The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  Meanwhile, just as before, there are women bent over on one of the side streets dropping stones into their bags, no more than two or three each. The mother hands the baby to Boris and goes with Felix and her friend to buy the television. Boris will remain seated on a tattered sofa with the baby in his arms, the two of them covered almost completely by a mountain of clothing and scraps of fabric in different colors. Felix and the two women walk along the empty, humid, snow-dirty streets with piles of debris on every corner. Now the space of the plaza is organized another way, to represent a small business cluttered with outdated artifacts; Felix can’t determine the function of many of these, much less their usefulness. On the far wall and nearly hidden in the shadows, a stack of televisions that seems like it might topple presides over the community of appliances as if over a kingdom of silent, motionless beings. Felix and the two women wait, facing a few wooden crates with holes in their sides; the women are anxious and speak to each other in a half whisper that Felix hears intermittently, when the street goes quiet. They talk about their husbands, what jobs they have and what time they get home, where they go after they wrap up for the day, when they leave every morning, their plans for the future, accidents on the job. The wall of televisions reflects the activity on the street with a slight delay and some disobedience: a passing vehicle is a shapeless blotch slowly crossing the screens; a pedestrian is just a vertical shadow, thin and dark, that looks like it might break into pieces as it goes by. Even the three of them, standing in the space reflected by the appliances, have become a cloud of darkness floating in the middle of the screens, motionless despite their movements.

  A long time goes by and they continue to wait. People sometimes come in from the street and exchange a few words with the two women, saying they’ve come for “small appliances” (then quickly discover they have a common acquaintance and the conversation turns to that person), but then get tired of waiting and decide to leave. Felix doesn’t understand what it all means, in large part because everything there is so big it would require at least two people to move. Eventually, a shape different from the previous ones is consolidated in the main column of televisions. Unfazed, Felix and the two women watch the salesman materialize; he emerges slowly from the screens and stands in front of them. He tugs at his clothing a bit, as if he’s just come from a long journey or wants to add a theatrical flourish to his appearance, and walks toward them as if they were old acquaintances. All the appliances appear to be broken, but try to hide their uselessness behind their excessive size, weight, and accessories. A radio, at least, insists the woman facing Felix, and the salesman immediately points to a pyramid of oversized wooden casings. The televisions are expensive, and Felix knows that buying one will mean the end of his time in Moscow. He is also fairly certain that none of them work, though this is not something he can say to his expectant friends. He imagines the three of them going back the way they came, struggling to carry the television through those empty streets, taking shortcuts, doubled over the whole time. Something tells him he should avoid this at all cost.

  Meanwhile, the plaza goes on with its lines for the market and passive rhythm of waiting. The small space assigned to the appliance shop has filled a bit more with the arrival of the salesman, whose presence draws even more attention than Felix’s. First, he imagines the wall of televisions, then he sees it; the same thing happens with the wall of radios off to the side. The young woman and her friend have come in close, he could kiss them both just by leaning forward a little. It occurs to him that, seen from the outside, by the salesman or one of the ladies in line, for example, the three of them seem to be talking about some important private matter. They are communicating, however, in a language of half words and undeveloped ideas composed of desires and reluctance. Another obstacle no one had considered is the fifteen flights of stairs they would have to climb with the television set. They stand there, thinking: the two women try to find a solution, one of them thinks about Boris and the baby, the salesman intuits where all this is headed, and Felix remembers Masha and wonders if she is done with her shopping.

  In any case, noon had passed and soon it would be night. Unleashed from the north, a persistent icy breeze was beginning to blow; it collided with the cobblestones in the plaza and gathered force, catching the women still patiently waiting outside the market by surprise. Trailing Masha produced no concrete result; at the end of the day, Felix was left with a series of inconsistencies, taking stock of which demanded real effort on his part. Nonetheless, he trailed her on several occasions, each of which was similar to the others, down to its smallest and most frustrating details. The setting was certainly always the same, given Masha’s invariable route, consisting of the streets between the hotel and the market, just like Felix’s idle periods, the encounters followed by missed encounters, the long waits, and even the vacuous reflections constantly popping up. It was like the invented lives of artificial beings that crumble into a facsimile of apparent vitality and are ultimately conquered by weariness.

  There was a secret that Felix felt compelled to uncover, but what he received instead from Masha was merely a series of actions determined by habit and devoid of any obvious content, and which were, upon closer inspection, only the appearance of activity. On the other hand, in the city (he could speak about the parts he visited), there was that copious, mechanical life that organized its habits into a chain of ephemera. I have sometimes wondered what led Felix to assume the existence of secrets that were worth uncovering, when in reality he would have had a hard time finding anything more predictable if he’d tried. Felix was convinced that one’s life held, let’s say, little psychological value; according to him, it was trivial, useless, and almost entirely without interiority. For this reason, one needed to complete it, or at least try to, by borrowing equally insubstantial elements from an ostensibly similar life. Hence, in part, his desire to travel. Destiny or intuition had turned that part of Moscow, the Hotel Salgado, and Masha into the network of elements that Felix needed to focus on in order to construct an image of simulated life, a being there and not; that strange presence the environment begins to see as familiar at some point, opening itself up, but never accepts as part of itself. Ultimately, this is the nature of the guest or the foreigner’s life. Still, Felix did not realize that things were not determined solely by his will, which was, incidentally, pretty vague, or that the plot he wished to be a part of already included him more than he knew.

