The Planets (21 page)

And so M, his father, and the other began a nervous dialogue filled with elided and half-spoken words, urgent gestures that were too quick and tense to actually communicate anything; they, too, had been left breathless. It was a matter of finding, in that pile of junk, the instrument of their salvation. M and his father resorted to a disjointed, but apparently effective, language. “Bugs and nails,” stammered the father, pondering the dangers of rooting around in there. He said it too late: M was already on his way, after replying—though he spoke first—“I’ll get.” His words, as sometimes happens, would hang in the air as he moved into the distance.

I found it surprising, under the circumstances—that mix of disquiet, hesitation, pressure and reserve brought about by the rats—that M would return, with those two words, to a domestic language lost who knows when by who knows whom. That “I’ll get” had its own, immediate, referents: in my own home there were those who said
I’ll get
several times a day. Between “I’ll get it” and “get going” or some other variant, those two words emerged, diluting the meaning by which the phrase was assumed to be conjugated, imprecisely but with eloquence: a paradigm of ambiguity. It was only a few minutes before dusk: the horizon was not yet ablaze but the process of the sunset was already set in motion, tinting the end of the street with a yellow that grew more and more intense, and would soon veer toward orange. M looked like a shadow cut out of that backdrop as he leaned over the mountain of junk, rummaging through it for the magical lance with the delicate movements of a rag and bone man.

In this way M, whose form was already slight, seemed to grow even more delicate from where we stood. The intensity of the light blotted out his silhouette, like those moths that grow even more transparent when they come to rest on a lamp. For a moment, we did not hear the rats, the man interrupted his litany, and M was endowed with a distinct plasticity in which magic, something ritual not unlike a dance, combined with beauty, drama, and surrender as we watched his body dissolve like a cloud against the light. His father and I watched as his silhouette, cut through by the line of the street, grew more and more narrow; his feet, restless atop the chaos of objects, tried to gain the balance that would allow him to continue his search, disappearing for fractions of a second at a time. It was then that he levitated before us, our impassive eyes filled with admiration. His father said, “He moves like a frog,” or something to that effect, alluding to his tentative movements and his transparency. I did not answer him; I understood the processes of the afternoon that were making M dissolve. Knowing this, however, did not reduce my fascination; on the contrary, it was enhanced because I was able to see this effect as essential, a legitimate confluence rather than something providential. As such, I was left in silent awe.

It would be easy, now, to interpret these incidents like dreams and M’s powerful, though fleeting, luminous apogee as the prefiguration of his absence, but this story has been particularly redundant and there is no need for allusions. Just as consciousness registers what is easy, incorporating it in a more or less mysterious way into its workings, it also coexists with the difficult, even the unknown, in order to dispel the field of darkness against which its silhouette appears. Now I am more than twice as old—that is, as many years have passed since M’s disappearance as did, for either him or me, before his death—and I simply can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Despite the workings of time, which forces us, among other things, to give up our resistance and yield to its advance, and despite the fact that this “I can’t believe it” became, in some way, rhetorical as the years went by, over time this rhetoric acquired, or regained, the full measure of truth contained by the original words. It is against the backdrop of the shallow, dark pit formed by that conclusive reality, the deepest subjective manifestation of which is, after all, this “I can’t believe it,” that I float, repeating the words. Like all rhetoric, it alludes to a truth in and of itself, though with years of repetition I have distanced myself from the original mystery, from the root of that darkness, to construct another: the foundation of all the time that has passed without M. Event and disbelief are castled, changing places as though “I can’t believe it” were the event and M’s disappearance the verbal form that questioned it. Sometimes I catch my mind wandering, as everyone’s does, only to immediately return to this thought and, if the circumstances are right, repeat under my breath that I can’t believe I can’t believe it, when so much time has passed and nothing has filled the void of his absence.

