The Planets by Sergio Chejfec Read Free Book Online Page A

They could make no sense of it. Just a few hours earlier they had still been themselves, but now a simple, innocent event threatened to become the soft crackling that announces the onset of an avalanche. Due to the strange nature of catastrophes, they, who had pushed the stone and had been full of delighted anticipation at the prospect of watching the complex effects of their joke from the side of the cliff, suddenly understood that not only would the avalanche exceed their plans and permanently distort the landscape, but that they would be buried up there , on the mountain, contrary to the laws of physics. But these fears seemed premature and too bleak to keep worrying about, and the next morning they awoke with a new hypothesis: they decided that they were being taught a lesson, that it was a tacit form of punishment. Nonetheless, they would have been closer to the truth if they had stayed with the theory about the avalanche, as they would discover later when fate stepped in to prove it.
    Meanwhile, the thought of punishment or lessons did not even occur to their parents, who were even more lost within their naivety than their sons: they simply did not notice the change. The anguish of that first night, born of the certainty that only terror can produce, brought Miguel and Sergio close to the truth, though it also made them retreat from it in favor of a more comfortable—albeit false—theory: that of punishment. And so, as tends to be the case, the more exhilarating the start—that unfortunate act of trading names—the closer they would get to the truth, from which they would in turn distance themselves the further they got from that inaugural rite. Meanwhile, the following night would be torturous for both of them. They missed their parents. They wanted to sit on the floor of their houses and never get up again, to breathe in the natural scent of home. Dinner on the third day found them quiet and depressed; not sullen—they lacked the confidence to be rude; at the end of the day, they saw themselves as guests—but solemn.
    The next day, in school, each saw his own desperation reflected in the face of the other. They thought they were dreaming, but their reciprocal experiences confirmed the simple, very real nature of what was happening. During recess they went over a number of strategies; by the time they said their goodbyes in the street, they had already decided to do something drastic in the hope of bringing things back to normal: they were going to admit to the prank. If the adults wanted their humiliation, they would have it. That afternoon they could hardly sit still. They had decided to broach the topic that night, so that was what they did. Decisive moments tended to come at night, during dinner: this was yet another of these important changes. They talked, confessed, admitted; they even considered an appropriate punishment for the offense. But nothing happened. There was no reaction at all. The parents looked at them in wonder, taking in what they thought to be a completely imagined account, an almost mystical illusion too fantastic to be taken seriously and too unbelievable to be understood. Miguel and Sergio insisted, swearing that they were not themselves, but the other, and that the people they were talking to were not their parents, but their friend’s. One pair or the other, when confronted with these flights of fancy, laughed in their faces; as mentioned, the couples were joined by a close friendship and felt flattered by the amusing fantasy of the little ones, which in some way held them as equals in their affections. But the boys insisted and, as might have been expected, the night ended badly: they cried, they begged, and fixated on the idea of going home to their real parents, until one set of parents or the other ended up dragging them to their beds, where they nearly needed to be restrained as a result of their intense nervous state. The fifth day was nostalgia and despair: they just couldn’t