The Planets (24 page)

This power brought us together almost every time, protecting us against distance. On other occasions it prevented convergences as though it exerted a negative force, impeding encounters—when it was a matter of bodies—and agreement—when it was a matter of consciousness. In those cases, shared feelings would vanish, as would convictions; the idea of having something in common seemed unthinkable, outside the realm of possibility. M’s hope, then, his desire to assign the photos—his or mine, in this case—a power that evaded and yet transcended the affective, is understandable. I have sometimes thought about how the magic of photos, according to M, is not contained by their visual aspect, their ability to provoke genuine surprise in the people who adopt a position of innocence to look at them, even when they know them and what they are of. The magic of photos was that they restored a rudimentary human faculty, though one that may have been forgotten: the inclination to endow an object, its interior or its future hidden by the very materiality of its mass, a logic that transcends all mysteries. “Why would someone hold on to his grandfather’s lighter or his father’s hat?” Not only because these objects bring them to mind and because the memory is permeated by a bittersweet emotion, but also because a protective energy emanates from them, though it may never prove its efficacy, one which relies on our belief in order to make us feel secure against the evil that threatens us always. This supernatural power, as such, is independent of our conscious mind and our will, and operates without our knowledge. As a result, we can disregard these objects and throw them into a bottom drawer where we never look for anything because they represent those responsible for our misfortune; we can indignantly renounce the things they touched, yet the benign force they exert will continue its work.

On our walk that night, before dawn on the 21
^st
of July, once the topic of virginity had been exhausted and the man who had lost his way looking for the Ezeiza airfields, where he thought Perón would be appearing the following day, was the memory of a fleeting anomaly, M and I ran into Sito. He came from the direction of Ciudadela. Much of avenida Juan B. Justo was still paved with colored cobblestones, and it was there, on one of those sidewalks, that we heard a loud whistle behind us. We turned at the same time—for a moment, M and I must have formed a strange, symmetrical figure—and we saw him coming up the middle of the street, signaling us with his arms. There was a block between us, but Sito did not hurry; he knew that we would wait for him (this sort of assumption inspires friendship). As he approached, I asked M, “How’s the mother doing?” “What mother?” he asked. “Sito’s mother, how is she doing?” “How is she doing what?” “You know… she drank, didn’t she?” “Oh. She’s the same.” As I remembered, she had given up drinking and gone back to it several times, in cycles that were always both drastic and drawn out. So I asked M, “The same as when?” “The same as always. She gives up drinking and then goes back to it.” “But how is she now? What is she doing?” I insisted. “Oh, now. I don’t know. Let’s ask Sito.” We had to wait a while before he joined us. The people he had gone to visit had not let him go during the day because of the violence; eventually, after he alluded to the anxiety his mother must certainly have been feeling, he had been allowed to leave. On days like those, and those that followed, danger returned the original sense of uneasiness to the geography of the city, its breadth. Just as in the past, setting out from Ciudadela for another place meant the risk of crossing hostile territory, giving people the sensation of going on a journey when they were only traveling between neighborhoods; movement was once again classified according to the risks it presented.

As he approached us, Sito noticed that we were talking about him; how could he not have, given the unexpected nature of the encounter and the fact that we were waiting for him. But he also knew that we were talking about his mother, despite the fact that we were too far away for him to possibly hear us, Sito confided in me the day we had a coffee after running into each other on Reconquista and Tucumán, as I have mentioned. He told me that he knew right away, that night as he walked toward us after whistling, when he saw us with our hands in our pockets, taking short steps almost in place, practically walking in circles without knowing it, that I was asking M about his mother. Hell is more predictable than heaven, said Sito, and living with her was a disaster, a perfect hell. Not only did he become accustomed to predicting her blows, her seclusions, her delirium, her tears, anguish, and complaints, Sito also grew accustomed to reading, in the faces of others, the appearance of his mother in the form of a question, pity, or disdain.