One afternoon a few weeks ago I was walking north along an avenue. Sundays in Caracas, as in a good number of cities, are calm and quiet. The light was diffuse; it was somehow fragmented and visibly corpuscular as it was returned by the mountain, as though the sun at its height were not enough and a greater intensity were required, the reflection off the slope, to ignite the air. A trail of marks along the street registered the activity of the people: contradictory, almost always aggressive, marks that spoke of a lack of peace. All of a sudden, a signal blinded me from up on high: someone had probably raised their hand in the foothills and the light from the sun had bounced off the face of their watch. This lasted an instant—a moment more brief than an instant. I observed the slope and thought about how far that particular light had traveled to reach me, guided with greater precision by chance than any other that surrounded me in that moment or this one. That flash had crossed the orbit of planets, illuminated asteroids; it was also the energy that propelled the comets and which had apparently originated in the sun and expanded as light and solar wind before dazzling me. One final moment of concentration, its reflection in the face of that watch, delayed its ultimate dissolution as it fell to earth, promising to make it unique one last time in the form of a flash of light. I don’t know why, but that was enough to make M appear in my memory. A cloud floated just above where the reflection had originated, girding the mountain in silence. “From there, Caracas looks like the model of a city,” I recalled, and continued on my way.

One day, he told me, he was sent out to buy a few things for dinner; he was given the exact amount of money needed. The grocer rang him up wrong and got confused giving him his change, so M ended up going home with his purchases and more money than he had when he left. His parents sent him back to return the money. At first, the grocer was surprised to see him again; later he understood what had happened, but badly. Leaning over the counter, he muttered his calculations as he scribbled on a piece of paper, as though it could talk back to him. M felt as though he was standing before a giant: broad, strong arms dense with hair, emerging from the creases of a white shirt. When he had finished his calculations, and ignoring M’s protestations, the grocer gave him part of the money he had brought with him. At home, his parents are so annoyed by his incompetence that they nearly refuse to let him in. They order him to go back to return it
all
. As in most humiliating situations, they ask him if he knows what the word “all” means. So he goes back, again. M walks the two blocks sensing that it is a ridiculous, foolish misunderstanding, but he does not dare to pursue the idea: the world of the adults is the only one there is, and as such it must be accepted as it presents itself. For his part, having nearly reached the end of his day, the grocer is occupied with cleaning his scale. He asks him to wait; it is a delicate operation. M carefully observes the scale, the weights marked out with short and long dashes, the numbers distributed among them, the red point of the needle, which is going wild at the moment as the grocer lifts and holds the tray over and over; he also reads the brand, written in five gleaming letters that form an arch across the top. Little by little it gets darker and the quiet stampede of cars on the cobblestones filters in from the street. Having finished his cleaning, the man, leaning on the counter as though it were a dividing wall, emphatically explains to M that the money does not belong to him—the grocer—and that he should go home immediately. M understands less and less, though he suspects that he will return several times more. As he is about to leave the store he hears the clicking of the grocer’s tongue; M notes that this is the way dogs are usually called, but turns around anyway. He sees the arm emerge from the creases of its sleeve, accompanied by a gesture that, from up high, invites him to come closer. Smiling, the grocer offers him a coin, saying that it is for him and that he should hold on to it. M feels an unprecedented sense of joy: the coin sparkles with its own light, like nothing else. “This is what it must feel like to touch heaven with both hands, as they say; I can feel it.” M feels as though he has been awarded an unknown prize—rather, what is unknown is the motivation behind the prize—not being able to explain it, he finds the situation all the more wondrous. Later on, the parents, somewhere between irritation and weariness, would discover that the boy had returned home with more money than he brought with him last time—even though he had taken the precaution of hiding his coin in the other pocket. And so, as he had anticipated, M must return to the grocery, where the man takes the money, performs a few other calculations and gives him back a greater sum. By now the amount is more than considerable; it is a small fortune, as though the money were multiplying on its own. The parents hesitate: every cent the child receives is a sum that must later be explained and returned, which means that it might be better not to send him and avoid his coming back with more money. They argue for a few minutes but in the end make their decision: there is no other choice—M has to return it all. Back at the shop, the grocer stretches a piece of paper out across the counter and does his calculations once more with a pencil; when he is done he hands M an even greater sum. The parents do not know what to do—they ask for an explanation but M tells them only what he has seen: the man speaks to the paper while he writes, then hands him the money. His father is indignant, but cannot resist voicing a paradoxical wish. “If only it were so easy to get rich,” he exclaims. They speak a bit more and send M back again, but with more money; this time they also add in, and not just a little: a good part of their savings. This goes on for two or three trips: M goes back and forth, carrying a fortune that might not be great but is not insignificant, his pockets bulging more and more each time, until on one of the trips the grocer, having finished his customary accounting, decides that he is satisfied: Yes, he says, you’re right, and he does not give back a cent. M returns home with nothing.

