The Incompletes Page 5

  After an exhausting labor of interpretation, Felix believed he had deciphered the text, which read, more or less: “My wise friends say traveling by boat causes seasickness, but could not agree whether this is true for everyone.” Felix arrived at that phrase, which he assumed to be an opening line, as the day was ending. In Moscow, the dusk was so long that it superimposed itself on the daylight, the first rays of which seemed to announce the faded brilliance of the last, as if it were a simple predictive mechanism hidden within a complex manmade object. This could be said of any day, at any latitude, but to Felix’s eye that kind of light, which fell so elusively from such a distance and always seemed ready to quit, turned the passing hours into a misleading sequence with no discernable force, as if it might give up at any moment (this would merely require the right conditions, which the most arbitrary and incidental combination of circumstances seemed ready to provide). In this case, the day might suddenly be interrupted and the people waiting for the next moment in their homes, or walking back from the market with their purchases, would not be surprised: they would assume that the astronomical cycle had finally broken down after numerous failed attempts.

  Anyone who saw Felix right then would think of a man touched by a ray of light, that is, somehow illuminated (this light as the only thing separating him from the empire of shadows that was his room). A polished surface glinted dully in the far corner, a weak echo turned mere suggestion, a miraculous and meager attempt to keep reproducing an invisible source of illumination. One could see the shadows interrupted around it, forming a point of suspension, or perhaps an end or a limit, that paradoxically generated more darkness than would have seemed possible at that hour of the day. Felix tried to imagine an appropriate context for the message, though its ambiguity made this difficult. He thought of a phrase pulled from a diary and inferred the state of someone about to set out to sea, or already in the middle of the uncomfortable crossing, who, taking advantage of the solitude of his cabin, jots down this neutral, but paradoxical and subtly malignant, thought. This individual is afraid of the sea, is afraid of seasickness, is even afraid of the huddled cohabitation forced on him by the journey. So he writes in his little notebook, which he always forgets to reread, defying the uselessness of his own thoughts and, more generally, the thoughts of his friends, who have offered him information that is as true as it is useless. The phrase occupies his thoughts, but Felix senses that no matter how much he might want to, or how much effort he might put into finding some concrete trace of meaning, he will eventually need to acknowledge that, as usual, little is to be gleaned from things only partially seen.

  From a secret to a warning, from a confession to a joke, Felix thought of the possibilities behind the phrase, that “private proverb” or “motto,” as he called it; as he considered more hypotheses (it might be the product of nostalgia, disappointment, intuition, or even compassion or anger), more limits began to form around the annotation, which slowly grew less clear and broke apart into fragments of truth. He imagined a set of partial and imperfect events, some without a beginning and some without a trajectory or an end, nearly all devoid of logic; a series of actions arranged in movable, portable, even interchangeable spaces; or, rather, like wooden domino tiles played face down. It was clearer that way, he thought, and above all more probable: the truth again showing its penchant for adaptation. But Felix would eventually remember that, whatever possible explanations might present themselves, someone had written that unique and self-contained message, and the confusion would return.

  At one point, it occurred to him to wonder how the phrase would be read in another country and, similarly, how it would be written (not in the sense of another language, just that of another place), whether different words or ideas would be used and, consequently, what “wise friends,” “traveling by boat,” “seasickness,” and “everyone” would even mean from one country to the next. In this way, new pieces were added to the game—pieces having less to do with intentionality than with the meaning of individual elements as determined by place. He remembered his hands in the window’s cold, how he’d imagined them as a punished and divided surface.

  Night had fallen, and the orderly murmur of the city was filtering in from outside, a noise that seemed to generate itself as if the streets were broadcasting the echo of the organization they maintained, albeit silently, in perpetual motion until the end of time, regardless of the activity of those who lived there; meanwhile, the steady hum of the hotel, that mix of inhuman silence and abyssal emptiness that joined the place to pits or caverns, seeped in through the walls. That was when Felix, still confused by the contradictory implications of the message and eager to leave on the following pages a few marks in his own hand that might, perhaps, inspire in some future person a curiosity similar to the one sparked in him; it was then that Felix encountered, in that fact, the ideal conditions to write me a letter. I don’t know the deeper reasons behind it, if there are any, but like some kind of conventional symbol or maybe a common phrase I wouldn’t recognize, a few lines below his comment about the Hotel Salgado opening its doors to him, Felix copied down the line about wise friends.

  Most obviously, it might have been that he considered his stay at the hotel like a journey at sea, or perhaps that was generally true of his time in Moscow, a city known for being as flat as it is impenetrable. When I read the letter, I wondered if he was trying to tell me something, and if he was, what secret would merit being told in code. It could also be understood as disdain for a certain type of wisdom based on general pronouncements that prove useless in concrete situations, or it might be a nostalgic ode to friendship, the kind that evokes those typical adolescent exchanges full of sarcasm and fondness. What I mean is that I needed to find an explanation for the phrase, because I could not understand it as information. It made no sense that Felix was announcing his apprehension about a maritime voyage, nor could it have been his way of saying, “I’m fine,” or “I think I’m in danger,” or “this place is horrible,” or anything like that; nor could it be read as “after such a long time wandering, I’ve finally found my place,” or, to the contrary, “I still haven’t found it.” And so I received, probably just like Felix had, a divided and contradictory picture from that letter.

