The Planets (7 page)

The other listened to M with particular attention throughout the story. From time to time the bus would slow down, until the driver noticed the delay and drove at full speed for a few blocks, only to slow down again later. When M finished, the other reflected on the obvious: that he could not find any connection between the story and the matter of more or less authentic Jews. It’s strange that you don’t see it, said M. It’s not the story itself, but the insecurity about one’s own nature, one’s own identity. The Jews are like Sergio and Miguel, each believing he’s the other, before or after, less or more than himself; they pass through life in this indecision, some with faith and others in puzzlement. When they take steps to discover the truth, everything becomes distorted. The universe that brought them to question their condition is disturbed and they remain adrift, somewhere in the expanse, while fear goes to work inside them. The Jews were never certain of their origins, which is why they found themselves surrounded by insecurity: both that of the world they believed they were observing and to which, despite everything, they were certain they belonged, and that of a more palpable and menacing sort, the kind represented by hostility.

The Orthodox Jews had passed and their long coats were probably already being illuminated by a different light, but they were nonetheless still among us, summoned by the narrative and the conversation. M could make any number of arguments, including contradictory ones, in favor of the authentic nature of religious Jews, but I sensed something in everything he said that exceeded the literal: a desire for the words to become something else, to reach another level, an auxiliary plane on which they did not need any proof to assert their truth. The subaltern and equivocal character of his language, paradoxically, turned the moment into an absolute truth. It may seem mysterious, but the excess borne by that which accompanies the voice is the substance to which images, commentaries, and influence yield. In this way, more than for what he actually said, M was credible because of these intimations, despite that fact that one—in this case, me—was only in a position to judge what was actually heard.
“It is the phrase,” he would say to the other on more than one occasion when they returned to the subject, “not the word, that establishes a prior truth” (understanding a phrase to be the combination of things that accompany the word).

The religious Jews could have been anywhere at that moment, but there was no question that an imagined pattern connected their bodies with ours, which were now walking down the wide sidewalks of Villa Urquiza along calle Altolaguirre, as though we—them and us—were figures, entities that were equally vital to this constellation. And so, he continued, even within time we are joined with them in solidarity as we define space. The story of Miguel and Sergio was not enigmatic because of its ending, but rather because of the way in which it unfolded, which has no end. And because of the old man, who puts his wisdom into practice at the same time he renounces it through the use of magic. A boot is, after all, a boot, and very few would be able to assign special powers to it or introduce it to the realm of the enchanted; that it should fit Miguel’s foot was not only a question of faith, it was also a matter of sacrificing the cause in order to give life to the effect.

TWO

The punishment obeyed the laws of oblivion. One would think that, had his powers been greater, the old man would have been able to avoid that particular outcome; but it is also true, as is often the case in these circumstances, that magic only exercises its power in a realm enriched by the upright conduct of man. This fact, which in most cases would have been an insurmountable obstacle, seemed like a secondary issue, a simple lapse, when it came to Miguel and Sergio. That they had decided to exchange identities did not matter; the real problem was that, by doing so, they would forget the essence of their own, their name. While they were not to blame for this error, they would suffer its consequences as though they had been. The parents, probably infected by the insightful fantasy of the children—and who watched, in the most uncomplicated way, the emergence of that which they themselves desired with such intensity and which they fought so hard, being adults, to define and overcome—seeing them come home one day transformed into the other, said “Why not?” to the inspired idea and, by doing so, condemned them both. Not even forgetting, in so many ways a necessity and even a virtue, could describe the circumstance, because it also meant uncertainty. So many things are called forgetting, and the confusion among these does not align with the concrete ambiguity of the problem. For a long time, Miguel and Sergio asked themselves if perhaps they were, in fact, brothers—the four adults got along so well that it was natural to consider themselves the offspring of the same community—but a shiver would run through them if they pursued these suspicions too far. Brother and friend have never been incompatible conditions, though in this case the nature of their friendship, so intimate and so problematic, clouded the idea of brotherhood with an inexplicable sense of incest. Meanwhile their parents drank wine at a rate of six bottles per night and squeezed each others’ waists as they passed, thought Miguel and Sergio once they reached adulthood, remembering intermittent but recurring scenes from their childhood, when the atmosphere would become more relaxed before the two were sent to bed.

Perhaps the parents received their punishment through their children, whose role, in that case, would be unclear; more precisely, what would be unclear would be their autonomy or responsibility for their actions. “What actions? They barely did anything,” I asked. M did not respond. He seemed to be lost in solitude; at that moment either he or I, but one of us, was invisible. It might also have been that the parents did not experience punishment at all, but rather the opposite: life as absolute paradise. In that case, the children would have been punished in place of their parents, but without knowing it. Maybe punishment, like forgetting, was the wrong word. Either way, however it is formulated, the debt is passed on to the children, M continued. Sometimes, without meaning to, the parents would torture them with their jokes, especially when they called them by the other’s name, that is, their original one. For a moment, Miguel and Sergio would imagine that everything had been set right—after all, things always happened that way; everything can be restored or destroyed in one brief moment—but then they would catch the irony in their parents’ gaze, a nuance in the tone of their voices, and would resign themselves once again to their permanent state of self-imposed error.

