The Planets (3 page)

M lived on a street that was divided in two by the railroad. Whoever wanted to cross the tracks had to do so by following its old-fashioned walkways in the form of an S, which would force them, precisely, to slow down. The house was thirty meters from the tracks; cars hardly ever drove down his block, which was lined with trees and façades so similar they seemed indistinguishable, interchangeable. To get to M’s house, one had to walk down a long hallway that extended almost to the middle of the block. Every few meters a door would appear on the right—these were not only similar, but in fact completely identical. His family lived behind the fourth. The door opened on to a patio, which was the nucleus of the house. There were a few plants and large flowerpots in it, which at first glance seemed to be scattered about at random. M’s room was reached by climbing a narrow staircase that rose up from the patio next to a large sink and doubled back above it (so closely you had to stoop over to do the wash). I remember my surprise looking down for the first time through the steps of iron grating, just like the ones found on countless railroad bridges. M should feel lucky to have his own room, I thought the first time I visited, especially one so isolated from the rest of the house.

The residence, which was nothing special in itself, took on an enigmatic quality the moment M’s family moved in. It was not just the building or the apartment, as I will explain later on, it was also its location. Even though it was in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, the house was in an area that was not considered as such. The proximity of the two, as is often the case, made the differences between them even more pronounced. The opposite can also occur, as it did with my family, which did not live in a Jewish neighborhood but drew little attention just the same. Invisible from the street, in an area that seemed strange to my inexperienced mind, M’s house was ensconced within the very heart of the block, surrounded on all sides by other houses and other families. This confinement, which shaped the family’s daily activities, proved that “confinement” was not really the right word for it; more accurately, it was an excessive form of cohabitation and a different sort of abundance, though it was foreign to me. It was the realm of the diverse, the disparate. I should say that the “geographic” oddity of the house represented only my first concern; a second arose when I met M’s parents, who spoke without any particular accent. I still remember my surprise at hearing his father speak; his language was unquestionably that of Buenos Aires, utterly
porteño
in usage and intonation, and was, of course, more emphatic than my own. My admiration mingled with suspicion. I had always seen a foreign accent, especially a Yiddish one, as a perceptible mark; because of this, I viewed its absence as a profound ethnic limitation. The way I saw it, a foreigner displayed greater abundance than a local did through his speech, the outward sign of a nucleus that affirmed his identity.

There are, in life, passing moments and pivotal ones—some can be both at once, some, only one or the other. This lack of an accent was one of these: not passing, but pivotal. If the condition of being Jewish were a hollow meant to be filled with distinguishing attributes, in those years I considered flawed speech to be a fundamental element of the mix. We had been taught to set our sights on this, and it is well known that everyone else was doing the same. I sensed, in the lack of an accent among M’s family, a diffuse sort of danger, which did not attach itself to anyone or anything in particular; in the worst case, it suggested a threat, in the best, a mistake—the destruction of that which separated them from the rest of the world. The world thrives on difference; it is from this difference that we learn. In this way, language and geography came together in M, highlighting his enigmatic surroundings and forming a complement.

I’ll now mention another thing that was important to our friendship: the railroad. The tracks became our territory. To M and his friends, a stroll through the area was an exclusive activity; it meant walking, separately and guided by individual routine, along streets and homes that offered up their hidden corners without resistance. They killed time looking for oddly-shaped rocks, pulling weeds from the sides of the embankments, poking around the fences and walls at the furthest ends of the lot. Over the years, this place would become another shared emblem. I would take the train into Buenos Aires every day from the outskirts of the city, often traveling the same route along which M would walk. As I passed his house, I would stick my head out the window and look back at the short, tree-lined block, its cobblestones in perpetual shade. We spoke with great composure about the trains, not with a sense of admiration that could deteriorate into enthusiasm, nor from a desire to expand upon any meager technical knowledge of the subject, but rather paying particular attention to the details, which were often questionable, as all details are, in an attempt to understand them as part of a real—and apparently unattainable—whole: the one represented by trains of metal, glass, and leather that crisscrossed the city, more noisy than they were fast.