People made life with her more difficult, he continued. Sometimes he would get distracted and spend hours dreaming of a world in which he would never have to see anyone: he would busy himself only with caring for his mother, not with explanations. In that case, he thought, the alcohol would be less of an affliction than a hobby, since it was the others who saw it as a stigma, not the one who drank. It’s always the outside world that ruins family relations; were it not for their contact with the outside world, he and his mother would have enjoyed a tight and lasting, happy bond limited only by the length of their lives. In the same way, his marriage would be absolute heaven if the two of them never had to see or speak with anyone; the same goes for the children. But this is obviously impossible, admitted Sito, and so life turned into a hell. Something in the air told him when someone was thinking of his mother, which created a pressure behind his eyelids that felt as though his eyes were forcing their way forward. It left an impression on him when he was a boy, he continued, the way she would look first at the bottle, then at the glass, right before she took a drink. As though her eyes wanted to leave their sockets, to anticipate the materiality of the drink, pressed on by anxiousness.

Sito learned to monitor his eyelids when daily life suggested that the effect would be repeated. He conserved the reflex after the death of his mother, though it had been stripped of its original attributes. In her absence, this sixth sense had no purpose; but the eyelid, true to character, continued alerting him to other dangers: the change of tone in a conversation, defects in an elevator, someone lying in wait. Just now, I remember the gesture Sito made, of pressing or closing his eye with one hand, when I persisted in questioning his occupation with an attitude between grave and mocking. I don’t know why, but this reflex inspires a fear in me worthy of being expressed by one just like it; it seems like a dramatization of the unconscious, and for that very reason a sign that its master has embraced both innocence and cruelty, skirting both territories without exercising control. People like that are capable of the greatest malice, I thought of Sito’s tic, but not necessarily of him, as I walked along Bernardo de Irigoyen toward Constitución. We were talking when all of a sudden something went wrong; I don’t know what had happened, but I watched him smooth his eyelid with his fingertips every so often, following a convulsive movement of his arm that looked as though he were trying to shake something off. At one point, he knocked over a glass. In fact, he rubbed his eye throughout our whole conversation, and also while we walked down Reconquista and later along Corrientes toward the Obelisk. Sito may not have done anything else. I don’t know if I represented a danger, or if he told me that bit about the danger in order to explain a gesture that had no justification; the empty memory of his mother as she caressed the glass or bottle with the tips of her fingers, reading the worn label as though it were a means of understanding the true nature of the drink.

Sito’s silences were always unique, always his own. He had learned to live with drama early on, hence the combination of reserve and surliness that emanated from him, particularly from his eyes, when he fell silent. There was a reason that Sito had not stopped talking during our entire encounter; he had even found a way to correct those inevitable silences, when one thinks back or before going on, by coughing or making noise with something or another. As a boy he had been completely withdrawn and his friends had experienced his mortal silence as a burden; he could remain mute and impassive, answering in sporadic monosyllables that only served to underscore his solitude, for hours at a time. But now, with the weight of memory threatening to crash down upon his truth, a moment’s hesitation alluded to those past silences, making a fraction of a second seem intolerable; it was in this delicate and simple net that Sito had been caught. As such, despite their difference from the earlier ones in both their duration—these were nonexistent compared to those others—and their nature, Sito found that the value of his silences remained the same: reality seemed to shrink and objects to stretch out as long as the silence lasted. Everything seemed more ominous, there was nowhere to conceal a secret, because everything was brought into focus with clarity and immediacy. (If it had been concealed in the depths before, the truth was now right out on the surface.) It seemed to me that Sito also possessed a mineral obstinacy that equaled his verbal compulsion. The quieter the person, the less stubborn they tend to be. Sito spent much of the afternoon insisting that he couldn’t believe I was a writer, until he ended up admitting that he had always thought that the writer would be M. This opinion was so common on the block that his mother—irritated by the silent reproach of her son, whose sadness did not stop her from adding to the growing mountain of empty bottles—would order him, as a way of getting him off her back and as a kind of insult, “Go, go see that writer of yours,” meaning M. Sito would go see him, though they would never so much as touch on the subject of writers, or anything related to them. M was never interested in anything of the sort and yet, from early on, he had a reputation as a writer: a partial recognition, of course, but an emphatic one. More recently, after they lost the bond of free time, when they ran into each other every day or nearly every day, as I have said, M and Sito would exchange a few words. Usually when Sito would take the empty bottles out to the tracks at night, to leave them for drifters and vagrants to pick up later.

