The Incompletes

  PRAISE FOR SERGIO CHEJFEC

  “The Incompletes is a masterfully nested narrative where writing—its presence on the page, its course through time, its prismatic dispersion of meaning—is the true protagonist. Heather Cleary’s flawless translation adds yet another layer to this extraordinary palimpsest of a novel.”

  —Hernan Diaz

  “The Incompletes is, simply put, Chejfec’s best book, a ‘thriller’ in a way, although the thing that gets me is how it’s also an inside-out Madame Bovary.”

  —Javier Molea, McNally Jackson

  “On first reading Chejfec, we recall many admired authors, but at a later moment—a more solid and lasting one—we realize that he resembles no one, and that he has chosen an unusual and quite distinctive path, one that reveals itself slowly because of the demanding and very personal searches the author himself carries out in his narrative.”

  —Enrique Vila-Matas

  “It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who, marrying true intellect with simple description of a space, simultaneously covers so little and so much ground.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “If genius can be defined by the measure of depth of an artist’s perception into human experience, then Chejfec is a genius.”

  —Coffin Factory

  Other works by Sergio Chejfec

  Baroni: A Journey

  The Dark

  My Two Worlds

  The Planets

  THE INCOMPLETES

  SERGIO CHEJFEC

  Translated from the Spanish

  by Heather Cleary

  Copyright © 2004 by Sergio Chejfec

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Heather Cleary

  Originally published in Spanish as Los Incompletos by Alfaguara, 2004

  First edition, 2019

  All rights reserved

  The citation from A Complicated Mammal by Joaquín O. Giannuzzi is taken from Richard Gwyn’s 2012 translation, published by CB Editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-948830-03-4 / ISBN-10: 1-948830-03-5

  This project is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

  Text set in Fournier, a typeface designed by Pierre Simon Fournier (1712–1768), a French punch-cutter, typefounder, and typographic theoretician.

  Design by Anthony Blake

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  THE INCOMPLETES

  NOW I AM GOING TO TELL THE STORY OF SOMETHING THAT happened one night, years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed. Ending a day the same as any other—nightfall, exhaustion, silence, solitude—during those final domestic acts one performs with resignation and mounting fear, wondering if that night will be the last, if the world will vanish while we sleep, or if our soul will wake to find itself forever separated from its body—from that night’s protracted beginning until the moment I nodded off, my thoughts turned insistently to a friend I hadn’t seen, I haven’t seen, in years. When we were young, a time nearly forgotten and from which decades separate us, he decided to leave his country and survive in the world like a wandering planet, to steep himself in the languages he would pick up along the way and, among other things, to take on a vague international luster (always bearing the ambiguous yoke, both brutal and enviable, barely visible yet indelible, of being an Argentinian in flight).

  I should say “I haven’t forgotten,” rather than invoke memory. Of the morning when he left, I haven’t forgotten the empty port, a little blue stall with a white roof, trees scattered as if by chance across the surrounding area, and, above all, the piers and the repetitive backdrop of nautical equipment (cranes, jetties, tracks, and moorings) at the ready, though they seemed gratuitous in the absence of more people or other ships. I got there early and waited. (It seems to me now that time was more complex in my youth: I was waiting for someone who was about to leave, as if waiting had asserted itself in advance as a cause—this was why the days passed so slowly; maddeningly drawn out, they sometimes even seemed to grind to a halt and the whole idea of reality, along with the idea of nature concealed within it, presented itself as distressingly multiple and unpredictable.) The pier was just a damp promenade; drops of dew fell from the roof of the little stall, and the slowly dissolving night still hid the water’s surface like an immense, uninhabited depression. The wait seemed to suit the occasion—even if you understood time as an unstoppable thing set in motion, its languor, or rather its apathy, was still surprising: the morning’s lack of urgency to arrive.

  A long time passed like that, I think. Distant lights slowed their flickering in the sky; just as they threatened to go out altogether, I saw a car approach slowly and what might be described as shakily, probably because of the cobblestones. It was the taxi that had brought Felix. The car rolled forward for what I considered a theatrically long time. And then nothing happened. Felix remained inside for no reason at all, like a stage actor delaying his entrance, though I had no way of knowing that. After a while he opened the door and started removing his luggage. I thought he’d never finish—at first glance, it seemed impossible that the suitcases and packages piled beside the car could have fit inside. (It reminded me of those comedic scenes of trunks or vans spouting endless streams of objects.) Then the taxi drove off and Felix was left standing in the middle of the street, flanked by two sizeable heaps. Suddenly alone, he had trouble getting his bearings. I could tell he was paralyzed, probably completely overwhelmed to find himself out in the open and even more so by the task ahead of him; I don’t mean just the ordeal of moving his luggage, but rather the act of recognizing it for the first time as a surrogate of himself: silent and necessary additions, an extension of his body bound to follow him for a long time to come … That was when he saw me, almost hidden in the half-light of dawn, and I in turn saw his surprise at my being there early.

