The Planets (22 page)

I am going to recount, as I remember it, something that happened on the night of June 20, 1973, while I walked with M in the early hours of the 21
^st
. Public transportation was not running; nothing moved, in general. The few signs that indicated that the city had not been abandoned spoke of a recent tragedy, or worse, of some kind of catastrophe, incomprehensible and not yet over. Half a block from the avenida del Trabajo, a woman waited for her son, in tears. She was sitting in a doorway and strangely, despite the shadows, I remember her face as being illuminated. She repeated the boy’s name; it wasn’t enough for her to wait, we thought, she also had to call to him. But there was no reaction, not from the boy or from the people shut away in the neighboring homes, despite the fact that they had probably been listening to her for quite some time. We drew closer. M and I wanted to imagine the interior of the house from which she voiced her living warning and her absent need, though this may sound contradictory. The woman took no notice of us, but we could sense the silence of the home, the objects that, from that night on, would be redundant, useless. A nightstand, a bed, a shelf, a brush.

We walked from Mataderos to Villa Crespo; the same funereal silence inhabited every neighborhood, every block. We met with a dual intimation and an ambiguous beauty in the dark streets. A few hours earlier Perón, the political leader, had returned to Argentina; a throng of people had gathered to wait for him, but the desert around us brought to mind a city that had obliterated its inhabitants. The great mass of
porteños
slept, protected by walls and roofs, on beds tucked behind the façades of their houses, as we walked. Like ships, M and I floated along a surface composed of silence, the rough and the smooth of things, with the disciplined fatigue of the traveler. The shipwrecks were the others, the ones who waited, like the woman with the illuminated face.

That night, M and I talked about virginity. Not about our experience with it—it was still of longstanding relevance to one of us, though I will not say which—but rather, in anticipation of the truth, about the false promise hidden in its loss. One of us attempted to deny any change, and to this end alluded to a number of impossible absolutes. Experience, as the different pressures, sensations, and temperatures to which our skin is submitted, did not matter; the memories that could be etched into the mind on the basis of these circumstances mattered even less. Their triviality was absolute. The moments of a life, which, by the same mystery that allows it to unfold can take on significance despite being the pinnacle of superfluity, cannot be compared with the importance of “that” moment, despite the fact that it is the one truly fated to wane. The millions dispersed after waiting for the leader. Some had gotten there days in advance, but everyone wanted to leave at the same time. They turned and began to walk toward their homes, lost and disillusioned. As is well known, many remained where the bullets found them.

M and I sensed an abyss that divided us from the masses; this might have been due to our natural condition as members of the minority. Of all possible emotions, the masses inspired in us more sympathy than mistrust, more disbelief than fascination. The majority, overwhelmed by its own numbers, was unable to recognize the same essence from which it drew its own strength in the scarce, the brief, and the scattered. Yet one dreamed of joining those vital swells, the very identity of which pulsated in the form of a crowd, because they offered the possibility of giving in to the current and floating along without a care for the truth. Now, as I have been saying, the sea that had been swelling at the outskirts of the city to the southwest of Buenos Aires had dispersed in all directions.

At the corner of Rivadavia and San Pedrito, we relived the sensation of crossing, within just a few meters, a great divide between civilizations: just barely past Rivadavia, we were already nearing Nazca. Someone approached us, breaking our silence. He was poor, probably younger than his appearance let on, with a round face that promised virtue; he did not know which way Ezeiza was. He was walking, like us, which meant that we could have sent him a number of different ways; as such, Ezeiza—without being metaphorical—could be in any direction. “Ezeiza is so far away,” we answered, “that you could get there by going this way, or that way, or by heading over there. But the rally’s over.” “Do you think I could get there before dawn?” “It depends which way you’re going,” we offered. “To Ezeiza,” he answered. M and I looked at each other: “Ezeiza is a big place.” “To where the rally is.” That place was good only for escape. It had nothing to offer now, hours after the violence; it was of no interest to anyone. “You won’t find what you’re looking for,” we warned him. “I’m going to the rally. I’m going to welcome General Perón. My neighbors told me he was coming tomorrow.” He had been on foot since Retiro, where he had gotten off a train and had found no other way to keep moving. We asked him when they had told him this. “Yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday when?” “Yesterday, yesterday afternoon.” “Listen, it’s already over—that was today.” “Right, like I said, it’s today.” “No,” we explained, “that was today, or rather, yesterday. Perón already came back.” “It can’t be,” he said, embarrassed. “Yes—in the end he didn’t get off the plane at Ezeiza, but he arrived.” “So where did he go?” “I don’t know,” we said, “Morón, El Palomar, who knows…” The man walked off to the west; at that exact moment, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The clear sky, the stars, orderly beyond the clouds, the absolute silence, and the cold, pulsating, closing in on us from all directions, even from within our own bones. It all seemed like an illusion, like the morning that follows a night of excess, only the other way around. We stayed on Nazca, crossed the tracks, and a few blocks later picked up our topic of conversation.

Virginity is an abstraction, someone asserted, equivalent to non-virginity. The only concrete thing is its loss; it is never acquired, but since the experience of losing it cannot be prolonged throughout one’s lifetime, and in fact generally tends to be fleeting, one is always either within a before or an after, without options or a choice. There should be alternatives: going back, reclaiming it, abandoning it rather than losing it, getting it and losing it all over again, et cetera, like in a game of masks in which each represents a different personality. Virginity is always seen as something unstable, a state that can be abandoned at any time, regardless of one’s age, but we should be able to lose it as many times as there are opportunities to be other, to be different, or to be less. Thus the violent anxiety before the loss, armies of adolescents speculating over the inevitability of their condition, turns into a true condemnation when they find they can no longer regain their innocence. “But they can, actually, all of us do,” suggested the other. It’s true, responded the first. What was in the air was a catastrophe without any outward signs (something particularly Argentine in its insistence on covering tracks, concealing events, and looking the other way).

