The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  One afternoon a few weeks ago I was walking north along an avenue. Sundays in Caracas, as in a good number of cities, are calm and quiet. The light was diffuse; it was somehow fragmented and visibly corpuscular as it was returned by the mountain, as though the sun at its height were not enough and a greater intensity were required, the reflection off the slope, to ignite the air. A trail of marks along the street registered the activity of the people: contradictory, almost always aggressive, marks that spoke of a lack of peace. All of a sudden, a signal blinded me from up on high: someone had probably raised their hand in the foothills and the light from the sun had bounced off the face of their watch. This lasted an instant—a moment more brief than an instant. I observed the slope and thought about how far that particular light had traveled to reach me, guided with greater precision by chance than any other that surrounded me in that moment or this one. That flash had crossed the orbit of planets, illuminated asteroids; it was also the energy that propelled the comets and which had apparently originated in the sun and expanded as light and solar wind before dazzling me. One final moment of concentration, its reflection in the face of that watch, delayed its ultimate dissolution as it fell to earth, promising to make it unique one last time in the form of a flash of light. I don’t know why, but that was enough to make M appear in my memory. A cloud floated just above where the reflection had originated, girding the mountain in silence. “From there, Caracas looks like the model of a city,” I recalled, and continued on my way.

  One day, he told me, he was sent out to buy a few things for dinner; he was given the exact amount of money needed. The grocer rang him up wrong and got confused giving him his change, so M ended up going home with his purchases and more money than he had when he left. His parents sent him back to return the money. At first, the grocer was surprised to see him again; later he understood what had happened, but badly. Leaning over the counter, he muttered his calculations as he scribbled on a piece of paper, as though it could talk back to him. M felt as though he was standing before a giant: broad, strong arms dense with hair, emerging from the creases of a white shirt. When he had finished his calculations, and ignoring M’s protestations, the grocer gave him part of the money he had brought with him. At home, his parents are so annoyed by his incompetence that they nearly refuse to let him in. They order him to go back to return it all. As in most humiliating situations, they ask him if he knows what the word “all” means. So he goes back, again. M walks the two blocks sensing that it is a ridiculous, foolish misunderstanding, but he does not dare to pursue the idea: the world of the adults is the only one there is, and as such it must be accepted as it presents itself. For his part, having nearly reached the end of his day, the grocer is occupied with cleaning his scale. He asks him to wait; it is a delicate operation. M carefully observes the scale, the weights marked out with short and long dashes, the numbers distributed among them, the red point of the needle, which is going wild at the moment as the grocer lifts and holds the tray over and over; he also reads the brand, written in five gleaming letters that form an arch across the top. Little by little it gets darker and the quiet stampede of cars on the cobblestones filters in from the street. Having finished his cleaning, the man, leaning on the counter as though it were a dividing wall, emphatically explains to M that the money does not belong to him—the grocer—and that he should go home immediately. M understands less and less, though he suspects that he will return several times more. As he is about to leave the store he hears the clicking of the grocer’s tongue; M notes that this is the way dogs are usually called, but turns around anyway. He sees the arm emerge from the creases of its sleeve, accompanied by a gesture that, from up high, invites him to come closer. Smiling, the grocer offers him a coin, saying that it is for him and that he should hold on to it. M feels an unprecedented sense of joy: the coin sparkles with its own light, like nothing else. “This is what it must feel like to touch heaven with both hands, as they say; I can feel it.” M feels as though he has been awarded an unknown prize—rather, what is unknown is the motivation behind the prize—not being able to explain it, he finds the situation all the more wondrous. Later on, the parents, somewhere between irritation and weariness, would discover that the boy had returned home with more money than he brought with him last time—even though he had taken the precaution of hiding his coin in the other pocket. And so, as he had anticipated, M must return to the grocery, where the man takes the money, performs a few other calculations and gives him back a greater sum. By now the amount is more than considerable; it is a small fortune, as though the money were multiplying on its own. The parents hesitate: every cent the child receives is a sum that must later be explained and returned, which means that it might be better not to send him and avoid his coming back with more money. They argue for a few minutes but in the end make their decision: there is no other choice—M has to return it all. Back at the shop, the grocer stretches a piece of paper out across the counter and does his calculations once more with a pencil; when he is done he hands M an even greater sum. The parents do not know what to do—they ask for an explanation but M tells them only what he has seen: the man speaks to the paper while he writes, then hands him the money. His father is indignant, but cannot resist voicing a paradoxical wish. “If only it were so easy to get rich,” he exclaims. They speak a bit more and send M back again, but with more money; this time they also add in, and not just a little: a good part of their savings. This goes on for two or three trips: M goes back and forth, carrying a fortune that might not be great but is not insignificant, his pockets bulging more and more each time, until on one of the trips the grocer, having finished his customary accounting, decides that he is satisfied: Yes, he says, you’re right, and he does not give back a cent. M returns home with nothing.

