The Planets by Sergio Chejfec Read Free Book Online Page B

understand it. The future seemed uncertain and they asked each other about their parents, the smells of the house, the floors, meaningless details, and about the boxes in which they hid prized objects, amulets, and talismans. The sixth day brought envy: the beauty and intelligence of the mothers was directed at the wrong person, just like the strength and the sympathy of the fathers.
    From that time on, whenever the families would visit one another, Miguel and Sergio would feel joined again in brotherhood, although every time it was their despair that brought them together. They saw themselves as victims of a cruel conspiracy that, if not the product of nature, was all the more cruel for being their parents’ idea. It goes without saying that the moment arrived when their names seemed unreal to them, both the previous (Miguel and Sergio) and current ones (Sergio and Miguel). When they heard them, they saw only an equivocal extension of the other and not of themselves. But the problem was also that the extension was evident; the evidence was right there in the names. At the same time, the friendship between their parents revealed its own ambiguities: for example, Miguel and Sergio were able to see, one night when the two families got together, how the ex-father of the first—making an elaborate effort to conceal the gesture, which only highlighted the transgression—grabbed the waist of the boy’s current mother as he asked her to let him pass, despite the fact that he had the whole width of the house at his disposal. After a few bottles of wine the conversation turned to the mysteries of romantic affinities and how, when they fizzle out, they tend to redirect themselves toward a person of the same social circle as a means of staying faithful, if only to some basic and primordial sense of community without which we all would feel lost, orphaned in the void. They were, evidently, talking about themselves and their own crossed desires, which had been aroused by the alcohol: as though they belonged to a shared but unknown past, they longed for a galaxy in which those affinities could be realized. It was then that the four, without the prompting of anything concrete, looked over at their children, who were watching them in silence. In this way, Miguel and Sergio sensed, without fully comprehending, that they were the manifestations of their parents’ desire. Not so much as people, bodies—that seemed obvious—but as subjects whose identity constituted a relative and unverifiable gift, conferred or withdrawn according to circumstance or the emotional state of the adults. The friendship that once could have joined them had been eclipsed by domestic ambiguity; at the same time, this confusion would seem redundant to anyone who understood that it was simply a friendship.
    One might say that time passed and the friends grew up, but even something as straightforward as that would be complicated by the circumstances: time did not pass and they did not grow up, in the true sense of the word, despite the fact that the years advanced and before they knew it they were adults. The misunderstanding they created had opened the gates to a darker nature, with its own rules and conditions (just as natural as any others, but different). This fact, their being at the mercy of something and knowing what it meant but not what it was or how it worked, led them to wander around in a state of absolute confusion, impervious, despite their physical maturity, to events and experiences. One was the origin of the other, the source of his identity and the proof of a deviation. They were sensible enough to admit how deeply they relied on their mutual friendship and did all they could to maintain it, but were slow to notice the mystery that, though created by them, existed independent of their feelings, their will, and their intelligence, and threatened to make them indistinguishable from one another. They were tired of being themselves, but also of being