The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  As I mentioned earlier, I have on occasion wondered whether someone, should someone read this, might think that I am proposing, or hoping to discover, through the image of M, the logic or mystery through which the people have drifted since those years. The truth is that there is little to propose and even less to discover. Historical meaning was not buried, it was on the surface, there for all to see, saturated with death and unfolding according to an order that was both transparent and faulty, because it was the practical response to another historical meaning that had fought its way into being, eventually becoming legitimate; a practical response, efficient in its way, that ended up replacing the other. It was a macabre substitution that took on a number of trivial embellishments. Nonetheless, I am going to give a meaningful example.

  One day, when we were looking for the car, our conversation turned to something like civilizations or cultures in general. M surprised us by saying that, like Borges, he advocated a universal government. “I agree with Borges, I’m in favor of a universal government,” he said, exactly. His father maintained a skepticism that was both radical and predictable: seeing as how governments couldn’t resolve the problems of their own countries, he could not imagine the efficacy of just one for the whole world. But M, as he immediately clarified, was not talking about a government like the ones they knew, but rather a supreme regulation, an entity on high that would shape great movements and determine the scope of human endeavors. A form of moral government whose authority would be so fully accepted by all mankind that no demonstrations of its force, no evidence or action, would be necessary. Without question, he said in different words, all that would be needed would be to assign human behavior with a precise meaning accepted by all. This government might not coincide with that proposed by Borges, but it was also universal. It would have two central traits: 1) food would be free—like in images of the golden age, people would wait, seated and with their mouths open, for food to come to them; 2) people would be travelers—over the course of their lives they would circle the globe, dying where they were born. Life in the countryside and the cities would go on as normal, as it does now, he added, not aware that he was contradicting himself.

  Following a precise order, everyone would work where they could or wanted to, while they lived, went about their routines, whatever, until their next move. In this way, the cities would be cleaner (according to M, no one really dirties a place they will not be staying in for long) and fortunes more modest (travelers cannot accumulate too much). The largest companies would be those owned by laborers and the employees, who, always being temporary, would delegate all control to the users who, provisional in their own right, would create a minute registry of their endeavors so that the future inhabitants would be up to date on what had been done. The population, however, would never be renewed as a whole. There would be no mass migrations, it would all be part of one perpetual journey: from everywhere to all places, each with his family (should they wish to accompany him, according to M) and with his past (inevitable baggage). There would always be a majority in the cities that knew the streets, businesses, public offices, neighborhoods, and the combination of risks, drawbacks, and alternatives that every city has. The same would go for the countryside, towns, hamlets, or smaller cities. The people would travel by plane, boat, train, or on the highway. Whoever wanted to bring their furniture with them would have to find a house they knew could accommodate it all; if not, they would have to leave it. Schools would educate the children—these would be language schools; adults would study where they worked. In every place, the language spoken would be that of the majority (though minorities could also communicate in other languages). The administration of the cities or regions would be the responsibility of elected committees. Everyone, before leaving their place of residence, would cast a vote in favor of one of the individuals or parties that were campaigning; at the end of their terms, the votes cast up to that moment would be calculated. The people voted looking toward the past, but their elections looked toward the future and toward another place: the elected candidates would serve their terms in their next place of residence.

  Books, drink, music, tobacco, and television would all be free. Meals would always be regional, just like restaurants, consequently, would be; along with literature, these would be the two principal allusions to the former age of nations. Eating, drinking, and reading—which was the same as sitting and listening—the people would feel the indistinct reminiscences of a lost and vaguely luminous past. This would obviously be a world without nationalities, but it would have towns and families. Religion could go on being collective but would not likely be global, as the idea of the world, the universe, thus materialized, would prove paradoxically imprecise. There would be religions of two or three hundred people, not likely more, and nearly all would adhere to their own private, fragmentary, and often accidental—when not vague or contradictory—cosmovisions. Indigenous tribes, denominated as naturals, would be protected. His father asked if there would be a maximum period of residence in any one place, after which a person would be forced to move himself out—his exact words. M brushed the idea off, that would not be necessary, no one would want to stay on forever; it would be boring and eccentric, practically immoral. The most sedentary would be the elderly and the students, but always for a reasonable time, six or seven years at the most; on the other hand, few in either state would put up with as much.

  And yet, the father asserted, in different words, there is a need, a pleasure, or a virtue in living in one’s place, where one was born. He was alluding not only to a feeling of loyalty toward one’s homeland, but also to the fact that it is necessary to see the world as a mystery in order to be part of it. The earth is a planet that looks a great deal like itself. As such, knowing different places meant noticing the similarities among them; on the contrary, knowing none meant being unique. Between the homogenous and the singular, he preferred the singular. One travels in order to see those who do not as part of the landscape, because they are the ones who possess the unique traits of the region. M did not know whether to agree with his father or not, so he said, “But I’m not talking about the world being different, I’m talking about it being other.” They were the same thing, replied his father, and said if he kept on like that, they were going to lock him up. “If you keep talking like that, they’re going to lock you up.”

