My Two Worlds

by Sergio Chejfec

  There was the sign in front of us showing the visiting hours and the day the aviary was closed, but since I was a stranger in town it occurred to me that the sign could be old or that there it was customary to ignore it, and that the neighborhood woman was asking me about something else, a more fundamental matter, or for some news that wasn’t immediately obvious. I was about to tell her I didn’t know, but instead pointed to the sign indicating the aviary was closed, or maybe told her at the same time that I didn’t know; in truth, I don’t remember all that well. Whatever the case, for a brief moment the two of us stood waiting for something to happen. Then, as it tends to occur, there was a screech of a bird from above, half-mixed with the revving of a distant motor. I began to think: the coincidence was too great for the sign to be incorrect; so despite its being my first time in the park and at this aviary, which I would be unable to visit any time soon, or maybe ever, since I planned to leave the city the following day, I once more relayed the first and probably last piece of information I’d acquired on this subject, and I told her that the place was closed on Mondays. By way of argument I pointed to the sign once more.

  As has happened to me on other occasions, and continues happening to this day, the woman thought it reasonable to ignore me. Something about the way I speak must cause this; it’s probable that my lack of conviction in saying even the most obvious things, or the things I most believe in, works against me at times. Most likely, I thought, the parcel she’s carrying has food for the birds who spend their entire lives caged and eating nothing but the same old ground meat. She told me she knew it was closed on Mondays. To that I could only insist that today was a Monday. It was a fact I could be sure of despite being a stranger in town, because obviously it was Monday in all of Brazil and the rest of the continent. She stood there thinking, and I noticed how for a fraction of a second she was mentally transported to another place, or another time; she seemed to be taking inventory, and wiping the slate clean. She finally sighed, acknowledging her error, and told me she had made a mistake and would have to go home and come back the following day.

  I was more or less convinced that she lived nearby, and from the way she described the operation (have to go home, come back the following day, etc.), it was clear that she treated these visits, which were no doubt frequent, or in any case regular, as events that required preparation and, above all, represented a high point in her daily routine: a duty, a regular habit. That suspicion, if that’s the right word, allowed me to glimpse the net weight of a normal life, of any life, to allude to it in a perhaps condescending manner. The skein of a person’s own acts, whether unnoticed, essential or absurd, which range from the unconfessable to the naïve, from the irrational to the repeated, each with its dose of fear and dignity. I imagined this lady walking through the fairly empty streets of the surrounding area; two blocks before arriving home, she would think about the best moment to take her keys from her pocketbook and clutch them in her fist until she reached the front door. Most likely, I thought, the spot is predetermined: when she passes a certain tree, or crosses at a corner, she looks for her keys, and when she’s found them she removes her hand from her pocketbook. The operation is unconscious, however, just like the “thought” she has before she decides to take out the keys. A thought that is definite and vague at the same time.

  I don’t know if any of the birds could have noticed our brief conversation; in any case I’m certain no one saw us, because this area seemed separated from human time, as did nearly the entire park for that matter. On one afternoon quite some time ago, at the end of one of my long days of mechanical strolling, during a period of isolation in which I did nothing but read and walk, as two different and yet sadly related activities—I’d forgotten about work and about the world, which didn’t bother me a bit, though I’d suffer the consequences soon enough—one afternoon I collapsed in exhaustion at the end of one of my long walks, and for something to do I opened the first book that came to hand. Halfway down the page there was a description of a bird’s gaze; and I don’t know if it was due to exhaustion or surprise, to my situation in general or the particular eloquence of the story, but the fact is that I was immediately overwhelmed by suggestibility and fear. The impact was such that I had to stay in for several days, probably frightened I’d run across some bird, even at a distance. Since then I’ve been unable to look a bird in the eye without reliving, more than my fear, the terrifying memory of that moment. Because sometimes the memory of what one has read tempers the actual experience, and the experience itself becomes, more than something physical, the realization of the reading . . .