  The last of the early afternoon light was fading when he left the market. The cold had turned the air blue. In the gaps between the lines of women, Masha thought she saw Felix’s silhouette. This irritated her, and stoked her anger at herself for having gone out in the first place. Parts of the plaza were covered by layers of ice that looked like enormous puddles from a distance, but protected the flagstones as if they were a delicate and valuable patrimony. She always felt as if Felix were trailing her. Whenever she ran into him in the hallway, or this time, as he observed the people lined up for the market with his transfixed, but not at all innocent, air, she had the strong suspicion that the encounter was anything but coincidental. She thought about all the old doorways she needed to cross, the street with its crumbling sidewalks, and the area in general, which converted the city into a sequence of little villages, and she grew tired in advance. It was striking, how Felix had acclimated to certain local practices, for example and especially living with the cold or speaking softly, in a murmur, but she looked with a mix of pity and annoyance on the fact that he maintained the disjointed air of an imperfect or unsuitable person, despite the fact that his infinite passivity let him fold himself contentedly into any situation. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember another guest like him. He immediately caught her attention when, standing in the middle of the cold, dark lobby after appearing in the middle of the night as if guided by destiny, he asked if they had a map of the city he could see. At the time, Masha had thought he didn’t know where he was and—partly because she had no way of
helping him, and partly to avoid starting a conversation she didn’t have the energy to finish at that hour—decided not to answer.

  Her purchases were heavy, so she wanted to avoid Felix. She never really knew how to react to him; as such, she opted to slip away from the plaza, hidden by the crowd. It would be a long walk back to the hotel, despite the yards and homesteads she crossed through as shortcuts; once there, her irritation would fade until the night before the next time she needed to do the shopping. With all the cargo on her back, the company of the masses thronging the street with the market stalls (an obligatory leg of the journey) was even harder to bear. In this sense, Masha was a foreigner just like Felix: she wondered why there were so many people concentrated in one place, all walking in the same direction. She told herself it couldn’t be true, that something in her way of seeing things had led her to construct certain kinds of realities: people always going the same way, as if life weren’t eloquent enough on its own and she needed to see it as even more uniform. Sometimes she wandered off course, but bumps and nudges from those same people returned her to her path, as if she were being escorted by an army of violent, sullen and irritable though ultimately benevolent, spirits. Masha couldn’t wait to get back to her room and dedicate herself to her ritual of counting the money and, at the height of her fantasy, imagine that her dream of becoming a character had come true.

  It was already night when she reached the hotel. Her arms were tired and her feet were numb; the last stretch through the dark had been the hardest, struggling to keep her balance so she didn’t slip on the frozen puddles. She pushed open the door and went straight to the basement to drop off the shopping bags. Then she stood motionless for a long time with her eyes closed, gripping the edge of a bare table with both hands. She tried to go over it in her head. She hated her life, especially the day she’d just had; she hated the cold, which never left her in peace; she hated her clothes, and she hated the hotel. The more she thought about the things she hated, the tighter she gripped the edge of the table. Later, her hands would relax, which would mean her mind was gradually going blank, conquered by lethargy, until she ended up thinking about virtually nothing. It was a listless, homogeneous form of thought, approximate, like a consciousness that recounts only what is right in front of it or what it stumbles upon by chance.

  A long time went by, and Felix was already back at the hotel when Masha came to. She opened her eyes and had no idea how long she’d been in the basement, source of the building’s eeriest noises. The heavy thuds, which normally were buffered by several floors, suggested large pieces of metal being pushed slowly by a mechanical arm; the constant leaden scraping that seemed like chains endlessly dragged across pulleys and stone, was, in reality, an almost invisible mechanism regulated by the heating valves and ducts, by the system’s temperature, or by the unsteadiness of the building’s foundations. Completely isolated, Masha felt that this noise, though irregular—sometimes it slowed down as pressure accumulated until it seemed on the verge of falling silent or erupting in multiple explosions, or else it sounded like an incomprehensibly guttural horn—distorted her own notion of time, if there was such a thing, turning whatever forward movement it might have into a purely auditory experience. The sounds reached her muffled by those depths of echoes and reverberations (not just the ones she could hear right then, but also the ones that were translated, the ones she was used to hearing on the upper floors), and achieved a state of foreignness and detachment, as if it were the residue of an unverifiable circumstance; the noise from the street, on the other hand, arrived whole and full of energy despite the dampening effect of cold and, especially, the snow.

