The Planets (5 page)

It is also true that while many of us may have felt powerless or indignant at his omission from the lists of the abducted (first his body disappeared, then his name), his parents may have seen this absence as natural or even necessary. After all, it was clear how little could be done about it. The accusations, investigations, and protests contributed to the collective reaction through which the victims were reborn and claimed their right to have gone on living. They also allowed the people to touch the horrific medium into which they had sunk. In the meantime, most Argentines, thrilled with questionable accomplishments like the 1978 World Cup and the 1982 war in the Falkland Islands, noticed too late that the flood of kidnappings, torture, and murder had unequivocally renewed its campaign against frivolity and barbarity; in the face of this, they chose to forget.

It is natural that, when confronted with this panorama, the complexity and meaning of which were beyond the average family, so many would choose resignation. M’s parents did the same; on one hand because death was natural to them and, on the other, because their meager resources and particular lack of aptitude and personal connections left them not only without tools, but also without the reflexes to deal with the hardship that had been imposed upon them. What is more, at the time, political violence and death hovered in the air; they were recognized as an everyday occurrence toward which many or few could feel aversion or horror—this did little to reduce its power; in fact, it had the opposite effect, preserving it as part of the normal order of things. This acceptance could have been a result of detachment, consent, or debasement, but either way it meant that death had proliferated through its use; a use that was sanctioned by endowing politics with a functional dimension, turning its morals back into action.

There is the incident that took place a few months after M was abducted. I was about to cross one of the typical, cramped avenues of Greater Buenos Aires, which were roads in the days before the area was populated and only later, with the spread of urbanization, ended up as very narrow avenues. There was no curb; the simulacrum of a sidewalk angled slightly toward the pavement, creating a formless space in which a bit of earth ate away at a fine layer of asphalt. The cars kept coming; I was waiting to let them pass before I crossed, when a hand holding a cigarette emerged from a car window, trying to burn me. I did not jump back, but managed to lean away and watched the bandaged hand, still holding the cigarette, return to the car a few meters down the road. There was a military base a few blocks from there; it was clear, despite its lack of markings, that the car belonged to the so-called security forces. I was not afraid, nor was I angry; again, typically, I felt nothing. Nonetheless, I saw how the coincidence of my crossing as they passed created, momentarily, the setting of a game, of order, organized with ease and pleasure to which the rest of us submitted with a certain natural acquiescence, at the dramatic and even more organized core of which M had met his end. That hand was accustomed to burning, and it found diverse, even incidental, opportunities to exercise the habit. Afterward, I crossed, but I did not forget what had happened. Once more it had become clear that chance is a condition of tragedy.

