The Planets (14 page)

Just as had happened with M’s mother years earlier, that day after the abduction when the weight of his disappearance would have kept us on that sidewalk forever had it not been for her wisdom in acknowledging, in different words, that M was gone; just as had happened years earlier, Sito and I were playing a part that was not only unpleasant, but also unclear. Any change of tone, any word half-said or said with undue emphasis, and we might freeze up and remain there, at the corner of Tucumán and Reconquista, for all time—the preserved relics of an encounter immortalized in its impossibility. In light of the disappearance, his absence, every comment, even those not about M, took on a valence of inadequacy, incorrectness, as though some weight were keeping it from achieving any real significance. And yet Sito, with his chattiness and gestures of fatigue, which were actually just a product of his laziness, conveyed something of the image I had of M from those years, no doubt with the spontaneous assistance of memory. In a way, it is those feelings that I am trying to represent now. (Sito greatly influenced my decision to write this account; though the idea existed before, it was one of those vague promises, caught halfway between commitment and resignation. Our meeting was decisive in this regard. Sito was the final impetus.)

Today one might see in Sito—in his robust figure, his agitation as he approached, climbing the hill like some tired animal—M’s consent to divulge some aspect of his story, even if that were only his existence. This may seem like magic, or superstition, but it is also hard to refute. Before his death, I had never suspected that a person’s substance or spirit could manifest itself from time to time; this was the outcome of M’s leaving (I say that he left in the way someone might say I never saw him again, he died, et cetera). But at no moment since have I come so close to feeling M’s presence, perceiving it as a sign unto itself. While Sito spoke, I went over the chance nature of the encounter and was even more convinced of the direct intervention of M. Any witness would have said that two old acquaintances ran into each other, but the reality, as usual, turned out to be something less serendipitous and more lasting. A permission had been granted to me, almost a gift, the benefit of which depended on the way it was used. I realized this as Sito’s words followed their course, though I was still listening to him. There were two paths: the straight one of his words and the winding one of M’s intervention, which, despite its twists and turns, kept up with the other. This is why I believe that, whether irrational, fantastic, or serendipitous, the encounter was a sign. M’s presence showed itself to be fleeting and without gradation; one could say that, though perhaps he had always been present; only now, fleeting, did he choose to show himself.

If one can speak of a thing called candor, a virtue some people supposedly possess, I should say that Sito’s was somewhat questionable. I realized this when he chose a meandering route to recall that M had not been abducted from his house. Sito’s roundabout remarks had something ceremonial to them; in order to speak he resorted to preambles and clarifications whose meaning, if they had any purpose at all, had been lost in a memory overcrowded by time and the—often purely mental—reiterations to which he subjected his own story. (As is well known, repetition does not simplify; on the contrary, it distorts.) What Sito said was more or less this: A kidnapping on the block, with no witnesses. Like nearly everyone else, M lived somewhere: his house. But he was somewhere else, far from there, when he was taken. This meant that the significance of the event dissipated almost immediately; it was not easy to absorb something that had happened outside the neighborhood. Something as decisive as a man’s life had closed itself off within its own virtuality, without leaving a trace. His family, especially his parents, by not acting in any ostensible way, seemed to give themselves over to the lack of coincidence between event and geography. And so began the delayed reactions for which they would, gradually, become known; more absorbed than they usually were by the familial penchant for distraction, they were now so slow to turn when someone called to them, for example, that they were already being hailed for the second time when they finally did. Their thoughts and reactions, said Sito, appeared to reach them from the back of their heads, rather than the front. The neighbors gradually found out about the painstaking, short-lived inquiries—which were not worthy of the name and never met with any success—but Sito could not remember how, he said as we drank the coffee to which he had invited me, since no one in the family talked about it with anyone.

One day the father went to the police station.
Went
says too much: the truth was that he simply stepped inside. He was walking along an avenue when he crossed paths with a patrol officer. Something inspired in him a vague sense of duty; he could not pass by the authorities without asking about his son. Information, like life, is sometimes so random that it is impossible to know what path might lead to the truth. In the police station they misled him despicably. They made him wait for hours, saying that the person who could help him wasn’t in. All the while, the father watched people arrive who had been in an accident, or who came to report a noise, a theft, or a scam; people who came for a certificate of residence. Every now and then the police would mention a prisoner in the back, in the cells. Only just before he left did he discover that they were not prisoners, but detainees. It was strange; the word remained etched in his memory. Under the circumstances, there was little difference between one (prisoner) and the other (detainee), yet the second was more optimistic. From that moment on, he had the hope that M was a detainee. As long as that was all, he thought; detention can last years, decades, but it is always only temporary, as long as he is alive. The thought of seeing M appear at the far side of the station, from the third wing, as the police called it, excited him. It is so easy for one to believe that reality is directed at them. After a while a sharp pain in his chest made him lean his head against the cold wall. He left the police station at dawn, after another officer, who had just arrived and was supposedly the one assigned to help him, questioned him about everything, absolutely everything, and told him nothing at all; he simply ordered him to leave.