  For his part, resigned to having lost Masha’s trail, Felix had begun to walk away from the market. The ice forced him to move slowly; for this reason, and also because of its vast surface, it took him a long time to cross the plaza. Sometimes, interrupting his reverie, he would notice people huddled together for warmth on the corners of the surrounding streets. He was constantly struck by the contradiction between the vast, dilated spaces that turned Moscow into an endless city, and the concentric spirit of its residents, who gathered together as if the territory were a desert where none of them felt safe. When he finally reached the other side of the plaza, the market was a memory at once definite and difficult to prove: from that distance, the afternoon shadows and soft light broke down its imposing form into a quivering white mass that looked like the atmospheric effect of a bright, cold day fading into night. On the other hand, if he turned away from the plaza and looked straight ahead, Felix could see the strange outline of a residential complex. Built on a ridge, its height made its presence all the more noticeable.

  Felix started off in that direction. He remembered other walks, also endless. In Buenos Aires, when he used to roam the suburbs at dawn and everything seemed to belong to a dying world, or along the old canals of Manchester, which traced the melancholy web of a forgotten plain fallen out of circulation, populated by chimneys in disuse that had come to resemble taciturn geological formations. There were few places he’d gotten this feeling of having a territory expand as he crossed it. Many associate this experience with nature, or rather with wide-open spaces (the sea, flatlands, even interconnected valleys); for Felix, however, it was a condition specific to cities. It seemed obvious to him that the more constructed the world, the closer it was to crumbling, and that this expansion was just a more or less indirect, perhaps distracting and certainly nightmarish, corollary of that destruction. Strolls through the city and the suburbs proceeded incrementally (corners, gutters, plazas, lights, bridges, stop signs, and so on) while you forgot about yourself so fully that two characters, each ignorant of the other’s presence, emerged: the expansion of the landscape (proliferation) and destruction (the material withdrawal or retreat of what had been constructed). Both adopted their roles as changeable beings or states, they overlapped and went on like that, perhaps not even revealing themselves, with their borrowed qualities. More than anywhere else, in certain cities Felix got the sensation that he was traveling through a body made of repetition and weariness, of forced postponement and decay. The destruction that the rain, the thaw, and the cold visited on buildings in Moscow might, in other places, be produced by humidity, heat, or wind. He would say this regarding physical conditions because the feelings inspired were often quite similar.

  The residential complex was a chain of identical ten-story buildings connected at the sides—sometimes at right angles, sometimes not—to form a sinuous barrier, line, or garland hundreds of meters long. He imagined that from above it must look like a trail in search of its own form, set on the colorless earth. From a distance, though, it seemed like a truncated wall, and up close, due to the glint off its many articulations, it looked like a sleeping or moribund snake. There were a few straight, interconnected paths made of slab cement that had cracked and shifted in the cold, which Felix followed to the base of the buildings. An air of neglect filtered through its entryway, corridors, and common areas, an air of something that had ended long before, which insinuated itself in such a way that Felix wondered if he might be looking at a city that had been evacuated at some point in its long history. Off to one side, buried up to its waist in the frozen soil of an old garden, he saw the incomplete body of a plastic action figure. The figurine was raising the only arm it had left, as if it were calling in vain for help one last time before it disappeared; nonetheless, it was a scene without an end. Behind it, he saw a rusted, damaged television antenna propped against a wall next to the broken carcass of an old wooden radio. In the area where, thought Felix, the neighbors from the lower floors might have gotten together in the old days to hang their clothes out when the weather was good, hoping the sun would dry them before they froze, faint trails of steam rose up from around the worn edges of the cement slabs, dissipated, and soon died out altogether.

  This was the only sign of life or activity. Felix looked up at the bare interconnected buildings without embellishments o
r additions, all those identical dark and corroded windows, that seemed as if they had been ready to fall for a long time but by a generous concession had decided to wait and allow the residents to save themselves and gather to wait for their collapse. He felt, however, like the only member of the audience. For a moment, he imagined he was the mutilated man calling for help from a sinking ship, and maybe because that toy was the closest thing he could find to a person, albeit a particular kind of person and long since forgotten, he felt sympathy for the figurine and a baffling, inexplicable sense of nostalgia. Perhaps the toy wasn’t just trying to save itself (salvation was too basic a desire and all the apparent effort didn’t guarantee a positive outcome), but was instead trying to recover a borrowed life. The affable, measured smile, which might have been meant to inspire positive qualities like temperance, optimism, and equanimity in its days as a childhood idol had become, in the figurine’s current state, a completely inappropriate expression. Felix thought about those people who crumble and are happy; about those moments of appreciation one might experience in the middle of a disaster. A slave to its smile, the doll had no way of expressing its desperation, and as a result met its misfortune with a gleeful fatalism, which nonetheless revealed itself as false. Who knows what force took his other arm, thought Felix, leaving only a stump in the shape of a notch.