The Planets (11 page)

The girl’s name was Marta. She did not know whether she had wanted to be stopped; without rushing, she had simply started to walk. In the same way, she did not hide, but tried not to attract attention, to make herself invisible, to see without being seen and exist without being present. The night before she left, something had kept her from sleeping; she heard noises. One of the animals must be restless, she thought, as she tossed and turned in her bed. After a while she got up, wondering why no one else had woken. When she reached the shed, her attention was caught by the sudden stillness, which had neither cause nor effect, as though normalcy had returned to stay until the morning. She vacillated between turning back and pressing on, but her curiosity won out. When she opened the door she saw that nothing had ended; in fact, the action was at its apex. There was her favorite older brother, on his knees, pressing a hen to his abdomen. Marta was not shocked. She admired the harmony between skin and shed, between her naked brother and the backdrop of chicken wire, planks, hay, earth, feathers, and excrement; there was more truth in that combination than clothing could ever provide. This surprise would serve as an initiation. She slept badly the rest of the night, not knowing whether she was thinking in her sleep or dreaming while awake. Her innocence kept her from fully understanding the scene, but her intuition hinted at the inescapable presence of a revelation. Early the next morning, the din of the birds reached its usual pitch. She woke up not knowing how she had gotten back to bed. She remembered the unclothed figure of her brother trying to disappear behind the hen, and she was filled with a confused sense of anxiety. After a while, she got up and started walking; she would not be coming back. She walked past her parents, her brothers, even a few neighbors. No one noticed her, each went about their daily activities; she seemed transparent. That was how she left.

Marta handed back the glass and waited. They did not speak. The sky was turning pale, the afternoon coming to an end; the night would soon impose its own style, that of suspension. She was not afraid of what might come, she insisted, she just wanted to keep going. A little while later they would watch her fade slowly into the horizon, a reversal of how she had appeared. Of all their encounters, this had been the most intriguing. They did not overlook the affinities between them—a mysterious shared disposition, the same penchant for migration, the same diffuse violence enacted upon them by forces they could not name—to the extent that they imagined a life shared between them. Two were simply a pair, but three made the beginning of a tribe. Why not ask her to join them? Why had they not adopted her, even if they had to do so by force? They reproached themselves too late. They blamed their timidity and bemoaned their lack of initiative; sometimes, they thought, a bit of decisiveness is in order (though they forgot this right away).

The next day was cloudy; the clouds formed an armor-plated ceiling under which not the slightest breeze stirred. The stillness was so complete that they immediately thought of the cold, of those polar days on which everything, time and air, seem to stop. It was sad to see the wind, perhaps the closest natural simile of itinerancy, conspire against them, the consummate wanderers, with its absence. A few days’ journeys followed, one after the other, according to the custom of the road. The trace left by the girl began to dissipate, gradually turning into an imprecise figure and a vague sense of nostalgia. Nonetheless, they occasionally suspended their silence to wonder about her out loud; she was, of course, just a girl, they thought with regret. In those moments, the excuses stuttered by one or the other did little to absolve them; explanations explain, but they rarely justify.

They would see just how right they were a few days later, shortly after discerning the forms of several people on the unhurried horizon. They were Marta’s parents and brothers, who were shocked to hear that they had let her go on her way alone—she was just a girl, they couldn’t believe it. They asked where she was headed. The two responded with the truth: nowhere in particular. The road, in fact, was straight and there was no other; unless she crossed through the countryside she would not have left it. This answer surprised Marta’s family, who took it as a provocation. They found it shocking that the two had nothing else to add. No one passed through there for days on end, there was no way the girl had not given them some explanation. The mother added her own touch of drama: Marta was her only daughter and, as they could see, who knew if she could have any more children. She would not lose her. This argument moved them, so they mentioned the story about the hen, in case they could deduce something from it. The family was unaffected, like someone who, hearing a familiar story, wants only to verify a few of its details. It was always the same dream, they said at the end. Standing in the middle of the road, all seemed to realize at once that there was nothing more to say; their silence took on the shape of a truth. Marta was one, her family, many; they were two. Thanks to divisions such as these, which so often translated into running away, insomnia, or persecution, tribes are formed and continents joined. They said their goodbyes wishing one another luck; they would be sure to share any news.