  The bird should remain at rest and the observer, whoever it is, perhaps myself, should stand in front of the creature, at some distance or closer-up, but facing it straight on. This exercise is impractical with fidgety birds, in general the smaller ones. It is the larger birds, much higher up the scale, and a few medium-sized birds, or those slightly removed from the aerial world, roosters for example, that make a greater impression. When you look at them you receive a terrible shock, because it’s hard to avert your eyes. It’s much more complicated than looking at fire, of course, because while the flames elicit an innocent fascination, which lets you have thoughts that are distant in time and space, the gaze of a bird induces the most anguished stupor in the observer, such that the bird’s violent origin can be seen; that is, both poverty and delirium at the same time. Afterward, in my experience, and in that of others who have mentioned theirs, it’s advisable and with effort, possible to turn your eyes from the creature’s transparent gaze, but it’s impossible not to turn them back to it again. You may think you’ve broken free, but unawares you are once more unavoidably drawn to the same icy, never-ending stare.

  I remained observing the aviary a little while longer. A few of the large birds had changed their places, and now a pale beam of sun lit up their beaks from above. And the spatial counterpoint their beaks created with the meat almost on the floor had intensified, so much so that for a moment I imagined that my eyes were the vertex of a rather large angle: one line represented my downward gaze at the birds’ red meat, while the other shot upward, where the beaks could be seen.

  The shady path I had come along continued toward the park’s interior. I caught sight of a bright point toward the end of the path—the afternoon light, as it turned out. I headed in that direction, since I intended to keep strolling through the park and the idea of a slight change in scenery appealed to me. Before I left the canopy of trees that surrounded the aviary, I looked back several times, a habit of mine, and was struck by the color of the ground in the aviary and its environs. It seemed like another surface, not dirty but dirtied, though no stains or traces of garbage were visible. It had a different shade of color, most likely owing to the birds and their constant production of feathers, dust, and droppings, scattered in great part by the breeze. I wanted to study that color more closely, but meanwhile told myself that if anyone saw me stopping repeatedly to look back, he or she might think I’d been seized by a kind of fear of or obsession with birds. No matter where I am or what I do, I cannot free myself from the thought that I’m being observed and judged by others, nor from my frustrating inability to imagine the nature of their evaluations.

  As I approached the open section of the park, which from my perspective promised to be fairly large, I could more clearly make out splotches of color that represented people in various postures and situations: they were sitting on benches, walking, or lying in the sun and under isolated trees. A large fountain in the center sprayed jets of water all around, creating a mist that blurred the surrounding space like a vaporous, unmoving cloud. When I reached the tree-lined mall and got closer to the fountain, I saw bougainvilleas again, purple like those in the circular garden, spread out here and there over a much greater space. As perhaps might be imagined, I instantly felt a bond with the few people walking there, since they were sharing in that halfheartedness, even lethargy, of mine toward walking in parks, which I ref
erred to earlier as well.

  So I began to think about how long I’ve been taking walks. Years, decades. And if I live significantly longer I could keep on adding, because one thing I’m sure of is that I’ll never stop. But despite this great amount of walking, however, no walk has provided me with any genuine revelation. In my case it’s not as it was in the past, when walkers felt reunited with something that was revealed only during the course of the walk, or believed they had discovered aspects of the world or relationships within nature that had been hidden until then. I never discovered anything, only a vague idea of what was new and different, and rather fleeting at that. I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia. Nostalgic anxiety would be a state of deprivation in which one has no chance for genuine nostalgia. There may be various reasons for the block. If I’m going to explain it, I have to tell the story of my borrowed ideas, which I’m full of—I say “borrowed,” but I’m not suggesting I don’t have full rights to them, on the contrary . . .

