The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  The half-buried toy Felix saw at the residential complex, for example. Even with its marks of neglect and decay, so difficult to imagine for those who haven’t seen them, that plastic figurine—heavy and solid like everything Russian—was, though mangled, the only complete being. It occurred to me that people were hobbled from the outset: a decisive emptiness fettered each and every mortal, and that this had become a human characteristic; in contrast, artificial beings—figurines made in factories, like the mangled one, or invented in the privacy of home when the most unlikely materials, forgotten and immune to sleep or dreams, come together on their own at night—represent everything people have not managed to be in the world as it stands. Given this, it was not surprising that the residential complex should be empty and lifeless; everything seemed meant to underscore the presence of the survivor, whose missing arm was perhaps the price he paid for his dealings with mortals. For his part, Felix held the figurine’s presence up alongside the precarious or clandestine lives of the persecuted, who at the end of their lives are also the most forgotten: the poor migrant, the ostracized, the segregated.

  One more among the displaced masses coming from those distant republics in a constant state of poverty, the figurine had appeared in Moscow’s street markets behind a crate of fruits and tomatoes that he covered with a tarp to guard against the cold. If someone expressed interest he would pull back the cover, then lay it out again when they left. At the end of the day he would carry the crate and the rickety table it sat on back up to the top floor of a house he shared with several families; the artisans had set up their workshops in the stables, and there was farming equipment stored up in the attic. He walked between these instruments with care, afraid to touch anything, as if doing so would mean waking them and stripping them of the memory preserved by their stillness.

  The figurine goes about his work as if it were permanent; he does not consider the possibility of change, nor does he even think that at some point his merchandise will run out and he should find a way to replace it. He does not understand how commerce works; to him, it is a surrogate for farming or, even more so, for gathering. Despite the distance, the loneliness, the different language, and even his nostalgia, the city seems like an extension of his village, so much so that he anxiously awaits the moments he can make his phone call, as if the remove became real only in that instant and vanished again as soon as he stopped talking. On the appointed days, the figurine stands in the long line outside the vestibule where they’ve set up the public phones. A cursory glance tells him that a few of his colleagues from the market are doing the same: he sees someone who seems to be from Mongolia, a Manchurian, and a Yupik man. When he thinks about these phone calls, he tells himself he is going to talk to “them,” without specifying anyone in particular. That “them” means something, though, because when he thinks about the city of Moscow, about the multifaceted urban world that surrounds him and about most tangible manifestation of this new lifestyle, that is, the people, he uses the same word: “them.” Felix imagines him with his hands in his pants pockets and his typical pensive demeanor as he goes over the things he still has to do that day. At some point, though, he will lose his arm; unlike the paper and cardboard artisans, miniature carpenters, or tinsmiths, the figurine will be able to adapt to his new condition and keep doing his job. The only difference is that, from now on, he will carry only the crate up to the attic at the end of the day, leaving the rickety table in the street, right where it was.

  Felix tries to compare this image—of an uprooted individual with leathery skin and baggy clothes staring at the ground with his hands in his pockets—with that other image of the same person, in a similar posture and dressed the same way, but missing one arm, and the contrast is difficult to accept. In response to the greeting of some acquaintance, or to a confusing occurrence with no real explanation, the figurine must have felt the urge to lift his hand. But his first impulse was directed at his missing arm, producing a brief hesitation that unsettled whoever was waiting for his reply, and causing that person to interpret the fact as the typical delayed reaction of an immigrant. It was strange to see how the absence of his arm caught everyone’s attention, but was then considered only in practical terms. It couldn’t really be called suffering, either. No one thought of the figurine as an incomplete being, but rather as someone who had achieved his own version of wholeness. Meanwhile, the Moskva flowed slowly, partly due to the cold, and the figurine walked to one bridge or another to observe the water and the calm navigation of the blue steam that stretched across it. There, he gave in to simple thoughts; for example, it seemed like a miracle that the current was passing under him, that it was so slow and so quiet, and that he was in that exact place at that exact moment.

  Felix dedicated several afternoons to making sure the limit territory was still where he left it. He went there in secret; the best way to do that, he thought, was to delay his approach. He made extraordinary detours on each trip, as if to avoid reaching the area near the linked buildings head on; every time he got close, as soon as he saw them stretching out to the sides like an endless gray snake, he felt a twitch at the base of his skull, which was his sign of apprehension: he was afraid the territory wouldn’t be there anymore. Logically, though, he always found it, as desolate and somber as the antechamber to the underworld. Its depth, together with its unbelievable expanse, which presented no obstacle across its mineral surface, produced an unbroken sound like that of the void, a ravenous but quiet suction. If he looked back, the line of buildings rose up like a front line of frail, aimless ghosts turned into something mistakenly ornamental, a border no one cared to cross. Sometimes, when he walked toward them, aiming right up their center, he sensed that they were waiting in silence for him to draw near so they could close in and crumble down on him until the end of time. (Though this threat might never have been realized, Felix believed in things like that: the unexpected never happens, until it does.)

