The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  The light in that region, which a poet once described as viscous, perhaps due to the humidity always on the verge of freezing, shone from the west, giving the towers a ghostly aspect with areas of half-light where one could sense an even more glacial cold on its way, and other places where the illumination cast long, deformed shadows as the day drew to an end. The patches of dirt between the buildings, which perhaps had been set aside for recreation or decoration, were now completely barren and reminded Felix of the tundra, the taiga, that imprecise but generally solid idea of a wild territory battered by the severe Artic weather. He kept wandering around because he had nothing better to do, but also because he was vaguely drawn to the silence and desolation. Behind the buildings, on a small strip of barren land where the residential complex had apparently decided to create a space “out back”—maybe in reference to the place’s past, or as a gesture of shame over what had happened there, that is, the construction of the towers itself—short, strangely gray weeds grow in thick, light-colored clumps that contrasted with the surprisingly dark earth. Felix was distracted by the islands of vegetation distributed according to an order that was at once improbable and impossible to define. Then he walked between them with his eyes on the ground, the cold hardness of which did not come from the temperature alone, but also from the long time that had passed since anyone set foot on it and took even just a few steps.

  At one point, Felix walks away from the buildings and feels inhabited by desolation and withdrawal. Then he thinks about the Buenos Aires port as he remembers it on the day he left, sleepy places that seemed to be used sporadically, launching into feverish activity for a few hours when their turn finally came, and then falling right back into disregard. That morning, after walking with me over to some vacant warehouses and making small talk while we stared at the cobblestones, he stopped to look out across the wide river, as that low-lying estuary with no opposite bank, no visible currents, and barely any trace of maritime transit is known; despite the great void represented by all that dormant water, which slapped heavily against the piers and sluice gates as if some clumsy giant were out there splashing slowly in the distance, he felt an even greater void at his back, hovering over the city he was leaving behind, despite its complex buildings, population, and the length of its streets. Steeped in reminiscences, he continues walking through the darkness around the residential complex with his back to the buildings, until at some point he looks up and is struck by the panorama that extends before his eyes, and to which he can’t help but dedicate an ecstatic ritual of contemplation: as if it were a vast, bygone sea or the river he just recalled, a few meters ahead a huge crater stretches all the way to the horizon.

  Felix stares in silence. He doesn’t really know in the first place, but he needs a few moments to gather his thoughts and review (where he is, what he’s doing, and so on). He’s searching for the feeling this landscape might inspire, but his mind usually turns to muted vistas; the silent or invisible ones, the lacking, absent, or empty ones. He registers nothing aside from this vast and lonely depression, where life could never take root; if it were to, he thinks, it would quickly die out, leaving no trace behind. Nonetheless, this show of grandeur excites him, as if the landscape had chosen to reveal itself to him alone. Felix, who had always felt he came in last (not in the sense of taking last place, but rather of arriving last), now has the intolerable suspicion that he is the very first witness to this vastness. Something like a dream, but inverted, in that it doesn’t restore the trace of any memory or affinity, but rather tells him he is occupying, right there on the edge of that crater, a space that is not only empty but also uncharted, and that, in all likelihood, he could be the first in a long line of silent visitors. Strangely, looking out over the desolate and somehow final landscape (it would be hard to imagine it as the beginning of anything), Felix notices a similarity with how things are in Moscow: situations develop as predetermined narratives—repetitive, old, even obsolete—but he experiences them as if the only meaning or justification of his physical manifestation, that is, of his body in that place and time, breathing and occupying a good deal of space, were to discover them.

  Ever since arriving in that city, he has been immersed at all times in a scene too habitual and too complex to not be imposture. He thinks that of all the things he has seen, few seem less natural than that crater, with its artificial-looking and almost shadowless basin; and yet, nothing seems more authentic than the stillness of the landscape, so close to oblivion and death. The glossy sheen of its surface is simply the action of unchanging time. Felix makes out a few scattered heaps of earth, as if someone, or a small or weak but organized army, had dug haphazardly in vain, leaving little mountains of dirt distributed across its expanse. This trace of activity, as recognizable and imaginable to Felix as the efforts of a child digging in the sand at the shore, was nonetheless what lent the landscape its inhuman character; the labors of man, once reabsorbed by nature and translated into a new form, turned into their opposite or adopted the condition of antithesis, combining threat, oblivion, and warning in this murkily lunar landscape. No neglect could underscore this, no melancholy could describe it, thought Felix as he gazed at the crater. The evening light struck only one of its walls, casting an irregular shadow at his feet, jagged for long stretches at a time, from the ridge on the opposite side.