  It was at these words that I wanted to arrive. In an obvious way, in spite of himself and though it was said with a degree of irony, the father’s warning called attention to the violent and trivial substitution produced by so-called historical meaning, the ideological persecution of those years and, a little while later, death. That day, as on many others during the search, we would eat sandwiches in a plaza. We would buy bread, cold cuts, and water or soda, and go eat. Except for the big ones, no one really went to the few plazas there were in the suburbs. Since open space is all around—in the houses and the streets alike—it is unusual to see children playing, the elderly talking, or couples waiting for nightfall in them. Vagrants sometimes wind up there and spend the day; in the afternoons, workers from the production plants nearby prefer them to sitting on the pavement out front. That day we ate on the patchy grass of one of those plazas. We sat there and, though it was not true, we felt as though we ruled the area from on high. The streets seemed to flow downward like the rooftops and façades of the houses. Normally during lunch M’s father would announce his sales route, but he preferred listening to our conversations about school, the subjects we studied, our professors and classmates. He felt deep pride and, ironically, curiosity about the scholastic experience of his son, an experience he himself had lacked; any reference made to it, even an allusion to a flaw or an outright failure, sounded to him like a praise or commendation. Evaluations, in all their forms, roll call, “group work,” the ways students would cheat off one another, disciplinary measures—the world of the schoolhouse represented a universe that was of a juvenile yet essential complexity, too brief to be ta
ken seriously, given the normal duration of a life, yet too important to be ignored. It was the generous world that kept us occupied and whose routine provided us with a provisional identity (of which, as years go by, only fragments remain).

  Sometimes I think about the path my photo is likely to have taken, obviously a variation on the question of M’s fate. His is in a box, mixed in with clippings, papers, and objects whose colors supposedly conserve some sort of essence. I usually find the photo hidden and turned over; always intrigued by that piece of cardboard encrusted with dirt, I realize it is M a fraction of a second before reading the half-faded inscription, “Buffeted by the wind.” With a turn of my wrist, I examine it. I am going to avoid a second description of the photo—I will add only that M is looking at the camera. If photos say little when one looks at them, there is even less to be extracted from a commentary on them. The truth is, like M, I don’t believe in photos—I should say that this forgotten one is one of the few that I have. “Let’s keep these photos as talismans, but not as proofs,” was what he said, to avoid committing. As inhabitants of that infinite country that is the present, they were both suitable and true; in this sense, assigning them the value of talismans, M allotted them a power that no proof could attain. We often joked about the properties of our photos, which, though removed from the realm of magic, nonetheless frequently immersed us in states of mystery. This mystery, according to M, derived from our belonging to an absent time, that is, either a time long past or one that hadn’t yet arrived.

  This time belonged to the itinerant past of humanity and the itinerant future of civilization, according to his idea of the society of tomorrow, as he sometimes called it. Jews, gypsies, the nomadic peoples of the Amazon or the Pacific, and the tribes of Mauritania, the Sahara, or Africa in general, existed between these two like floating bridges. M and I, as individuals exiled from reality and transplanted into the pure present, retained (and anticipated) the moral and emotional condition of both our precursors and our descendants. This was why, for example, when he and his father would search the outskirts of the city for the car, I would receive signals, vague but definite, from their travels kilometers away. The noises they heard would reach me—I would actually hear them—despite the distance. Smells would emerge in a jumble but would define themselves, little by little. Distance was not an obstacle; on the contrary, it was a stimulus. There was something powerful at work, I have no doubt, that broke down the restrictions of geography. I obviously could not know, and certainly could not see, what was keeping M occupied at the moment, yet an invisible bond connected us, despite our being spread across a vast territory. The simultaneous, which is unknown, and the visible mixed together in a bundle of partial, intermittent, and accurate impressions. More than once, one of us surprised himself by knowing about a supposedly unknown event, being privy to even the most intimate convictions or feelings of the other. Nothing could explain such knowledge, nothing but affinity, that particular form of communion, the relation of subtle similarity that joined us across space. I would be walking, for example, along San Martín when another me, a second consciousness, drew near to offer me blurred images: hazy embankments, low-set houses, empty lots, deserted streets, cement walls, factories, fences. The trees, identical, accentuated the realness of this dream world; there, the hand of man had settled upon something living. (Because the same mystery that moves the planets also impels people.) This other me would let me know that M was walking with his father in search of the car. On some occasions, this mental communication would be less evident, even imperceptible, though it would still be active, that is, it would be gathering strength. Telepathy exerts the greatest control over the unconscious, though, in those cases, it cannot be proven. One afternoon, however, these two circumstances converged: we were subject to a powerful telepathic influence, the force of which was, in fact, verified.

