The Planets (12 page)

Buenos Aires accomplished what Clorinda could not: it did not even occur to them to go back to their old life. They preferred to hold on to the memory of a countryside “of our own,” as they would say, that nonetheless was as neutral as the sea, as ephemeral as time and as undefined as Marta. When they moved into the house that would become their home, they were surprised at how young the trees on the block were. The train, whose tracks were just a few meters away, also embodied the ideas of travel, freedom, and migration: this was a comfort to them, as well. The first thing that happened to them was finding a large image of a certain virgin. They adopted it, as they had not done with Marta. There, from the living room, she would oversee the daily activities of the pair, who had gone from being perambulatory to being sedentary and, what is more, to being still. In a language so secret that it was never even expressed as sound, they called her “the colossal virgin” (or something like that): the lack of space, territory, and mobility lapsed into a pious devotion. They also lit candles to the memory of Marta, for whose presence they were able to find no better image than that of a girl about to dive into a pool, her hands folded together as though praying downwards, cut from an old magazine of current events. Marta’s innocence became atemporal; even the vocabulary that described it changed, swelling with mysticism, something like a beatitude. If they had, up to a certain point, referred to their first encounter as her “arrival” and their second as her “return,” now they spoke of an enduring presence, albeit one that chose to manifest itself only occasionally. Marta had shown herself at one moment or another, though she had—since they had met her—always been present; she still was, only in absence.

It was inconceivable to anyone who saw them that they had been consummate, slightly diffuse travelers (a passing difference). The hostile air of the city, which was intangible but nonetheless verifiable, forced them into their home, pressing them into its corners. They never went downtown, or anywhere too many people got together or too many things happened at once. They knew only the streetcars and buses that took them to work. They were not aware that the city was changing; had they known, they would not have cared. When they would think back on their glorious past, the whistle of a train would save them from sadness, transporting the imagination of both to the great open spaces of the North.

As time went by and their religious life expanded, they would attract the attention of the neighborhood; first as two people unusually attached to their vigils, and then for their demeanor, which gradually grew more cautious and reserved. They wanted to be invisible but they could not, and so the care with which they moved and the way they directed their gaze recalled the behavior of certain animals. At a time when the city was filled with Paraguayans, they were unable to distinguish themselves as natives of Formosa; if they did manage to do so, it was only a little while before the simple and ruthless judgment of the people, which assigned nationality by association, would render the distinction irrelevant. Apparently, this situation reproduced the one in Clorinda. They were suspicious in the eyes of others, regardless of the situation. The fact that they retained, even after living in the city for years, the traits of vagrancy—an inability to distinguish between the fleeting and the permanent, a penchant for long periods of fasting, a tendency toward vacillation—would make things even worse. A cult was attributed to them that was much more exotic and, in its way, much more provocative than the innocent, private one that they practiced.

The emptiness was palpable, with the exception of a few old-timers annoyed at having to walk all the way to church when there was a perfectly good altar nearby. There, in the tiny room that crowned the courtyard and was reached by a narrow flight of stairs with bowed slats, the habit of prayer and of honoring the memory of relics and beliefs they had shared throughout their life together created a unique sanctuary. What causes a cult to grow, to expand? It’s hard to say, exactly. The cult grew. When it was private, the room presented no problem; once it acquired a certain reputation, however, a window would have to be opened to air out the smoke from all the candles the people brought in. And that is how an individual, or dual, cult came to expand. The hosts, whose sense of hospitality at first led them to politely explain the images to which the place was dedicated—alluding to a divine intervention in the midst of their prolonged itinerancy, offering proof of Marta’s story—would later watch strangers arrive who were already initiated, in a wayward sense, in the details and events of the iconography. The cult took on a life of its own, as did the worship in the chapel; they said that three hundred was an ideal number of followers. Peering in from a landing on the stairs, the heads drew back as before a mystery: this was the reason they were there. But since that mystery also attracted them, it kept them from withdrawing enough to forget.

