Empty Set

by Verónica Gerber Bicecci

  Have you come to clear out the señora’s stuff?

  To do the archiving, yeah.

  His name was Chema, and he was the faithful assistant and caretaker of the house. He took me to the third floor, unlocked a door, put the key in my hand, and vanished.

  Inside, it was completely silent. Marisa(MX) Chubut’s bedroom was also a carefully decorated studio. An enormous window looked out onto the garden, a piece of cloth with Moorish motifs hung above the head of the bed, and the furniture seemed to have been passed down through generations. There was a selection of first editions of Mexican and Argentinian literature in a museum case; also recognized an original Joy Laville painting and a Toledo print. It was nothing like the bunker, which was the typical apartment of seventies exiles, with pieces of furniture in the “Mexican rustic” style, others of imitation wood, a bookcase of cheap editions, the Salvat encyclopedia, melamine crockery, and reproductions of the grand masters of painting (Vermeer, van Gogh) hanging on the walls. Sat in a small armchair to wait, and after a while Chema returned.

  Señor Alonso is going to be late getting home. He says it’d be better if you came back next week.

  Señor Alonso? Who’s he?

  The señora’s son.

  Ah.

  Told my Brother(B)’s girlfriend about what had happened, not hiding my annoyance at having to wait until the following week to go back because her friend Alonso(A) hadn’t turned up for the appointment. And what’s more, it was weird wandering around the bedroom of someone I didn’t know and hadn’t realized was dead, even if that was supposedly obvious. I know very little, almost nothing, about death. Death is another kind of absence, one that leaves a sudden, big (enormous) wound that gradually heals, or so it seems to me. Disappearance, on the other hand, makes a tiny, uncertain wound that grows a little larger every day. (My Brother(B) and I thought up the theory of wounds during the many empty hours in the bunker.)

  I collided with a parallel Universe(UII) that, lucky for me, gave signs of being an emergency exit. Marisa(MX)’s funeral was just a few months ago, my Brother(B)’s girlfriend said in explanation, and Alonso(A) hasn’t been able to sort out all her papers, he’s really busy, and all that must be hard for him.

  One afternoon, having forgotten we were neighbors, I saw Jürgen(J) crossing the park and went down to “run into him.” It felt good to me that he didn’t ask my name, that he believed I didn’t speak English, that we had nothing to say to each other. And best of all: that we wouldn’t need many words to get to his room. Our relationship was about other things. It was a matter of balance, or rather, it functioned as a counterpoise to an equilibrium in which (I) was the fulcrum:

  His handwriting interested me, it was big and scrawly, difficult to decipher. The legs of the p and the y were longer than the others, and the A of his name occupied a lot of space at the bottom of the page. He gave me a set of very odd instructions:

  Dear Verónica,

  Start by gathering the photos together, they’re all over the place, but mostly in the chest of drawers. Throw out the blurred ones with no people in them, the unidentifiable landscapes . . . There’s no point in keeping those. Then you can put them in the folders and binders I’ve bought. If you finish before I come back, start emptying the desk and classifying the documents and other stuff.

  I hope to meet you soon,

  Alonso

  Wanted to meet him too, even if he had stood me up again.

  The chest of drawers did indeed contain photographs, but also postcards, clippings, diplomas, and other stuff. My first task was to organize them into sets: assorted papers in one pile, postcards used for correspondence in another, unused postcards in a third. The heaps of photographs, classified by format, gradually traced the different eras of Marisa(MX)’s life: her forebears in sepia, her infancy in tiny black-and-white reproductions, squarer ones with pale colors corresponding to her youth, magenta-tinged rectangular ones from her middle-age, eighties minilab images, home prints from the nineties, and so on. I made a time line across the whole room, and in doing so, realized Alonso(A)’s childhood seemed very much like my Brother(B)’s, despite the difference in their ages. Or maybe all family portraits are the same. What distinguished them was Marisa(Mx) Chubut, who dressed like an old-time movie actress, and not all moms look like that on weekdays; it gave her a rather bizarre air. By contrast, the bunker’s family album was on indefinite pause; if anyone saw it today, they’d think our camera had been stolen or that we’d all died in a tragic accident because it comes to a halt so abruptly. The last photos I remember are from Cuernavaca, in the house belonging to some of Mom(M)’s colleagues. Even though the water heater was out of order, my Brother(B) and I had gone in for a swim; our lips are purple, our skin wrinkled, and we’re sitting on the edge of the pool wrapped in towels with colorful stripes.

  There were a lot of supermarket receipts (almost all for hair dye and face creams), airline tickets (to San Francisco), birthday cards, wedding and baptism invitations (the children and grandchildren of certain writers and other wellknown people). I had a separate pile for the landscapes and out-of-focus pictures, and added the ones with only feet, hands, or unrecognizable bits of heads, plus the large number of images of empty rooms and inanimate objects.