When the world is so dark that the truth seems beyond our reach, it is best to create an efficient, though illusory, system that allows us to represent it as though it were real. These topics of conversation, then, were assured their longevity not only by the fact that the trains were a part of both of our lives, but also by the monotony of those lives, a rut into which we gradually fell. I would mention things I had seen, M would describe others. He would tell me, for example, that the bells on the corner near his house had rung the whole afternoon, that there must have been something wrong with them. I, for my part, would listen, think about what he was saying, and remember, for example, that I had been delayed an hour near Ramos Mejía station. The car I was in—as always, the last—was blocking the street. I could see the frustration of the drivers as they looked out at the obstruction that was arbitrarily blocking their way; they must have thought that it would have made no difference to the train to have stopped a little further along. And maybe they were right, I said, the fact that the last car of the train was exactly as wide as the street made it seem like something that had been done deliberately, maliciously. M thought for a minute, and then asked if there were many people on the train. “On what train?” I replied. The train I said I was on, he explained. I answered him with a wave of my hand that signaled “like this,” when what I had wanted to convey was “you know” or “the usual,” meaning that I could only speak for the car I was in; as I described to him in detail, the car was about half full but many of the passengers, myself included, were standing, which allowed me a better view of the street. It was no problem for the people riding bicycles or traveling on foot, I continued, they went around the back of the train and crossed the tracks carefully. The drivers of the cars sighed as they watched people on foot pass them by; they were slaves to their vehicles, and they rested their arms on their steering wheels in a gesture, I repeated, of both resignation and impatience. Sometimes a few of them spoke; a pedestrian pointed into the distance.

After thinking for a moment, M wanted to know: Were the crossing gates lowered? “What gates?” asked the other. “The crossing gates, the ones you were just talking about,” he answered. “I didn’t say anything about any gates.” “Where you were stopped,” he said. “How did he know about the gates?” the other asked himself, not expecting a response: he looked at M without understanding and answered with a gesture, a widening of the eyes—the train was in the middle of the street, how could they not have been lowered? Even the bells, which had been meant to announce the train’s passing, were a platitude and, in some respects, a failure: there it was, stopped in view of everyone. The fact was that the train was full; everyone was pressed together without room to raise their arms. The noise from the alarm, coupled with the lack of space and the closed windows, provoked a general sense of drowsiness, except among those who shouted things like, “We’re going to be here all night,” “Keep your hands to yourself,” and jokes of that nature, before letting out a guffaw. M, listening to the commotion all afternoon, had come to the same conclusion, although by an opposite and incomplete route: it seemed obvious to him that the bells would sound when a train passed, and so he assigned the error to the fact that no train was passing: the cause of the commotion was unclear, but the fact that there was no train coming was an obvious mistake. “But what was the mistake?” asked the other. “What mistake?” replied M. The mistake of sounding the alarm without the train ever passing; was it the error of the train or the alarm? M replied that he couldn’t know, just as he couldn’t know what was
obvious about the situation. In the other’s account, he continued, it was different, both train and alarm were implicated, the error was obvious. All afternoon M had watched his neighbors lean out their windows, as if they might identify the cause of the alarm by doing so, but they could not; he had also noticed the care with which the few pedestrians had crossed the tracks. He had not gone down to walk along the tracks—the way they wound through the terrain there, the bells were the only way to know a train was coming. Later that night, they stopped ringing. It was a moment like any other, but different because it marked a change. The other’s train had also suddenly begun to move, without warning. Many of their conversations were like this, a vague compendium of news from the railroad. From the comments of the other, M learned about the curve of the tracks at Villa Luro, harder for diesel engines than for electric trains to take, just as the other discovered the nicknames that M and his friends had for the engineers.

M had always had a poor sense of direction; this led to a complete detachment from the geography of the city. It took him the same torturous effort to locate a point five blocks away, as fifty. His gaze would drift off and, absorbed, facing the abyss of which he felt a victim, he would finally ask, “How do you get there?” Great feats of memory allowed him to go to familiar places; it was impossible for him to orient himself if he was forced to set out from anywhere other than his house. To his mind, space was a question without a clear answer. After more than six months of classes in our first year at school, he would still confess some mornings that he did not know how to get home: he knew which bus to take, but since he had forgotten its route he did not know where to get off. A corner two blocks from his house was mute, it said nothing to him. Experience told him that that it was part of the same city, but to his mind, it might as well have been at the antipodes. The names of the streets, like the streets and avenues themselves, did not say much to him either; his understanding of the city was tangled and confused, and therefore naturally unfathomable. Things could be anywhere: they could even occupy the same place, superimposed upon one another. This system, which seemed natural but was actually based on the extremes of absolute dispersion or absolute condensation, condemned him to perpetual uncertainty. One afternoon, on his way back from school, he fell asleep and didn’t get home until after midnight; the bus had an unbelievably long route, going as far as G. (Which was very close, in fact, to P; it might even have bordered the area where, it is my belief, his body would fly through the air just seven years later.)