  This desert made Felix realize that, without meaning or wanting to, he had discovered a limit territory. In the only sense he knew, at least, the world ended and this other territory began, with its new and unfamiliar rules. Felix gave himself over to the steppe—its depth, the sharpness of its air, its abyssal silence, and its immense scale—and again thought it strange that he felt nothing remotely like exaltation. This mysterious landscape, excessively literal in the sense that it was excessively silent, seemed the complementary inverse of the other one, the reality behind him that he inhabited, the city of Moscow, but also the entire network of cities and places that started there and stretched out, straddling the seas. The world seemed flat, dead, and hollow like the empty sea he was staring at now. He took a few steps amid the scraggy vegetation, the ground beneath which looked as if an army of invisible organisms had digested it and turned it into a dark, nondescript powder. From time to time he discovered some trace of human activity, for example a length of wire, old balled up sheets of paper, or shards of glass. These things, as if admitting their impotence through their sparseness, were not enough to allude to the atmosphere or past, let’s say, of a community; they did not convey oblivion or neglect, either: it was an elemental abandonment, the traces of a vanished community. (The line from Giannuzzi bears repeating here: “It seems that culture consists in the thorough tormenting of matter and pushing it through …”) From his vantage point, Felix could see the undulations of the gradual slope that formed the depression, slow and endless like the foothills of a large but not particularly tall mountain.

  A stone had stopped rolling at the most predictable obstacle, another stone, and Felix thought the two might spend centuries in those exact places, untouched despite periods of freezing weather, sun, and shadow. It might seem strange, but it was this simple idea of unchanging cycles that moved him in the end; struck once more by the spectacle and the solitude, it occurred to him that he was the first person to discover that theater of neglect. He thought that the world ended right where he was standing (and that whoever managed to cross that flattened and rambling terrain, surely after years of futile attempts, would be faced with even greater desolation). As evening fell, the scene’s surface changed color, without abandoning its metallic tint. Although there was nothing unusual about any of it, everything Felix saw seemed unique, and this exceptional quality confirmed for him that he was the protagonist of a discovery. This was enough to convince him to keep the moment a secret; he had found a desert as vast as a continent, despite having stumbled upon unintentionally.

  Back at the hotel, as he crossed the lobby—which was even gloomier at that late hour—F
elix wondered if Masha had returned yet. He imagined her bent under the weight of her purchases, skirting the ice, making laborious progress and in danger of taking a wrong turn at every corner, as he supposed she often did, though never without managing to find, sometimes with great effort, the way back to her designated route. A thought frightened him: she could become a threat in all her innocence if, on one of those chance detours, she discovered the territory. In reality, he wanted to keep it a secret as compensation for the Hotel Salgado’s mysteries, all the things it concealed and never revealed. And though he didn’t know what use he could make of his lunar valley, it was enough for Felix that it was his private discovery, something that expanded, let’s say, his meager interiority, which was, even according to him, sparse by nature and with increasingly few experiences to support it. For a foreigner, discovery is no more than an unlikely manifestation of justice—one that is obviously off-limits to locals. Having dedicated a good part of his life to traveling the world in the hope of escaping the mental province to which he’d thought himself condemned, Felix realized in Moscow that his idea of experience had changed, or that it had always been wrong, or else had simply evaporated at some point, and that so many of the things he took for experiences in the past now barely left a trace on his hardened sensibility, having been transformed into almost unrecognizable states devoid of any real interest, of which nothing but a formless memory remained, impossible to recover except as a vague reminiscence.

  Every experience was first consolidated as confusion, then was gradually transformed into forgetting. He had lost the thread of continuity with the past: his memories were floating moments unable to come together as a sequence, shards of events provisionally recovered that served only as fragments. The place as a whole, including the origin of the things in it, was something that would remain unknown. This produced in Felix uncontrollable states of bitterness that made him cowardly and indecisive, and led him to further mistrust his unpredictable and complex sensibility. I have occasionally thought of Felix as a two-dimensional person without psychology, contradictions, or even subjectivity. The same could be said of Masha. An imprecise being with the mutable consistency of a dense fog, whenever she appeared she fluctuated like an abstract figure, say, at the mercy of the always-unpredictable interaction among currents of wind.

  It seemed to me that both had invented themselves from the crudest, most trivial materials possible, each hoping the other might see them as an equal in their shared meagerness, and that this might, at the same time, be a way of inhabiting their own existence. Let’s imagine that at some point—as if out of the blue, or from the combination of two strange elements—Felix’s consciousness emerges, on the one hand, and Masha’s, on the other. Gradually, and with great effort, both consciousnesses gathered enough energy to draw additional material to themselves, mostly things accessible to them by chance, like objects found on the unswept streets: odds and ends, papers, damaged scraps of wood, pieces of plastic. (Felix probably witnessed the capacity for survival of these materials when he saw them in their decades-long slumber in the barren plots around the residential complex.) In this way, they amassed a nucleus that began to hold in heat, increasing their chances of attracting even bigger, stronger, more flexible objects: pieces of fabric, sticks, or boards; whole containers, glass. And so Felix and Masha began taking shape, like two self-made figurines unexpectedly confronted with their own lives and respective consciousnesses. In both cases, lives and consciousnesses that would never be such, because they were artificial beings and therefore lacked any sense of intimacy or subjectivity, among other things.

