My Two Worlds

by Sergio Chejfec

  I found it impossible that this situation should be occurring, and nevertheless that’s what was happening. We remained silent for a good while, in a sort of mutual contemplation. It may have only seemed so to me, but the carp and the turtles had taken on a supplicating mien. Their bodies swayed steadily in time with the water, corresponding to the gentle waves that reached the shore; and I was startled to verify that, despite their to-and-fro, they were able to keep their eyes fixed on mine, as if—the anxious thought occurred to me—they wanted to etch my face and my demeanor in their memory, in case we met again in the future. I understood it as a threat. The animal world continues to be fairly unknown, and I have no notion how they transmit experiences there. I wanted to cover my face with my hands to hide myself, and spy on them from between my fingers without their seeing me. Nonetheless they remained just the same, expectant. If someone had at that moment looked where I was standing, he would have thought it was a matter of a man weeping, a possibility which, when I tired of the position, made me feel like not lowering my hands: I feared I would find human eyes on me, surely anxious to discover some morbid detail or an explanation, perhaps the eyes of the attendant or the ice cream vendor, or those of a father bored with walking through the deserted park with his child.

  Before this afternoon, I’d never wondered whether animals could be curious, like people. This situation made me see that the question was relevant, because my guests—note my vanity—never took their eyes off me. I knelt before the water as a means of getting out of the situation. My plan was to lift my hands suddenly from my face and give them a scare; once they’d been frightened off I’d go on my way as if nothing had happened. But it didn’t work. I waited a short while, the silence growing predictably deeper, and then all of a sudden I threw open my arms, gave a shout, leaned still farther over the water, and attempted to make a scary face. The front rows of the orchestra didn’t blink, as if each one of them had been sure of what to expect. Nothing was keeping me from turning my back on them and returning to the path, but we’d established a communication, and I didn’t want to be the one to put an end to it. Finally the solution came from someone also natural to the lake. First I noticed the waters roiling, and my audience as well; afterward I found out it was caused by a swan passing, though making its way relatively slowly. On board rode a father with his daughter, or so I imagined.

  When I met the eyes of the two passengers, I offered a greeting. But I noticed that they weren’t so prepared for the situation, since the daughter kept looking at me impassively, while the father conveniently averted his eyes. I waited for them to move away a bit; they were heading for one of the far ends of the lake, where I had glimpsed the low-lying building. The swan was No. 15, it sported the number on its tail end painted shiny black, similar to the paint of its eyes. As I noted before, I had seen this specimen parked next to the boarding ramp, and now, meeting up with it again, I felt some solidarity with its condition. But as if it had been a signal, its entrance on the scene dispersed my audience, because when I looked at the water again, I found that the carp and the turtles had moved off. I managed to make out one lone turtle as it swam halfheartedly toward the middle of the lake.

  It’s one of the things that will always remain a mystery, and which no one believes when I mention it, of course. But it happened, and I’ve remembered it so truly that I can’t manage to visit any park and its corresponding lake without reliving those feelings of perplexity I experienced when the carp and the turtles were observing me, as if they scrutinized me. What must they have thought of me? What do animals think of me, if they indeed think . . . I elected to return to the path that circled the lake to go on with my walk; I had the sensation of having been present at a part of an extended reality, though obviously minimal, reserved only for my private experience.

  I don’t ask myself those types of questions on a habitual basis, and when I do they refer to people: what do those who know me think of me, or rather, what must they think of me? I’m not referring to those closest to me, those who’ve known me for years and with whom I have a lasting bond. I worry about the opinion of the others, the half-acquaintances, if I can call them that, those who know me a bit, maybe only by sight, and to whom I’m relatively familiar, or on the contrary, relatively hazy and non-existent. It’s a recurrent question, which otherwise doesn’t always make me as curious, perhaps because of its sporadic nature, yet it’s one I take up every so often as proof of my own existence, or rather, my physical permanence in the world.

  In one way, the question acts as a private beginning of fiction, or rather, as a beginning of private fictions: I see myself through the improbable eyes of people for whom, quite possibly, I don’t exist in actual reality and in whose minds I’m no more than a blip. Here are the facts: that afternoon in the south of Brazil, it was November, the month of my birthday. When I noticed the coincidence I realized that I’d assigned to turtles and carp the thoughts that each year visited me with astronomical punctuality. The month was even well along—more than half over, only a few days left. As is evident, the occasion served as an invitation to meditate on the passage of time, on the past and on the future, the unknown and the abandoned, what had been lost and what had been squandered, on consolations and the promises of the future, etc. All of it like that, fairly messy. An invitation I don’t believe I wasted. I went on my way, then, head bowed. I have no idea why, but whenever I think about time, I look down at the ground; maybe it’s the only way I can distract myself, because I immediately set about scrutinizing the unforeseen details of its surface. I was headed for the end of the lake and kept noticing the imperfections in the dirt path that had stood up against people’s footsteps.

