The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  They looked back over the past and found only one essential moment. By baptizing themselves in jest, by exclaiming in the sharp and unwitting voice of a child, Ciao, Sergio and Ciao, Miguel as they left the schoolhouse, a ritual whose outcome their immature minds were unable to grasp, Miguel and Sergio did nothing less than create themselves. Everything that followed would be secondary to this. Yesterday, when everything was positive, black and white, didn’t matter; what mattered was today, the invisible present in which differences were erased and everything seemed unreal. Like those charmed lives which were able to mitigate failures and thereby free themselves from a precipitous downfall, Miguel and Sergio held on to the hope of restoring the plenitude they had lost in the prehistory of their youth. But they were unable to resist the slow collapse—the true operation of time—that added a sense of ambiguity to their mutual indistinguishability.

  In the end they took to walking. They would choose a street and follow it from one end to the other, navigating changes in its name, and even changes to the street (if the one they had chosen came to an end, they would follow the nearest one that ran in the same direction). To return, they would cross the street and follow the same route all the way back. Seeing them together one would almost think they were siblings, yet something did not quite fit. In their movements, in the distance they kept between themselves, and in the monosyllables they used to communicate, one could sense an unfulfilled promise; a promise that sustained them, yet did not unite them completely. As though they were indeed siblings, but were brother and sister. That was their problem: a slight but radical difference. What could they do now to regain their autonomy? The streets offered no solution: it was only the truly desperate, those given over to the mercy of God, who searched for answers in the streets. Still, they had no choice. The solution was neither in their homes nor inside them, nor could it be found in the past; in fact, that was where the drama began.

  Sad, bewildered, and powerless against their luck, as they walked along avenida Garay one day waiting for the afternoon to end, they would come across a beggar resting against a wall that surrounded a municipal building. From far away he looked like a bundle of clothes; drawing nearer, he appeared to be asleep. It was only from within a few meters that his alert stillness became visible. Before, in the past, the human form used to be more clearly defined, thought Miguel and Sergio; heaps like that were never thought to be anything but people, due in part to the fact that one didn’t tend to find bundles of clothing or fabric left out in the street. (The mass of cloth only appeared to be defenseless, within it breathed a life on guard within its nest.) It was an old man with pale skin and thick eyebrows, into the shadow of which his eyes, gazing out as though from the greatest depths, seemed to recede. Miguel and Sergio froze at the sight of his face, which was veiled by short, sparse stubble discolored by tiny flecks of silver that caught the light. One of them realized that he was not asleep and immediately thought that it was not only poverty or indigence that had put the old man in their path. This old man was one of those whose age is concentrated in their eyes, suggesting a wisdom that transcends experience. He might have had poor vision; perhaps this was the reason for the intensity of his gaze, but the eyes themselves were enough: they would have been wise at any time or in any circumstance. He looked at them, they stopped. A casual remark about a distant street and a bitter one about the state of his back did the rest; they served as a pretext to start a conversation with Miguel and Sergio who, as tends to happen, found themselves under his spell before they knew it.

  They found that the words of the old man transcended their literal meaning. Colors, for example, became sharper when he spoke of them; they took on a shine that was able to stand out through the quality of his speech. At one point Miguel and Sergio felt the same shudder run through them both: it occurred to them that perhaps this old man could help them. And as though the air were condensing in an unusual way—unusual for the climate and circumstance, somewhat theatrical—they noticed a rough incandescence surrounding his shadowy figure (the nimbus of intelligence). And so they started to recount their whole misadventure from the beginning. The old man kept silent as he listened. Voices, saying more or less incomprehensible things, could occasionally be heard from the other side of the wall. When someone spoke really loudly, Miguel and Sergio would stop talking and look up to see that the wall was only a bit taller than they were, and that there was probably an expanse on the other side, an enclosed area, perhaps a garden, where the voices and the people to whom they belonged could walk around. Seen from the street, Miguel and Sergio probably seemed to be talking to a pile of clothes; whoever came a bit closer would think that they were conversing with someone who was asleep. They alone could see the attention with which the old man listened to them, deaf to all other voices and sounds. They went on like that for a long time. The encounter took on such meaning for them that Miguel and Sergio forgot that it might only be a coincidence; they imagined that someone or something—even they themselves, though they found it hard to believe—had guided their steps toward that place. When they finished their story, they waited for the old man’s verdict. The noise of the street returned, distant but vital. While the man reflected, they gave themselves over to the gradual diffusion of their surroundings: the plastic bags and bits of cloth, the dirty wall on which he leaned, the municipal building and its complex, the dilapidated neighborhood and the city as a whole, with all its flattened expanses, were held in suspense. But it was not that the scene was actually dissolving; it simply was not of interest. What mattered was the two of them, after so many years, finally being understood for the very first time. Perhaps the old man had the answer. After talking for a long time, mostly about a few strange moral episodes that he had experienced in own life, he made his decree: “Go to the river. If one of you catches something, come back right away, but if three hours go by without a bite, you won’t have anything to worry about anymore.” Miguel and Sergio looked at each other. They were disappointed by the enigmatic nature of the task; having expected a solution, even if only a bit of advice, they found themselves confronted with an order. They gathered from the words of their maestro that it would be preferable not to catch anything, so they chose to go at night, when they thought there would be less chance of landing a fish.

