The Planets Read Online Free PDF Page A

greeted the family. And, on top of it all, the worst thing imaginable had happened to M. Outside, the sun was hard at work. My mind was an intensely white screen, as bright as the chalky wall behind me. Strangely enough, my first impulse was toward calculation: I wanted to guess how long it would take the bus to reach the corner, how many cobblestones fit on one street, how much heat it would take to melt these walls, and the houses along with them, once and for all. These calculations were a way of stopping the advance of time, anyone could have seen that, but there was still a time that evaded me: it was the moment itself, in which something was beginning that I did not understand, something born of abandonment and also, although it sounds contradictory, a double life. (I mean that I felt M’s life in danger within me; of the few duties and sensibilities he had chosen for himself, I decided to follow and complete the greatest number possible. It was a means of survival. Later on, I will explain how.)
    One afternoon, weeks after the explosion, I ran into his mother on calle Acevedo. She was distracted, not looking where she was going and wrestling with her bag; one of those that can be used either for shopping or as a briefcase (I remember because it seemed very large to me, empty; a flaccid weight hanging from her arm). This woman, about whom I knew so much, seemed to know very little of herself. The dense trees formed a tunnel of shadow, the exact center of which was occupied by her weary approach. Her disarray did not surprise me; it was the outward sign of a trait shared with something, many would say with someone, that was irrevocably absent. Beginning with M, I had noticed certain attributes in each member of the family, the presence of which affirmed that they belonged to the same clan: disorientation, dishevelment, and a particular vacillation that persisted even after they had made a decision. M’s mother remained true to her nature, but there was a nuance to her demeanor that had not been there before. I did not realize it at the time; I only came to recognize it much later, thinking about that encounter in the course of one particularly long night. This new trait was not something commonplace, but a profound weight; it was the mark of accelerated aging. I am not referring to the signs of her pain, which were evident. To say it in a direct and slightly arbitrary—perhaps even fallacious—way, one sleepless night my mind happened to linger on the memory of that encounter, and the obvious truth that had been hidden finally dawned on me: the body of M’s mother was smaller that afternoon; she had been reduced. On Acevedo I had only noticed something strange which, coupled with the familiar, became mysterious. This union of the strange and the familiar was, I believe, the first effect of the tireless labor of M’s absence. The familiar accommodated the strange, and the strange took over the familiar. The former absolved the latter, and the latter pardoned the former. (The familiar was M, the strange, death.) When I saw her, almost at the end of the block, I said “There is R, M’s mother,” and nothing happened. I recognized her gait, the family’s shared demeanor of tribulation and bewilderment; I thought about the son and was saddened by all that familiarity, which had been divested of its origin and purpose. What was I thinking as we approached one another and I tried not to look at her? I remembered the number of times M and I had walked down that street, on that very block and in that same direction, and lamented that chance had brought his mother and me together in that moment. Our paths crossed. She did not see me and I did not stop her, and we passed one another. To speak with her would not only have meant interrupting her distraction—her momentary unawareness of evil—and restoring the absent image of her son, but also drawing attention to a disruption imposed by circumstance; for these reasons, I