  I began thinking about that old friend of mine, Felix, and he seemed unrecognizable beside the person he currently was; though the same could not be said of Masha, because I’d known nothing of her before, though through a kind of assimilation with Felix it seemed possible to assign her (or, rather, draw from her) a series of attributes. “What does a friendship become?” I wondered. Its original intensity, a result of our seeing each other daily, had broken down over time into the sequence of sporadic lines Felix would send me, until it took the shape of a displaced feeling, gradually faded, which relied on a composition of snippets to adopt a new form. At some point, then, it occurred to me that Felix and Masha were like spirits, I don’t know what else to call them, artificial beings, characters so completely available they could be put together like makeshift dolls. It is revealing that, in the age of instantaneous communication—when an incessant stream of electronic messages can reach you without any outside intervention, not even your own; when you could send messages all day long without any effort beyond that of writing, and sometimes not even that—at a time when communication has become so direct, Felix would still turn to the old system of postcards or notes written on hotel stationery, sent through the postal service. Another thing, I thought, that relegated my friend to the world of indirect developments, of divided courses, of interventions and prologues.

  And so, as a character from another world, who, moreover, reached me by way of exotic objects—as I said earlier, those postcards and the protocols that govern their writing and mailing, with their allusions to travel that concealed more than they revealed—Felix had all the attributes of a fabricated being; not, say, someone without a soul, but rather an individual without a fully developed will whose movements were dictated by reflex and partial outbursts, each of which fulfilled only its own mission, whatever that might be, but never managed to compose a whole, a complete personality. For example, I have the sense that there was nothing coincidental about the way Felix paused in front of the photograph decorating his room during one stay, that famous photo titled “The Marionettist’s Hands.” Standing in front of it, he first felt implicated, then exposed, observed, and warned. The strings dangling from what was ostensibly a frame (a wall, the false back of a tableau, the suspended backdrop of an open-air theater, the balustrade around a rooftop) and indistinguishable from their own shadows, those strings were in fact directed at him, the invisible form on which the performance hung. Hidden in the immensity of Moscow, invaded by the cold and the darkness, Felix took another step back, reducing his fragmentary personality, and felt a sense of reconciliation; years later he found himself understood in his limitations, as if those tangled strings were still consoling him, saying, “Don’t worry—be less, withdraw, we’re here; to the right, now, and up …” As for Masha, she was increasingly a mere extension of Felix. If she’d had any aspiration to an autonomous life, as if she were real, it had vanished that first cold, dreary night spent condemned to wait for the being that justified her existence.

  After his discovery, Felix tried to go about life as normal, or at least in a way that was similar to the life he’d had since arriving at the hotel. He sensed that something had changed, though he couldn’t identify what it was. His impressions were so vague as to be essentially useless; he observed, for example, that the part of the city where he was staying seemed more desolate than usual. In his room, after performing the semi-acrobatic operations required to look out the windows, he surveyed the erratic angles of the streets, the large sheds or barns attached to the houses, the stairs out back, the internal patios and storehouses in general; that idyll of the countryside inserted into the suburbs seemed to him not only melancholy, as it always had, but also condemned to an incomplete life of eternal survival. His view was partial, but, having glimpsed and even wandered around it many times during his aimless walks, he could easily imagine the network of passageways woven outdoors between the sides and backs of the houses, which, over time, had been hidden in the unseen parts of the buildings. It was precisely this image of a clandestine village, the hidden face of the city, that led him to think that in Moscow things were subject to a contradictory form of time, at once accelerated and permanent. Before his discovery, though it had been common to see just a few people in the street, there had at least been, some facsimile of life and contradiction; now, however, when no one stepped outside, Felix thought
they had all succumbed to the unique temporality of the city, that they had allowed the geography to swallow them.

  Some afternoons offered no sign of life at all, others stood out for a lone sled gliding furtively down the street, as if animals were fleeing from something in terror. And so the city seemed to him like a complete world—without fissures, but fictitious—that revealed how it functioned, a plot that was visible at first glance in the different elements organized according to their roles and places in the hierarchy, that is, and also the practical uselessness of this organization. The streets, exaggeratedly straight and empty, clearly belonged to the order of the evident, but they also belonged to the order of the artificial, like the grid of a board game waiting for the pieces to be laid out. Moscow’s “disuse,” an emptiness Felix viewed as spontaneous, seemed to him to be the consequence of forgetting certain words. In this case, “people,” or the less extreme “individuals.” These things were no longer seen, as if from one moment to the next both word and idea had been eradicated from thought.

  As for me, my thoughts turned to the world. To its increasingly powerful mechanisms and how we are inescapably destined to obey the working of its gears. These thoughts could only lead to the most pessimistic state of mind, into which I sank as if it were the sole respite or salvation permitted by an inevitable but still unrealized tragedy. And if I thought about the past, about the chain of events both shown and concealed, half-known or distorted, that is, about the series of actions that gave us the so-called “world today,” though one way or the other it was an invented sequence, everything got much worse, because in the perpetual end of the road that is the present, unrelenting madness and eternal cruelty emerged as proof of humanity’s wild ambition. Faced with such a somber and irremediable panorama, I thought, the only alternative would be to trust in artificial beings. I didn’t expect them to provide some kind of justice or correct any wrongdoings, I simply imagined them as an alternative, a way of announcing that another world, also incomplete, would have been possible, and that this other world—insofar as it presented itself as a corrective to the so-called real one, or as its complement and commentary—was infinitely more fair.