The Planets (27 page)

Once there Mirta’s skin radiated heat; it burned and yet, I don’t know why, the body did not seem to belong to its owner. A mix of desire and restraint impeded any externalization or connection, creating, as a result, a pitiable delay in movements and gestures, as though she were following orders sent from far away and each maneuver, gesture, or thought were broken down into so many specific, repetitive commands that it was impossible to accomplish anything in an efficient way. Mirta’s torpor in bed—which at times was frighteningly ecstatic, as though she were on the verge of unconsciousness or sleep—was similar to her silence as she walked, when she seemed to be at the mercy of lethargy, hard-pressed to move herself. At that moment I was another; not who I thought I was or who she thought I was. Her surrender was so disproportionate compared to my desire or my feelings that I was left with no choice but to concede: to be less, different, a third person. Mirta would get excited to the point of collapse, only to immediately trail off into languor. There was no connection between her breathing and any of this, and her fluctuations produced in me a vague sense of shame. In a moment of particular tumult, I caught sight of her credentials, her identification card, on the rug. “Mirta del Soto, Assistant,” it said. I imagined that fate had put her title in front of me to instruct me on the many possible meanings of the word assistance.

Afterward, I walked her to calle Moreno, where she could catch the 56. We had fallen quiet again, but now, as you can imagine, the silence was different. Mirta’s availability was no longer as passive; it had become obsequious. She could say the first thing that came to mind, as long as it corresponded to the tone of affectionate gratitude that she felt compelled to express. At the bus stop, across from a hospital, there was a shop that made shirts. As soon as we arrived, Mirta said, “I want to buy you one,” and set about looking at the different samples in the window. I stared at the wall in front of me; I sensed the vague memory of something having to do with M. Mirta, for her part, noticing that I had not so much as turned to look at the shirts, as she had hoped, turned and immediately remarked, “The bus is taking forever.”

I should say that Mirta’s help was essential, though I never did achieve my objective. We met on two other occasions, aside from the days when I went to visit her at the registry. It was impressive, how she could make a routine out of nothing; this certainly derived from a deep-seated need. She fell in love with the café, where we would sit in the same place and order the same drinks, and of course with the hotel, where she never actually managed to ask for the same room. Until the very end, I debated whether to tell her the truth, but I was sure that, for one reason or another, I would regret it. It might even be, I thought, that something similar had happened to Mirta, in fact, it was very possible; at the end of the day, the story about the crippled mother and the absent father could absolutely be one of those that cover up other, more painful, events and, as such, might be no more than the modified version of a less general tragedy. If that were true, however, if someone close to her had disappeared, my wish might be offensive to her.

I know that passivity, I said to myself as I watched her get on the crowded 56 bus as though stepping into a cave of shadows, that dream of peace that seeks out the void, assimilates it, but is flustered by the slightest discord. My confession would be like a thunderclap, which meant there was no room for the truth, though at least I didn’t lie: to this day, Mirta does not know why I wanted to change my name. If at any point she had directed the power of her portable magic kit at me, I might either have confessed to her or given up the idea of taking another name; but if, as I have said, I sometimes believed myself to be other, or less, or different, then these states are so fleeting and so autonomous, in their way, that I might not have been subject to her influence.

Once, resting my head on her back, I listened to the sound of Mirta’s heart beating; as an echo of her diffuse ugliness, it seemed even more unreal. There is nothing more enigmatic than someone’s back, a personal plain that one never sees in its entirety, upon which all strength, weariness, and betrayal converge, and where grease accumulates as it does on a face that’s been covered up. Mirta’s heartbeat sounded far away; it seemed to reach me from across not one, but many bodies, or at least to come from the depths rather than just a few centimeters beneath her skin. From the other side, I thought, against her breasts all it takes is a bit of attention to hear her pulse, but from this side her heartbeat is relegated to the distance. Lying on her stomach, Mirta did not speak. How I wanted to go on like that, to hold on to the silence for as long as possible and forget that it was her skin under my ear (it was no use).