  In the past I used to think that the best way of spending my birthday was to keep hidden and opt for a one-day banishment: to leave home, go to the city’s unknown or rarely visited district, and devote myself to roaming around for the day as if I were somebody else, or at least as if I didn’t exist, or were indeed nobody; or to adopt some twenty-four-hour personality, etc. I’d take any train at all and get off at a remote station. Then I would set off walking, calmly and tirelessly, as if I’d arrived in another country once I stepped off the train. But I was in my own place, in my own city, I’d actually lived not far from there for a long time, a phase that now seemed to belong to somebody else, so that, alien to and simultaneously accustomed to that landscape, I kept recognizing the signs of my old life, although devalued. I was never capable of following other people, though the idea occurred to me more than once, as a subterfuge to while away these long, aimless birthday walks.

  It could happen that not too far from the railway station, but far enough, I would come upon some solitary person walking through the empty streets—under such circumstances, tailing another person was impossible, because in those neighborhoods the itineraries are too short, and especially because I had no way of dissembling or fading into a landscape as barren and quiet as that, both of us, walker and pursuer, would be the only living creatures in the desert, and thus too visible, etc.—and so it could happen that if I saw someone in the empty streets, I’d feel an initial impulse to follow him at a discreet distance, but in the end I’d give up on it; the very desolation of the neighborhood would override any argument and conviction. It was as if the desire for adventure, for fiction to a certain extent, as I explained just now, which had originated someplace as a variant of curiosity, had dissolved before assuming any true form.

  The atmosphere on the outskirts of the city turned out to be both intimate and alien to me; I could recognize the language, since I shared it, but I’d lost a bit—or a great deal, I don’t know—of the pulse of its expressions and of the local idiom in general, its resonances. And so these birthday walks were approximate in more than one sense. My birthdays consisted of vague gestures of this type, an exile for a few hours toward a part of the past and toward a geographic area that no longer belonged to me, but because they’d been mine once, I had considered them uni
ted until that moment: both parts were one and the same, a mixture of time and place. When the day was nearly over, I’d return from the outskirts as if I were coming back not from another reality, but rather, from a brother planet, an outlandish dimension into which I could set foot only once a year, when the calendar, underscoring my presence, so to speak, in the world, invited me by this same operation to suspend that presence, to doubt it, or at least, to hide it.

  The path that ran along near the water kept displaying its neglected surface; in reality, I didn’t expect it to change, but between one thought and another, some sideways glance at a distraction or some specific point in the landscape that called for my examination, I gradually arrived at the aforementioned place, the oblong building that stood at the lakeshore, with large, empty terraces on either side and great, wide windows that gave onto the water. One didn’t need to examine it for long to know that it had been the old boathouse, converted at some point into a café, according to what it said on several lecterns on both terraces and on a sign over the entrance: CAFÉ DO LAGO. The structure was modest and embellished at once. As one could easily imagine, it was in the same style as the terrace on the plaza by the pedalinhos, as well as the guardhouses, or tool sheds, whatever they were, that were scattered across the park.

  I went to sit down on the left-hand terrace, as far as possible from the water, from where I had a rather privileged view of the lake; I could also see, from the vertex of the old boathouse, how the panorama slowly opened out until it achieved its full breadth even beyond the swans’ area, which now could be seen, on the left-hand shore, as a slightly undefined concentration, a mixture of trees and various facilities. While I was waiting to be served, I began to consider the most recent events. Obviously, the episode with the fish and the turtles, and the associated thought, too, which arrived like an instantaneous revelation, though I should have foreseen it: I was ensconced in my birthday month, and what’s more, the day itself was only a few days off. By now I’m sufficiently acquainted with the fatal succession of nights—Borges said this, I believe—to understand that no distraction or idea can stop time from being realized and the future from arriving. It’s not that I wanted to postpone my birthday, it was my certainty that it made no difference to start thinking about it in advance, though I hadn’t expected to, in that park in the south of Brazil.

  Then I happened to have the thought, as I mentioned before, of the two friends whose birthdays seemed to them an opportunity, or alibi, for writing about themselves in relation to time, or to life and its possible changes, and the impact all this had on them. And as I remembered them, an odd thing happened, my birthday vanished from the horizon as a looming eventuality, to assume the validity of the present itself. I felt, as I say, truly ensconced in the day of my birthday. I mean, in one way or another, reality had organized itself in such a way as to anticipate this date, and it inspired in me a feeling of solidarity and concord toward both friends and their books, and one of gratitude toward the carp and the turtles for prompting the moment and having allowed me to preside over that near-secret aquatic celebration. Consequently, from where I sat, I could devote myself to contemplating the calm waters of the lake, and also to reconsidering for a moment these most recent events and thanks to them, understanding that the whole park in its entirety had worked as an unexpected catalyst for my birthday.