Their worship could not be kept secret; little by little it would be rejected by the community and its churches. What did they get out of their cult? The freedom they had lost in the prison in Buenos Aires, the abstract pleasure found in the proliferation of the air and the landscape. Looking at the images that hung from delicate nails, they were able to breathe the rich and enigmatic aroma of nature once more. Standing before the photos of Marta and the pictures of the virgin, they caught their breath, began to dream again. Veneration, as both a credo and an experience, was the next best thing to itinerancy; the key to both was less a matter of continuity than it was of persistence.

One day they had a dream: They were at the foot of a mountain. They looked up and were overwhelmed by the climb ahead of them. They turned and saw a peaceful valley, with lazy little foothills spilling over into a river, a narrow and sinuous strip that reminded them of a snake. The noise of beasts hidden in the underbrush filtered down along the dense face of the mountain; from the valley they could hear the whisper of the breeze, an anxious whistle. The plain stretched on and became a narrow crate that made the wind rear up in frustration. In the dream they remembered moments from real life. These moments no longer belonged to their past, but rather to that of the dream: they were planes superimposed upon one another, searching for a framework that could accommodate them all. In the meantime, they needed to decide. They didn’t have all day. Above them was the mountain, below them, the valley. The dream repeated this over and over, highlighting a difference that disconcerted them, first and foremost because it was so obvious, and secondarily because it revealed to them that they were nowhere. At first they thought that the moments of their shared past were coming from above and prepared themselves for the climb, but then they saw that they were coming from the river and started their descent. Every call they heard was followed by its opposite. All of a sudden, someone wearing a uniform came down—he looked like the agent or guard of something—someone who protected a good or goods. They thought maybe a forest ranger (but that was ridiculous, there were no forests). They asked him about the truth, but he turned away before he could say anything. And so they came to know a kind of terror not born of fear, but of confusion.

The pressure grew; combined with the prevailing climate in the community, it would end up destroying the chapel. They had to lock it up and turn it over to the house next door for use as a bedroom. They sealed off the door and made another, facing the back and opening on to an empty space where a flight of stairs would soon be built from the neighboring courtyard. But it was not enough. Their persecution ended up consecrating the place, and a religious multitude chose it as the site of their gatherings. The story would end shortly thereafter when the two decided to run off in the middle of the night and were never heard from again. Some have said they’ve seen them off to the side of the train tracks with their packs, looking like vagrants; others say they’ve passed them walking up and down the avenues with a blank stare and an absorbed look on their faces, paying no attention to the world evolving around them. Either way, it is hard to imagine two more innocent souls.

Unlike in nature, where everything is explicit and categorical, in the city, they remarked, the abstract imposes itself upon the concrete. In the city, mental operations come before facts. At the very least, said M, the streets are an entelechy, defined by what they are not. It is the space of withdrawal, the scene of mental operations. The names of the streets are the greatest proof of this misunderstanding and the origin of the most notable exercise in abstraction of all, M continued: the routes of public transportation, which arbitrarily unite remote points. One can imagine, in an instant, the slow trajectory of a bus—have its entire route in one’s mind. (“I wish I could do that,” said M. Make connections, establish
confines not only in thought, but also in practice.) The way the line refers to a specific geography is just as arbitrary as the names of the
streets, but of a greater complexity; if the former suggest a trajectory, the bus routes also assume the complication of obstacles, traffic regulations, unevenness in the terrain and in neural centers, which are also pathways. He would be overcome with excitement as he named a line for the other
to translate. It could have been the 109 (Liniers-Luna Park), the 96 (San Justo-Constitución), the 53 (Boca-José C. Paz) or the 61/62;
when he described the return route, he provoked outbursts of admiration
from M, who would stare at him wide-eyed. The lines that had been
shut down remained as traces, as living furrows in memory, as did those
that came before the ordinances that would transform them, the ones
that had belonged to trolleys or streetcars. The various names of certain streets were also a source of mystery and happenstance; as tends to be the case, chance was obscured by reality. “Uruguay becomes San José,” they recited, “Cobo de Caseros, Yatay de Muñiz,” and so on.