  But the great treasure consisted of thirty or forty photographs from which Marisa(MX) had cut out the subjects. You could see the scissor marks around “someone” who was apparently important. It wasn’t out of spite; in fact she’d selected those she treasured most dearly. That much became clear later, in the study, when I saw the enormous collage on which all those absent characters coexisted. What wasn’t clear to me was why she’d kept all those squares and rectangles with holes in them. The only thing still visible was the setting, from which the person in question was exiled, separated forever. Those characters would never return to their original contexts, and none of those “frames” now had any time. Didn’t have the courage to throw out that small collection, so put it in my backpack and took it home.

  Through them, you can see the world “from above”—that’s why I like Venn diagrams. There isn’t much documented evidence of this, but during the military dictatorship in Argentina, teaching basic set theory was prohibited in schools. We know, for example, that a tomato belongs to the tomato(TO) set and not to onions(ON) or chilies(CH) or coriander(CO). Where’s the threat in reasoning like that? In set theory, tomatoes, onions, and chilies might realize they are different foodstuffs, but also that they have things in common, like the fact that they can all belong to the fresh hot salsa(FHS) set and, at the same time, to the Universe(U) of cultivated plants(CP), and might perhaps unite against some other set or Universe(U); for example, that of canned hot salsa(CAHS). In short, form a community of vegetables. Venn diagrams are tools of the logic of sets. And from the perspective of sets, dictatorship makes no sense, because its aim is, for the most part, dispersal: separation, scattering, disunity, disappearance. Maybe what worried them was that children would learn from an early age to form communities, to reflect collectively, to discover the contradictions of language, of the system. Visualized in this way, “from above,” the world reveals relationships and functions that are not completely obvious.

  Didn’t see anything of Alonso(A) during the first months. Chema said he had things to do at the university in the United States where he was working on his PhD in literature, but would be back in the summer. He gave me a check to cover my fee until then. I deposited almost the whole sum into my savings account, keeping only what was needed for gas and daily expenses. The calendar didn’t mean much to me, having neither a proper job nor vacations, but I understood we were going to meet in June and it was then the middle of April. Six months had gone by. Six months hoping for a repentant Tordo(T) to call, and those same six months trying to resign myself to the fact that this would never happen.

  The landscape of time is pretty extensive. On the pine plywood boards, it wasn’t just the time contained in the wood grain tha
t was visible: there, in black, white, and grays, was everything I’d outlined and filled in with my brush. The third board remained unpainted. It made sense to do only two; together they were like an enormous double-leaf door, an entrance to another dimension (an entrance I still didn’t know how to open).

  If I were to throw a stone into a pond, it would cause tiny concentric waves to form in the water, and these would radiate out one by one until they disappeared. Diagrammatically, those waves also form a cone. The tip is the point and instant the stone hits the water, and the body is the waves opening out and spreading one by one. All this is important because time behaves in a very similar way to cones of light. I may be misinterpreting Stephen Hawking, but every event in the Universe(U)—just like the stone in the water—unfurls one cone of light toward the past (←) and another toward the future (→). The present, this exact moment, is where the tips of the two cones meet. The scientific diagram of time is a mirror image of a cone, a sort of hourglass. My particular case can only be described if two cones—Tordo(T) and Mom(M)—are located in the past, and their superimposed reflection, in the future. That is the only way to explain my feeling of being inside a washing machine on the rinse cycle, or why the future, from here, resembles the entrance to a whirlpool:

  Marisa(MX) Chubut was born ten years before Mom(M). She too was an exile from the Argentinian dictatorship. But her story was different from my parents’. My system for organizing everything that came out of her desk was simple. First, large groups: documents, newspaper clippings, manuscripts, recipes. Then a detailed classification of each batch. Told Chema I would need more stationery, and the following day had a box of a hundred green folders and another of pink ones. At that moment, Marisa(MX)’s room became a city—the piles of papers were the buildings, and the streets were the spaces they enclosed. I liked being in that city. My time was divided between that parallel Universe(UII), in which (I) coexisted with the absence of Marisa(MX), and my original Universe(U), in which (I) coexisted with the absence of Mom(M). (I) moved from the perimeter of the bunker to the perimeter of that room on the top floor of a house in Tizapán, San Ángel (and vice versa).

  I have this nightmare: want to speak, but can’t. Want to cry out, but can’t.

  Inside each of the folders was a small story, green if it finished happily, pink if badly. Invitation to attend the wedding of Marisa(MX) Chubut and Tono(TN) García, Argentinian marriage certificate, and Mexican divorce certificate: a love story reduced to three pieces of paper inside a pink folder. Birth certificate (Argentina, 1973), certificate of baptism, elementary school grades (average, seven and a half), secondary school grades (average, seven and a half), barium enema results, and International Vaccination Certificate in a green folder, with a Post-it reading, “Alonso García Chubut/CASE HISTORY.” Handwritten will of Mauricio Chubut (father of Marisa(MX)) and photocopy of the family tree of the house of Chubut, copies of payments to Gonzalo Elizondo, letter to my dearest grandchildren (June 1, 1965), inventory of the estate, death certificate (automobile accident), all in a pink folder. This Post-it read, “Mauricio Chubut/GRANDFATHER.”