The relationship between M and the other was based on a mutual—though not always shared—time, within which certain topics, interspersed with actions and events, were advanced through both conversation and silence. As I have written, the railroad was discussed throughout their friendship, but there were other recurrent topics that became more central over time, signs of harmony or danger, the marks of a shared identity. One Saturday morning, as they were going to the house of a classmate, M and the other saw a group of Orthodox Jews; all were male, men and boys, and they walked without any particular hurry. M said, pointing, that they were genuine, real Jews. “They’re authentic,” he murmured. “Who?” asked the other. “Them, the Orthodox Jews. Don’t you think they’re more authentic?” M replied. “Why would they be more authentic than us?” retorted the other. He made a gesture to signal his reproach; he felt slighted at his exclusion from a group to which he had been certain he belonged. “I don’t mean that they are more Jewish,” M continued; only that their condition has retained qualities that speak of a truth and not only of constraint, as in our case. Our nature is marked by loss, by absence; what is left of an abundance that is slowly becoming more remote and somehow exotic: the Yiddish language, the religious holidays, the dances, the food. They, on the other hand, signal a confirmation, affirm a continuity with every step; they operate in time, within the diffuse time in which sons are, in the future, mistaken for their fathers like a convergence of the self, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their lives find meaning in repetition, turning it into constancy. “But,” the other said, “what does repetition have to do with authenticity? It’s true that repetition ends up becoming authentic, but that’s not just a matter of repetition. On the other hand, how can you turn authenticity into a collective category? Yes, an observant Jew has an image that is easier to assimilate to Judaism than one who is not religious. One aspect of this is appearance (we are talking about them now because we were able to recognize them); no one would recognize us, though in some cases, like yours, certain features do help,” the other asserted, avenging himself for M’s earlier exclusion. “Every trait, whether visible or spiritual, shows its condition; a condition that is not necessarily religious,” he continued. “The truth is, one could say someone is—for example—a gaucho, when he lives the life of a gaucho; when his experience aligns with the model, generally speaking. Still, it is possible to say that the further he gets from that model the less of a gaucho he is, and just as there may be a moment in which he is no longer a gaucho, there may be a moment in which one is no longer a Jew or an Indian or a homosexual. One simply isn’t, or one is in a complete and absolute way one moment, only to find that one isn’t, the next. There are also moments in which one is so little, when one is at the mercy of the slight pulse that keeps our hearts beating. Perhaps, then, Jews have a more flexible threshold of identity; more accommodating in one sense, but more implacable in another, since someone might no longer belong to a congregation, without knowing it, or the congregation might include someone among its ranks who sees himself as an outsider.” “I hadn’t thought of all that,” answered M, emphasizing the
all
, “but it doesn’t seem like you disagree.” At that moment the other got distracted: the bus lurched forward and the sidewalks, filled with pedestrians, slipped into the distance with the sole objective of avoiding scrutiny; he saw vague colors and reflections, neither whole nor essential; the side streets opened up to him only to close in on themselves like dark little wells. After a while M, noticing the silence, asked, “What were you be thinking about?” “When?” the other wanted to know. “Now,” said M, “what do you mean, when?” “What should I be thinking about? Nothing,” he answered. “The street.” So M told a story that the appearance of the authentic Jews had helped him remember. It was an adventure plagued by imprecision, like all fables; or rather, it was a collection of precise imprecisions. This fairy-tale quality extended further still: M did not know how he came to know the story, which seemed not to have an author. At some point he heard it for the first time, yet he already knew all its principal details—just as he already knew its outrageous conclusion.

THE FIRST STORY TOLD BY M

Two boys, classmates, decide one afternoon to play a trick on their parents: upon leaving school each would take the road to the other’s house, go in, and greet everyone as though it were their own. They finalized the details as they left the building and, anticipating the illusion they had dreamt up, both laughed happily as they traded names: Sergio called Miguel
Sergio
, Miguel called Sergio
Miguel
. Until they arrived, neither wanted to give up their role; the routine of the journey home, coupled with the novelty of the route and particularly the new identity, intensified both impressions and thoughts. It was a kind of emotional tourism; similar to, though the opposite of, the way children imagine their own death and actually feel afflicted. They got their first surprise when the mothers welcomed them naturally, as though they really were their sons and had been at school since the morning. The second setback was encountering the same attitude in the fathers when they got home from work later on. In the meantime, everything seemed at once strange and familiar because, even though they had been over innumerable times before—their parents were also friends—they realized that they knew nothing beyond the superficial. One generally associates the unknown with terror, especially during childhood: silence, darkness, or being around strangers produces a singular sense of anxiety that is immediately dissipated by turning on a light, hearing familiar sounds, seeing familiar faces. This was something similar, though not exactly the same, given that experiencing the extraordinary in the company of people close to them—and the fact that those very people would be the primary actors in the nightmare—allowed them to deliberately immerse themselves in confusion and represented a kind of ironic terror. Both boys spoke little while they ate, but the parents did not stop talking; they even seemed more talkative than normal—though, of course, they were comparing these parents with their real ones. The boys were asked the usual questions about their time at school, their assignments, and the material they might have learned, then they all talked about their days: work, acquaintances, the neighborhood, politics, whatever came to mind, until the conversation turned to the coming weekend and the many choices of things to do, as they said. In one case, they were leaning toward the rose gardens in Palermo, and in the other, toward La Boca and the Costanera Sur preserve. Miguel and Sergio realized the persuasive power their words had over the other, as well as the influence of their real parents over the other ones, since those had been their own excursions the week before. Now they were faced with the prospect of repeating them, after having spoken enthusiastically about the activities of the other.

