The Planets

If one can speak of a thing called candor, a virtue some people supposedly possess, I should say that Sito’s was somewhat questionable. I realized this when he chose a meandering route to recall that M had not been abducted from his house. Sito’s roundabout remarks had something ceremonial to them; in order to speak he resorted to preambles and clarifications whose meaning, if they had any purpose at all, had been lost in a memory overcrowded by time and the — often purely mental — reiterations to which he subjected his own story. (As is well known, repetition does not simplify; on the contrary, it distorts.) What Sito said was more or less this: A kidnapping on the block, with no witnesses. Like nearly everyone else, M lived somewhere: his house. But he was somewhere else, far from there, when he was taken. This meant that the significance of the event dissipated almost immediately; it was not easy to absorb something that had happened outside the neighborhood. Something as decisive as a man’s life had closed itself off within its own virtuality, without leaving a trace. His family, especially his parents, by not acting in any ostensible way, seemed to give themselves over to the lack of coincidence between event and geography. And so began the delayed reactions for which they would, gradually, become known; more absorbed than they usually were by the familial penchant for distraction, they were now so slow to turn when someone called to them, for example, that they were already being hailed for the second time when they finally did. Their thoughts and reactions, said Sito, appeared to reach them from the back of their heads, rather than the front. The neighbors gradually found out about the painstaking, short-lived inquiries — which were not worthy of the name and never met with any success — but Sito could not remember how, he said as we drank the coffee to which he had invited me, since no one in the family talked about it with anyone.

One day the father went to the police station. Went says too much: the truth was that he simply stepped inside. He was walking along an avenue when he crossed paths with a patrol officer. Something inspired in him a vague sense of duty; he could not pass by the authorities without asking about his son. Information, like life, is sometimes so random that it is impossible to know what path might lead to the truth. In the police station they misled him despicably. They made him wait for hours, saying that the person who could help him wasn’t in. All the while, the father watched people arrive who had been in an accident, or who came to report a noise, a theft, or a scam; people who came for a certificate of residence. Every now and then the police would mention a prisoner in the back, in the cells. Only just before he left did he discover that they were not prisoners, but detainees. It was strange; the word remained etched in his memory. Under the circumstances, there was little difference between one (prisoner) and the other (detainee), yet the second was more optimistic. From that moment on, he had the hope that M was a detainee. As long as that was all, he thought; detention can last years, decades, but it is always only temporary, as long as he is alive. The thought of seeing M appear at the far side of the station, from the third wing, as the police called it, excited him. It is so easy for one to believe that reality is directed at them. After a while a sharp pain in his chest made him lean his head against the cold wall. He left the police station at dawn, after another officer, who had just arrived and was supposedly the one assigned to help him, questioned him about everything, absolutely everything, and told him nothing at all; he simply ordered him to leave.

The neighbors, said Sito, offered to help with “anything they might need.” M’s parents thanked them evasively, as though they did not understand, or as though accepting any help would be to turn their backs on their son, to evade the guilt that had tormented them since the kidnapping and whose weight they felt obligated to bear. There was nothing they could have done, Sito pointed out, how could they have contributed anything more than what they already did anyway? Neighbors help one another with ordinary things, common to all, unless some catastrophe strikes. Nonetheless, there is no extraordinary assistance for extraordinary events; the help available was the usual, the neighborly: a supplemental solidarity that was, given its magnitude, rarely decisive. Half a year after the abduction, in the opposite season — that was how M and I used to break up a

Soda water, said Sito abruptly, putting down his cup of coffee. It was because of soda siphons that he came to know more about M’s abduction. An old friend of his from school had showed him the siphons full of gasoline that he kept in his house. He led him into the kitchen and drew back a short floral curtain, with a flourish. A few plates embellished with gondolas, birds, and mountains rested on the cabinet. Sito did not count the bottles, nor did he try to verify any of it; instead he amused himself with the thought of the cloud of boats, feathers, ceramic, and water they would create if they exploded. Preparing the siphons required artisanal zeal. He remembered the care it took to prepare them and the naivety of his friend for showing them off. He could still see the i

And so on that afternoon, months ago, as we drank our coffee I grasped the nature of Sito’s doubt. In his memory, the figure of M, who was always distracted to the point of appearing indifferent, retained an aura of i