The Invented Part Read online

  So The Boy is running across the hot sand (just two or three meters of thick sand, stones and shells crushed by the tides of centuries and, yes, more parentheses, forgive me, and there’s nothing to forgive) and the curiously pleasurable pain in the soles of his feet makes him run faster and stranger. Running like—it’s already been said—children run, almost coming undone. The Boy doesn’t scream, but his whole body quivers like a scream, like a silent scream, until he reaches the shore’s damp sand and calms his feet, and the pleasure of its relief gives meaning to the pain. “I can well understand why children love sand,” a philosopher wrote some time ago, a philosopher whom The Boy will read some time later; but The Boy already agrees completely.

  This boy—now that we see him up close, now that we’ve been watching him for a few minutes—is, really, the opposite of what we thought in the beginning: he’s a restlessly restful boy. He likes being immobile, to move for the pleasure of stopping. He likes to spend long minutes staring at fire or water (later, The Boy will never be able to pin down, despite not being a boy anymore, whether water and fire are entities or vegetal, animal, or mineral organisms; nor will all the explanations and definitions that he’s been offered over the years satisfy him entirely) and he likes, all of a sudden, as if pierced by an arrow of desire, charged with quivering energy, to stand up and run off in any direction, to feel the exuberant joy of wearing himself out until there’s nothing left to do but stop, to stand still.

  That’s why he’s running now. Running like that Roadrunner the Coyote can’t stop chasing; because that uncatchable Roadrunner is, first and foremost and when all is said and done, the only thing in motion in that panorama of minimal desert lines. And it’s the Roadrunner who makes the Coyote move. And The Boy likes thinking of himself as a roadrunner and that behind him are coming, oh so much slower, two young adult coyotes, a man and a woman, his father and mother, no doubt about it.

  And his father and mother have no strength, or they have the kind of strength—weak, slight, miniscule, in decline—parents have at the equator of long vacations. So they’re not The Parents and, ever since they became parents, they’ve felt themselves reduced, diminished, as if some parasitic and alien entity were absorbing their vitality. The father and mother don’t chase The Boy. No, the father and mother are dragged along by The Boy. The father and mother drag their feet, and a wicker basket, and an umbrella, and towels, and their own bodies. And the father and the mother are dragged by The Boy. As if he were steering them, lassoed, pulling them along, strangling them with an invisible and inseverable rope around their necks. And it’s not like the mother and father have tried to sever it, but it’s also not like they haven’t thought many times about what it would be like to cut it. And—presto!—magically return to the past, to those other beaches, where The Boy only existed as a pleasant and egotistical fantasy. The father and the mother return, further away all the time, to The Boy as a mere idea that occurred to them every so often. An idea to enjoy for a while and then hide away under lock and key (one of those keys that you can’t ever find when you look for it and that, with the aid of a pair of parentheses, seems to become invisible) in the drawers of a more or less possible future, always yet to come or, at least, a lateral future, in the possible variation of a possible future. This is what every father and mother in the universe dreams when they close their eyes, though none of them ever confess it. Right there. In that instant. Before falling asleep and dreaming of any other thing, of free falling or being naked in public—the greatest hits of the common nightmare. But first, like the trailer for a movie that will never premiere. About what it’d be like to not be parents. To wake up on a planet where there wasn’t someone resting—yet restlessly moving and making noise—in the next room. About times when they went to bed late or not at all. Times when the next morning was a sort of luminous sequel to the previous night, when, before collapsing into bed, they bought a freshly printed newspaper and sat down to eat breakfast in a bar and read aloud in loving voices things like how a group of scientists with a lot of time on their hands (as much time as they had) had come to the conclusion that, in past millennia, children always bore a close physical resemblance to their parents. They argued that this was the genetic and narcissistic mode by which the species had insured its survival: primitive beings protect and love better and don’t discard something that reminds them of themselves. Now, it’s different, now it doesn’t seem so necessary: the resemblance between parents and children has diminished significantly, statistically speaking, because human beings love each other more or pretend to, or feel themselves culturally and sociologically compelled to do so. And so The Boy looks nothing like his parents. And, true, it’s a cliché, a tired perspective: you don’t get to choose your parents. But it’s also true that parents don’t get to choose their children. And it’s worth wondering whether they, if granted access to other models, would have chosen this one. Or if he would’ve chosen them. And how did his parents choose each other in the first place: did they feel identical or complementary or did they see in the other what they wanted the other to see in them? The way things have been, they understand now—though they don’t dare admit it openly—was all a misunderstanding. A mirage disguised as an oasis. Now the effect has faded and what’s left isn’t its memory, but the certainty that what passed between them is already in the past. Now they feel that what ties them together is, maybe, what they like least in themselves reflected in and through the other, not in the glass of a flattering mirror, but through the unforgiving lens of a magnifying glass, where everything appears elementary, my dear. And that The Boy is nothing but the result of that sudden, precise distortion. Some really irreal thing. Something that, at times, seems like the undertow of a dream, slipping away just as you try to catch it. Something that happened but couldn’t have happened. And sometimes The Boy’s dreams overlap with his parents’ dreams, producing a strange phenomenon: The Boy dreams he’s running on a beach without them and his father and mother dream they’re running on a beach without him. And they’re all so happy. And yet the next morning they understand that they can’t live without each other; that, though less and less, they still need each other; that now, nothing and nobody can or will ever be able to separate them or untie the knot of their lives.

