The Planets (15 page)

I waited at the corner of Corrientes and Carlos Pellegrini as Sito walked away. I wanted to see his back, the labored mechanics that moved that enormous body. He seemed relaxed; he even stopped a few times to look at the shop windows he passed. It had not been two minutes since we parted—that is, some particularly brief period of time; barring the absurd, let’s assume one can go two minutes without breathing—and it was obvious that Sito had already forgotten the encounter. I disdained and—though it may seem excessive—detested the passive, brutish availability that submitted to my appearance as a way of passing a few afternoon hours. There was no question that both M and I were far from Sito’s mind. The effects of apathy could be seen on his body the same way I had heard the indolence in his voice. His mother was still alive, that much was obvious; he had lied to me about that, too, without any restraint or fear. He stopped at a kiosk, and I watched him buy a pack of caramels. How perfect, I thought. Sito likes candy. He unwrapped one and raised it to his lips as he walked. He was pretty far away, which may be why I was tempted to follow him. But all of a sudden, doubtless prompted by my own nerves, he turned around to look for me in the crowd that filled the length of the block. He eventually saw me and raised an arm. In spite of his exceptional height, he stood on his tiptoes to wave to me, holding the candy wrapper between his fingers like some kind of semaphore. This good-natured gesture dispelled my mistrust: no one could turn and wave like that, in such a casual way, without also being a simple, transparent individual. I did my part, in turn; I moved my arm back and forth two or three times until he went on his way. And that was my encounter with Sito: so serendipitous it seemed like a dream, which made it obvious that M had been involved. The Obelisk finally stretched out its shadow, which glided along the sidewalk where I stood, still trying to make out a head—Sito’s—despite the distance. As night began to fall, this time unmistakably, I crossed Corrientes and followed Carlos Pellegrini south.

Earlier I said that Sito’s intervention was decisive in my writing all this. Now I see that Sito was important, even beyond his words, in that he paid for our coffee. It might seem ridiculous or inappropriate—for a number of reasons—but Sito’s gesture served to make me feel that something good could come from M that did not necessarily have to belong to the past. This is why I recount it from time to time: the invitation did not correspond to any mundane sense of courtesy, but was rather a protective gesture, a backward-looking nod of support.

Night arrived quickly: in the city, the sun knows neither patience nor lassitude. It’s strange, when I think of those streets I remember the width of the sidewalks, the façades of the buildings and the breadth of the avenue, all of it punctuated by trees, yet that is not what I saw as I walked. At the time I was focused on the people around me and above all the parking lots, which the press was saying were in contract for millions; I have long since forgotten the details and circumstances of these things. Despite how long it had been since last we saw one another, and the slow pace of the conversation that was kept alive, at times, only through halting and painstaking effort, I had the feeling that we had not remembered M. Hours spent talking with Sito, and at no point did we speak of him fully, I realized, astonished. What kept us from evoking his voice, the way he walked, his kindness? How could we not have talked about his intelligence, his modesty, his generosity? M was completely theatrical: the faces he made could signal both happiness and oblivion, distraction and enchantment; M had a knowing sense of humor that inspired reflection, but Sito and I didn’t talk about that, either. At Belgrano I thought about the cruel memory those who survive keep of those who did not, not because it eventually fades away, as they all do, but because it is
distorted
; changing things with this transformation, abandoning them before their time. This fact, which is simply the mechanics of memory and is seen all the time, took on a dramatic, doubly cruel, twist in M’s case, in that we had nowhere to assign his presence, that is, his body—we know how important place is in the adoption of customs and the interpretation of events, as evidenced by my absolute certainty of M’s intervention in the encounter with Sito (as though he were capable of being anywhere).

Later, as I crossed calle Chile, I realized something else: the reason for our silence could be found in the excessive nature of M’s disappearance. I will illustrate this with an example. We sigh in different ways, according to different circumstances. We know many different types of sighs, most of which are recognizable: sighs of fatigue, impatience, pleasure, boredom, languor, surprise, and even of terror, but never of excess (in that case what is produced is a silence: people fall quiet before the excessive—this is the
silence of excess
). Shock or fear can leave us at a loss for words, but excess takes away our ability to speak: we don’t want to scream, but rather vanish, disappear, die. Neither Sito nor I, I said to myself as I crossed Chile, was ready to know what had happened to M, and so the facts left a wake behind them that was dense, lasting, and difficult to assimilate. If the fatefulness of his absence exaggerated what had happened, the lack of a space, a site, as I said, made it incomprehensible. It might have been a matter of just one person, as was the case, but it was infinite in scope. Paradoxically, it was so excessive that it became something simple and absolute, the way one might say something is both childish and appalling. In this way, we did not give ourselves over to silence, which would have been a pointless and gratuitous gesture; instead, silence chose us, enveloping us from within.

Enveloping us from within. Sito had used those words a little earlier but, strangely, only now as I repeated them was I able to remember them and ask myself what they might mean. He said them in the café where we had gone for a cup of coffee, on his invitation, as he described a fishing trip he had taken with a friend to a lake in the country.

By that point, Sito had gone back to his circumlocutions: There are few things more eerie than spending a night beside a lake, he assured me: a noiseless sea, a river that makes no sound and has no opposite shore. The gentle lapping of the water seems to announce that someone is out there, emerging from the silence to attack us. Even if one believes that no danger is going to come from the depths, one immediately realizes that it is across the surface, of the land, that is, where it could appear. This certainty, so strange in its way, creates a greater sense of anxiety than that experienced by someone who spends a night out in the country, with neither sea nor lake nearby. In the country, Sito explained, the attack could come from any angle of the imaginary circle formed around one’s body: 360 degrees suitable to aggression. At the water’s edge, however, if one admits that nothing bad will come from that direction, the angle of exposure is noticeably reduced, generally to between 120 and 180 degrees. The security that follows this calculation is misleading, because though there is less possibility of aggression, the likelihood of its effectiveness, given the reduced radius, is much greater. So: the combination of the decreased probability and increased effectiveness of the attack, the motive of which would no doubt be ascertained once the aggressors end our lives, produces great anxiety and fear.