Our pair was silent for several days. What Marta had confided in them as a tragic revelation was actually the retelling of a dream (as such, her flight from home might also have been a habitual bit of mischief). On the fourth day, once they had recovered, they picked up their dialogue and reached their own conclusions: just as the girl had made them participants in the dramatic account of her discovery, the family had not only expelled them from that drama, but destroyed it altogether. The days began to blend together again; the color of the countryside varied imperceptibly. In one area they noticed an unusual number of towns named after saints. One evening they came across a sign, but it was dark so they decided to wait; in the morning they were able to read: “Area under Dispute.” This was the sort of thing that would happen. They were far from Marta’s country when a form appeared on the horizon, just as indistinct as on that other day. Their pulse immediately quickened: the scene was exactly the same, it seemed like a repetition. Their impulse was to start running, to hurry the embrace, but the girl’s vacillation left them once again at a loss, preventing any outburst. They kept quiet and waited for her to speak. Lesa sat down on a pile of lustrous bones, skeletal remains that had probably been there for thousands of years, and spoke: Later that same evening, she had felt genuine terror as night began to fall. The countryside that had seemed so limitless during the day turned, in the dark, into a magical cell whose walls were slowly closing in and would eventually crush her. It was impossible to move of her own volition; a secret, industrious force pressed her forward, while the silence and the heavy sky kept her from making out even the slightest reflection among the shadows. On top of all this, it was getting colder and she was afraid of going mad before freezing to death. She called desperately for help for a long time, but could only remember the blow that knocked her over—she hit her head on a rock and slid, unconscious, into a ditch. It would have been the perfect opportunity to dream in colors of a different hue, she remarked, or about a community of wise men, but instead she would awaken the next day as though nothing had happened, with the sun scuttling across her face.

They wanted to know where all this had happened. Marta remembered nothing, except that she had been walking all day. She was still lost, but was no longer running away: now she was walking in order to find her parents. She felt strange in her own skin, as though a new—but not necessarily strange—body had taken over parts of her own. At the same time, everything seemed so recent: the anxiety, the memories of the night before. She thought about her name. There was something about it that she could not quite define, but which seemed not to fit: she did not know why, but she was convinced that “Marta,” as a sign, as a verbal substitute for her person, was hardly the right word. The name belonged to a recent past, that much was true, but a past that was also remote, before she ran away and before her fall; maybe her name was Mirta. The two regarded her in silence. They were about to correct the error of their previous encounter, when they did not invite her to join them, but their intuition held them back yet again. Something had made Marta unrecognizable, though not on a superficial, or even a deep, level; it was something essential. They noticed it in the tone of her voice, and also in a change in her gaze and the way she walked. This transformation, though unclear, manifested itself in Marta with a touch of innocence, even beatitude. They vacillated between baptizing her and convincing her that her name should be something else—Lesa, for example—or, the other way around: convincing her first and baptizing her later. Either way, they said, they should keep her with them. Who, except someone trying to start a cult, would baptize a person only to abandon them?

