The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec

Author:Sergio Chejfec
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2019-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

After his discovery, Felix tried to go about life as normal, or at least in a way that was similar to the life he’d had since arriving at the hotel. He sensed that something had changed, though he couldn’t identify what it was. His impressions were so vague as to be essentially useless; he observed, for example, that the part of the city where he was staying seemed more desolate than usual. In his room, after performing the semi-acrobatic operations required to look out the windows, he surveyed the erratic angles of the streets, the large sheds or barns attached to the houses, the stairs out back, the internal patios and storehouses in general; that idyll of the countryside inserted into the suburbs seemed to him not only melancholy, as it always had, but also condemned to an incomplete life of eternal survival. His view was partial, but, having glimpsed and even wandered around it many times during his aimless walks, he could easily imagine the network of passageways woven outdoors between the sides and backs of the houses, which, over time, had been hidden in the unseen parts of the buildings. It was precisely this image of a clandestine village, the hidden face of the city, that led him to think that in Moscow things were subject to a contradictory form of time, at once accelerated and permanent. Before his discovery, though it had been common to see just a few people in the street, there had at least been, some facsimile of life and contradiction; now, however, when no one stepped outside, Felix thought they had all succumbed to the unique temporality of the city, that they had allowed the geography to swallow them.

Some afternoons offered no sign of life at all, others stood out for a lone sled gliding furtively down the street, as if animals were fleeing from something in terror. And so the city seemed to him like a complete world—without fissures, but fictitious—that revealed how it functioned, a plot that was visible at first glance in the different elements organized according to their roles and places in the hierarchy, that is, and also the practical uselessness of this organization. The streets, exaggeratedly straight and empty, clearly belonged to the order of the evident, but they also belonged to the order of the artificial, like the grid of a board game waiting for the pieces to be laid out. Moscow’s “disuse,” an emptiness Felix viewed as spontaneous, seemed to him to be the consequence of forgetting certain words. In this case, “people,” or the less extreme “individuals.” These things were no longer seen, as if from one moment to the next both word and idea had been eradicated from thought.

As for me, my thoughts turned to the world. To its increasingly powerful mechanisms and how we are inescapably destined to obey the working of its gears. These thoughts could only lead to the most pessimistic state of mind, into which I sank as if it were the sole respite or salvation permitted by an inevitable but still unrealized tragedy.

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