I asked him several times about the origins of the story; at first, M would answer evasively, then end up admitting what to him was just as obvious as it was enigmatic: that, as I have already written, he heard it once and felt absolutely sure that he already knew it. He knew all the details, even the most obscure: the ones that were, despite being problematic, impossible to forget or to set aside. And of course, he knew the ending. Yet each time he heard it, it seemed as though it were for the first time, or as though it prefigured a dream. On the other hand, if the story were interrupted he would sit there in suspense, unable to react, as though he suddenly found himself abandoned in an unfathomable landscape without any means of orientation. These conditions may seem contradictory, but in M they proved their correlation: the same spatial perception was at work. In this case it was simply directed at a story, which made it fluctuate between conjecture, confusion, and ignorance. His mind was organized according to recollections; there was an ideal state or territory to which he was certain he belonged and from which emerged the collection of impressions, and even experiences, that made their way to him.

This might lend existence an inexact and, above all, a symbolic quality—depending on the moment, the situation, and the need—but did not strip it of its ineffable reality. A balance like this hardly seems compatible with everyday life, but M maintained it, partially because his beliefs had always been hypothetical, stopping just on the verge of certainty. The absolute meant destruction: the absolute collapsed under its own weight. It was his deepest conviction that forests should never be too dense or plains entirely flat, that peaks could never be too steep or days utterly bright; nature always maintained an excess: nothing was completely anything, there was always something more that could be added. This was the circumstance, this absence, that kept dissolution at bay. For this reason, and much like the time he found an eye, he paid uneven attention to, and was perhaps even a little negligent of, the signs and symbols handed down to him by reality.

One Sunday morning, the embankment seemed like a surface expanding. (The embankment is bigger on Sunday mornings, M would repeat before describing his walks along the train tracks.) Perhaps the light, sharp under clear skies, was the cause of this amplitude. An invisible tunnel saturated with silence and transparency rose up from the sides of the embankment; it was an illusory radius, but it was almost palpable. M walked along the tracks, lengthening his steps, trying to make them match the railroad ties. He was focused on the shapes on the track—thin oil stains—and the industrious plants along the rails, and was halfway attentive to the murmurs emitted by his surroundings. The boredom that, according to him, had driven him from his house moments before had evolved into calmness, hope, but not eagerness. Four walls, he said, would have driven him crazy; on the other hand, the open countryside would have crushed him—too much space for just one person, as he used to say. What he meant was that the parallel glint of the rails, and the houses so low they seemed crushed against the ground, created an ideal frame for contemplation and thought. Generally, he did not stray far from his house, although he did not stay very close, either; sometimes, because of the curves, he was closer—along a straight line—than the distance created by the tracks.

That morning, the tall grass, bent slightly by the breeze and a bit more by its own weight, caught the light, and from time to time the late call of a rooster could be heard from some nearby property or another. “What a morning!” thought M. “Such a hypnotic intelligence to it.” Clarity, air, silence; light. Walking along the tracks stimulates thought. I’m in my room and notice the time, I can hear the sounds of cleaning—my mother and the neighbors—I hear a television—nothing irritates me more than the sound of a television in the morning—and with all of Sunday ahead of me, I feel a sense of terror at the monotony to come: I am bored in advance. So I get up and go for a walk. One imagines that things reach a limit at the tracks, even go beyond it, particularly at night, but that all signs are erased by the morning. Everything that has occurred either belongs to the obscurity of oblivion or was once harmonious (but that never happens). Being young, M believed that at night evil—pure horror, according to his imagination—occupied space in such a way as to saturate it without leaving a trace; the disruption of the landscape was so great that not even the most patient efforts of man would be enough to restore it, and yet every day the morning set about its reconstruction and, in fact, did so without any help at all. Partial measures would have been no match for evil’s absolute power of devastation. Terror nested there at night, but nonetheless during the day it inspired the calm confidence of a well-maintained park.

Dying cats and dogs come to the tracks, he continued, to lie down in the vegetation and wait; other times people bring them there, already lifeless. Dead bodies. Someone is walking along and he catches a scent, heavy and sweet, that quickly turns into the undeniable smell of decomposition. As he gets closer, discerning the body and being overtaken by its intolerable stench are one and the same thing. He needs to quicken his pace and get past the critical area, to cross through the field of odor and feel as though he’s gone back to the beginning, the sweet air as an advance toward normalcy. A strange feeling because, even as he keeps moving forward, the return down the scale of odor makes it seem as though he were going back the way he came. But, as also happens with noise, the direction of the wind has an effect.

That morning there was no wind or any dead animals, or at least none that stank. At the most, a faint breeze rustled the vegetation. What a prodigious morning, what extraordinary light, he repeated. The thought that a train might approach seemed unrealistic, not because it was impossible—in fact, one must have been headed that way—but because the tumult of vibrations, noise, and air, the rupture, however fleeting, of the peace of that morning, would have seemed like something from another world. M paused to listen more closely and without realizing it looked up into the sky, as though he were expressing gratitude to a god, then back down at a jumble of weeds that looked as though they had been embedded in the soil by a giant fist. Curved against the blue sky, they wavered just slightly under their own weight, an effect distributed along the line. Further down, the wind could not so much as stir the leaves on the trees; any agitation, like that of the grass, should have shown its cause; otherwise, it would not have been perceived at all. Meanwhile, deafening noises emanated from the houses. On Sundays the neighborhood turned industrial; workshops became factories, there were storehouses where lathes and grinders, if not power saws and sanders, were kept running all day. Mechanics revved motors just to see what they could do. “Shut off” was not part of their vocabulary: the entire neighborhood seemed to have its generators going. You could even hear the sound of hammers on metal. The clamor of machinery was concentrated near the plateau of the tracks and spread upward from there. The silence was an illusion, but the noise, being so frenetic, also turned out to be illusory, like those Sunday afternoons when the stadium seemed to roar.