  He paused before the immensity, feeling an ownership over it; he observed the vast emptiness and the distant, ambiguous light on the horizon for a few moments, thinking of nothing, until he retraced his steps with a strange sense of satisfaction, as if he had just renewed a peculiar sort of title. He left the place at nightfall, when he could make out the lights of the city, which had already been lit for a while. Crossing its wide avenues was an episode from which he emerged with tired eyes; the intense glint of the bulbs (in streetlights, headlights, the spotlights illuminating signs) on the accumulated ice blinded him. Masha vanished from his mind for days on end, except when he remembered her with apprehension, as someone capable of discovering the secret of that frontier. It was absolutely normal for Masha to disappear from people’s thoughts, just as her own mind drifted, while she completed her chores, to her sole desire of closing herself in her cold room at the end of the day, counting the money, and imagining the book.

  They both had their secrets, and in each the mysterious presence that secret represented, given the zeal with which they kept it hidden, imposed itself as a new nature that distorted their identities. Felix occasionally stumbled upon Masha’s image, her available external form: he’d watch her turn at the end of a hall or walk past without seeing him. The same thing happened to Masha: for example, from a dark corner of the lobby where no gaze could reach her, she would watch Felix walk nervously beside the reception desk with his splintered personality, afraid someone might discover the truth about his comings and goings. When he returned to the hotel after his walks, Felix sometimes felt he was stepping into a temple dedicated to a defunct cult, or a palace devastated by neglect. It wasn’t just that the building’s permanent shadows were discordant with the diaphanous light of the city, but rather that despite the age of the walls and the irreparable wear and tear to the objects between them—from functional devices to ornaments, including several instruments fallen out of use, all of which were immediately visible, like the aforementioned sheets of hotel stationery piled in every room, or the worn or b
roken soap dishes in the bathrooms—despite all this accumulated age, the hotel constantly revealed its makeshift nature. And so one imagined that some terrible and sudden event had taken place and everything had been preserved exactly as it was in that moment.

  Things were different in Masha’s book. There, she was a woman of means who—giving in to family tradition and the despondent apathy that tends to afflict millionaires, and also respecting a promise reluctantly made to her father on his deathbed—grudgingly ran a hotel that, in any event, required minimal effort to maintain. She did little in her free time, though she would never have admitted it was free time, that is, a series of sequential moments at her complete disposal to fill as she pleased. She spent it at a few of the building’s unusual windows, which, from their different heights and placement in the most unlikely corners, offered completely contradictory views of Moscow, as if it were a city made of snippets, or rather a city built to be viewed only partially. It was impossible to see it as a panorama, and this was the result, thought Masha, of the fact that the city had been constructed, and later rebuilt, in successive stages of concealment; its aim was not to house, let’s say, the suffering or vulnerable population, but rather to avoid the gaze of the Hotel Salgado. As such, from the countless windows Masha found at her disposal, she could examine a truer, more partial, and more compressed city, like the individual pieces of a puzzle. Moscow resembled a scale model or, rather, several of them united by a strange bond of solidarity that connected them only insofar as it foregrounded their differences. Masha would get lost as soon as she set foot on the pavement (in this, she was no different from the real Masha) and the incomplete, deformed views that she remembered taking in from the hotel were now transformed into menacing and often grotesque apparitions on the verge of collapsing onto her, multiplied by the continuity of streets and the strange orientation of the houses and buildings.

  Felix enters the hotel one night, long after Masha has shut herself in her room; with the natural but reticent air she will come to know well, he asks if they have any rooms available. The hotel is, in fact, practically empty, so Masha arbitrarily picks a direction. She walks with her eyes closed, confident in her extended arms and in her knowledge of the building’s layout and quirks, which are etched into her memory down to their smallest detail. One of the times she pauses to wait for Felix to recover from a start provoked by the thick darkness and the unknown, or simply to catch up to her in the shadows, she registers his approach as freezing air on the back of her neck. In the book, Masha reflects on this man’s mysterious presence, who extends his stay over and over for no apparent reason. A free and apparently uncomplicated person, she thinks, who nonetheless dedicates himself to enclosed spaces and the convoluted streets of the city.

  A few pages later, she intermittently hears the nocturnal sounds of Felix’s slumber through the walls: he seems to be advancing and retreating. The inaudible murmur and spontaneous, incomprehensible words rely on the silence in order to become something else; a shout occasionally dissolves into a series of inarticulate noises. Sometimes she recognizes his presence in the empty city she moves through on her way to the market like a wedge cutting through the glacial air. Felix’s presence only appears coincidental at first glance: Masha notices the care he puts into going unnoticed. It is nearly impossible to hide in a deserted city. The whole place seems distant, muted, and foreign, but since it is the only one she knows, she is prepared to admit that she would probably feel the same way in any other city; she views everything with detachment, finds cause for disgust and incomprehension on every corner, and sees in the wide avenues framed in gray a pitiful melancholy that displays their outdated beauty like a mediated form of decay. This urban landscape remains immutable; she has never seen any change in it: the streets and facades begin each new season of snow in the exact same condition in which they bid farewell to the last, just a few weeks earlier. This fact is not simply boring; it unfurls as a coiling, condensed, tormented monotony.

  At this point in her plot, Masha understands that Felix must be derived from her. For some unknown reason, she had begun to gather, let’s say, heat and an array of substances and materials; she accumulated these with distracted patience until, grown and relatively autonomous, they formed the nucleus of what would later take the shape of Felix. Though Masha thinks this is a figurative way of understanding things, and Felix would certainly agree, the form it takes as a symbol is so true that it alters nothing essential. In a different time, Masha’s reaction might have been to withdraw, fall into a deeper silence than usual, and lose herself in one of the routine managerial activities so often mentioned in the book; on this occasion, however, she has an unexpected reaction, which consists of freeing herself from the fiction constructed between them and, as such, impose on her guest a relationship of dominance. She will dominate him through the hotel, the only place in Moscow where Felix has found refuge, but which nonetheless will insistently set obstacles in his path.

  Once Felix, struck by the hotel’s silence and above all by the image of Masha, which took shape and quickly vanished again like a ghost, is alone in his room he sits on the nearest bed to think. He has been wandering around for hours and is exhausted. Of his arrival in the city he remembers the cold train station, the wide stairs and high ceilings, and the pastry stand he found when he stepped into the street. Nothing after that, except for the vague impression of having crossed inhospitable avenues and an endless chain of interconnected plazas. He assumes that an unknown force guided him to the Hotel Salgado. What was he looking for? Where had he come from? In Masha’s book, Felix is unable to answer these questions, which further illustrates his diminished condition; not as a person completely devoid of free will or consciousness for any profound or circumstantial reason, but rather as someone who, obeying some strange force, has chosen to hide and not act, or to act only partially, according to his diurnal or lunar mood.

  Between the cold walls of the room packed with useless beds, without any sign of windows or the outside world, he cannot imagine what floor of the building he is on at the moment, immersed as he is in the constant cavernous thrum, like a mill set to pulverize the building’s foundations. And so, newly arrived, he finds himself at the mercy of his dismay. He opens his only suitcase, spreads his few articles of clothing out across one of the beds, and lays down on another with such contained desperation that the creak of the wood sounds to him like a cry of fear, or warning, that hangs in the night air until he falls asleep.

  Meanwhile, Masha couldn’t care less that the plot of her book includes elements taken from reality. Felix, the hotel, the city, even those old walls and building’s quirky structure, to say nothing of herself, are simply entities able to step out of the book without any significant consequences for their true condition. Nonetheless, she can’t explain why she prefers the consistency she finds in its pages, even if all that would still exist and the sun would continue to shine on the Moskva if the book were to disappear. Everyday life, the concatenation of events that typically occur all around her, and even the more or less unexpected ones that reality sometimes delivers, seems predictable to Masha, and therefore not stimulating enough to be read. Even so, there are no guarantees about the imagination that draws on this world, and the imagination that tries to oppose or deny it might be even more insignificant. Masha understands, then, that she is faced with at least one unresolvable dilemma: she does not believe in books or characters, but she herself is little more than faded substances grouped together by chance and unceremoniously set in motion. Come to think of it, she realizes that she has never read a book before, a fact she does not regret, given the scant and lackluster lessons her book has to offer. As such, she does not see the principal use she has found for it as strange: just as she was made wealthier by the currency she discovered in the wardrobe, she assumes that the book is also enriched when its pages are used to store money.

  Back then, in that other time, when we were young and held our heads high, we had no ide
a what lay in store for us. Like the old Sicilian said, whoever makes the mistake of leaving can’t make the mistake of going back. It’s an assertion that, as far as I know, Felix has never repeated, most likely because the idea of returning never crossed his mind. The day he left, I stayed there on the quay; the truth is, from the moment he stepped aboard the boat and they began to ready the port and blow horns that probably meant many different things, events moved too quickly for anyone to notice my presence near the docks. Later, as everyone began to leave on foot or by car and not a single person paid me any attention, I wondered if Felix’s absence had made me invisible. Something similar occurs in puppet shows, when for one reason or another a character disappears in the eyes of the others, but of course not from his perspective, or for the audience that unquestionably gives him life, though not enough.

  In any case, silence and withdrawal took over as soon as the ship began to recede; the dock went back to being a point that was forgotten, constructed, and forgotten again on some unspecified sector of the map. Just like Felix’s thoughts about being last or, rather, his feeling or belief that he was last, that day I also felt I was the last person in that theater of sadness and despair. As I said before, I was the first one at the port as the night came to an end. I watched Felix arrive early, and found it strange that such a corporeal being—with all his luggage, besides—was about to embark on a long absence, the duration of which could not be clearly defined. Then we went on our walk along the quay with the warehouses, a brief stroll punctuated by stops and half-dialogues. Later, I was a witness to the ceremonies of leave-taking and, lastly, stared at the river and watched the boat fade into the imprecise strip that was the horizon, as in so many scenes from paintings and films.