  Perhaps the most predictable of his options was to destroy the paper and forget about the whole thing; at the other extreme, since Felix did not know what he should do, the most ambitious and arduous choice was to complete the task he had adopted as a mandate, that is, to join in the chain of messages. He could leave the paper where he found it, write his own message on a fresh page, or even leave the exact same phrase in his own handwriting on a new sheet of paper. In the end, he decided to combine all these options. Felix thought about the roundabout way the message was transmitted. He assumed someone had thought it up, or perhaps it had been dictated by custom. As is generally the rule with secrets, it was not clear which norms it obeyed and which laws it ignored. The eiderdown quilt grazed the floor beside the tall bed; at the far corner of the room, where the ceiling came down at an angle and the walls closed in to form a kind of children’s nook, or something resembling a hidden cave in which a person could slip quickly into the dark, there was an old brazier made of heavy iron that appeared to have gone unused for a long time, with a single burner that nonetheless remained surprisingly warm.

  A few isolated lights appeared in the windows. Just as Felix had observed that the Hotel Salgado was disproportionately large relative to its front door, the lights he could see from his room seemed too faint, flickering, or simply too distant from one another for a huge city like Moscow. He didn’t know what psychological mechanism compelled him to compare sizes and notice differences; it was an aberrant form of observation, attuned first and foremost to some supposed dissonance or incongruity. But this dissonance had proven more than once to be false, or rather, the opposite of false: completely true or natural, and as such, obvious and irrelevant. This gave him the sense that it was his perception
that was maladjusted, that perhaps some old defect or cultural condition, or both, led him to this kind of thought and, let’s say, sensibility. Argentina was a country of open expanses; like Australia, its name was synonymous with space, transgression, and emptiness. Felix supposed that perhaps the contrast between this image of his country, which had been drilled into him since childhood, and his own experience of excessive density (the throngs of family members, the lack of space at his school, the overcrowding in his neighborhood, and so on) had produced this deviation, turning him into a perennial eyewitness to misalignments in proportions and measurements.

  Felix knew the nimbus of light around cities, the glow seen at a distance by the traveler, who imagines them as beings that feed on the night under their domes of faint illumination. Now he was inside the umbral dome of Moscow, where the kingdom of night seemed to be winning the long struggle to recapture the shadows. Whoever approached the city from a distant place would see a hazy and uniquely dispersed mass at the end of the highway. The size of this splotch was disproportionate to the frailty of the glow, as if the city lacked the strength to assert itself against the surrounding darkness. In the street next to the hotel, the one his windows looked out onto, Felix could sense the humid air, the tentative fog that shrouded the night even further and reduced the few points of illumination provided by the city’s streetlamps into a pitiful landscape of scattered lights caught in the chaos of their vapor halos.

  He remembered the lights flickering in the dark, as if suspended in thin air at every intersection. A nostalgic tribute might begin this way: the humid nights in Buenos Aires, the stillness of the street, the constant tangible presence of water and half-shadow. Few things, however, seemed less reliable to him than thoughts based on his city; at some point, something had been severed and not one of the situations, places, or impressions he recalled belonged in their own right to the landscape of reality; or perhaps it was the other way around, and the present moment was translated over and over again, updating itself by erasing its own shadow, its sense of history, and the traces left on people. It was like being present for the creation of a world we know everything about, but from which, insofar as we are witnessing its birth, we are unequivocally excluded. We often think of things as being at the mercy of time’s passage: objects, places, even plants and animals forgotten or stamped out while the world goes on in any of its forms, like a machine designed to self-destruct or a series of natural, self-regulating cycles. In those moments, however, Felix thought of himself as an excrescence of the earth; he thought that everything more or less followed its indifferent race toward destruction, as it always had, but that people held pride of place among all that was abandoned, all that was built and cast into this unrecognizable history. (As the poet Giannuzzi once wrote, “It seems that culture consists in / the thorough tormenting of matter.”) It was not so much that Felix felt lost, part lonely and part out of place, but rather that he thought his condition—forgotten, scattered, nonexistent—was universal. As such, the idea of having a country or a hometown seemed to Felix to belong to a documentary or elective order of things, an act of faith; trajectories could be verified and one could belong to a place, but none of that translated to the sphere of reality, because countries were increasingly ephemeral geographies, appeals that had chosen to express themselves in hushed words spoken in a new language.

