The Planets (8 page)

M, absorbed in his thoughts, might hear nothing for a long stretch, and then, out of nowhere, he would hear everything a few steps later—not just the sum of the noises, but each of them, at full volume. Always inclined to frustrate desires, the trains had refused to run for hours, he told me, perplexed. At the dead ends he stopped to look left and right at the other tunnels of shadow formed by the branches of the trees that met several meters above the street. The absence of trains amplified the brightness of the tracks to the point that it made them seem impractical: the train could be eliminated and the rails would go on gleaming for all time; two long, straight, silver lanterns, M added. It was this gleam and nothing else that made the trains run, but it also frightened them (another of his theories). “I went alone, the boys from the block didn’t come with me” (I remember his voice, like that of an adult, and which I struggle to hold on to, saying that childish phrase I doubt belonged to him; nonetheless, he said it). He thought about the weight of the trains relative to the width of the tracks, about how strange it was that, on other vehicles, the widest were the most light. What I am trying to say with these examples is that M proceeded through the transparent dust of the tracks, lost in his thoughts but in some way already aware of what would soon catch his attention, when he stopped with the intuition of having seen something a few meters ahead, something he had not yet made out, but which would—once he had covered a considerable distance—come to the forefront of his perception. It was the eye. From that moment on, though he would not understand it, he would be at the mercy of the search.

The layer of dust left by the trains, the invisible shavings that come loose with the friction, the organic remnants the wind has torn from the trees; these were and are the only things on the tracks, and they’re incapable of rousing anyone’s interest. Nonetheless, M was interested. Very. His steps seemed to be driven by something outside himself, but it was actually something internal. The gravel, covered by a waxy grey that announced its own passivity, played a prominent role. Prominent and undeserved. M retraced his steps without knowing what he was looking for, leaning forward as though he had lost something. He couldn’t help but feel ridiculous and embarrassed. Someone, hidden in the shadows of one of the many attic rooms around him, might have been laughing at his every move as he bent pathetically over a stretch of land that could never hold anything worth looking for. Ever since he was a child, he said, as though he were no longer one, he had known how to choose at first glance the perfect stone for whatever game he was going to play; this knowledge, like all others, is not easily lost. At most it is forgotten, but it is always recovered. Now, however, those same stones refused to take on any particular shape, or rather, they organized themselves according to an unexpected order, taking on a quality beyond any classification or meaning. He stumbled twice. There was no question that they were stones, but the fact that he did not know what he was looking at, or for, meant that they could have been anything at all while still remaining themselves. After a few meters it finally appeared, close to one of the rails and on top of a small mound: nestled alongside two pebbles as though it were a third, there was the eye, looking out toward the horizon.

M told this story one Monday morning before class, and I still have my doubts about it. At the time I didn’t believe him—how could I? It was so strange: the absolute solitude, the radiant day, the discovery, which seemed so outlandish. Then I thought the opposite: Why not? I said to myself. What is the difference between an eye and a stone? (Discoveries of any kind are always somewhat exceptional.) Later it was the rest of it, everything surrounding the eye, that seemed unconvincing: finding an eye might not be that unusual, but filling the scene with a combination of primordial elements like the weather, the light, the noises, and the smells—all fairly vague and only halfway comprehensible—seemed a bit gratuitous and tenuous. The eye to which M wanted to call attention was invisible; it was hidden in a chasm of nature. For this reason, I didn’t listen to him at the time; I thought about other things while M went over the minute details, for example, the morning light on translucent leaves, the struggle between the sun and the raised branches of the trees; this scene of harmony and natural tranquility seemed more unrealistic than the discovery itself. A scene that did not actually end up being harmonious because the machines thundered on continually, the distorted voices of the neighbors splintered the air, and the tumult of the clouds, their urgency, was palpable; three or four times during his walk, M watched the sky darken, the light fade, and a storm almost erupt. If all these things remained on the verge of happening, even those that would have been by all counts mutually exclusive, without any of them actually taking place, it was natural to think that the eye itself had a limited, if not shadowy, existence.