  They arrived after midnight. The wind was blowing from the east, off the banks of the river, making the darkness even more still. Impassive, they supported the weight of their bodies on the rails of the jetty charged with protecting them from the abyss. Anyone would have realized that they were not fishermen and that, if they were fishing, they were doing so against their will. Gradually, they grew bored, observed the serenity of the air, the water lapping an unknown distance below, the unmatched depth of the darkness. A life of indeterminacy had emptied them of all interests, nothing really mattered; it had been a long time since the future held any tension for them. Five minutes were the same as two weeks, and two weeks the same as three years. But it was also true, as they had proven, that an essential element of friendship was tedium: knowing how to share it and how to tolerate it. This brought them back to the original problem, their mutual indistinguishability. And so, as they ruminated, they allowed themselves to be distracted by the lights they saw nearby: the wavering lanterns of the fishermen, and the ones further off that belonged to the ships.

  At one point, an unexpected movement jerked Sergio’s line. He froze, unable to react. The silence and the darkness would have kept the secret, but the pressure on his finger would not allow him to ignore the situation. After a while he exhaled and said, shakily, “I think something bit.” “What do you mean, something?” Miguel asked, unsettled. “How should I know? Something, I don’t know.” “What is it doing?” “What is what doing?” “It, the thing you caught,” said Miguel, “it must be doing something.” “Nothing” replied Sergio, “it’s tugging.” They started to reel the line in slowly, hoping that their prey would break free; so slowly it did not seem like they w
ere bringing anything in at all. The fish could have grown old and Sergio, in his anguish, would have offered it some of his own time—entire years, if it would have made a difference—for it not to appear. These lines seem short, he thought. They were both nervous; a profound shock heaved them out of the dark night they knew and into a darker one they did not. Miguel prayed that he would not have to take Sergio’s place although, in reality, it was actually Miguel who was reeling in and Sergio who was grateful he had not had a bite. They finally saw, tangled in the line, a rain boot. It was hard not to be disappointed by the climax. Having expected, though it would have complicated matters, a real fish, a real body thrashing about in a fight for its life, the river answered their hopes with a rubber boot filled with mud. They immediately began to analyze the nature of their trophy; while on one hand it could hardly be considered the spoils of fishing, it had, on the other hand, obviously come from the river. Fear, and the desire be free of their problems, as the maestro had predicted they would be if they failed to catch anything in three hours, impelled them to continue fishing. That was their mistake: they stayed there with their poles at the ready until—once the three hours had come to an end—a storm surged up along the river. The wind blew with an extraordinary force and the water turned rough, threatening to topple the jetty. The waves seemed to be reaching out for something: they broke high and scattered like horizontal rain. Miguel and Sergio wanted to leave, to go back to that which could be called “the city” (so different, under the circumstances, from the place they found themselves, which could not be named). But going back was the last thing they could do; the darkness had closed in around them so completely that the rain, the wind, and the howling of the storm cut them off from any spatial referent. Even the location of the river: it could have been at their backs, alongside, or even in front of them. And so it was that the water took over everything; by now the river was flooding. The two obeyed their mandate: they did not move, staying with their equipment until the last moment, but at the height of the storm a wave dragged them down to the riverbed. And so it was that Sergio and Miguel met their anonymous end, absorbed by a confusion not unlike the one to which they had exposed themselves as children, and which had perhaps marked them for a long time before that. With the boot, the wise old man would have solved the mystery for them: the one who was able to put it on and walk in it would be Miguel, since he had lost it in a previous life and it had later been thrown into the river by an angel so that one fateful night, if he passed the test, he would be able to recover it. But since this required the trust of both—they were still indistinguishable from one another—and such a thing did not exist, the two ended up being punished by an undefined, though evidently quite effective, authority. This authority may have been religious, or it may have been nature in general, their own desperation, or anything, really; the problem, if there was one, resided in the fact that it was both superfluous and inevitable, just like the lives of our two heroes.

  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 a
dulthood, 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.