The houses, whose façades constituted the exterior, were—according to M—pure reality, the backdrop of private experience and real life that nonetheless depended on the street to define itself as such. Safe within their homes, people entered a realm of shadow day after day, like the planets; here, however, shadow was a rhetorical quirk that meant isolation. And light meant the presence of others, of witnesses, in the street.

THREE

The story about the pair of nomads absorbed me just as much as the one about the eye. Unlike me, who was unable to describe the events of the previous day except in the most confused terms, M abounded in stories and anecdotes that not only concerned him directly, relating to his own experience like the episode of the eye, but also encompassed broader, more diffuse—and therefore more debatable and controversial—material, which reached him from who knows where to adopt a new form through his voice. This is why it is clear to me that, were he still alive, he would have been the writer, the novelist. (The surrogate that I believe myself to be at times does not represent a fault; I do not see it as such. I cannot say, “I failed,” I am not myself, et cetera.) On the other hand, writing is the order best suited to take up error and even simulation, converting them first into chance and then into fortune; I can hardly mistrust my affinity for replacement and substitution, as I have been convinced for years that if there were something to be said in my—particular—language, not the words or the facts, but rather the morals behind some and the value of others, it would be dictated in some way by the memory of M.

A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write. At times I have thought that with this work I abandon myself, submit myself to an unclear condition in which personal feelings and the ideas derived from them are mixed together. Yet it is also true, I believe, that there are few things as amorphous as identity, in terms of both depth and breadth, and that it is therefore pointless to wonder about its limits. I am here right now, but suddenly I cease to be; I am another, or simply
less
. Imagine the strain of someone trying to be himself all the time. M taught me to recognize the moments in which our identity appears, becomes a category, emits energy, and then subsides into a lethargic state of anticipation that lasts who knows how long. In less than five minutes we are able to oscillate among an infinite number of states, from abundance to saturation to emptiness. It is also true that we are not aware of
when
we are; those around us notice this when our signs become visible to them. Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle? M and I achieved solidarity, a bond through which our own intermittence was able to develop with neither pressure nor strain, but with a sense of union. If there were a dominant state (climate) in my memory of the friendship, it would be that of harmony and serenity, a nucleus of emotions, from the bosom of which emerged the certainty of creating something unconditional and everlasting, the loss of which I have never overcome.

The real illusion that is space, or, more accurately, the confined, familiar city in which our reciprocal identity manifested itself, disappeared in M’s absence. There was no sense trying to recapture it through intermittent, inevitably anonymous, and more or less melancholy visits to his neighborhood or the places we used to go because, unlike objects—which, like photos, can at any moment become talismans or relics—space has its own ephemeral hierarchy. Space is silent, it says nothing to us; it has no surface and yet, paradoxically, it is the most lasting of times. Armed with this proof, after circling the blocks around his house in the months that followed the abduction and returning every day empty-handed, as tends to happen, I understood the bewilderment of the two drifters who were dazzled by their surroundings but were blind to its successive manifestations. An event unfolds before our eyes; we attempt to uncover it, but cannot because it has taken the form of a landscape. There will always be an element of disappointment, just as happens with noises, which are always too loud or too soft for our consciousness. This frequent disappointment was the force that pushed the pair to want more countryside, more space, horizon, views; through the innocent—in that it was derived from their own movement—succession of these, their fantasy of the journey was returned to them. This fantasy shaped the pliable material of which they were made. The vast territory they crossed over the years was, and is, legendary, but their vague sense of distraction failed to take in these legends, which touched upon them in one way or another nonetheless. Occupation, conquest, camping, residence, property: these words were foreign not only to them, but also to nature. They were satisfied simply to cross. In this way, at the mercy of their indecision and to the rhythm of their footfall, a reciprocal being and identity grew to their own measure in the form of outbursts and lulls that flared and languished with fits of clarity and withdrawals into opacity. Similar oscillations between geography and consciousness would shape our friendship, as well.