I did not have to get in line when I went to visit her at work. I skirted along the side of the front door and walked toward the end of an empty counter, where it was darker. Mirta had already seen me come in, and a few minutes later she was with me, though on the other side. She got up on some sort of stool and projected her entire body forward—her arms and chest on the counter, her face in her hands—and looked at me. It was obvious that she was eager to speak. She asked me what I had done that day, commented on the weather, her job, and things of that nature. Her tone was trivial, but it would be a mistake to call it that because, although it was, it is also true that Mirta took great pains to explore the most intricate possibilities of any topic or situation; this, too, spoke of a kind of depth. At one point, she said to me, “I was thinking: since you’re a writer, why don’t you write a book and sign it with the other name?” I was stunned. It was a brilliant idea: publish a book and then later present it as my justification. Some time earlier, I had told her that I was a writer; despite her great propensity for wringing every word out of any conversation, she reacted, strangely, as though she had not heard me. “She doesn’t believe me,” I thought; but, at the end of the day, I didn’t believe the story about her parents, either.

Maybe she still didn’t believe me, and she gave me this idea to bring my deceit out into the open, I thought, as she distractedly folded the back cover of a book, a novel I had with me, as though it were any other piece of paper. As was the case with M, I have great respect for novels, but derive no pleasure from reading them; (in general) I only read for brief periods at a time. Furthermore, the story—like so many others, not worth repeating—did not interest me; yet something, maybe habit, kept me from putting it down, sort of like Mirta, so I carried it around with me anyway, reading it to little effect. How could Mirta do that? I thought. Apparently, books meant nothing to her. She racked her brain for another topic of conversation as she took hold of the back cover, folded it in half, and ran a fingernail along the edge to deepen the crease. Since she couldn’t think of anything, she would start in on the cover. The idea she had given me was a good one, the best. What is more, it came from someone familiar with the matter; as such, though there are no guarantees in life, it had a high probability of success. But when I saw her distractedly quartering the book—she was already on her fifth fold—I wondered whether Mirta might not embody an excessive simplicity, a simplicity so dimensionless that her intervention might affect the value and meaning of my endeavor and, along with it, M’s memory as a whole. It is true that this very simplicity was, itself, her portable magic kit, the combination of startling qualities behind which I had glimpsed the possibility of a certain freedom, but if I was inclined to change in that direction, to allow that change to take place in the part of me where M was and is kept, that also meant betraying his memory. So I took the book from her hands and said, “Mirta, I have to go.” She wanted to know if I would wait for her, she could leave early today. I can’t, I said. The idea about the book was a good one, the best, I told her; I never would have thought of it. That made her happy. “All right, get out of here. We’ll get together another day,” she said, by way of goodbye. When I left the registry, there was a wedding going on across the street, in an annex or something of the kind; they were taking pictures. I turned on to Córdoba and walked west.

Once more I felt, as I wrote several pages back, the lassitude and dissimilation that flowed from people’s faces. I knew that I would not see Mirta again; this did not affect me much, but I found it paradoxical that once a solution, the best reason, had been found, I would withdraw without making use of it. I turned right on Rodríguez Peña. I wanted to walk past the Education Library, where M and I often went to consult manuals. At the corner of Paraguay I stopped to observe the plaza. It was veiled in a green and orange mist; behind it, though it was no more than a hundred meters away, avenida Callao looked like the distant backdrop of a landscape, vaguely impressionistic in its colors, the grey stone of the buildings along the avenue and the dappled effect of the branches and leaves intermingled along my line of sight. It wasn’t worth it to go into the library, I thought; I was not going to request a book, nor did I have any intention of speaking with the employees there, and I had no doubt that the sight of the furniture, windows, and display cases—and, most of all, breathing in that smell (libraries have a smell)—would depress me. On the sidewalk outside, a long line of people was waiting for the 150 (Lugano or Villa Crespo to Retiro). After spending a while in the library, M and I would light our cigarettes in the doorway, facing the plaza, as soon as we stepped outside. A passive channel of wills: that is what the line of passengers waiting for the 150 was, standing beside the curb. The bus arrived and idled there a few moments; when it pulled away, the line had disappeared. Two or three people remained, at the most.