The neighbors, said Sito, offered to help with “anything they might need.” M’s parents thanked them evasively, as though they did not understand, or as though accepting any help would be to turn their backs on their son, to evade the guilt that had tormented them since the kidnapping and whose weight they felt obligated to bear. There was nothing they could have done, Sito pointed out, how could they have contributed anything more than what they already did anyway? Neighbors help one another with ordinary things, common to all, unless some catastrophe strikes. Nonetheless, there is no extraordinary assistance for extraordinary events; the help available was the usual, the neighborly: a supplemental solidarity that was, given its magnitude, rarely decisive. Half a year after the abduction, in the opposite season—that was how M and I used to break up annual cycles, according to opposing landmarks on a circle, the year—the father nearly died of another pain in his chest. The family’s accounts, always in terrible shape, collapsed irreparably. It seemed as though they had all been struck over the head, lost their bearings. They wandered aimlessly through the neighborhood day after day, always disoriented; that much was clear at first glance.

Soda water, said Sito abruptly, putting down his cup of coffee. It was because of soda siphons that he came to know more about M’s abduction. An old friend of his from school had showed him the siphons full of gasoline that he kept in his house. He led him into the kitchen and drew back a short floral curtain, with a flourish. A few plates embellished with gondolas, birds, and mountains rested on the cabinet. Sito did not count the bottles, nor did he try to verify any of it; instead he amused himself with the thought of the cloud of boats, feathers, ceramic, and water they would create if they exploded. Preparing the siphons required artisanal zeal. He remembered the care it took to prepare them and the naivety of his friend for showing them off. He could still see the innocent dedication that drove him; his idea of armed struggle, for which those explosives had been made, as something like a carnival, a pageant whose winner would be declared against a backdrop of exploding siphons. Sito remembered, at that moment, the last brigades to use carrier pigeons, whose devotion to their pets and to the virtues of their art led them to overlook the somewhat more decisive aspects of the war. World War II, to them, was a competition between legions of carrier pigeons. Speed, strength, adaptability, and intelligence were the qualities that would decide the victory; only, they were talking about pigeons. The same way that now, as Sito described in the café to which we had gone for a coffee, the strength, quality, and security of the siphons spilled over to the outcome of the struggle. That friend of mine ended up like M, Sito continued. One day he was absorbed in tightening a spout and didn’t hear the kidnappers knocking; I guess he imagined it didn’t seem like he was home. But what happened to M was different, since he didn’t do anything, right? Sito asked, fixing his eyes, as they say, on mine.

And so on that afternoon, months ago, as we drank our coffee I grasped the nature of Sito’s doubt. In his memory, the figure of M, who was always distracted to the point of appearing indifferent, retained an aura of innocence, even one of absence or ignorance; in this way, his disappearance represented not only a question about his fate, but also a mystery surrounding his past. M’s past, as Sito understood it, could have somehow caused the abduction—or, on the contrary, politics could have been completely foreign to it, which would make him the victim of a circumstance that was neither anticipated nor sought out. This might seem gratuitous; an abduction is, of course, an abduction under any circumstance, just as a murder is always a murder, regardless of the circumstance or place. Still, Sito believed that one’s behavior could influence one’s fortunes, the way his old classmate had encountered, in his kidnapping and death, the outcome of a process that began when he twisted the first spout on a bottle of soda water; he needed to know whether M was absolutely innocent, that is, according to his measure, an absolute victim. He was, I told him, by answering with a “right.”