And yet that was not how it happened; the discovery was real. M was filled with panic, but he did not run. “I was scared,” I remember him saying, “but I didn’t run.” An eye silently calls out for its complements: the lid, the lashes, eyebrows, even the rest of the face (a face, in turn, would demand a head, and the head a body, the body a life, et cetera; something is always missing, in that moment). The solitude of the solitary eye keeps it from being an eye in the broad sense of the word: it is a lost eye, which is a different thing. M did not know what to do. Somewhere nearby, perhaps no more than a few meters away, was an empty socket. Up close, it was bigger than he would have imagined; it blended with its surroundings, seemed like another stone. Its solitary nature was useful in this respect. M studied the eye until another burst of silence drew his attention away. “I couldn’t hear a train, or any other noise, just like I couldn’t feel my tongue resting in the space where my tooth used to be.” The eye had him in its power, its sphere of influence extending for several meters in all directions, making no distinction between animals and minerals. M amused himself by imagining its perspective, which lacked a focal point; so much so that he got the idea of lying down and looking in the same direction: the rail, a steel fence, the ground, craggy with stones, and a sphere too high above him, the sky. Now, for example, if someone were to look over they would see M lying across the tracks, his face resting on the sharp pebbles, looking off to the side. He thinks about people who commit suicide: maybe the eye he is trying to imitate belonged to one of them. M remembers: He once saw a mother who was unable to commit suicide without her son. The child was trying to get away from her, but she held on to him, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the train. The two were behaving normally; they did not draw any attention. No one noticed them. Did the child know the mother’s intentions? There is no way for M to know. They were seated on a bench in the station, wearing long coats that covered their bodies. It was winter, and although M has no memory of the cold, he can still see the swollen and flushed faces of mother and child, the watery eyes, the lips pressed tightly together. He also
sees
the breath that the mother expels from her nostrils; the child does not give any off. It is strange that, even when faced with the elemental state that is suicide, people tend to behave according to habit. There was nothing unusual about the scene of a fussy child, restless for whatever reason, and the mother forcing him to stay near to her. In those moments, according to M, the mother forgot about suicide. What mattered to her was not drawing any attention to herself; to her, composure was a gift, not just a behavior—it was a deep-seated value that opened the door to other virtues. Whether or not it came naturally was secondary, it was a gift that must have been ingrained, a deep conviction. M saw then that people’s natural actions served as a pretense to conceal self-destruction. It is true that this is the definition of pretending, doing something without calling attention to it, but M was not sure that the mother was pretending at all: to her it was essential that the child behave himself. It was everyone else that was concealing something, the situation as a whole. The mother’s efforts brought several jokes to mind: for example, the one about the prisoner condemned to death who, as he steps up to the gallows, turns down a final cigarette because they are bad for the health. Still, it is understandable that she would want to die in full possession of her convictions, not just her faculties. There was also a practical concern: the child could escape just as the train was coming, which would have meant waiting for another. But did the child know the mother’s intentions? Could he sense the danger? M thinks not. Mother and child were unaware of each other, even though they were together; he was used to expecting the worst and she to giving it to him. The child’s gestures were those someone would make around an unfamiliar person, a stranger, even. The mother bored him, so he grew restless. For her part, the mother was filled with two intermingling desires: not dying alone and not being accused of leaving the child to fend for himself. Abandoning the child meant recognizing that she could have chosen life; taking him with her affirmed her decision, made it unequivocal. She had little to think about, then, as these desires clearly indicated what should be done. Still, M kept returning to one thought: there was something so natural about the mother’s impatience at the child’s fussiness that it suspended the notion of death. M demonstrated this by turning it around, suggesting that the emotions were the individuals and the individuals the emotions. On one had, the desire for suicide: on the other, childish agitation. The first is the mother of the second. Suicide is ashamed of the effects of agitation; it does not show itself as it is because in those moments the desire for suicide forgets itself, becomes more concerned with not making a scene and shows a hidden sense of maternal propriety, wanting agitation to behave itself, not to be rude. If we believe this, that these two states have taken on form and that mother and child—two beings only half protected from the cold—are no more than the vague ideas known as Suicide and Agitation that inhabit bodies of flesh and bone, what name can we give the remains scattered on the tracks once the train had passed? What do you call the torn overcoat, the lone shoe with a foot still inside it, the crimson scarf? The desire for suicide cannot put on a jacket, nor can childhood agitation carry sweets in its pocket. Laid out across the tracks, M thought about that day when the whole station froze in an expression of horror as it watched the mother run, clutching on to the child.

