one that made photos and guided both planets and people.

No one is immune to deceit, not even their own; take Sito, for example, who I think still believes he fooled me, as I wrote earlier. His mistake was not controlling his impulse to say more than I expected. Excess, in such cases, either reveals the deceit or becomes a falsehood itself, in one way or another. I talked too much, as well, and because of that we both clung to the tiny bit of truth at the mottled nucleus of the stories we told, but at least I can honestly say, as I do now, that
I didn’t tell him that
or
I only told him half the story
. Despite his misdirection, he would have had a hard time not telling me something, no matter how minor. Sito has probably drawn his own conclusions, inferred things based on my words and my silences, and thinks that I am much more transparent than my reticence would suggest. In any event, it is important to say this because, though it may seem obvious, certain events remain unknown if they are not brought out into the open. I am referring to something I did not tell Sito, something I was careful to conceal due, in truth, to my own weakness and shame.

I don’t know how it might seem—strange, ridiculous, foolish—but I know what it was: futile. To put it concretely, there was a time when I tried to change my name; I wanted to take M’s. Perhaps tried is too strong a word, and I should say that I was “inclined” to change my name to his. Since he had the misfortune of being killed, since it was he who had suffered martyrdom, it seemed fair to me that, being the one to have survived, I would compensate for his absence by imposing his name over mine. I didn’t think of it only as a compensation; it was something more profound or superficial, depending on how you look at it: a balance that needed to be restored. I felt that M and I had achieved an unprecedented and varied sense of unity that should be recovered, if only in a purely verbal or even strictly figurative form. Yet despite the simplicity and precision of the reasoning, and setting aside the justice and dignity of the cause, some things are just impossible.

One day I went to a government office on calle Uruguay, the civil registry. That morning marked the beginning of the final episode, until today, of an adventure that has involved M as an intangible companion. I waited in line for a long time with people who needed to file certificates of birth, death, marriage, or adoption, or who needed to correct errors that appeared in the same, or several of these things at once. (There I learned something I had not known before: that there are errors that can just appear, that may not exist as such at first but can all of a sudden abandon the realm of the correct, moving to another and never being discovered, but rather simply materializing at some point as errors.) Aside from ours, there was another, much longer, line of foreigners waiting to do things with their residency; it seemed as though they had been there all night, with friends and relatives along to relieve them from time to time. I’ll say one thing about calle Uruguay: that morning, its wide sidewalk was constantly full.

Inside the building, the line took on a different shape: it zigzagged. When my turn finally came, I said to the clerk, “I’d like to change my name.” “What name?” she asked, not understanding. “Mine,” I said, “I want to change it.” “And may I ask why?” she retorted. “The reason is personal. I want to change it.” “But that’s a public request and we need to know why. If you don’t want to declare your reason, keep your own name.” Those words seemed to end the conversation. She was not a beautiful woman, that is, her expression, which had become her features, hid a prior, perhaps more lively, face. “Wait,” I said. “If I tell you, is there a chance?” “That depends,” she asserted. “Depends on what?” “Depends on the reason.” “What sort of reason could it be?” I asked. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” she said. “But I need to know if I can do it or not,” I insisted. “All right, tell me your reason, and I’ll tell you if you can. But not the other way around, because if I tell you, you’ll just pick one.” According to the card she wore clipped to the pocket of her uniform, her name was Mirta del Soto. “Listen,” I said, emphasizing my
porteño
accent and leaning in as though I were about to tell her a secret, “I want to change my name, and don’t care what reason I give. What I want is to do it quickly.” “All right,” she replied, in a weary voice, “tell them that you discovered that your parents aren’t your parents. We’ll verify it and you can have it changed.” “No, that won’t work.” “Oh, you don’t say,” she snapped. “It can’t be just any name. It has to be a specific one,” I explained. “In order to do that, we need to know the reason,” she raised her voice, “it’s the reason that justifies taking that specific name instead of any other.” “But what are the reasons?” “I can’t tell you that.” “There must be some sort of code, some rule book, where they’re all written down.” “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know where it is.” “So how do you know if a reason is valid or not?” “I don’t worry about that; I just take the forms. But I’m telling you: without a reason, it won’t get looked at.” She seemed agitated, but she wasn’t; it was just her way of doing her job. She would probably forget all this right away, but I tried to make sure that didn’t happen.

When I try to remember Mirta del Soto’s face now, it is as though it had dissolved, leaving only the indifferent recollection of an equally unassuming ugliness. Her features, barely defined, appeared to be subject to the order of weariness that had imposed itself on her other traits—traits that, at one time, might have flattered her—flattening, for example, the intonation of her voice or repressing any lively movement of her eyes. Her smock, the identification card, the counter at chest height, and, behind it in the half light, rows of desks, many of which were empty: all these things made her, in my moment of need, seem like a vaguely liturgical figure placed there to perform the ritual of changing my name. But she also appeared to me, more and more tangibly, as an individual, precisely because of her negative traits. (Features, a face: a mystery. I say this in general, beyond the case of Mirta del Soto. A person’s face is something brutish, a landscape waiting to be revealed with neither a before nor an after, only what is there in the moment of its discovery, overlooking its enigmas.)