The parents cannot believe it; they have been swindled in the most absurd way imaginable. They get angry and blame the boy: suddenly, at the most innocent hour of the day, that moment between sunset and dinner when nothing ever happens, they have been reduced to nothing, to the most crushing poverty; they had lost years of work and were facing years of privation. The mother cries in silence and the father broods: this is what they get for being honest. The effects of poverty come quickly: the portions at dinner are immediately reduced. The future is different now; it is longer. M’s mother says that his father measures time by money: the less there is, the less frequent and longer lasting everything has to be—and there was no end in sight. The three of them are trying to find ways to get the most out of their food when someone knocks on the door. They all go to the entryway, but imagine their surprise when they see that the man standing there is a stranger. He is not the grocer, though he is to M: that’s the person who had been helping him from across the counter all afternoon, he insists. The man, before launching into the explanation that all were eager to receive, asks if they would be so kind as to offer him a drink. The parents tell M to fetch the bottle of honey wine and three glasses while they get settled. When he comes back, M realizes that the grocer is already telling his story. The mother serves the wine; they toast, take a quick sip and the other continues: He is a millionaire who amassed a fortune that would take five people more than a year to calculate, but he has made so many mistakes—he calls them
errors
and hopes to have time to recount them one by one and thereby repent them anew—after so many mistakes and being unable to make peace with his conscience, God, through an angel, promised to absolve him if he distributed his fortune among poor and honest families. Saying this, he takes a bag full of money out from behind him and puts it on the table, on the one condition that they set a place for him at the table that night. And so, while the father and the man drink and converse, the mother sets about preparing a meal, the likes of which they had not seen for a long time. Off in a corner, M empties his pocket and watches his coin—as big, heavy, and brilliant as a talisman—spin.

FIVE

Despite the hazy origin of our friendship, which lacked a precise moment in my memory and was, like so many other adventures, mixed up in a bundle of circumstances in which very little is clear, I retain a vivid image of the gradual approach or affinity that, following the involuntary and somnolent rhythm of schoolchildren, would grow into a relatively close relationship. And yet sometimes I give in to a false notion: that our friendship began when I received his photo and M mine, not before. I convince myself of this. This conviction is so vivid that it veils all thought in one single color; I am unable to think otherwise until a while later, when I realize my error—that is, when I remember. Like any ceremony, the exchange was meant to inaugurate a new time, to divide a before from an after. Yet instead of indicating a beginning, I see now that it left one behind, forgot it, or something more: that private ritual, which was somehow innocent in that it did not attempt to engage anything beyond the people involved in it, that is, the two of us, set an ending in motion; its culmination was excessive in relation to its trivial beginning. By that time, Argentina was already filling up with the dead. If it had been normal before for them to show up in ditches and vacant lots, they now rejected all sense of measure and took on, in the form of corpses, a central role as the dead (but also as anonymous corpses, which in turn heightened the sinister hierarchy of the whole) in the verist theater that politics had become. When death is common, corpses become commonplace; there is nothing new to them. These corpses, because they were disturbing, seemed more numerous than the dead; thanks to their tragic nature, they also acquired a greater significance. This progression shows how fully their meaning could be inverted; not long before, the dead had exceeded corpses in number and significance. It seemed that there were more dead than living and more corpses than dead.