In that moment I noticed a different facet of M’s absence. It may sound self-absorbed and inopportune, but his absence, I said to myself as I neared the curb on Rodríguez Peña, is not only a loss, but also a threat. All these years I thought that the danger had been dissipating bit by bit, and yet, despite the illusion of normalcy derived from the periodic arrival of the 37 and the 150, it was clear that, precisely because nothing made mention of it, no mark or sign or notch in stone or metal that could resist the passage of time in an abiding way, M’s absence, the mystery and the silence surrounding his torture and horrible end, remained before our eyes, on the lids, as a threat: the likely blow, shove, or jolt that awaits us tomorrow, on the other side of the page or as we turn a corner. This, the evil that weighs upon us, is a singular truth.

At that moment I also noticed how the slightest setback—if someone spoke to me the wrong way, I stumbled over something, or a car did not let me pass—would be enough to make me feel that everything, the world, was falling apart. I felt myself oscillate between plenitude and nothingness; I ceased being and was again, quick as a heartbeat. M and I spoke of this often: being, identity, and truth come into view and linger only intermittently; they are never permanent or constant. We would find examples of this fluctuation in synagogues, in the repeated rocking of the worshipers. Most of them were old; the movement might represent submission, disagreement, or rebuttal. It was also an intermittent retreat from mystery. Immobility was more pointless than it was impossible: being needed to travel and faith needed to move. We sometimes went to religious services, for example, on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, either at the synagogue on calle Acevedo or the one on Murillo or, every now and then, at the one on calle Paso. People prayed and many chatted, as has been the case as long as synagogues have existed, and M and I felt like the last representatives, not of a culture—since everyone is always the last and every culture is on the verge of disintegration—but rather of a
time
that was coming undone, with too many doubts for enthusiasm or resignation. Something told us that, pointless or tragic, or both, the processes of organic continuity would pass us over, that our bodies were unlikely to give rise to new bodies, but also that our walks, conversations, and voyages, during which we could not tell one from the other, were the tacit proof of an alternate form of longevity. During the service, after listening to the prayers of the rabbi and the redemptive call of the ram’s horn, after observing the rites, an imperious reminiscence whose proofs are preserved in a reliquary, a sound forged by pure archaism, a primal gesture able to remain intact due to the brevity of its execution; after observing these ceremonies, M and I would talk about the mistrust that the start of a new year inherently deserved, about the different meanings of fasting, and, of course, about the implications of absolution.

I asked myself, on the corner of Rodríguez Peña, off to one side of the Education Library, how it could be that, having managed to find my justification and having garnered some degree of support, I would abandon the endeavor and want to forget about the whole thing. This might all be highly paradoxical, but faced with the real possibility of changing my name, I became aware of my own fear—not of what might happen to me, since, as is well known and easy to imagine, one never knows what is going to happen; the future is a true unknown, and it is precisely because of this that one resigns oneself to its mystery and actually prefers it—not of what might happen to me, but of what might happen to the memory of M that I held inside me. And so it becomes clear why one sometimes chooses inaction over change, though there are risks—the degeneration into futility, in this case—things dwindle and come to an end; it happens to everything.

And so, with the passage of time and the unavoidable changes to people and things, it was inevitable that I began to lose track of the traces left by M. Fewer and fewer things remind me of him. They remain only as memories, but there comes a time we can no longer be sure of the real value of what we retain because, just as we can mean so many things when we say forgetting, many of which are contradictory and some of which are complementary, it is also true that we should not be overly credulous when we say things like recollection, memory, or simply evocation: there, too, a cave of shadows lies hidden. At the time, as I have mentioned, my encounter with Sito snapped me into the present. But the flash caused by that impact illuminated the impossible; the truth is, there comes a time when the recovery of memories becomes a path riddled with obstacles.