The Planets. Sergio Chejfec
announcing what was to come, for example, that what once was light was about to fall into darkness.
Like many others, probably, I believed that I knew things the newspaper did not mention. In my case, the explosion had a painful history, which began with the abduction of M (M for Miguel, or Mauricio; it could also be M for Daniel since, as we know, any name at all can reside behind letters). Several days passed between the abduction and its announcement, a length of time I do not dare try to calculate, partly because I am not sure that I could: those days were not days at all—they were a single, interminable mass of time, at once ephemeral and able to reproduce itself without end; in a cruel twist of fate, as they sometimes say, the pages of that newspaper offered the only possibility of an ending, if not in the form of a conclusion then at least as a cessation, a way of giving shape to that mass and thereby opening it up to an after.
I should say that I lacked then, as I do now, any proof that M was in that explosion. But I was not, I am not, in a position to ignore the possibility. Imagining him among the dead served little purpose; in fact, it served no purpose at all. Nevertheless, it was a thought that insinuated itself time and again through association: what once pulsed with life, its own form of abundance, that is, his body, a combination of liquids, nerves or whatever all of that could be called (a typical presence to which the world has grown accustomed and is widely taken for granted, the habit of leaving life unspoken); the thought of something that had been inexhaustibly alive until that moment, the organic life of a body now emptied of its substance, took the shape of an idea marked by necessity, perhaps even by fate.
The pit opened by the memory of M was slowly covered over—days, then weeks and years—by the desolation left in the wake of barbarity. Unlike those of other transgressions, the effects of this crime do not fade immediately, in the short or long term, or ever. A deathly patina covers the faces of the living, their features become a shield against unsuitable gestures, emblems or examples of absent faces; these grimaces are eloquent precisely because the living, overwhelmed by the evidence before them, chose lassitude and dissimilation. (Now I will speak of my country.) I have always had the feeling, when walking anywhere in Argentina, but particularly in Buenos Aires, that I was doing so among people who, surprised by the intimacy of their relationship with death, choose cynicism as their form of atonement (when sincere repentance is such a simple act).
As a result, what follows is a story without an end. Perhaps within the sphere of evil there is a need to complete unfinished stories. When I say the sphere of evil, I am not referring to some sort of absolute complicity, but rather to the fact that its victims, though they belong to the realm of good, have been cast into another—the dominion of evil—by virtue of being victims. Since we know that good may be limitless, perhaps within the sphere of evil the need to bring stories to their conclusion becomes urgent. Maybe this is why I thought of M’s abduction when I read the news of the explosion. The time between those two events was an exercise in panic during which I imagined the cruelties he suffered, prior to the moment of that equalizing blast, which ended both life and horror. Looking at the newspaper I imagined that, after those interminable days, reason—though it was a childish and abominable sort of reason—had finally prevailed: his annihilation, of which the abduction was only part, had been fully realized.
I read the story three times, then found myself transfixed by its title. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was thinking about something, but I was not thinking about nothing, either. If there is a moment that precedes the formation of a thought—a moment in which one’s consciousness tries to make way for an idea but is impeded by the sheer number of details involved, a moment in which a future thought takes the form of a dream, an involuntary impulse—if such a moment does exist, I experienced it for an inordinately long time. So long that I jumped when the waiter came by to empty my ashtray, startling him. The title read: “Explosion in P.” I stared at it without taking in the words, the paper covered with disorganized blotches of ink, like when one stands in front of a mirror and sees the glass instead of one’s reflection. The newspaper said that, for a few hours, the locals had heard trucks speeding up and then stopping; unusual noises that somehow failed to draw anyone’s attention. (If it had happened during the day they would have seen the whole thing, but since it was night, everything appeared to be in order; night is the embodiment of the clandestine, which in this case allowed many to turn a blind eye.) It had seemed like some sort of public project, roadwork, maybe. Engines running at capacity, something heavy rocking back and forth, banging against metal. Sometimes the trucks could be heard dumping their loads of rubble, the stones flowing out of them like a solid, dissonant stream. Then the activity began to subside, and little by little the noise tapered off until at some point in the middle of the night everything seemed to return to its indifferent state of normalcy. And yet, as would be proven shortly, the process had already been set in motion and was gaining momentum. Having forgotten the trucks, all were shocked by the explosion. Silence spread among them until the following night. (The silence itself was a sign; expressed physically it would have been a grimace, an acknowledgment of the lack of explanations and also a means of excusing the violence. The people’s faces.)
A silence less enigmatic and drawn out than the one adopted by M’s parents. Despite its eloquence, which did not deign to utter a word, it was a silence composed of gestures as emphatic as blows with a stick. I never fully grasped the meaning of this silence, though I tried in vain several times to understand it. One could say that the absence of the child produced an emptiness in the parents, who lived their lives inside a sphere of glass bombarded by signs from the outside world. Because of the transparency of their enclosure, its interior was visible to all, despite the fact that M’s parents felt and acted as though they were living on the dark side of a planet composed of their own pain. They were comfortable in their anguish and consoled by their own desperation. The outside, generally defined as “others,” “things,” or just “the world,” which had always seemed somewhat adverse, revealed itself, after what happened to M, to be openly hostile. As a form of self-defense in the face of so much adversity, they chose to fade away, to become transparent. But the truth was that they were still being observed, perhaps more than ever.
I admired the fact that a drama so intense would, for them, be silent. It was not the hermetic isolation that usually imposes itself after a tragedy, the form of autism adopted by the victim, or the open display of fear and self-pity exhibited by friends. More tangibly, it was the melancholy silence behind which his family would hide, as though each of them were fulfilling a predetermined and accepted religious role that originated in the distant past. But this obedience, because it was born not only of personal conviction but also of their very nature, unfolded against a backdrop of confusion. In this way, even though they did not hear it, the explosion that ended their son’s life was still a shock to them, I thought as I sat in a café—a pizzeria, rather—on what was then avenida Canning. It shocked them still. Like stones in a pond, the waves of the explosion reached M’s family, actually gaining force as they traveled rather than tapering off, as they would have under other circumstances. Of all the dangers involved in going near M’s house, one of the most painful was confessing to his parents and his siblings, without actually saying anything, that chance had been on our side, that of his friends, and not on his. This arbitrary act of evil grieved us as though we were his kin and left us in his debt. M was our martyr, not because his sacrifice was intended to bring about our salvation, but because we were marked by his death. This is why some days I think of him as though he were divine, assigning to him impossible powers, worshipping his memory. Though his existence is slowly slipping away from me, becoming abstract, it continues to be the most vibrant, certain, and immediate thing I know.
Captives of geography, our past is shaped by the city. That earlier city is still our doorstep. A multicolored fabric of extraordinary vastness, woven of shortcuts and straight lines intersecting at outrageous angles, imposed itself as the backdrop of our sojourns. But its surface, known conventionally as the real and as resistant as a scab of asphalt and cement, lost something in M’s absence; it was reduced to belated shadows and reflections projected onto that other city, the one etched into the past. The true present faded into the distance, and the city itself, built from substances designed to withstand the effects of time, dissolved into a nucleus of disorder. This degeneration of the city, which spared only the traces of the two of us, making M’s absence even more pronounced, devastated me and left me silent for