Her way of speaking, inseparable from her foreign-sounding voice and the way her reflexive common sense did away with people’s—or, in this case, my—urgency, or at least the importance of their reasons: in her, all of this spoke to me of a sound and self-sufficient universe in which there was no doubt about names, colors, or memories. The unwavering simplicity embodied by Mirta del Soto did not reveal the advantages of a simple truth, nor did it possess the power of minor wisdom, but I was affected by the efficacy of her even, uncomplicated logic that worked like a portable magic kit, turning something complex into something simple and making the obscure transparent. Over the course of two weeks, I went to see her three more times, and on the fourth she let me wait for her near the exit of the registry.

I saw her without her uniform. She dressed carelessly, wearing a brown rain jacket over a red sweater. She wanted to go somewhere far from there, where her co-workers wouldn’t see her (she said
colleagues
: “where my colleagues won’t see me”). We walked along Uruguay toward Rivadavia. On the way, Mirta talked about her family, or what had become of it. She lived alone with her mother, who was bedridden. She had no husband and no children; her father, who had abandoned them in the distant past, was just a hazy memory. (Right away, I could tell she was lying; something indefinable, impossible to calculate, convinced me of it.) For some time, Mirta had wondered whether her mother might not have been pleased to have her, the daughter, all to herself after her father left. What is more, she could be two, like during the stretches of time when her mother would call her Mirto, as though she were a boy. “So you see,” she said, making a gesture in the air, “there are always reasons to want to change your name,” alluding to my reticence to give my own. Once we got to Corrientes, it became harder for us to talk—I should admit that it didn’t really seem necessary, either—we could not walk next to one another on the narrow sidewalks, so instead we walked with her in front and me behind, our way often blocked by people waiting for buses or leaving stores and buildings.

We went to a café on the avenida de Mayo. As soon as we sat down, Mirta covered the side of her face with her hand, warning me, “That guy over there is the section manager at the registry. If he sees me with you, I’m done for.” Far from concealing her, the gesture made her stand out, as did my spontaneous reaction of turning my head to watch him walk past. Mirta was out in the open, but the section manager, surprised and guarded because of our movements, did not recognize her. She loved scenes like that; in those moments she did not just imagine herself to be another, but many others at once; the others were also different—they could be other, too. After a while we cut to the chase: She told me that the only chance I had was to demonstrate my “longstanding use” of the new name, for which I was going to need proof. This proof would be in the form of documents, that is, I needed to present documents that made it clear that I had been called by the name that I wished to adopt. Personal documents like letters could help later on, but what mattered were the public ones: an extended and habitual use of the name that left no doubt as to its suitability to identify me. For example, she said, a photo of your graduation that shows you with the new name. Graduation photos, I thought. It was unthinkable; Mirta seemed to be from another planet. The only photo like that I could remember—and that, on the other hand, I was sure I did not have—was one from seventh grade, which of course showed me with my original name. I told her this, but her fatigue had latched on to the first opportunity to take over her mind and, having proposed a solution, even one that was of no use, she felt absolved of having to think of another. She looked out at the street, and it was as though she were sleeping with her eyes open. I observed the almost imperceptible down that covered her face, glowing in reflection from the window, as it grew more dense around her lips to form a delicate plush. Her neck was rough. Maybe it was true, what she said about her mother, I thought; next to her problems, the idea of changing my name with no justification must seem capricious to her. In that case, it would make sense that she would not want to offer alternatives. Until the very end, I wondered if I should tell her the truth. She might really be able to help me, I thought, but realized right away that it could ruin everything. After a while we left the café and walked in the direction of Congreso.

We got all the way to Montevideo without saying a word. I was thinking about M, about how different that walk would be if he were there, how different the city would be. One did not walk with Mirta; it was an operation that resembled being dragged, as though something had us in tow—if not with our participation, at least with our consent. Mirta acted pensive, but she made an effort to talk even when she had nothing to say, which was, after all, why she had been quiet. Whenever the car motors would allow it, I listened to the plastic rustling of her jacket as she walked. A few meters past Montevideo she said, “Well, this is me. This is where I catch the 56.” “All right,” I answered, “well, thanks a lot, Mirta.” She looked off to one side and hesitated: I watched the thought that had been forming over the past two blocks take shape in her head. “I thought you were going to take me somewhere else,” she finally said. In that moment, I understood that Mirta could not help me if I remained a stranger. We continued on toward a hotel on Rincón.