The Planets

“The mud envelops us from within. It is enveloping us from within,” the leader of this indigenous or impoverished tribe, though maybe it was both, had said in his plain, coarse, and somewhat cryptic way beside the lake, offering Sito a justification for his diet. It was a phrase that seemed utterly appropriate, I thought as I stepped onto the curb on the far side of Chile, as the slogan of that place inside us that had been occupied by silence ever since we learned that M had been taken. What I mean is that the silence was, in the first place, self-fulfilling, like a promise that is kept in its making (“I promise to promise” or “I swear to swear”); second, it was descriptive: it was part of our — new or old — nature and, as such, we could not escape its influence. Third, because there is always a third, it was also prescient in that it spoke of the silence in which we would all end up sooner or later, indistinguishable from one another. Half a block from San Juan, I thought: It is likely that Sito neither works in a café nor sells foam rubber; his mother might not be dead and may never have touched a drink, in spite of my memories. Still, there is no question that he has been reached, and invaded by, a silence just like my own. The lack of place, I thought, the absence of a space where M’s poor body might be.

It had grown dark by the time I reached Constitución; it was one of those summer nights that are cooler than usual thanks to the breeze coming off the river. From the morning we found out that M had been taken, from that moment on, we been invaded and silenced by excess. The confusion did not last long, the hesitation was brief; it was the lack of moderation that left us without words, just as M was left without a place. I forgot to ask Sito, I thought, whether he moved out of his house for a while after the abduction. But there was no need, I realized; it was obvious that he had not felt obliged to do so.

One is sometimes moved by the effects of time; while on one hand these promote continuity and endurance, often through the work of memory, on the other hand, they also induce forgetting. This forgetting is, after all, mundane and fairly banal, yet it is confusing, and sometimes disappointing, to acknowledge the particularities hidden in the past. We often speak of forgetting when we really mean to say distress, amnesia, mistrust, fear, indifference, distraction, doubt, weariness, omission. My mind oscillates within this narrow range of emotions when, on occasions like the evening after my encounter with Sito, despite the constant allusions in our conversation, which were largely indirect but were always concrete, I feel unable to attribute any tangible trait, even a trivial one, to M; a feature, a gesture or expression, a past, a family, affect, et cetera. A reflected image that has slowly given way to negation, to shadow. The effect is unreal, and this unreal effect makes his life seem not only improbable, but also incidental. Did M exist? Yes, I say. But what was his time on earth like? It is all conjecture, I reasoned, the more time passes, the less I know. This lack of knowledge has nothing to do with forgetting, though that is what we call it, nor with the length of his absence, but rather with its excess.

Constitución station, with its open platforms, its soaring ceiling, and its iron girders studded with colossal bolts, looked more like the hangar of a blimp. At that moment, all the train routes sounded far-fetched to me. Remedios de Escalada seemed just as distant as Bahía Blanca; beyond a certain point space began to dissolve, and that point was not far away. Concepts like near and far are derived from useless categories, I thought.

M and the other often had conflicting opinions about the differences between the capital and the suburbs. Though they took it for what it was, which was truly secondary, for ages this subject interested them more than other questions that were, from several points of view, more vital. Their discussions could last for weeks, with periods of greater emphasis and ones of apparent disinterest. And yet, though it was not mentioned, the subject was not cast aside: it followed its tortuous path without leaving them. M and the other were approaching an axis of coincidences that might seem fragile or weak, but which was useful as a foundation, like a moveable border, to propose new problems in response to a question — this was the basic implication, to which no one objected — that seemed to be both complex and impossible to resolve yet, at the same time, clear and simple. This question might seem pointless now, but the other would not be exaggerating if he said that, until a little while ago it was obvious to him as he passed from the suburbs into the capital, or vice versa, that he was passing into a contiguous order that was similar in appearance but was marked by difference (and certainly still is).

One tends to define both the location and the nature of limits; it is no different with cities. They were captivated by the idea of Buenos Aires as a never-ending city, but this trait was, in fact, disproven by its periphery: the proof of its supposed proliferation and, at the same time, of its limits could be found in the expansion of the suburbs, a complex built on contiguity that did not necessarily correspond to the city, and which changed it into something else. There are parts of the so-called suburbs that turn out to be just as incomprehensible as an unfamiliar, unknown city — so incomprehensible, in fact, that they defy comparison — but in general, passing through them, one acknowledges that their inhabitants live partially in our city and partially in another; in a border zone in which difference sometimes appears as a distortion, a substitution, or a replica. There exists a collective scene that this dissonance calls into question, though it rarely contests and sometimes even reinforces it. Because of this, at least in part, M and the other always walked around Greater Buenos Aires with a vague feeling of curiosity, adventure, anxiety, abandon, pleasure, freedom, and compassion. It was a difference that returned to them the sense that the familiar was both certain and decisive.

Sometimes, I recalled that night in Constitución station, M and I would make fun of Sito. One day, I remember it well, while we were talking about the tragic state his mother was in, M let slip a pobre Sito. We found this particularly fu