He made a gesture of relief; he had not been able to ask anyone for such a long time, and now his years of waiting were crowned not only with certainty, but also with peace. That was what he had thought. M’s memory became more complete: the truth had elevated it. Sito recounted the utter confusion in which his other friend lived, the one with the siphons, who had once enthusiastically told him that, if he ever needed to flee from his home, the Born money (from that famous kidnapping) would be at his disposal for expenses. The idea that it would be like a paid vacation fit perfectly with the image of a war of soda siphons, Sito observed. The phrase “the Born money” was a symbol of power, albeit a trivial power; it crossed his lips all the time. It was that money that paid for the gasoline, paid the vendor for the siphons, and covered other necessary expenses. Sito recalled his friend saying, with a childish ironic flourish, that they sometimes just poured out the soda.

Later, we left the bar and walked to avenida Corrientes, where the sun occupied nearly the entire width of the street with an exemplary sunset, reclining against the west at an angle too steep for the city. I asked Sito if he had heard anything about M’s parents and brothers, of whom I had not had any news in years. According to him, things went badly for a time: not only badly, but worse. As I already knew, one of the brothers had left his studies in high school. Then there were the undertakings of the father, which rarely succeeded—on the contrary, sooner or later they always failed. I could imagine these projects, impossible to call businesses, which in practice left their success or failure utterly to chance: before, when M was alive, it could have been the wholesale of old-fashioned pantyhose, or the purchase of a batch of defective housewares. It wasn’t until five years after the kidnapping that they had any luck; they rented a storefront, filled it with refrigerators and used furniture, and set it up as a self-serve—it didn’t go out of business as far as I know, Sito clarified, since they had to move shortly thereafter. That was the last he heard. When he was taken, the group from the neighborhood stopped getting together, he continued: no more talking on the corner or walking together. They went back to being neighbors, exchanging greetings and the occasional joke.

We walked along Corrientes toward the Obelisk for a while, talking about his children and about childhood in general. Sito commented that one never stops being a child—an opinion shared by many. For me, I said, childhood was the most forgettable part; I only sensed the continuity of my character when I left it behind, in a moment that coincided with my finding M. Childhood, that dynamic, foreign land. A broad, ascending stroke illuminated at the far end, in the west, by the sun—that was Corrientes. We were only a few blocks and a few minutes from watching, projected on the pavement, the shadow of the Obelisk grow longer and longer. Sito asked what I did, where I worked. I’m an executive now, I lied. I’m running an Argentine transnational. He was not inclined to believe me. “Yeah, and I’m a millionaire,” he said. Had I told him the truth from the start he might not have questioned it, but when I told him that I was a writer he warned me to stop jerking him around. To be honest, I hadn’t really believed that he worked in a café; now, with his vacillation, each individual deceit gave itself over to mutual distrust.

Anyone familiar with the weather in Buenos Aires, a fairly predictable climate that adds to the melancholy, indolent air of the city, could both marvel at and question what I am about to say, but it really happened. After going back and forth with Sito about our real or imagined occupations for a few blocks, he ended up saying that he was a mattress salesman; he had a little shop that sold foam rubber. It was what mattresses, pillows, and stuffed animals were made of, he said, but I don’t believe he was telling the truth about that, either. I, for my part, indicated that I had been living abroad, as though I were still trying to overcome his mistrust. And so, while we were going back and forth about our occupations and things of that nature, the sky was covered over with a cloud so dense that night seemed to fall in a moment. A metallic truss, at once subtle and impenetrable, settled over Corrientes. It was easy to predict an imminent deluge, yet everyone knew it was not going to rain. That sky, in the particular way it organized itself—a way that, despite its fleeting nature, gave us the full sense of the extraordinary force behind it—seemed to render all other climatic phenomena, all other states, obsolete. In that moment, all believed that they were looking at a vanished past, recovered only by some unusual combination of chance events: it was a phenomenon to be marveled at, if not immediately associated with the miraculous. Still, it lasted no more than thirty seconds. Sito and I discussed this; he reacted with similar surprise. “What a fog!” he exclaimed several times, looking upward. (This surprised me, and I thought back on that special class about the climate.) A few moments later, the sky cleared up and the afternoon continued its serene progress. We had agreed earlier to walk together to the Obelisk, and now that we were there we realized the conversation was coming to an end; we were forced to scour our imaginations in the hope that some new topic might arise. And so the encounter with Sito drew to a close. It was a farewell with neither a particular focus nor a future, like when one closes the wardrobe of someone who has died knowing that happenstance, and nothing else, will be the reason it is opened next. This is why we pretended to be so unsettled by the weather: in order to avoid having to go over it all again and say something formulaic befitting the occasion. And also why, as the darkness suddenly lifted, Sito and I rushed to say our goodbyes.