In any event, none of that matters, Sito asserted; not as much as an episode that took place the next morning, as one might expect, at the water’s edge. The sunrise promised a picture-perfect morning. The slow and tenuous illumination of the dawn, far from the tropic, flattened colors and textures, just as it did to the elements around us: the water was less like water, the mud less like mud. The moisture from the dew began to evaporate, spreading jumbled and vaguely agreeable vegetal smells; as the nascent morning advanced, the uneasy sounds of the night faded away like the unpleasant memory of a forced silence. We stuck our heads out of our sleeping bags, Sito continued, to make sure that nature had given us the gift of another perfect day, but a reflection sparked our concern: a few meters ahead of us, at the water’s edge, a shapeless mass was moving, or trembling, too cautiously to be anything natural. Sito and his friend were afraid the lucky star that had kept them through the night was about to run out right at the break of dawn, and they did not risk saying a word for fear of rousing the monster. Half upright, partially reclined, leaned a little to one side, expectant, their position was unusual and, what is worse, it was uncomfortable. They felt a sharp pain in their necks and yet they could not give up their observation. The fact that the morning mist, which—contrary to the way things should have been—was getting denser as the minutes passed, didn’t help things, either. Once more they proved that paying complete attention to one thing detracts from the senses and impedes one’s ability to notice other things; the morning and the place were stripped of their positive attributes and recoiled in the face of the threat. They stayed like that for an indefinite period: not long, the sky did not lighten all the way, but not a short time, either, because they were left with the memory of an endless vigil. All of a sudden they saw new shadows emerging, rapidly, from the underbrush to join the pulsating mass in the lake; this, together with the articulation of the forms they had been able to make out despite the confusion and the speed with which they moved, made them suspect that they might be looking at a group of people.

And so they were. In the light of day they would be able to perceive things little by little, eventually discerning a compact nucleus of bodies leaned over the water, as well as others that lay back against the shore, forming a protective arch. They wore coarse loincloths that barely covered their nakedness; many of them, the vast majority, were children. Their backs all had the same shape to them: square and broad at the shoulders, they proceeded straight down without tapering until they reached the waist, where a sudden stroke of reality seemed to remind them of the imminent expanse of the hips. Sito and his friend took care not to startle them; they approached cautiously, afraid they might be violent. They did not manage to avoid the former, Sito clarified, though thankfully they were mistaken about the latter; it was the others that panicked at what the two of them might do. What had appeared to be a protective human shield did not, in fact, do any protecting: it was a mass searching for warmth, which dispersed in a flurry of mud and barbaric exclamations. It was then that the two friends discovered the origin of the lapping they had attributed during the night to the swell of the lake: though they kept their mouths close to the surface, they drank with their hands, using them like little pitchers. It was their up and down motion, their splashing, that produced the melody. Once they reached the group, they realized something else that would surprise them: the water had mixed with the mud, which all were eating, as well. They approached someone who appeared to be the leader, who was about forty years old and wore a pair of pants tied at the waist, the holes in which revealed exceptionally pale skin. He stood up, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm to make it obvious that they were interrupting his breakfast, and greeted them. Sito and the other felt it was their right to ask questions—various measures indicated that they could consider themselves superior—and so they got right to the point. “Why do you eat mud?” they asked. “We’re very poor,” he said, adjusting the strap that held up his pants. Before that moment, Sito continued, he never would have believed it if someone had told him about gangs of the poor, but now he was face to face with one, and a big one at that. He and his friend had gone there to fish, which implied—as did their dinner the night before and the lunch they would have that day—that fish did exist there, though the others preferred the mud. Their organization was tribal. The leader said that they had been walking—and occasionally running—for three days without pause, not stopping to rest or to eat. They avoided towns, they only wanted to pass through; they had a savage industriousness to them that tended toward boring through hills and filling in gullies. As such, lakes were their favorite havens. They could stay there for a day or two, gather their strength, and relax. Their preference for mud was so obvious that it would be pointless to dwell on it, thought Sito, so they didn’t say anything else about it. Moments later, when the conversation lagged, they tried to pick it back up by asking his age. “Twenty,” he said, and in the difference between reality and appearance they saw the effects of hunger—or of mud. This was a good topic, and they took as much advantage as they could: they mentioned the strange combination of age and appearance, that though these are almost always linked, they rarely coincide, such that there are those who look somewhat younger than they are, others who look a lot younger or only a little. Still, they continued, there are also those who look somewhat or a little older than they are, and then there are those who look
a lot
older. As they said this, they emphasized its significance by looking him straight in the eye. The chief made no effort to respond; his gaze seemed transparent. He probably did not catch the allusion, suggested Sito. On the other hand, aside from leaning over the water, it had probably been a long time since he had seen himself in a mirror. It might also have been that twenty just meant “old,” whether that be thirty-five, fifty, or seventy. But all he said, moments later, was, “The mud envelops us from within.” These words were a mystery to Sito for a long time, he remarked that afternoon in the café where we had gone for a chat, but a little while ago it became clear to him, and now it seemed both accurate and evident. The mud was a premise; it was the earth that, once they were dead and buried, would tighten around them from outside. Sito was not interested in making conjectures about their diet: whether it was a collective suicide or a hygienic routine, whether it was a premonition translated into action, the portent of a final truth, or whether it was the memory or the embryo of some ritual; all and none of these possibilities were of interest to him. But he was sure that, beyond its own meaning, it had many others that were equally true.