  The humidity added a layer of fog to the darkness, thickening it and forming shadows that were hard to dispel. Standing on the chair to look out the upper window, Felix could barely see the street; on the opposite sidewalk (of which street, he wondered: the one behind the hotel, in front, or on either side) he saw a solitary pedestrian hurrying toward the corner, shielded from the cold by a large otter fur hat. Felix got down from the chair and kneeled by the lower window, through which he managed to see only the man’s final steps as he navigated the frozen puddles, deft as a Cossack, before leaving the frame.

  Felix wondered if there might be some meaning to this incomplete image, but his room seemed so dark and so bland, deep in the long night and that spectral hotel, that he got distracted: when he tried to picture himself in this state, he got upset and felt a certain animosity toward the city, when he discovered that much of his mood came from the indolence and neglect of that place. Felix remained on his knees by the window. Just as happens when one looks at the night sky and the stars appear inconstant, a light would sometimes disappear in the distance and reappear a little while later, reconstituting the original map. They were windows lit from within, or streetlights, or the traffic. These partial views of the broad thoroughfares seemed like unbroken strips of darkness on which headlights floated like points in constant horizontal movement, slowly and always in the same direction. Night, darkness, neglect, immensity, silence: Felix was unsure which of these supreme forces he was kneeling before. And then there was the cold, which had frozen his fingers at the other window, and which he now felt on his face as if the glass were a glacial screen.

  Next he thought he would have preferred to find a set of well-preserved letters, each one in an envelope addressed in a shaky hand and faded by the passage of time, preferably opened only once, and that those letters would contain the key to one or two lives gone astray, stories of cataclysmic arguments that were, by the vagaries of luck and a few poorly chosen words, both trivial and a little bit vain. That is, the suspicion, worry, and fairly typical misunderstandings that allow for the existence of letters, arguments about some secondary aspect of what really matters. Felix was not trying to peek in on another anonymous story—he knew there were no more meanings left to discover in life—he was simply after a chance encounter with the trace of a stranger he could take as the sign of a reality that was available, but always elusive. He told himself (he tried to convince himself) that letters achieved a maximal level of abstraction, free from people, objects, and causes, and that it is possible to read them as the flank of a story that does not, in fact, go anywhere. This flank was the height of abstraction, indeterminate narratives held up only by the outline of the words that comprised them. This is why it seemed to him that those letters written by someone else for someone else, from anyone to anyone other than himself, lent him life, bestowed on him a dose of brief but intense existence.

  Outside, the dirty snow gave the street a sad, bleak appearance. Though he could imagine the same thing happening every winter, Felix took this fact as a sign directed at him alone. Like the mountains of ice in his line of sight, which leaned against the walls to form small, dark glaciers, and their invisible companion, the constant cold to which the neighborhood submitted as if deep in a lethargic slumber; all this revealed, in its ostensibly natural organization, the surreptitious hand of Masha, intent like an invisible god on covering the tracks of her intervention. This suspicion was hard to confirm, since that passive being seemed incapable of devising a complex plan or having an objective beyond her daily chores, but her connection to the hotel was clearly of a mysterious nature. There, even the most banal things seemed to be linked together independent of any circumstance or person, always revealing their artificial nature, their status as something invented and immediately projected because, to put it euphemistically, they were already just another fold in the facts themselves, fully integrated into the normal course of events. This unremitting mechanism—like those beings in science fiction who generate imagined or parallel worlds that are, as such, more verifiable than reality itself—did not depend on the will of any particular person, Felix thought, but instead joined itself to Masha’s acting and intentions, as if some complex truth could only express itself along the winding, patient routes of her subconscious.

  After writing those few lines, having turned his back to the windows of his room and his general impressions of the streetscape, as he finished addressing the envelope (a task he associated with his idea of the present as a beginning without the intervention of experience or memories, borrowed or otherwise, as if his simplest actions were governed by a manual w
ritten for minds without a past, like his own, which only responded to direct commands), Felix felt an intense bitterness. He couldn’t guess its cause, but the excitement that had filled him as he paused time and again over the page, deciphering its code as if he were storming the gates of a well-equipped mystery, that excitement had now receded, leaving behind only the dregs of a boundless sadness. It was the experience of uselessness, of weariness and emptiness. Somehow, this was the feeling that I, without yet knowing all the facts, had while reading the letter; coming from Felix, that flippant and ostensibly funny line about seasickness seemed to indicate deep anxiety and suffering. When one stopped to think about it, the details surrounding the message only appeared at first to have fallen into place by chance.

  Felix’s enthusiasm had been sincere, though not entirely spontaneous, since even the smallest details seemed to have been predetermined. He had begun to think about this possibility as soon as he arrived at the Hotel Salgado. As he crossed the invisible border of the reception desk, he sensed he was stepping into a different order of things, one in which time adopted a form that was at once arbitrary, as it always is, but also autonomous. It was the kind of feeling a character who arrives at a distant town or an empty hotel might have; at first, they think they have stumbled upon a closed-off, autonomous world, but before they know it they are vital cogs in its machinery.