  Dendrochronology wasn’t going to solve the mystery of time in the pine plywood boards. Tree rings give clues to environmental processes, but there were no books or articles on how to study the patterns of grain lines or their potential for disordering everything: breaking it into pieces, and then reuniting those pieces in a different form, or leaving them to drift. Almost all the specialized texts focus on climate change, and it was impossible to understand them fully. Must have stared at the treetops through the library window for many hours. Every so often I’d reread certain paragraphs in search of some possibly overlooked clue, but boredom usually won out, and I’d fall asleep with my head resting on the table until Violeta came by to collect me.

  Alonso(A) had a sad expression, but he laughed at anything and everything. That made me feel insecure (or very stupid), because it wasn’t really possible to ask him what the hell he thought was so funny. I’d get irritable, but still spent the day waiting for the moment when he’d finally decide to come up to Marisa(MX)’s room to interrupt my silent routine with his awkward laugh. Afterwards, it occurred to me I could do or say certain things (very few) that made him nervous, and then his laugh sounded different. (I succeeded in deciphering the range of his tones of voice, breathing patterns, and volumes because that was the only way to know for sure what was happening to him or how he felt: if he was laughing because he was feeling fine, or bad, or nervous, or whatever.) At those moments, it seemed to me he was the one who was insecure, not me. A small victory. Alonso(A)’s presence made that parallel Universe(UII) that (I) was gradually moving into more concrete:

  This morning a different sound woke me. Nuar ran around the whole apartment with her tail bristling, then hid behind the bookcase. It sounded as if something ceramic had fallen onto the kitchen floor and shattered.

  Even though it was a matter of escape, of remaining for as long as possible in my parallel Universe(UII), the other Universe(U) was still exerting its gravitational pull, and it finally sucked me back in: Jürgen(J) on the phone—his first and last call. Guessed our nocturnal encounters were about to end (and yes, he asked me not to come looking for him anymore) but didn’t pay much attention to him because Alonso(A)’s face fell apart—almost sure it fell apart—and that was more important. The frontier separating the parallel Universe(UII) and the Universe(U) disappeared with the ringing of a cell phone. Would like to be able to say everything was more mixed up than ever, but in fact, what was left was an implacable order that didn’t bode well for me.

  The newspaper clippings say she was a writer, that she died at the age of sixty-five and published only one book in her entire life. Although I’m no expert, something tells me it wasn’t a great work of literature. She was also an actress, but she’d only given a single performance in Argentina and one dramatized poetry reading in Mexico. Despite the many newspaper clippings about her book and her excellent acting in that stage play, Marisa(MX) Chubut was a secondary character. She was in the center of the “artistic world,” but she was no one.

  Probably felt a certain amount of empathy for her because I’d become a secondary character in my own life. In books, those sorts of insignificant beings attract me strongly: the ones who feel tiny, but are in fact enormous; the ones who seem gigantic, and are only inflated paper bags. But being incidental in real life is another story. A photograph of three personages, cut from the social pages in 1979, was particularly revealing; underneath, it said, in these exact words: “Josefina Vicens (left), Vicente Rojo (right), and unidentified woman (center).” Unidentified woman. That was Marisa(MX). Someone who is no one.

  How are your telescope observations going? Alonso(A) asked after a period of silence.

  Oh, bad news. I’m not cut out to be an astronomer. I’ve been looking at everything but the stars . . . But, hey, you haven’t said if you want to come to Argentina . . .

  He didn’t reply.

  How long since you’ve been there?

  . . . Not since I was a child.

  . . . Wouldn’t you like to go back? I insisted.

  Yeah, I would.

  . . . With me?

  Yeah, with you.

  . . . So?

  So what?

  Shall we go?

  . . . Sure, let’s do it.

  And at times we’ve thought Mom(M)’s story would have more meaning if we could go somewhere like the Plaza de Mayo to demand her return, to ask: Where is she? But that’s absurd, because she didn’t disappear like the others. Or did she? It’s a logical absurdity because if it were possible for us to go to the Plaza de Mayo and demand her return, we would never have been born in the first place.

  All her manuscripts were replicas of the same thing over and over. The only change was the writing, a firm hand becoming increasingly tremulous until it was practically illegible. What I discovered was not Jack Torrance’s manuscript in The Shining; Marisa(MX)’s
were “clean” copy after “clean” copy of a handwritten book that never managed to get to its ending. That had no ending, no title, no date. That just ran out of words. I read the first sentence so many times I knew it by heart: “Impossible to return to the place one has left.” It reminded me of the tangos Mom(M) used to listen to when she was feeling nostalgic.

  Found Exile—Marisa(MX)’s only publication—in the bookcase and compared it to the multiple manuscripts: this text did have an ending. Alonso(A) had suggested other unpublished works might turn up among her papers, but the copies I discovered weren’t even corrected versions; each and every page said exactly the same thing, with the commas and periods in the same places. Don’t know if it was her melodrama that made me indignant—“Mother! Father! Will I ever see you again? Why have you left me so alone? Why have you abandoned me? Is not life now a form of death?”—or if it annoyed me to see myself reflected in such schmaltzy phrases: “I am a quiescent absence in the tragedy of my life” (the word quiescent is so pedantic). Was on the point of giving up, but morbid curiosity won out. While reading, I wondered if Alonso(A) had ever opened the book.