  That afternoon we were walking along streets that had been on the verge of flooding. For days, all we had talked about was the weather. The rain had erased avenues, evacuated neighborhoods, and besieged cities. The television still showed people standing on their rooftops with the few things they had been able to save, waiting for help to arrive. A small, rigid splotch was visible on a roof nearly hidden under the water: it was a dog, paralyzed with fear. A fireman arrived right away and climbed up a short ladder onto the roof to catch hold of it, then dropped it, shivering, into the boat. There were also scenes of the rescued: sleeping in schools or meeting houses, living in freight cars. The images seemed to speak of a new foundation for the city; everything had a touch of the provisional to it, the feeling of camping, a leveled landscape. M and I expounded upon things that might have been platitudes, for example, that tiempo—in its most enigmatic sense, that is, when it refers to the weather—is hard to predict, and that even when one can predict it, there is rarely anything that can be done to change it. There was something supernatural in the ability to anticipate the vicissitudes of the weather, not so much for the possibility of foreseeing them, but for the tendency to adapt them to a human scale in order that they might always unfold according to this order, even when they did so in the form of catastrophes. M explained a theory to which he had subscribed throughout his childhood and that even now, nearly an adult, he was unable to discount. This idea postulated the existence of an invisible human race on a microscopic scale. Their time passed much more quickly; a life did not last as long, but to them it was just as long or as short as ours is to us (they could do more or less the same things, M explained); they reproduced at an extraordinary rate. This civilization lived on the surface of the planet and could share our buildings, though no one would know it. The space of a room would be like the entire solar system, of an inconceivable magnitude. Just like us, they would be subjected to catastrophes: the most common, though they would not know the cause, was a phenomenon not unlike an earthquake. These disasters would be produced by people, by us, walking. Megalopolises razed, the countryside damaged beyond repair, roads and channels of communication destroyed. But the lapse between one footfall and the next might represent two generations, or three, meaning that the memory of the disaster would have already faded by the time we stepped down again. It was different when we stood or sat in one place, or where the furniture took up part of the floor: those places were the outer confines, the places where the world ended and things brimmed with mystery and danger. The various forms of cleaning, with their disastrous consequences, translated to something akin to the end of an era. Perhaps, thought M, the weather might end up adapting to the scale of this world; all appearances, however, seemed to indicate that this would be more difficult to achieve. Take an ant in the lightest drizzle: it’s not a catastrophe, but it is a greater quantity of water, proportionately.

  The two of us walked along an avenue whose sidewalks were covered with tables and whose cafés bore signs that had been made to look like marquees. In front of one of these—passing through meant walking between tables, even though one was still in the street—four men were talking about the weather. They seemed relaxed, having stretched out to fill their seats completely; the table was cluttered with coffee cups, beer bottles, and whiskey glasses. Everything was empty, consumed; there were ashes and cigarette butts. A typical afternoon chat, M and I thought, without needing to say anything. Nothing seemed worthy of our attention, except what we heard. A man with ruddy skin said, “I don’t want to know the future, I just want to know what the weather will be like.” “Why?” asked another. “So you can lose again?” “Lose what?” “I don’t know. Lose. You must have lost something.” “I won what I lost before. I don’t lose. I pay.” “If you want to know what the weather is going to be, you have to learn to read its signs, like the gauchos do,” interjected another. “Signs of what?” they asked. “The signs of the weather,” he said. “And what are those?” asked a few. “The smell of the air, the color of the sunset, the clouds, the direction of the wind.” “But the gauchos don’t do any of that,” the fourth intervened
, “they just know.” Yes, but that’s no guarantee,” specified the one who had asked. “I knew a guy once who had been living in the country for a long time. He was used to predicting the weather, and he bragged about it. He wanted to be asked about it, to show off his unusual skill. But no one said anything to him. In the country he had been a normal person who knew the same thing as everyone else; here, too, he was just a normal person. Until he went back. The first few times it went well: just like at the beginning, he predicted the same thing as everyone else. They would get together at the bar and talk about the weather—and then the errors began. He stopped being normal. The radar he used to detect the weather seemed to be broken; it seemed to be working in reverse. If he predicted heat, it would be cold; if he announced a drought, it would rain for weeks; the skies never cleared when he thought they would. He finally asked himself, What good is this skill if I’m always wrong? I’ll draw the opposite conclusions. And so he did, and he was right again, by interpreting the signs as their opposites. He was happy to be normal; the weather once again fell under his purview, if not as an object of knowledge, then at least as one of intuition. One morning a few months later, though, he found himself unable to tell the difference between sign and interpretation: the inversion to which he had grown accustomed had been incorporated by nature, which meant that if he chose the opposite, he ran the risk of being wrong again, though he ran the same risk if he didn’t.” That was the last thing M and I heard as we passed, before the voices began to grow faint. The coincidence between what we had been discussing and the topic at the table did not surprise us as much as what would happen a few hours later, when the two of us, having forgotten what had happened, experienced a greater mystery than those usually created by the weather.