They immediately reconsidered. They were prepared to venerate Marta, but could not live with either Mirta or Lesa. And if they were going to venerate, they preferred their memory of the Girl a thousand times over. With this conviction, they sank into an uncomfortable silence and, again, deep into regret. They didn’t want to seem insensitive but, at the same time, could not make that mistake knowingly. Meanwhile, the girl waited longingly for some sign, even the most ambiguous, even part of a word; she could have waited there for hours and at the slightest hint of an invitation would have said yes, she would love to join them. The two, for their part, knew that they would never see her again. They no longer had the will to console her, aside from telling her how worried her family was. Then they wished her luck. Forgetting that both their lives and the landscape contradicted the excuse of haste, they said their goodbyes in a rush: it was urgent; they had to get going right away. And so, once again, they left a little girl alone in the middle of nature. But, just like the word
urgent
, the word
left
rang hollow to them, as drifters. Both words, against the desolate backdrop of nature that surrounded them, took on a hue of irrelevance—though they were familiar with the word abandon. Still, since they had certainly never possessed Marta, they did not know which sense to adopt. Mirta, Sela, or whoever she would be from then on, would hold a special place in their hearts. How perfect it would have been had things gone differently: if Marta had woken up in a way that would have allowed them to adopt her. But nothing ever happens according to plan.

They continued down the road. Sometimes they would come across train tracks and follow them for weeks, stopping to cook on the crossties and spending the night off to one side. Life went on as usual, which is why they did not notice how long it had been that any image of a girl—a photo, a drawing, any portrait on any surface—would bring the oval of Marta’s face back to them. Every morning they woke up not knowing where they were. This happened to both of them. They had been sharing feelings for some time; these almost certainly passed through their skin and were transmitted through the air. Sometimes they surprised themselves by thinking the same thing; other times one noticed that the other’s thought was not new to him, but was rather the memory of another, similar one. They never quarreled, never separated. Yet even recognizing that few other unions could be as harmonious, the memory of Marta proved to them that no relationship could ever be intense enough, profound enough. Her memory reproduced itself on an industrial scale. Photos of schoolgirls, illustrations of small female athletes, simple and anonymous charcoal portraits: any image of a girl produced a passionate feeling of devotion and kindness. Yet, strangely, they were impervious to girls of flesh and bone. This detail caught their attention right away—they interpreted it as yet another aspect of their own eccentricity—then, little by little, it took on a menacing air. The fact that Marta was not called into presence by the living and corporeal, a person, but rather by these images, made them wonder whether the world of travel that they had chosen might not also belong to a secondary order, a reflection or shadow of the real one. A world built by the imagination might be limitless, of this there was extensive proof, their own inexhaustible, intense experiences included; yet in order to last it needed the calm of the other world—the real, tangible one—because when it erupts, whether under the sign of condemnation or redemption, the other surface of the planet—the hemisphere of the imagination—becomes the substance of that breach, the fuel for the fire. Sometimes truth and imagination seemed like two fairly harmonious hemispheres, other times they could seem like different moments in the cycle of the same one; yet the fall of one always meant the rise of the other, as they consumed one another. This was the amorphous substance of which their vague intuitions were formed.

It was so easy and entertaining to formulate theories that a few years later, unaware of any danger, they were detained as vagrants outside Buenos Aires. They had not been arrested since Clorinda, nor had they spent much time in any one place. At first they were taken to the famous prison Villa Devoto. They would be moved often after that, though not as often as they would have liked. What is more, the places they were taken were increasingly unsubstantial; the last ones, little barracks scattered at random across a field zigzagged by barbed wire, barely sealed them off from the outside. Their time in prison was a time of stillness, of the lack of movement. This conclusion, obvious to anyone, held for them the inverse meaning, as well: that stillness was a prison. They had been locked up for two years more than they had spent on the road. They came to understand that if, in the country, the poor had a right to wander, in the city they had to follow a prescribed circuit; the rich, on the other hand, who stayed still in the country, were the ones who commanded the surface of the city, constantly moving from one place to the next. They could hear tango music all the time, no matter where they were inside the prison. It was better not to think in there; wide eyes wakefully dreaming and a blank mind made it possible for time to pass more quickly, for little to happen and, at the end of it all, to leave behind a lean life, with few things to remember. When they were finally released, it took them a long time to recognize themselves. They had to reconstruct the image from memory. They saw their own suffering in the eyes of the other; as consolation they walked away from the prison reliving the heights of their wanderings.