  The characteristic scent of Buenos Aires, a mix of aquatic plants and the local soil, which—as many have told me and I’ve also read—still filters through the streets on the breeze, was an incipient aroma slowly rising off the river to form waves of disparate and paradoxically incomplete smells that morning, probably due to the hour. Here, the memory skips to the next scene: we take a few indecisive steps toward a warehouse’s loading dock, where—with nothing better to do as we wait for the still-empty pier to spring into action and fill with people—we begin to talk. I’ve forgotten the essential parts of that conversation; I retain most vividly the image of a few very large, very yellow kernels of corn that had fallen between the paving stones, at which I stared intently the entire time. They stood out as a glimmer of life protected deep in the rock, in crevices that pigeons would later try to rob of their prize, rarely with any success.

  The fact is, every so often I receive a few invariably brief lines from Felix in which he casually summarizes the recent events of his life. I don’t know whether to call it coincidence, a premonition, or some kind of message, but just hours after I remembered him, after his presence asserted itself and no other thought could eclipse the ideas associated with him, that same presence spontaneously materialized the next morning, translated into a simple postcard sent by Felix—an act that was surely less eloquent than the meaning it took on through the coincidence. A day like any other: nothing had happened to make Felix occupy my thoughts the way he did for much of that night and the following day, when I finally sat to jot down a f
ew notes about it as a way to welcome a mental visit that at once conceals and consolidates distance.

  A long time often goes by without Felix sending word from somewhere he has moved or is passing through. He typically uses cheap or free postcards, or sheets of hotel stationery. Before I read or receive them, and probably before Felix even writes them, these messages are already old-fashioned, archaic; they have the quality of obsolete correspondence. I’m not talking about our friendship, but rather the paper itself, that stiff material faded by the passage of time. On occasion it has occurred to me to think about how long a postcard would need to sit in one of those stands to look like that, or about those envelopes embellished with the kind of flourishes you see on school diplomas, all distinctly sepia. Felix’s handwriting is tentative, or maybe I should say nervous or emotional; it suggests an inhibition whose underlying motives only he can reveal. He announces some “new battlefield,” as he calls it, that is, a change of activity and place. Leaving the country was an attempt to free himself from the bonds of nationality in favor of other, more fluid ones that would protect him, illusorily, from the decisions of any single State and from the emotional effects of what happened there. As a citizen of the world—“What does that mean, anyway?” he asked in one of his early notes, more frequent after he first left—like any good citizen of the world, Felix tempers his defining characteristics according to a series of ever-changing conventions. It’s not that he is conventional; he simply realized that the anonymity he sought, in order to be such, should resemble uniformity—and, by extension, predictability.

  He even sent me a postcard once from Buenos Aires: a partial view of its taciturn bus terminal with a police car crossing the avenue in the foreground. Several hundred meters behind the building, the background offers a glimpse of a monument blurred by the distance and, presumably, by the city’s noxious air; to its right, two rows of buses all painted the same dark color seem to be paying it some incrutable military tribute. The image on the postcard, which appeared to have been captured in a rush, managed to seem less like a photograph than like a glance cast by one of the thousands of people who pass through there every day, not seeing anything in particular. It was as if Felix were saying, beyond the content of his terse, hand-written note, “Here I am, so immersed in this movement, the confusion and the daily grind, that I’ve grabbed an artless postcard that says exactly the opposite of what you would expect and dissolves into a conventional panorama.”

  One could, in fact, picture someone reaching Buenos Aires after days at the mercy of the continent’s endless highways, and imagine this person feeling relieved or even happy rather than dejected, despite the gloomy scenery offered by that part of the city, to have reached their journey’s end. After getting off the bus, the passenger immediately forgets the trip (a recent, but curiously faded, ordeal); nonetheless, by some strange mechanism he is able to recall the roads, the passing days, and the gradual transformations along the route; he can also imagine, without error, how much of what he has seen remains the same and probably will forever. For example, that the eatery next to the gas station where they stopped one morning is still there, and so is the bathroom where he let water run for a long time over his hands. The traveler imagines all these elements (bathroom, sink, eatery, highway) with their blind, mismatched routines as the nuclei or eternal wellsprings of experiences, given over to their own phenomenon: having shown a fleeting relevance, they might continue on like that indefinitely, at the disposal of whoever might pass through and wish to make the same use of them. In the midst of this contradiction between the fresh memory of his journey and the impersonal existence of the landscape that the recently arrived realizes that the gloomy postcard panorama that is morning in Buenos Aires is the only event of any value he can cling to; it may be a sad and miserly spectacle but, ultimately it is proof of what that arrival represents.

  Another time, a postcard with the words “Plaza Catalunya” printed on it arrived from Barcelona. I looked at the image and couldn’t understand it at first. Much of its surface was taken up by the awning, printed in different colors and languages, of what appeared to be a tourist information center. The sign was too big; it took up the entire width of the postcard and had the effect of making the office’s glass doors, at the end of a flight of stairs leading down from street level, look even smaller. I thought of shiny plastic miniatures fabricated for the sole purpose of revealing the existence of a baroque and artificial nature that typically remains hidden but sometimes, only sometimes, is revealed. This confusing ornamentation, which the sign’s vibrant colors were meant to offset, provoked an even greater sense of disorientation: it felt as if you were standing at the entrance to an underground walkway that offered only the cold comfort of even illumination in contrast to the sordid darkness underground. Above the tourist information center was the plaza, while below and to its sides were the unfamiliar world of things buried, and, a few hundred meters away, the deep waters of the drowsy, boundless sea.