  The parents cannot believe it; they have been swindled in the most absurd way imaginable. They get angry and blame the boy: suddenly, at the most innocent hour of the day, that moment between sunset and dinner when nothing ever happens, they have been reduced to nothing, to the most crushing poverty; they had lost years of work and were facing years of privation. The mother cries in silence and the father broods: this is what they get for being honest. The effects of poverty come quickly: the portions at dinner are immediately reduced. The future is different now; it is longer. M’s mother says that his father measures time by money: the less there is, the less frequent and longer lasting everything has to be—and there was no end in sight. The three of them are trying to find ways to get the most out of their food when someone knocks on the door. They all go to the entryway, but imagine their surprise when they see that the man standing there is a stranger. He is not the grocer, though he is to M: that’s the person who had been helping him from across the counter all afternoon, he insists. The man, before launching into the explanation that all were eager to receive, asks if they would be so kind as to offer him a drink. The parents tell M to fetch the bottle of honey wine and three glasses while they get settled. When he comes back, M realizes that the grocer is already telling his story. The mother serves the wine; they toast, take a quick sip and the other continues: He is a millionaire who amassed a fortune that would take five people more than a year to calculate, but he has made so many mistakes—he calls them errors and hopes to have time to recount them one by one and thereby repent them anew—after so many mistakes and being unable to make peace with his conscience, God, through an angel, promised to absolve him if he distributed his fortune among poor and honest families. Saying this, he takes a bag full of money out from behind him and puts it on the table, on the one condition that they set a place for him at the table that night. And so, while the father and the man drink and converse, the mother sets about preparing a meal, the likes of which they had not seen for a long time. Off in a corner, M empties his pocket and watches his coin—as big, heavy, and brilliant as a talisman—spin.

  FIVE

  Despite the hazy origin of our friendship, which lacked a precise moment in m
y memory and was, like so many other adventures, mixed up in a bundle of circumstances in which very little is clear, I retain a vivid image of the gradual approach or affinity that, following the involuntary and somnolent rhythm of schoolchildren, would grow into a relatively close relationship. And yet sometimes I give in to a false notion: that our friendship began when I received his photo and M mine, not before. I convince myself of this. This conviction is so vivid that it veils all thought in one single color; I am unable to think otherwise until a while later, when I realize my error—that is, when I remember. Like any ceremony, the exchange was meant to inaugurate a new time, to divide a before from an after. Yet instead of indicating a beginning, I see now that it left one behind, forgot it, or something more: that private ritual, which was somehow innocent in that it did not attempt to engage anything beyond the people involved in it, that is, the two of us, set an ending in motion; its culmination was excessive in relation to its trivial beginning. By that time, Argentina was already filling up with the dead. If it had been normal before for them to show up in ditches and vacant lots, they now rejected all sense of measure and took on, in the form of corpses, a central role as the dead (but also as anonymous corpses, which in turn heightened the sinister hierarchy of the whole) in the verist theater that politics had become. When death is common, corpses become commonplace; there is nothing new to them. These corpses, because they were disturbing, seemed more numerous than the dead; thanks to their tragic nature, they also acquired a greater significance. This progression shows how fully their meaning could be inverted; not long before, the dead had exceeded corpses in number and significance. It seemed that there were more dead than living and more corpses than dead.

  I am going to recount, as I remember it, something that happened on the night of June 20, 1973, while I walked with M in the early hours of the 21st. Public transportation was not running; nothing moved, in general. The few signs that indicated that the city had not been abandoned spoke of a recent tragedy, or worse, of some kind of catastrophe, incomprehensible and not yet over. Half a block from the avenida del Trabajo, a woman waited for her son, in tears. She was sitting in a doorway and strangely, despite the shadows, I remember her face as being illuminated. She repeated the boy’s name; it wasn’t enough for her to wait, we thought, she also had to call to him. But there was no reaction, not from the boy or from the people shut away in the neighboring homes, despite the fact that they had probably been listening to her for quite some time. We drew closer. M and I wanted to imagine the interior of the house from which she voiced her living warning and her absent need, though this may sound contradictory. The woman took no notice of us, but we could sense the silence of the home, the objects that, from that night on, would be redundant, useless. A nightstand, a bed, a shelf, a brush.

  We walked from Mataderos to Villa Crespo; the same funereal silence inhabited every neighborhood, every block. We met with a dual intimation and an ambiguous beauty in the dark streets. A few hours earlier Perón, the political leader, had returned to Argentina; a throng of people had gathered to wait for him, but the desert around us brought to mind a city that had obliterated its inhabitants. The great mass of porteños slept, protected by walls and roofs, on beds tucked behind the façades of their houses, as we walked. Like ships, M and I floated along a surface composed of silence, the rough and the smooth of things, with the disciplined fatigue of the traveler. The shipwrecks were the others, the ones who waited, like the woman with the illuminated face.

  That night, M and I talked about virginity. Not about our experience with it—it was still of longstanding relevance to one of us, though I will not say which—but rather, in anticipation of the truth, about the false promise hidden in its loss. One of us attempted to deny any change, and to this end alluded to a number of impossible absolutes. Experience, as the different pressures, sensations, and temperatures to which our skin is submitted, did not matter; the memories that could be etched into the mind on the basis of these circumstances mattered even less. Their triviality was absolute. The moments of a life, which, by the same mystery that allows it to unfold can take on significance despite being the pinnacle of superfluity, cannot be compared with the importance of “that” moment, despite the fact that it is the one truly fated to wane. The millions dispersed after waiting for the leader. Some had gotten there days in advance, but everyone wanted to leave at the same time. They turned and began to walk toward their homes, lost and disillusioned. As is well known, many remained where the bullets found them.