  And yet, the invulnerability of that instant of pure love doesn’t last long; and now The Boy is trying get away from them, running. And his father and mother follow him, stumbling like sleepwalkers, repeating his immense little name, angrier all the time, adding his last name in order to achieve, they think, an air of greater authority, of scholastic strictness. His father and mother say his first name followed by his last name and then—realizing it’s not working, sounding more schoolish still—his last name followed by his first name. The Boy hasn’t started primary school yet. But he’s already learned that, coming from his parents’ mouths, first name followed by last name and last name followed by first name mean that the grownups’ patience is wearing thin, that his childhood is wearing them out.

  (And his first and last name won’t be revealed here; because writing them and reading them would be the same as making that boy disappear and having him—catastrophically and violently, not by art of magic but by art of witchcraft—supplanted by that adult he became, a man everyone recognizes and about whom so much has been said and written recently; the disappeared man who appears everywhere, the man so many wanted to meet and so few know and whom, because of that, they read now without comprehension or enjoyment, but just to be hip, up-to-date, deformedly informed.)

  His first and last name leap across the sand like more or less domesticated pets or, why not, better, like stuffed animals that don’t bite or shit or die. As if they were chasing their own heels; and that’s why The Boy runs even faster, under flashing rays of sunlight. They’re not going to catch me, The Boy thinks, they won’t catch him. But they catch him. And they catch him in a way that doesn’t figure in The Boy’s plans—they get tired. They look for and f
ind a place on the sand. They spread out their towels. They toss two books down on top of them, two books that have the same title and author on the cover and the same characters inside, but are different editions. They plant and open their umbrella and uncap their thermoses of iced tea mixed with some liquor. His mother’s book has various lines and paragraphs underlined throughout its pages. His father’s book suffers abundant corrections and numbers and notations in the margins and, on the last page, a list of words including “flapper,” “bob,” and “crack-up.” And both the readers and the books sit down to read, facing the sea, and off to one side, The Boy, feeling not chased but ignored, caught, stops and retraces his footsteps. Slowly, not in a straight line, but with elegant swooping curves, spinning around himself, delaying as long as possible the Kodak Moment of the three of them together once again: father-mother-son; an organism with three heads and three bodies and yet, even still, indivisible as long as decisions of a radical and final nature can be avoided. And, as already mentioned, decisions are about to be made. All of them. All at once.

  The father and the mother and The Boy are—The Boy understands and repeats it as one indivisible word—onvacation. And, whatever it means to be onvacation, it is, fundamentally, to be elsewhere. Together all the time. And let’s see what happens, let’s see if something happens, let’s see if the internal climate, encouraged by the fine external weather, improves. The mother and the father are there, incommunicado (far away from everything and everyone, inaccessible; the closest extant thing to mobile phones that, at the time, only appeared in movies with a-go-go spies dancing among miniskirts), and doing all they can to communicate. But soon, shortly after arriving, the father and mother find themselves found out and exposed and wanting only to go back to the big city, where it’s a lot easier for them to lose each other in order to find themselves.

  It’s the first days of being onvacation and The Boy hasn’t adjusted to the new rhythm—some gentle moments, others accelerated—of the new routine yet. Everything is new and everything is strange and The Boy misses his toys that the buckets and shovels cannot replace. The Boy never liked plastic and he misses the metal. The metal of that little tin man with a suitcase most of all. A toy that turned out defective—it doesn’t go forward when wound, it goes backward—and that The Boy insisted on keeping anyway and not exchanging for another one that functioned properly because, intuitively, he likes its defective defense mechanism. Being dressed and ready for the future and, nevertheless, only being able to project itself into the past. And there are days when The Boy almost convinces himself that his toy is the only model that actually functions properly, while the rest, the ones that move forward, are imperfect, manufacturing errors, failed trials for something that only his little man has achieved. And The Boy has been chosen by fortune, by fate, because the toy came to him and him alone. A tiny tourist who travels backward to the table edge and, there, executes a half-turn and returns to the opposite edge. Never falling off, courtesy of a simple yet effective invention. A catch on its feet that keeps it from toppling into a void full of chair legs, but that doesn’t stop it, time and again, from peering down into the abyss, so the legs of those chairs can tell it a story.