  A section of the plaza appeared in a thin horizontal strip at the top of the postcard; leaning over the handrail above the hollow carved out by the stairs, a few people were killing time in the big city. Anonymous shadows, irregular silhouettes, different clothes. They looked like cutouts, mannequins dressed and arranged to represent, each with its unique outline, the contours of a group. I looked more closely and could distinguish two buses crossing the avenue in the background. Some kind of plastic monolith topped with a pinwheel had been erected on the sidewalk; another indication of the tourist information center beneath, I thought, based on the colors. For a moment, I imagined those people leaning on the counter inside; then I mentally transposed the office onto the surface of the plaza, like a full-scale blueprint placed in a larger setting. In that case, the people at the counter would either be employees or curious tourists waiting for information in the designated spot, but in the wrong way, without anyone around them noticing the error or any means of putting their space, as it were, back in its place. It seemed clear to me that by sending that postcard, Felix was trying to hide behind the mask of the hurried or distracted individual who chooses a point crossed by people of different origins in order to leave a trace of his movement far from there (that is, in the postcard I would receive at a great distance); it also seemed to me that this simple postcard, just like the event itself, that is, his footsteps going up or down those stairs, was destined to be fleeting and, above all, forgotten. Still, one could think of those figures with their backs turned as the theatrical epicenter of the city, the personification (though they lacked faces or identities) of an urban brain without which everything would come apart. It didn’t matter if the silhouettes were cut-outs made of cardboard or wood—in fact, the more artificial they were, the better.

  Felix went into a shop where they sold lottery tickets, stood transfixed for a moment by the packs of cigarettes, loose tobacco, pens, and lighters, then sent the postcard. When he stepped back into the street he wondered what he’d been doing; cities inhabited by indistinguishable bodies confused him. His attempt to return to his hotel took him on a detour that cost him half a day; during that time, he walked without thinking about anything, or was overcome by the lethargy produced by wide open or densely populated spaces. A life on loan, pawned life, fabricated life—Felix thought of several other options. The streets looked to him like an ostentatious theatrical backdrop: thousands of people synchronized in their movements and alert to Felix and his trajectory, staging a representation, probably of themselves, as they saturated the landscape and filled the city to the point of overflowing. This act was, however, useless: there was nothing unique in it. He was still at the first hotel he’d checked in to when he arrived; he had seen an understated sign on the front of a building, too far from the door to clearly belong with it, which read, “Samich Guesthouse.” He’d made himself go inside, though his first thought was that they wouldn’t have a room for him. With his first steps, he left the noise of the street behind; Felix sense
d he was somewhere else, an abandoned enclosure in the epicenter of the city or a place lost on the map. The silence, the cavern’s thrum, the cool shade of tall buildings. Further in, he found a sign on the dark wall like the one he’d seen from the street, but smaller and so timeworn it was hard to read; set apart from that (as solitary as a light switch) he saw an old doorbell with a loose button he immediately started fiddling with, in vain. He began to think about that house, but the ideas were incomplete and never fully coalesced, most likely due to his impatience. Just as he was about to give up and leave, he heard voices that made him think someone was coming to let him in.

  When he stepped into the reception area he felt as if he’d been transported to another place, one completely different from everything he knew, where small things reigned. Had it not been for the Dominican owner and her improvements to the space—the walls covered with simple, brightly colored decorations and Caribbean hammocks hung too close together like tattered scraps of fabric—Felix would have made a run for it to save himself from the unease that saturated the shadows, and the space in general. The owner and her teenage daughter (who was Cuban and, he would discover moments later, spoke as such) stood on the other side of the counter. This unusual Antillean combination intrigued Felix; he began imagining explanations and possible routes, clandestine trips, bitter disputes, name changes, escapes, and adoptions. At one point, a door slammed and the sound of a radio, which had been clear before, became something like a vibration emanating from the walls. Behind the women were shelves littered with objects that at first glance appeared useless and forgotten, as if their principal virtue was simply remaining where they were with a defiant attitude toward the luck that had landed them there, perhaps independently, and which could, at any moment, make them disappear. On the lowest shelf, four plastic animals were lined up as if they were fleeing toward the wall: two identical seals, one black penguin, and one slightly larger penguin with a white chest (as I understand it, these have a special name). At the center of the shelf, a clock in a square frame had stopped telling time at twenty-seven minutes past ten one day. Propped up on the clock, which was the only thing that kept it from falling over entirely, was a small paperback titled What Napoleon’s Biographers Don’t Say and, on the other side, perhaps suggesting the existence of an alternate astronomical hemisphere or temporal dimension, the spine of a book from the same series read Adam, Eve, and I.