When we reached calle Esmeralda, Sito asked me to wait; he had to pick something up nearby—it wouldn’t be more than two minutes, and then we could keep walking, he said. I stood on the corner, as he asked, and watched him walk toward Lavalle and go into a storefront that was both a hair salon and a candy shop where they also sold fountain pens, almost in the middle of the block. There was traffic on Esmeralda, and the cars took part in a game of patient waiting that could easily last hours; they seemed prepared for that. Thanks to the narrowness of the sidewalk, I could hear the conversation two women were having in the back of a taxi that had stopped in front of me. One said, “I swear, it didn’t turn up.” “It can’t be,” answered the other. “But it is. They looked for half an hour, and not a trace.” “But it was such a large ashtray, it couldn’t have just disappeared.” “It didn’t all disappear, only half.” “Which half?” “Half. It broke when it fell. They looked everywhere, and one half is missing.” “That’s not possible.” “It is. They put the half on the table and stared at it. No one notices an ashtray, but when half of one is missing, everyone is paralyzed with fear.” “Why fear?” “Because they didn’t see anything supernatural, only its effects.” “What effects are those?”

At that moment, Sito left the shop and the cars moved up a meter. He walked toward me with a piece of flimsy pink paper in his hand, on the center of which the number 435 had been quickly scribbled. “It’s my lucky number. I always play it, but only sometimes win,” he said. Then Sito surprised me further still: he turned the paper over and showed me another number, 733. He was radiant: “
El Pajarito
and
el Uruguayo
, and the two of us meeting, to boot. You’d better believe I’m going to win today!” As we crossed Esmeralda it occurred to me that Sito might be the cause of every bad thing that had happened, particularly and most obviously M’s death. It was a ridiculous idea, but I was surprised that nothing kept me from thinking it. Sito talked about the prime sales periods for mattresses; when they sell more, it’s not that the prices go up, but rather that there are no discounts. He said: It’s our policy. So I changed the subject; I asked him to imagine that he is in a café, having a coffee, when a false move knocks the glass ashtray off the table. He hears the noise—it has broken—but when he bends down he finds only half there on the floor; the other is gone. I asked Sito how he would react if, after looking again and again, he could not find the other half. “I wouldn’t believe it,” he answered. “But if that’s how it was—if you were there and the ashtray had fallen from your own hands,” I insisted. “In that case, I would think it had disappeared, but that the part I couldn’t see had to be somewhere—that it must still exist in one form or another, that there must be some reason for it.”

As I have already said, Corrientes slowly took on a horizontal light, compressing all visual perspective. At the far end, in the west, the sun gradually set. The curves of the street hardly mattered; it was as though the rays of light were traveling straight through the buildings. Sito continued explaining, much more interested in his response than I was—I had immediately gotten distracted: I would look in all four directions, and if there was nothing to catch my attention, nothing that something could be hidden under, and if there was no one who could have hidden it or seen anything, then I would say to myself,
it’s lost
. It was an unobjectionable piece of common sense. As I walked a while later along Bernardo de Irigoyen toward Constitución, I would think about the different types of tragedy. Nothing stands in the way of taking the disappearance of half an ashtray as a sign, an omen, an effect, a cause, a proof, or a reminiscence. It might also be that the women, aware that someone was listening, had invented the dialogue in order to trick me, referring to a completely false event. But I was not interested in its degree of truth, only the scale of what I had heard. Perhaps it had not happened to either of them, but rather to someone who had then told them about it, or one of them might even have read it, or it might have been part of a movie. In that case, the enigma would be of a secondary nature, like the final echo produced by a clap of thunder, in whose resonance the singular moment of truth that generated it becomes unclear.