  One of these ideas, among the first I assimilated so thoroughly as to make it my own, was the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk. There must have been something wrong with me, because at the point at which I should have chosen a way of life for my future, I found nothing persuasive. From early on I’ve felt unequal to any kind of enthusiasm: incapable of believing in almost anything, or frankly, in anything at all; disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success; suspicious of the benevolence of charity and of self-improvement; oblivious of the benefits of procreation and the possibilities of biological continuity; oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle; unable to work up enthusiasm for any impracticable profession or scientific vocation; inept at arts or at crafts, at physical or manual labor, also intellectual; to sum up, useless for work in general; unfit for dreaming; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm; too shy or incompetent for an enthusiastic sex life; in short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.

  To walk and nothing but. Not to walk without a destination, as modern characters have been pleased to do, attentive to the novelties of chance and the terrain, but instead to distant destinations, nearly unreachable or inaccessible ones, putting maps to the test. I laughed when someone would tell me a city was too large. And laughed as well if they told me it was too small. A city has one size, a fact known only to the person who walks it aimlessly, for all the world like a curious dog when it’s strayed and lost its bearings, but isn’t hungry or lonely yet. Here lies the blurry distinction between the cities’ homeless and walkers such as me. One peers into a world where few, but definitive, rules divide people according to their street conduct and how long they remain there. I would often think . . . What do I want to find? A glimpse of the tramp’s life, made up of nothing but fear and instant opportunism; or some old Modernist ideal that posited the long walk as the basis for a new urban religion. It’s too confused and I’m not sure . . . That’s why I’ve kept on walking, out of insecurity and a lack of convictions, as if walking were the ultimate experience I could offer to the ruined landscape I move through, with strength neither to overcome it nor destroy it.

  As I said, the other walkers in the park—colleagues, as it were, in these adventures and private sorrows—had scattered themselves out across the greenswards and the vast, gleaming concrete esplanades, near-white with reflections from the bright sky, that dominated the alameda. The visitors, randomly grouped this way, seemed to accentuate the geometrical order of the area, rather than disrupt it. Despite the differences in their ages—they ranged from breastfeeding infants to the elderly infirm—each of them exuded that air I referred to earlier, at once absent and absorbed, self-abandoned, the sign, according to my criterion, of genuine familiarity with a park, and with all places generally. The young people were the most sociable, and a few solitary individuals carried their own maté kits, from which every so often, pensively, they’d take a long pull, at least that’s how it seemed to me, or perhaps they were merely keeping the straw between their lips and forgetting to take a sip.

  As everyone knows, Brazilian maté gourds are large; they’d be difficult to conceal if anyone was inclined to do so. Most difficult to hide, though, is the thermos—essential to all those who use a maté gourd, large or small. I headed for a bench that stood next to the fountain. Let’s say that from the opposite side no one was able to see me through the jets of water and the cloud of mist mentioned earlier. Before taking a seat on the bench, I stood contemplating the panorama around me and all the while a fairly lengthy silence prevailed, unusual for that setting—even I noticed that—and I wondered if I were participating in a sort of collective trance, which included all the people and activity in the vicinity, or whether, on the contrary, I was suffering from a mental lapse, or was simply dreaming it. Whatever the case, I sat down, and a moment later took a deep breath; when I let it out, for an instant, and without knowing why, perhaps as a result of the cloud a very short distance away from where I sat, I briefly imagined I was invisible, or in hiding, and that an unaccustomed gift, or power, was allowing me to look without being seen. I put the map in my backpack, took out the book I had with me (it was a novel I’d been carrying around only a short while; I’d started reading it on the trip just before I arrived and hadn’t had either the chance or the desire to go on with it since then), and became so engrossed in contemplating the water and the spaces around it that I felt omnipotent, as if a random but well-intended force had bestowed a gift upon me: I myself was dissolved in the mist that surrounded the fountain and could verify that my sight adjusted, in this way, to any situation: it could discern the indiscernible, catalog the invisible, uncover the hidden . . .