Perhaps because it was repeated, or because it was somehow unique, the ominous climate of that night has not been easy to forget, though I have often tried to do so. But, as is well known, wanting to forget and forgetting are rarely aligned. Someone might even want to forget, not in order to forget, but to be able to hold on to a memory in a different form, in order to be able to evoke it at will. That night, M had little more than three years to live. Now, as I sometimes evoke that walk and remember more clearly the neighborhood of Flores—calle Bacacay, for example, where the darkness is multicolored under the dense branches of the trees—I also remember the nights in the suburbs, when the whistle of a distant train, as prolonged as that of a ship, offered a textured backdrop of sound. I would go up to the roof of my house, rest my arm on the ledge, and, protected by the darkness, identify different shades of black in the shadows of the foliage, silvery reflections on the asphalt and on distant rooftops. Crickets, a nocturnal bird, a car, and the barking that bounced back and forth across the street suggested a quality much like that of the heavens, upon whose sphere the sidereal abyss takes shape. Before or after this, one might hear explosions or the rattle of a machine gun and be left without words (just as happens now, when one hears shots in the night and there is nothing to say). And so, without noticing—or, noticing, but without realizing—Buenos Aires filled with the dead; they took on a life of their own, an extension of the mark left by their bodies.

As I mentioned earlier, I have on occasion wondered whether someone, should someone read this, might think that I am proposing, or hoping to discover, through the image of M, the logic or mystery through which the people have drifted since those years. The truth is that there is little to propose and even less to discover. Historical meaning was not buried, it was on the surface, there for all to see, saturated with death and unfolding according to an order that was both transparent and faulty, because it was the practical response to another historical meaning that had fought its way into being, eventually becoming legitimate; a practical response, efficient in its way, that ended up replacing the other. It was a macabre substitution that took on a number of trivial embellishments. Nonetheless, I am going to give a meaningful example.

One day, when we were looking for the car, our conversation turned to something like civilizations or cultures in general. M surprised us by saying that, like Borges, he advocated a universal government. “I agree with Borges, I’m in favor of a universal government,” he said, exactly. His father maintained a skepticism that was both radical and predictable: seeing as how governments couldn’t resolve the problems of their own countries, he could not imagine the efficacy of just one for the whole world. But M, as he immediately clarified, was not talking about a government like the ones they knew, but rather a supreme regulation, an entity on high that would shape great movements and determine the scope of human endeavors. A form of moral government whose authority would be so fully accepted by all mankind that no demonstrations of its force, no evidence or action, would be necessary. Without question, he said in different words, all that would be needed would be to assign human behavior with a precise meaning accepted by all. This government might not coincide with that proposed by Borges, but it was also universal. It would have two central traits: 1) food would be free—like in images of the golden age, people would wait, seated and with their mouths open, for food to come to them; 2) people would be travelers—over the course of their lives they would circle the globe, dying where they were born. Life in the countryside and the cities would go on as normal, as it does now, he added, not aware that he was contradicting himself.

Following a precise order, everyone would work where they could or wanted to, while they lived, went about their routines, whatever, until their next move. In this way, the cities would be cleaner (according to M, no one really dirties a place they will not be staying in for long) and fortunes more modest (travelers cannot accumulate too much). The largest companies would be those owned by laborers and the employees, who, always being temporary, would delegate all control to the users who, provisional in their own right, would create a minute registry of their endeavors so that the future inhabitants would be up to date on what had been done. The population, however, would never be renewed as a whole. There would be no mass migrations, it would all be part of one perpetual journey: from everywhere to all places, each with his family (should they wish to accompany him, according to M) and with his past (inevitable baggage). There would always be a majority in the cities that knew the streets, businesses, public offices, neighborhoods, and the combination of risks, drawbacks, and alternatives that every city has. The same would go for the countryside, towns, hamlets, or smaller cities. The people would travel by plane, boat, train, or on the highway. Whoever wanted to bring their furniture with them would have to find a house they knew could accommodate it all; if not, they would have to leave it. Schools would educate the children—these would be language schools; adults would study where they worked. In every place, the language spoken would be that of the majority (though minorities could also communicate in other languages). The administration of the cities or regions would be the responsibility of elected committees. Everyone, before leaving their place of residence, would cast a vote in favor of one of the individuals or parties that were campaigning; at the end of their terms, the votes cast up to that moment would be calculated. The people voted looking toward the past, but their elections looked toward the future and toward another place: the elected candidates would serve their terms in their next place of residence.

Books, drink, music, tobacco, and television would all be free. Meals would always be regional, just like restaurants, consequently, would be; along with literature, these would be the two principal allusions to the former age of nations. Eating, drinking, and reading—which was the same as sitting and listening—the people would feel the indistinct reminiscences of a lost and vaguely luminous past. This would obviously be a world without nationalities, but it would have towns and families. Religion could go on being collective but would not likely be global, as the idea of the world, the universe, thus materialized, would prove paradoxically imprecise. There would be religions of two or three hundred people, not likely more, and nearly all would adhere to their own private, fragmentary, and often accidental—when not vague or contradictory—cosmovisions. Indigenous tribes, denominated as naturals, would be protected. His father asked if there would be a maximum period of residence in any one place, after which a person would be forced to move himself out—his exact words. M brushed the idea off, that would not be necessary, no one would want to stay on forever; it would be boring and eccentric, practically immoral. The most sedentary would be the elderly and the students, but always for a reasonable time, six or seven years at the most; on the other hand, few in either state would put up with as much.