  M and I sensed an abyss that divided us from the masses; this might have been due to our natural condition as members of the minority. Of all possible emotions, the masses inspired in us more sympathy than mistrust, more disbelief than fascination. The majority, overwhelmed by its own numbers, was unable to recognize the same essence from which it drew its own strength in the scarce, the brief, and the scattered. Yet one dreamed of joining those vital swells, the very identity of which pulsated in the form of a crowd, because they offered the possibility of giving in to the current and floating along without a care for the truth. Now, as I have been saying, the sea that had been swelling at the outskirts of the city to the southwest of Buenos Aires had dispersed in all directions.

  At the corner of Rivadavia and San Pedrito, we relived the sensation of crossing, within just a few meters, a great divide between civilizations: just barely past Rivadavia, we were already nearing Nazca. Someone approached us, breaking our silence. He was poor, probably younger than his appearance let on, with a round face that promised virtue; he did not know which way Ezeiza was. He was walking, like us, which meant that we could have sent him a number of different ways; as such, Ezeiza—without being metaphorical—could be in any direction. “Ezeiza is so far away,” we answered, “that you could get there by going this way, or that way, or by heading over there. But the rally’s over.” “Do you think I could get there before dawn?” “It depends which way you’re going,” we offered. “To Ezeiza,” he answered. M and I looked at each other: “Ezeiza is a big place.” “To where the rally is.” That place was good only for escape. It had nothing to offer now, hours after the violence; it was of no interest to anyone. “You won’t find what you’re looking for,” we warned him. “I’m going to the rally. I’m going to welcome General Perón. My neighbors told me he was coming tomorrow.” He had been on foot since Retiro, where he had gotten off a train and had found no other way to keep moving. We asked him when they had told him this. “Yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday when?” “Yesterday, yesterday afternoon.” “Listen, it’s already over—that was today.” “Right, like I said, it’s today.” “No,” we explained, “that was today, or rather, yesterday. Perón already came back.” “It can’t be,” he said, embarrassed. “Yes—in the end he didn’t get off the plane at Ezeiza, but he arrived.” “So where did he go?” “I don’t know,” we said, “Morón, El Palomar, who knows…” The man walked off to the west; at that exact moment, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The clear sky, the stars, orderly beyond the clouds, the absolute silence, and the cold, pulsating, closing in on us from all directions, even from within our own bones. It all seemed like an illusion, like the morning that follows a night of excess, only the other way around. We stayed on Nazca, crossed the tracks, and a few blocks later picked up our topic of conversation.

  Virginity is an abstraction, someone asserted, equivalent to non-virginity. The only concrete thing is its loss; it is never acquired, but since the experience of losing it cannot be prolonged throughout one’s lifetime, and in fact generally tends to be fleeting, one is always either within a before or an after, without options or a choice. There should be alternatives: going back, reclaiming it, abandoning it rather than losing it, getting it and losing it all over again, et cetera, like in a game of masks in which each represents a different personality. Virginity is always seen as something unstable, a state that can be abandoned at any time, regardless of one’s age, but we should be able
to lose it as many times as there are opportunities to be other, to be different, or to be less. Thus the violent anxiety before the loss, armies of adolescents speculating over the inevitability of their condition, turns into a true condemnation when they find they can no longer regain their innocence. “But they can, actually, all of us do,” suggested the other. It’s true, responded the first. What was in the air was a catastrophe without any outward signs (something particularly Argentine in its insistence on covering tracks, concealing events, and looking the other way).

  Perhaps because it was repeated, or because it was somehow unique, the ominous climate of that night has not been easy to forget, though I have often tried to do so. But, as is well known, wanting to forget and forgetting are rarely aligned. Someone might even want to forget, not in order to forget, but to be able to hold on to a memory in a different form, in order to be able to evoke it at will. That night, M had little more than three years to live. Now, as I sometimes evoke that walk and remember more clearly the neighborhood of Flores—calle Bacacay, for example, where the darkness is multicolored under the dense branches of the trees—I also remember the nights in the suburbs, when the whistle of a distant train, as prolonged as that of a ship, offered a textured backdrop of sound. I would go up to the roof of my house, rest my arm on the ledge, and, protected by the darkness, identify different shades of black in the shadows of the foliage, silvery reflections on the asphalt and on distant rooftops. Crickets, a nocturnal bird, a car, and the barking that bounced back and forth across the street suggested a quality much like that of the heavens, upon whose sphere the sidereal abyss takes shape. Before or after this, one might hear explosions or the rattle of a machine gun and be left without words (just as happens now, when one hears shots in the night and there is nothing to say). And so, without noticing—or, noticing, but without realizing—Buenos Aires filled with the dead; they took on a life of their own, an extension of the mark left by their bodies.