The Planets

Earlier I said that Sito’s intervention was decisive in my writing all this. Now I see that Sito was important, even beyond his words, in that he paid for our coffee. It might seem ridiculous or inappropriate — for a number of reasons — but Sito’s gesture served to make me feel that something good could come from M that did not necessarily have to belong to the past. This is why I recount it from time to time: the invitation did not correspond to any mundane sense of courtesy, but was rather a protective gesture, a backward-looking nod of support.

Night arrived quickly: in the city, the sun knows neither patience nor lassitude. It’s strange, when I think of those streets I remember the width of the sidewalks, the façades of the buildings and the breadth of the avenue, all of it punctuated by trees, yet that is not what I saw as I walked. At the time I was focused on the people around me and above all the parking lots, which the press was saying were in contract for millions; I have long since forgotten the details and circumstances of these things. Despite how long it had been since last we saw one another, and the slow pace of the conversation that was kept alive, at times, only through halting and painstaking effort, I had the feeling that we had not remembered M. Hours spent talking with Sito, and at no point did we speak of him fully, I realized, astonished. What kept us from evoking his voice, the way he walked, his kindness? How could we not have talked about his intelligence, his modesty, his generosity? M was completely theatrical: the faces he made could signal both happiness and oblivion, distraction and enchantment; M had a knowing sense of humor that inspired reflection, but Sito and I didn’t talk about that, either. At Belgrano I thought about the cruel memory those who survive keep of those who did not, not because it eventually fades away, as they all do, but because it is distorted; changing things with this transformation, abandoning them before their time. This fact, which is simply the mechanics of memory and is seen all the time, took on a dramatic, doubly cruel, twist in M’s case, in that we had nowhere to assign his presence, that is, his body — we know how important place is in the adoption of customs and the interpretation of events, as evidenced by my absolute certainty of M’s intervention in the encounter with Sito (as though he were capable of being anywhere).

Later, as I crossed calle Chile, I realized something else: the reason for our silence could be found in the excessive nature of M’s disappearance. I will illustrate this with an example. We sigh in different ways, according to different circumstances. We know many different types of sighs, most of which are recognizable: sighs of fatigue, impatience, pleasure, boredom, languor, surprise, and even of terror, but never of excess (in that case what is produced is a silence: people fall quiet before the excessive — this is the silence of excess). Shock or fear can leave us at a loss for words, but excess takes away our ability to speak: we don’t want to scream, but rather vanish, disappear, die. Neither Sito nor I, I said to myself as I crossed Chile, was ready to know what had happened to M, and so the facts left a wake behind them that was dense, lasting, and difficult to assimilate. If the fatefulness of his absence exaggerated what had happened, the lack of a space, a site, as I said, made it incomprehensible. It might have been a matter of just one person, as was the case, but it was infinite in scope. Paradoxically, it was so excessive that it became something simple and absolute, the way one might say something is both childish and appalling. In this way, we did not give ourselves over to silence, which would have been a pointless and gratuitous gesture; instead, silence chose us, enveloping us from within.

Enveloping us from within. Sito had used those words a little earlier but, strangely, only now as I repeated them was I able to remember them and ask myself what they might mean. He said them in the café where we had gone for a cup of coffee, on his invitation, as he described a fishing trip he had taken with a friend to a lake in the country.

By that point, Sito had gone back to his circumlocutions: There are few things more eerie than spending a night beside a lake, he assured me: a noiseless sea, a river that makes no sound and has no opposite shore. The gentle lapping of the water seems to a

In any event, none of that matters, Sito asserted; not as much as an episode that took place the next morning, as one might expect, at the water’s edge. The sunrise promised a picture-perfect morning. The slow and tenuous illumination of the dawn, far from the tropic, flattened colors and textures, just as it did to the elements around us: the water was less like water, the mud less like mud. The moisture from the dew began to evaporate, spreading jumbled and vaguely agreeable vegetal smells; as the nascent morning advanced, the uneasy sounds of the night faded away like the unpleasant memory of a forced silence. We stuck our heads out of our sleeping bags, Sito continued, to make sure that nature had given us the gift of another perfect day, but a reflection sparked our concern: a few meters ahead of us, at the water’s edge, a shapeless mass was moving, or trembling, too cautiously to be anything natural. Sito and his friend were afraid the lucky star that had kept them through the night was about to run out right at the break of dawn, and they did not risk saying a word for fear of rousing the monster. Half upright, partially reclined, leaned a little to one side, expectant, their position was unusual and, what is worse, it was uncomfortable. They felt a sharp pain in their necks and yet they could not give up their observation. The fact that the morning mist, which — contrary to the way things should have been — was getting denser as the minutes passed, didn’t help things, either. Once more they proved that paying complete attention to one thing detracts from the senses and impedes one’s ability to notice other things; the morning and the place were stripped of their positive attributes and recoiled in the face of the threat. They stayed like that for an indefinite period: not long, the sky did not lighten all the way, but not a short time, either, because they were left with the memory of an endless vigil. All of a sudden they saw new shadows emerging, rapidly, from the underbrush to join the pulsating mass in the lake; this, together with the articulation of the forms they had been able to make out despite the confusion and the speed with which they moved, made them suspect that they might be looking at a group of people.

And so they were. In the light of day they would be able to perceive things little by little, eventually discerning a compact nucleus of bodies leaned over the water, as well as others that lay back against the shore, forming a protective arch. They wore coarse loincloths that barely covered their nakedness; many of them, the vast majority, were children. Their backs all had the same shape to them: square and broad at the shoulders, they proceeded straight down without tapering until they reached the waist, where a sudden stroke of reality seemed to remind them of the imminent expanse of the hips. Sito and his friend took care not to startle them; they approached cautiously, afraid they might be violent. They did not manage to avoid the former, Sito clarified, though thankfully they were mistaken about the latter; it was the others that panicked at what the two of them might do. What had appeared to be a protective human shield did not, in fact, do any protecting: it was a mass searching for warmth, which dispersed in a flurry of mud and barbaric exclamations. It was then that the two friends discovered the origin of the lapping they had attributed during the night to the swell of the lake: though they kept their mouths close to the surface, they drank with their hands, using them like little pitchers. It was their up and down motion, their splashing, that produced the melody. Once they reached the group, they realized something else that would surprise them: the water had mixed with the mud, which all were eating, as well. They approached someone who appeared to be the leader, who was about forty years old and wore a pair of pants tied at the waist, the holes in which revealed exceptionally pale skin. He stood up, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm to make it obvious that they were interrupting his breakfast, and greeted them. Sito and the other felt it was their right to ask questions — various measures indicated that they could consider themselves superior — and so they got right to the point. “Why do you eat mud?” they asked. “We’re very poor,” he said, adjusting the strap that held up his pants. Before that moment, Sito continued, he never would have believed it if someone had told him about gangs of the poor, but now he was face to face with one, and a big one at that. He and his friend had gone there to fish, which implied — as did their di