  His father and mother—on the edge of a different abyss, their story almost told—no longer miss anything and play by themselves and inhabit a pure present. They don’t move backward (because the past deceives, distorts) or forward (because tomorrow you never know). So, the reign of the minute-to-minute. A slow slide, like skating across very thin ice or along the treacherous edge of a cliff. Knowing they lack the primitive technology to keep themselves from falling and crashing down on the crags of their mutual disappointment: because love is a sickness—they self-diagnose with a strange mix of sadness and relief—and they’ve already been cured.

  The Boy doesn’t know it yet; but he suspects it without being able to explain it. Or explain it to himself. Having that rare capacity that some children have to perceive everything, to soak it all in: yeah, yeah, yeah, the father and the mother have already made one of those decisions. It’s the dawning of an age when The Boy will go back and forth between them, one side to the other. And, every so often, they’ll get back together just so they can split up again. Respecting the spasmodic but strict rhythm of a new calendar where the seasons become secondary, almost banal. Something useful only for that rare breed of children, the disappearing models of that démodé species: children who still live with both parents in the same home.

  On the other hand, for the more numerous members of that new race of children—these recent mutations—weekends and vacations will be the new ways to divide and explain time’s passing. Long days. Far longer than their twenty-four numbered hours. And each one of them itself seemingly divided into three days: the day of the morning, the day of the afternoon, and the day of the night. Three acts, precisely and perfectly delimited. Like tragedies and comedies. Or like both at the same time; because as a child, in one day, you can cry your eyes out before lunch and fall asleep laughing after dinner. For a child, each day is a lifetime. What time is it? Who cares? His parents don’t care, they—even imposing this custom on some of their friends, as if the gesture implied a secret code granting access to a sect of the chosen—wear their watches facedown. The lens and hands facing their wrists. Inside out. With the supposedly original affectation of people who say they don’t care about time and its passing when, really, fugitives, there’s nothing they care about more than time and its passing and passing through and being passed through by time. And The Boy doesn’t care; his life hasn’t yet been reduced to hours and strict external schedules and is still ruled only by the rituals of eating and sleeping and waking.

  (Many years later, The Boy who would no longer be a boy—but who would always feel like one when discovering new and surprising things—would read, dumbstruck, that there had been a time when a general and universal time didn’t exist. That the abstraction of a uniform time for everyone was successfully imposed and assimilated as recently as the end of the nineteenth century; when clocks were coordinated according to the arrivals and departures of transcontinental trains, so people would arrive at the station on time and not miss the train and, in the end, before long and all of a sudden, everyone agreed that it was twelve noon when the bronze tolling of the bells and the steel whistle of the locomotive could be heard.)

  The father and the mother and The Boy came to this beach on a moribund train, on one of the last trains of a derailed country. And—The Boy doesn’t know it yet, but in a way, as already mentioned, he feels it, senses it—another train is approaching at top speed. Filthy smoke and adulterous fire spewing from its chimney—The Divorce Express. A vehicle representing a time of great change. A train not connecting distant places, but separating them with a series of barriers, wandering rails onto which, every so often, a poet shrouded in his own verses will throw himself or a damsel in distress will drop a flower. Stations where there’s nothing to wait for because nothing showed up a while back, and it’s here to stay. And that explains the lack of imagination of this summertime vacation, where nothing ever seems to happen. Where everything seems fine, but in the worst way possible. Where the smiles of his father and mother are always thin and tense, like the moist cut left behind by a very sharp knife or like the cold blade itself. Either way, it’s all the same. The cut, the blade: one ends at the exact point where the other begins—the smiles of his father and mother wound and are wounds. As he decodes those smiles, though he doesn’t understand their language, The Boy smiles—his is still just a smile—and doesn’t know why he’s smiling. But he smiles just in case, cautiously, and that’s why he feels the irresistible urge to get away. To run and not stop. To consider himself from a slight distance, to gain a little perspective, to take a few steps back. The whole “. . . they understand that they can’t live without each other; that, though less and less, they still need each other; that, now nothing and nobody can or will be able to separate them or untie the knot o
f their lives.” (Many years later, The Boy would read, in a novel whose protagonist goes mad in a more or less civilized way, sending letters to the living and the dead, to celebrities and strangers—the sentence “Seashores are good for madmen, provided they’re not too mad” and, looking up from the book, he’ll say to himself: “Exactly. That’s right. My parents were mad, but back then, they weren’t too mad yet. Two or three summers later, well, now that’s a different story . . .”) But that would be a complex novel, a novel with complicated breathing. Here and now, on the beach, The Boy’s “preoccupations” are more childish, but just as hard to resolve. Many of them—The Boy lacks and is lacking words, ways of putting them together—more intuited than verbalized and thought; others only came to him later on; but he’ll evoke them, always, as part and parts of a childhood without clear limits or border. Things that, at times, seem to drive him just mad enough, because here, on the beach, he’s not “too mad” yet. Random samples that, if translated into an adult format, would sound more or less like this: