The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  I have, however, a more detailed memory of the afternoon and evening that followed, during which I was absorbed for hours, lulled into drowsiness perhaps by the profound and unbroken silence, watching the birds (pigeons and sparrows) search greedily for food with their eyes so close to the ground they seemed nearsighted. That silence, those minor facts of life that could be revoked at any moment, since nothing seemed more likely than those few birds deciding to take their search somewhere else in the port or the city, indicated to me that something was about to end; night would fall and as it did, this part of the world would emigrate to the dark side of the moon, perhaps never to return to the light, and I would remain, for anyone who might later by interested in the area by the piers, as the only witness to that final evening. Night fell suddenly, despite the languid sunset, though not before the birds started taking refuge in the few surrounding trees, their song producing isolated murmurs that underscored the silence and gave the impression that in each tree a secret or a confession was being drawn out.

  This evening song lulled me to sleep. I remember sitting on a granite bench as cold as a gravestone, and turning my eyes to the water. The sun was slipping behind the broad continent and at my back was the immense strip of land separating the city from the mountains; consequently, the river’s surface, which was already normally quite still, looked like an oily carpet, its slow swirling forming just a few whitecaps across its surface. And so I nodded off, I don’t know whether from boredom or exhaustion, staring at the water as if it were a marshy lunar landscape. When I awoke, it was already night; my sleep had made the twilight pass surprisingly fast. In contrast to the morning, when odors spread out fresh and distinct, not yet macerated by the heat of the day, what surrounded me now was air saturated with silt and humidities, proof of the unbearable temperature and intense weariness emanating from the earth at that hour. If I turned and looked up, I could see a distant, cloudy bell of illumination above a series of small geometric figures composed by lights organized into diagrams; these were buildings in the city. If I looked straight ahead, I could see the depths of a dark night.

  A few points of light appeared in the distance, some of them intermittent, probably a motorboat or steamer moving through the thick darkness. I imagined that the boat taking Felix probably looked like that, too, a metal crust surrounded by that immense liquid mass, leaving its trail of vacillating light, always on the verge of disappearing into the blackness. As the night went on, those buoyant lights grew scarcer, and I suppose there was a moment just before dawn when they vanished entirely. By then, the noise from the city had also faded, the ground had cooled, and the water’s lapping sounded both clear and insubstantial, as patient as the constant erosion of beaches, cliffs, quays, and piers. And so the night continued its work without obstacles or distractions, the swift navigation of astral bodies seemed like a leisurely stroll, a haven of stillness before the noises and glints of the day took over. At a certain point, from the leaves of a plane tree off to my side, I thought I heard a muffled, or stifled, shriek. I looked over at the tree and caught a glimpse of a slight rustling in the leaves that couldn’t have been produced by the breeze and that somehow expressed the same thing, that is, a stifled movement. I thought about two animals fighting, or birds that were either nocturnal or lost in their nightmares. But that wasn’t the strangest part: just then, as I was trying to determine the source of a cricket’s sporadic intervention, I saw a majestic cylinder of light stretch from the river straight into the sky.

  I don’t know if it makes sense to go into detail, though I should say that no one would have been able to explain this phenomenon. The column of light remained visible for a long time, and to this day I wonder if it’s still there, appearing regularly in the middle of the night, and whether I stopped seeing it back then not because it went out, but rather because it was hidden by the morning light. The dew and the humidity had wet all the surfaces nearby: the bench and gravel and stone paths around me, along with the rugged terrain flecked with fledgling vegetation and the sparse surrounding trees. I was soaked, as well, thought I didn’t notice this until I lifted my hand from the bench and saw its opaque, dry silhouette.

  My religious experiences had always been tied to more or less human activities (rituals, venerations, offerings, and so on); this was the first time one resulted from a natural event, or something that at least seemed not to involve human intervention, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was supernatural, and it gave me a feeling of fear and vacillation, of admiration, and also of shock. The wide column of light wasn’t close by, but I would also be hard pressed to say it was far away; in any case, its unusual brilliance, which seemed to impose itself on its surroundings with calm but imperturbable force, probably due to the absolute darkness of the night, eradicated distance and became the only protagonist capable of carrying that moment. I had a fleeting memory of those distinctive scenes in science fiction: a protagonist from another time or a visitor from outer space descends to Earth inside a glowing tube that gradually dissipates (this is the end of the journey) to reveal the pallid, dazed being that just successfully completed the process of transubstantiation. Its body has traveled in the form of light for days and days to cover the extraordinary distance, leaving behind a fading metallic sheen as evidence of its passing. In contrast, the column was lit up for a long time and clearly exerted a force of attraction on everything around it. Despite the distance, my exhaustion, and how my eyes burned when I looked directly at it, I couldn’t look away; the solitude and shadows around me seemed empty and unimportant beside that extraordinary, if sadly uniform, spectacle.

  So anyway, I also saw that what I had taken for small clouds of volatile substances or steam related to the column of light or the difference in temperature, was in fact a legion of small organisms or insects apparently attracted to the unexpected light, which were launching themselves at it, resolute and orderly, as evidenced by the way they swirled around it, testing the power that had brought them together in that place and would somehow, I thought, mark the end of the lives they had known. Below the surface of the water, the decimated river fauna was probably also congregating. Then I had another absurd thought: I thought that the strange nocturnal dust was hurling itself into the column of light in order to make an interstellar journey. (Tiny intelligent beings swarming on the surface of the water near the shore, always ready for any opportunity to travel and colonize another world.) But the course that was charted—whether blind, intentional, or desperate—meant a sacrifice even if it didn’t ultimately end a life. Who could guarantee they would still be the same people when they reached their destination? Science fiction also expressed doubts about this (to say nothing about the unlikeliness of making the return trip). As such, I did not feel I was in a position to venture a truth about what I was observing, much less while in the presence, because of the night, of the stars and the strange phenomena produced, and of the wild course the planet was charting through outer space.

  I wondered only whether, given exemplary height it reached, holding its shape along its entire length and not allowing even a single particle of energy to filter off sideways, I wondered only whether the column of light had caught anyone else’s attention, given that people in the city must certainly have been able to see it. It was such a treacherous phenomenon that it might, like so many things that were evident, suddenly become invisible. I could not come up with an answer, and since then have not been able to find an explanation, though I have tried to do so countless times; all I know is that I was afraid of being the only audience to that scene. It was not a fear of any danger or punishment I might face as the result of some supposed intrusion, but rather the idea that the condition might imply assuming some special responsibility, a duty or a mandate, even if it were simply to keep quiet. (I now see how similar this experience was to how Felix felt about the limit territory: his fear of being discovered, or of being accused and ultimately unmasked.) Meanwhile, I thought that night at the port, Feli
x was crossing the silent, calm sea. To this day, I still don’t know whether the column of light gradually went out or whether it was hidden by the prologue to the onslaught of morning. I do know that it started getting weaker just before the day really made its presence felt, until I could see a kind of sovereign decision or a voluntary defection on the part of the light, which opted to die before being completely overwhelmed by the sun’s rays.

  When all this was over and the morning had definitively begun, I prepared to abandon the granite bench and retrace the many steps between the port and my house. As a farewell, I looked at the plane tree off to the side, from which several of the birds from the day before had already begun to come and go; it occurred to me that the image would make a good idyllic memory of that morning. When I tried to stand up, though, some force prevented me. I don’t know whether it was the sleepless night, the loneliness, or the nocturnal phenomena I had witnessed, but the fact is that I found myself at the mercy of a complete and total disorientation. I had no idea where I was, or to which order of reality the landscape surrounding me in that moment obeyed. Even the idea of myself contained a fundamental contradiction, as I believed myself to be at once the invisible stranger observing me and the real person who had set out on a journey toward forgetting. And so I awoke as if out of a dream, as if Felix’s departure had occurred in a distant and almost immemorial past that manifested through intermittent ideas or recollections. Then, as I will explain in greater detail, I left the area by the port and returned to the city proper along the same route I had taken on the way, and also thinking the same thoughts.

  It was well known that Moscow, perhaps as a result of urban planning, ends abruptly. Felix was fascinated by this. It is possible to locate a point on the map, or the grain of dust or wisp of vegetation on the terrain, that sits outside the limits, which makes it possible to say, “here is the city, everything past here is not.” In this way, every interested observer unintentionally reproduces the gesture, though of course not the impulse, of the squatter, of the settler, of anyone who establishes a border to define what is internal and what is external. As a result, anyone right at the outskirts of Moscow would get the sensation of sinking into the depths of territorial desolation. The forces in play were the same ones unleashed in the continent’s distant epicenter, and the consolation of being near the city—in case something went wrong and someone, say, urgently needed an overcoat—quickly evaporated because everyone immediately felt transported to some immense expanse in the distance. Seen from the air, the city looked like an old fortress frozen in time; the world around it had reshaped itself, erasing all trace of past urban influences on the surrounding areas and reaching the city limits as if it were a military assault or a flood’s slow embrace. The highways oriented in all different directions reinforced this feeling of isolation and loneliness: in their emptiness and silence they were like lines drawn on a vast, nameless map. It seemed contradictory to Felix that things were so scarce, so meager in a way, in that land of formidable distances, and that they were also so marked and defined. He looked up at the sky and saw three birds industriously flapping their wings as they flew in a straight line; in that exact moment, they crossed the city limit and were lost in the direction of the steppe.

  Masha’s book tended to associate Felix with these kinds of meanderings, almost always related to observation, which assigned him the role of reflecting on more or less vague occurrences, usually something having to do with the adjacent landscape or some apparently spontaneous event. Her intuition had proven itself yet again by immediately noting the true nature of the person—in this case, Felix—and determining the best way to dominate him, so that his undefined personality, always open to the next distraction, would bend readily to her will. For example, there comes a time when she tires of imagining Felix’s nationality; his name, easily confused or forgotten, has a dubious ring to it in Russian, like Salgado’s. Felix could come from anywhere, which is why Masha needs to dispel the uncertainty; it is a detail that will help her compose his profile, which has been shrinking rather than expanding over the course of his stay. It might be mere coincidence, but when she asks the question (she tries to use a semi-bureaucratic phrase that her custom of dealing with the public has imposed on her, though this same habit has also worn the phrase out, leaving it entirely meaningless) Felix seems to go transparent, as if his upper body were dissolving into the air.

  They are facing one another in the lobby; it is night, and Masha remembers the late hour and similar silence when Felix arrived. And just as he was back then, he is still enveloped in the cloud of nocturnal mist that has followed him in from the street and performs strange operations on his body, breaking it apart or making it evaporate, Masha can’t say exactly, but in any event, endowing it with a dose of transparency, a few slight but decisive gradients, as if his flesh and his clothing had conspired to make themselves less dense. This effect will imbue the scene with a sense of mystery, but by unspoken agreement it remains hidden; Felix does not know what to say (he may not even be aware of what is going on) and Masha is unable to think (the speed at which these events unfold unsettles her). It is disturbing to watch his form darken and go translucent as if it had turned into a screen, especially the area around his shoulders, right near the edge of his body, where his clothes hang by their own weight from his skin, and his neck. This is how Masha sees through Felix: not by discerning how things really are, but by looking at them as if through a dark and granulated window able only to offer glimpses of smudged masses with difficult contours. She completes the vague images of Felix’s shoulders and neck, then, with her detailed knowledge of the Salgado’s lobby: the lighter patch in the back that is a window, and the dense, vertical plane of the door.

  When she heard Felix say “Argentina,” that he was of Argentinean extraction, Masha was not inclined to believe him; she thought he had just invented the country and for some reason was hiding the truth from her. But my friend insisted so forcefully, tapping his fingers on the reception desk, that Masha resigned herself to acting as though she found the information credible. In any case, it would be perfect for her book: there was nothing better for a fake protagonist than an invented nationality. Masha knew she could direct or mold Felix as much as she pleased, just like the little polar bear on her nightstand and the countless objects, made of every material imaginable, that children in Moscow use as toys. Felix did not particularly mind that she didn’t believe him, either; even he sometimes doubted his origins, that is, he questioned the existence of his country as a homeland or region. He knew he had a national affiliation similar to a civil document, that is, a passport, but he found the meaning and concrete effect this might have on his character increasingly mysterious. And yet, as the importance of his own origin disintegrated, the world’s other countries and regions—with their wide range of sub-nations, autonomous territories, mini-countries, and super-states—began to seem more decisive. He trusted in nationalities as if each one were a cell in a tray for sprouting the seeds of idiosyncrasies and unique attributes; only Argentina’s was an orphan identity, an empty slot with inhabitants who belong to a separate world, before history, class divisions, and the existence of languages or religions. This is why Masha’s distrust was, for Felix, a gesture of recognition, a nod to his neutral and undefinable condition. No one asked him anything, or made a single comment, as if he didn’t exist, as if he were invisible, or were the last member of a dying tribe.

  On one occasion, as the evening drew to a close and he sat waiting in his room for the depths of night, by some spontaneous association Felix remembered the figurine from the residential complex and imagined it as a being whose nationality was absent, scattered, or dissolved by the passage of time, stemming perhaps from an era before its own existence, always waiting for some unlikely astral alignment, maybe just to have something to wait for, that might reestablish its forgotten nature at some point in the past. The world plunges into its blind and autonomous wandering all the time, he
often said to himself, so it makes sense that there would be bands of individuals getting temporarily and then definitively lost. The figurine must belong to one of those waves, and Felix thought that, had it not been for his slight dimensions, he might have taken it for a real person. Inert as it was, like a rock, it still seemed that day like the most eloquent object he could have found in that place. He had bent over to get a closer look, and was surprised to find that the surface around it conformed to the figurine’s scale; the visual field matched its dimensions, rendering it bigger and more convincing. The surrounding area guaranteed the creature’s existence, like a hidden garden or primal environment. It was just a few centimeters from his shoe and wasn’t even half as long, but Felix was still able to assign it dimensions that could, at any moment, become human if the gaze falling upon them accepted the illusion.

  Given that Masha’s book should be, at least in part, about men who change nature, it did not seem off the mark that in other respects (physiognomy, physical proportions) the figurine would resemble the peoples of distant republics, who always arrived in the city at the same time of year, like permanent fixtures on the calendar, after digging canals, draining swamps, and making endless roads that in principle went nowhere. They came on vacation, or sometimes without a future after relinquishing their strength or some part of their body, and were received at first like heroes for their labors, until the memory began to fade just as the year ran out and the next batch of workers was about to arrive.