Later that night, in the solitude of the other’s room, each grew more uneasy with every passing hour; they felt the unchecked growth of something that, despite their having initiated it, was strange to them. They could make no sense of it. Just a few hours earlier they had still been themselves, but now a simple, innocent event threatened to become the soft crackling that announces the onset of an avalanche. Due to the strange nature of catastrophes, they, who had pushed the stone and had been full of delighted anticipation at the prospect of watching the complex effects of their joke from the side of the cliff, suddenly understood that not only would the avalanche exceed their plans and permanently distort the landscape, but that they would be buried
up there
, on the mountain, contrary to the laws of physics. But these fears seemed premature and too bleak to keep worrying about, and the next morning they awoke with a new hypothesis: they decided that they were being taught a lesson, that it was a tacit form of punishment. Nonetheless, they would have been closer to the truth if they had stayed with the theory about the avalanche, as they would discover later when fate stepped in to prove it.

Meanwhile, the thought of punishment or lessons did not even occur to their parents, who were even more lost within their naivety than their sons: they simply did not notice the change. The anguish of that first night, born of the certainty that only terror can produce, brought Miguel and Sergio close to the truth, though it also made them retreat from it in favor of a more comfortable—albeit false—theory: that of punishment. And so, as tends to be the case, the more exhilarating the start—that unfortunate act of trading names—the closer they would get to the truth, from which they would in turn distance themselves the further they got from that inaugural rite. Meanwhile, the following night would be torturous for both of them. They missed their parents. They wanted to sit on the floor of their houses and never get up again, to breathe in the natural scent of home. Dinner on the third day found them quiet and depressed; not sullen—they lacked the confidence to be rude; at the end of the day, they saw themselves as guests—but solemn.

The next day, in school, each saw his own desperation reflected in the face of the other. They thought they were dreaming, but their reciprocal experiences confirmed the simple, very real nature of what was happening. During recess they went over a number of strategies; by the time they said their goodbyes in the street, they had already decided to do something drastic in the hope of bringing things back to normal: they were going to admit to the prank. If the adults wanted their humiliation, they would have it. That afternoon they could hardly sit still. They had decided to broach the topic that night, so that was what they did. Decisive moments tended to come at night, during dinner: this was yet another of these important changes. They talked, confessed, admitted; they even considered an appropriate punishment for the offense. But nothing happened. There was no reaction at all. The parents looked at them in wonder, taking in what they thought to be a completely imagined account, an almost mystical illusion too fantastic to be taken seriously and too unbelievable to be understood. Miguel and Sergio insisted, swearing that they were not themselves, but the other, and that the people they were talking to were not their parents, but their friend’s. One pair or the other, when confronted with these flights of fancy, laughed in their faces; as mentioned, the couples were joined by a close friendship and felt flattered by the amusing fantasy of the little ones, which in some way held them as equals in their affections. But the boys insisted and, as might have been expected, the night ended badly: they cried, they begged, and fixated on the idea of going home to their real parents, until one set of parents or the other ended up dragging them to their beds, where they nearly needed to be restrained as a result of their intense nervous state. The fifth day was nostalgia and despair: they just couldn’t understand it. The future seemed uncertain and they asked each other about their parents, the smells of the house, the floors, meaningless details, and about the boxes in which they hid prized objects, amulets, and talismans. The sixth day brought envy: the beauty and intelligence of the mothers was directed at the wrong person, just like the strength and the sympathy of the fathers.