M stood up and observed the eye from above. If it came from a suicide, it had not stopped pretending, he thought, except that now it had chosen to be a stone. He thought for a moment about his missing tooth. Only for a moment, but it was enough: he picked up his foot and brought down the heel of his shoe on the eye, as hard as he could. The rite had reached its apex; the sacrifice was complete. A white liquid splattered his other foot with such force that it seemed to come from something living. The delicate resistance of the eye was, for a few chaotic instants, a vivid and lasting memory; stepping on something rarely has such a contradictory effect. He observed the colloidal remains, which were just as disquieting as they had been a moment earlier, even though their origin was, by then, difficult to discern; a new, undefined state. He was afraid. “I must have been afraid, I don’t know” he clarified; either way, he found it intolerable. The eye, that solitary presence, left the body that had served as its vessel and its protection exposed; far from establishing its autonomy, this produced only confusion. It was like the sudden jolt caused by the presence of an insect, only in this case it was not precipitous, but belated. With the eye smashed, a change had taken place. It was striking: though the morning was not yet over, M sensed the premature decline of the day; the light began to withdraw and shadows stretched languidly across the ground.

Later, he continued, it occurred to him that he should tell his friends, but there was nothing left to show them; he had destroyed the evidence. So he began to look for its mate: if he found one eye, he thought, he should be able to find the other. He inspected the stones again. The railroad ties, especially that day, were dead trees that could not exist in any form but as railroad ties. He looked up and saw the rails extending toward the center of the horizon, cutting the city in two. He could sense, to the right and the left of him, the world spreading out symmetrically on either side of the tracks, just as the Red Sea parted before Moses. “The planet divided by the San Martín line, who would have believed it?” he asked that frozen morning before heading into school, amusing himself with his witticism before the sun had yet warmed the space we occupied on the very planet he was talking about. “Why should anyone believe it?” I responded. “Believe what?” he asked. I looked at him without understanding. “What you’re saying, that the tracks divide the planet.” “No one has to believe it; they only have to understand it. You don’t know why I said that?” he asked. “Since when do I ever know what you’re trying to say?” I retorted. As an answer, he regarded me silently. Our conversations were occasionally that mangled.

M was lost in his thoughts about endless train tracks when he heard the whimper of a dog coming from the vegetation. The machines faded away; he forgot the impassive advance of the day, just as he had noticed it a moment earlier. It was not a pitiful howl like that of most dogs, but a feeble wail. Orienting himself by the sound, he advanced with caution. He saw a white head and a grey back in the tangle of vegetation; he went a little closer. The dog had its back to him. M had a sudden and devastating intuition: that was where the eye came from, he thought, that poor animal must have just lost it. To confirm this he would have to get it to turn around. He yelled, throwing stones at it, but in vain. The dog drew further into the vegetation, probably lamenting the bitter fate that had imposed the hostility of a child upon it. M was happy with the solution to the mystery. Finding the owner of the eye explained the discovery and therefore made it more real. But the irritation with which he had crushed the eye returned, only this time it was directed at the animal as a whole, as though there were an unfinished task he needed to complete. Meanwhile, the dog was moving away. “I could accept it if it runs away,” said M, “but not if it ignored me.” He quickened his pace and, when he got close enough, grabbed its tail and pulled, hard. This time the animal would react: it forgot the reason for its whimpers and let out a howl, forceful this time, as it turned its head to defend itself. Then M could see both eyes, which fixed on his for a moment.