Earlier, I referred to geography as question without an answer in M’s mind. This trait—which he was the first to admit: “Give me a map and I’ll read it upside down”—was equivalent to the mystery I sensed in his neighborhood: an unusual, if not defective, sort of suburb. His lack of any sense of direction or spatial relation absolved him of all commitments. When it came to the area in which he lived, he could not be held responsible. I did not realize it at the time, but my uneasiness followed from ignorance. Later, as time passed and we remained friends, I would notice the natural feeling and steady rhythm of the neighborhood, which was strange in many ways but also so much like others in Buenos Aires. Everyone thinks of their block as the epicenter of daily life: they leave from and return to it every day. This sense of certainty about space fades as the perimeter grows until it becomes, depending on the individual, a ghostly image. Distance, in this case, is confusion; anything, as I said before, could be anywhere and everything could be everywhere, which is to say that any place could be anyplace. M had a limited radius of movement, which altered his perception, but since he also lacked a sense of direction, experience and routine often translated into greater insecurity rather than understanding.

Earlier I said that M’s abduction left us speechless (I should add that my world fell apart). I am going to recount the moment I found out. One afternoon I heard someone knocking at my front door; still, nothing seemed particularly urgent that day. I dressed slowly, wondering who it could be; when I neared the door the knocking began again. I opened the door reluctantly, only halfway. It was my neighbor, who was about to leave. As he turned he said impatiently, “Hurry up, now, you’ve got a call.” We started walking, him in front and me behind. It had been quiet inside my house, but out on the street everything was jarring. I tried to excuse the delay, saying, “For what it’s worth…” “So don’t give out the number,” he responded, and he was right. We got to his house and I walked… back along the walls; one burned from the hours the sun had been at work on it. I got to the kitchen, where they kept their telephone. Up to that point everything was normal, even predictable: the untended plants, the two old plum trees out behind the house, the smells of the kitchen, where they were just sitting down to eat (my standard joke: I would be there in a minute). A friend was calling, to let me know. That’s what he said: To let me know. This friend, named A, sounded like an idiot. How could he say “to let me know”? (Someone, someone else was speaking through him; he could not be saying that.) He said he couldn’t believe what he was saying (what he was letting me know). I could not believe him, either. Some of the details were absurd, fragmentary, unclear. We didn’t know what to do, him on his side and me on mine, which was demonstrated by the silence we maintained for a few long moments before hanging up. I remember a parenthesis opening up as I put the phone back on the receiver; something was interrupted, for how long, I don’t know. Some time had passed when I came around, but my neighbor and his family, who were waiting to eat, the bottle of soda water sweating on the table, were looking at me as though I had just hung up. Something had happened, they could tell, and they were waiting for me to explain it to them. The meal didn’t matter; they could wait in silence for hours until I was ready to speak. I regretted the silence, and regretted in advance what I might say. I muttered something about the soda siphon, that it was getting cold; that the bottle was getting cold because the soda, as it warmed up, let go of the cold it had absorbed in the refrigerator. I had wanted to say something about the food, which was steaming (and actually getting cold), and tell them that I didn’t want to bother them any further (this is what I was regretting in advance: that I would sound like my mother with her overly emphatic courtesy). I had wanted to say that the food was getting cold, but seeing the perspiration on the siphon, I felt utterly defeated: not only had something terrible happened to M, I thought, but on top of it all the sweat from the bottle was pooling on the table. And so, with those disjointed words I left, flustered and impatient, not knowing where I was headed. I went back through the house. I crossed the stone patio and walked along the wall, which was giving off a more intense heat than before. I stepped into the street and was pained to see that things were going on as usual, when the worst had come to pass. Everything expanded around me; time took on intolerable, immeasurable dimensions and nothing seemed to have an end. I went over what had happened; the notice from my neighbor, our conversation; I was ashamed that I had been so leisurely in the way I dressed and so cavalier when I greeted the family. And, on top of it all, the worst thing imaginable had happened to M. Outside, the sun was hard at work. My mind was an intensely white screen, as bright as the chalky wall behind me. Strangely enough, my first impulse was toward calculation: I wanted to guess how long it would take the bus to reach the corner, how many cobblestones fit on one street, how much heat it would take to melt these walls, and the houses along with them, once and for all. These calculations were a way of stopping the advance of time, anyone could have seen that, but there was still a time that evaded me: it was the moment itself, in which something was beginning that I did not understand, something born of abandonment and also, although it sounds contradictory, a double life. (I mean that I felt M’s life in danger within me; of the few duties and sensibilities he had chosen for himself, I decided to follow and complete the greatest number possible. It was a means of survival. Later on, I will explain how.)