  An old man was coming slowly toward where I sat, and only when he paused a short distance off did I realize he was going to sit down beside me without saying a word. No empty benches seemed to be left in the shade; and he was leaving the vast sun-scorched area as if emerging from a danger zone, with halting step, but content to have reached safety. His approach displeased me, as did his very materialization, which I took for a sign of hostility or, at the very least, an interruption. I realized immediately, however, that the intruder was most probably myself, and that this man in all likelihood walked every afternoon to a spot he now saw occupied by me. It wouldn’t be the first time, I thought. I remembered other situations, of course, minor reversals of fortune lying dormant in the recesses of my memory. For instance, I was once, briefly, in a European city known for its splendid lake and venerable canals. I happened to be, quite literally, admiring the lake and strolling along the adjacent park. One of those German cities bombed in the Second World War, destroyed and then, with obsessive attention to detail, rebuilt to be just as they once had been.

  A while back I met a woman who, alongside her mother, took part in that rebuilding as a child; she told me about the women’s brigades, made up of women of all ages, who’d worked on it. In particular, she remembered her work assignment: she had to move the remains of bricks from one corner—or what was left of it—to another, so as to sort the bricks that were still useful, and set aside the pieces too small to be usable. The few men who were present gave directions to the older women in accordance with some oversized specs and blueprints they were incessantly opening their arms wide to consult. Anyhow, this city now seemed far too impeccable to me, as on the whole German cities do; it proclaimed that there had never been a war, much less such widespread devastation. I recalled the stories of that long-ago little girl as I walked through the park. It was just past noon, and from where I stood I could observe the busy avenue and the orderly flow of cars. Some swans from the colony that had settled on the lake—the
only visible fauna, as far as I know, besides the underwater variety—swam up to anyone who approached the water’s edge, doubtless hoping for something to eat. And when they received nothing they would bury their heads and the full length of their long necks in the water, to hide their failure, I suppose, or to look for something in its depths.

  A friend who was living in the city at the time had warned me that the swans devoured anything they came across, even the most rotten and foul-smelling stuff. In his view, the birds’ voraciousness contradicted the bucolic image the lake was intended to project. When I saw the swans anxiously courting me, never letting me out of their sight, I recalled his remark. Because of it I found them so unpleasant that I had to retreat to a path several dozen meters away that led to an avenue that encircled the lake. From that point on the path, one saw the surface of the water as a great metallic expanse. People who passed by this spot were either taking a short cut to a nearby railway station, which at that midday hour didn’t attract many passengers, or were headed downtown and would have to go around the station on their way. Having nothing better to do, I sat on a bench and gazed at the skyline beyond the lake. I held the book I’d brought along for the day, which, as usual, didn’t interest me, and which therefore I had no desire to open. I preferred to admire, as I said, the metallic expanse of the lake, despite its failure to glisten.

  From that distance one could recognize the swans only by their sinuous necks, like ghostly shapes whose blurred silhouette concealed a secret or a promise to be revealed in the future, or in the present if the circumstances were different. All the time, though, my thoughts kept returning to an object I’d seen that morning in a shop near my friend’s home. While I awaited him for our early breakfast, as we had arranged, I walked along the avenue browsing in shop windows. A wristwatch in one of the windows instantly caught my eye. Its case was black and its face white, this in itself didn’t distinguish the watch from the rest; but what was unique was that it ran in reverse: the hands moved counterclockwise. This oddity, which I otherwise would have deemed irrelevant, since it turned the watch into a kind of toy or curiosity, became in this instance a coincidence charged with meaning. For various reasons, my visit to this German city confronted me with a particular point in time; it was a journey to the past, and in part, to a form of the past that indirectly belonged to me. On one hand, a good number of years had passed since I’d seen my friend, and being in his company now was causing me to relive, unexpectedly, and with who knew what outcome, several memories from an era we both had left well behind us; and on the other, ever since the train crossed the Belgian border, my apprehensions regarding this country, Germany, connected with the elimination of a good part of my family during the Holocaust, had been barely palpable, and still worse, were on the contrary being transmuted into a dulled sensation of guilt and frustration.