  A young waiter had left me the menu, only to take refuge immediately inside the café, probably wanting to benefit from the air conditioning. By now a brief age had gone by since his first appearance—short if one takes into consideration the span of a lifetime, long compared with the time most anyone would spend deciding what to order. For a moment, I thought I saw him keeping an eye on me from one of the windows. Not openly, like someone looking straight out, but diagonally, most of his body hidden behind the wall and his face peeking out a bit. I didn’t give much thought to him, because at the same time I discovered I was being observed from another angle: swan No. 15 was headed right toward where I was sitting.

  It had its eyes riveted on me, as if it were trying to memorize what it would say when it arrived and wanted to get a head start. I recognized the swan because the father and daughter were aboard, their heads peeking out from behind the animal’s neck, one on either side. I recall that the girl was laughing as the father talked, and that her laughter became heartier just after her father said something and she looked at me. They were talking about and laughing at me, I supposed. It was the worst that could happen to me that day, being sensitized to the opinions of others in such a way. Perhaps I was mistaken, but it’s not easy to overlook certain signs, especially when someone wants to disguise them. The swan kept coming nearer, despite almost touching the shore and having the entire lake to itself, spread out behind it like a mirrored metal fan, tinged slightly with green because of the reflections of the plant life. The father and daughter seemed to be in control of the boat; but seeing them like that, sunken up to their necks inside the enormous body, made me think of them as involuntary yet unnecessary participants in the actual scene that was unfolding.

  The scene was the most bucolic of paintings or photos: the afternoon light, the lacustrine landscape, and eloquent in the foreground, the swan looking directly up the line of sight. It was looking at me, as I said, and would keep doing so even if I changed tables or left the terrace. It would keep on looking at me if I stationed myself to one side of the lake, even if I spied on it from behind a tree, or if I actually placed myself behind it. Even to me, one of the protagonists of the critical moment, what was happening was impossible. I started thinking about causes. It obviously involved a dramatic exaggeration. It’s common to find eyes that look at us from paintings or photographs, as if they looked out once and for all, since they’ll never look away from us while we are looking at them. One of the friends I’ve been mentioning has to this day never forgotten an event from his childhood when an older lady lavished praise on a painting whose model gazed at all times at whoever was beholding her.

  For me, to compose a picture with that scene of the swan was at that moment the most immediate way of discovering a meaning in it, and that no doubt came about because of my feeling designated, chosen, somehow lionized by chance or fate on being the birthday boy. It was even possible that what I’d picked up on somewhat apprehensively—the father’s derisive remarks to his daughter and her brief look—had in fact been a simple commentary, a piece of information, he told his daughter it was my birthday or that it was about to be, either way it was all the same, except that it would have been more inspiring if he’d said the latter, so that she had smiled shyly in my direction without knowing whether she should believe her father or not.

  And I now recall Kentridge, the famous South African whose animated characters, especially one, named Felix—for whom he has a special affection, so much so that he seems to be an alter ego—rarely look out at the viewer. Nonetheless, they compensate for that characteristic, if indeed it must be compensated for and not entirely abandoned, by projecting visible gazes, I don’t know of any better name for them. A visible gaze would be the path traced by someone’s gaze, as if it were a beam of light or a luminous fluid. William Kentridge draws visible gazes by means of dotted lines, like those of the jets of water spurting in manifold directions in the fountain of the park I was in, which I described above. In this way, something physically impossible for painting or drawing to depict, as is the visual behavior of characters whose eyes we don’t see, is successfully achieved. We can observe Felix with his back to us, or from the side, while he contemplates a point in the landscape, a corner of the room, or the stars in the firmament, and we note how intermittent dashes leave his eyes to make up the dotted line, giving the impression of a column of ants or an action in progress, in this case almost the same thing.

  The gaze thus drops its habitual burden of passivity. The physical argument, possibly erroneous, that supports this idea, I suppose, is that light is not unduly speedy, and as a result contemplatio
n itself can become material, and hence easily seen. The dotted lines represent not only a connecting link, but the gaze in a process of continuous renewal, stretched toward the point under observation, as if each line, no matter how small, were a concise or great concentration of energy shot from the eye which will, on reaching its goal, vanish. Kentridge is famous for his animated films in graphite that tell stories for adults in the style of the pioneers of animation. Sometimes he seems to seek to represent the insatiable appetite of the capitalist system, devourer of souls, bodies, and nature; at other times he presents graphic reflections charged with melancholy about feelings and human actions. By and large, I’ve been moved after witnessing the physical metamorphoses of his characters, who are subject to earthly forces that literally dissolve them, extinguish them, or reconfigure them in another form in the next drawing.

  Once the scene in which they are the protagonists is over, these people yield to their own bodily transformation. One sees the silhouettes in motion and beholds the supreme weariness that overtakes these characters by the time they’ve nearly given their all; a moment comes when they appear to stumble, they get muddled in the forest of dashes the screen has become, and one frame later they’ve been dissolved or transformed. Needless to say, I feel more and more often like a Kentridge character, especially Felix, that errant being, someone versatile set adrift in history and the course of the economy, but at the same time exaggeratedly indolent in the face of what surrounds him, things or individuals, to the point where he succumbs with no sense of shock to the consequences, at times definitive, of his actions.