Flying Objects

Flying Objects Abdón Ubidia, from El palacio de los espejos (1996) Translated by Nathan Horowitz They were a perfect pair, the mother thirty-four and the son fourteen. In those days the father was a barely recollected dream, a gentle breeze dissolving in the air: he had died in his plane on a night lost in his son’s earliest memories. The mother had elected to remain faithful to him, so that his death wouldn’t be the end of him, and so that he would survive somehow as a soft voice whispering advice in her ear during her evenings of sadness. The mother was strong and wise. She organized her life in such a way that hunger, cold and uncertainty stayed as far from her as the men who wanted her for themselves, as far from her as romance, which she had to deny herself until her son was grown and didn’t need her protection anymore. That way her loyalty to her husband evolved into loyalty to her son. And that way her husband lived on in him. Their apartment, on the fourteenth floor of a fifteen-story building, was like a castle that could never be taken by siege. On the cold nights of the rainy season, when vapor fogged the windowpanes, the mother and son would open two circles with their hands on the glass and peer out through them to watch the cars fleeing through the rain and the street people taking shelter under trees in the park. The mother and son felt sorry for them, and they regarded each other in silence and celebrated the strange luck that kept them safe from the troubles of the world in a warm, secret place designed for life and happiness. Then the apartment seemed a hot air balloon suspended in the chilly night, with a hidden crew of two accomplices who could see without being seen and judge without being judged. On other nights, when the moon shone, they would sit in the living room with the lights turned off, looking at the splendid intensity that lit up the carpet as if it came from a fantastic floodlight. The mother would talk about the vanished father and quote his favorite sayings from the Bible and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. One of them resonated in the son’s mind with mysterious echoes: “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” When the noise of the city died down, before he went to sleep, wrapped in his blankets, he would recall his mother’s eternal story, her voice echoing in his ears like the murmur of tender branches stirred by

the summer breeze in a happy valley. “One morning,” she would say, “a swift flew in the living room window. And although I never figured out what the connection was, I suddenly knew then that I was pregnant and I was going to have a baby boy.” From time to time, she would call the son “my swift.” There were almost no secrets between the mother and the son. Even sex they discussed with a respectful system of questions, answers and tacit understandings that would flow into other subjects, whether philosophical or trivial. Within their custom of talking about everything from the economic situation to the teachers in his school (who were always seen as rather limited and sinister beings by this “League of Two,” as they called themselves), there was only room for two secrets, admitted as rights of exception. One was the mother’s and the other was the son’s. The mother’s secret was simple and complex at the same time. In her long abstinence she had come to fear the idea of falling in love like death itself. Perhaps so many years of aloneness had cooled down her body so much that the simple idea of accepting a husband when her son left her side became unbearable. She believed she had closed down and dried up forever. The son’s secret was also simultaneously simple and complex. When he grew up, he wanted to be the one thing his mother could never stand him to be, a pilot. As he understood it, his father had flown off to the skies of heaven, leaving him the mission of taking his place in the world, continuing where he had left off; even, somehow, being the father himself, with a second chance at life. That secret, the only real one he had, swelled up and multiplied until it became its own autonomous world requiring an endless series of lies to maintain. For example, the mother didn’t know that the son flew in a classmate’s hang glider. To do this, he had to invent nonexistant mountain biking trips. While he was flinging himself into the void from one of the peaks of the volcano that dominated the city, she believed he was safely tied to the earth, absorbing its compact power, its weight, feeding himself with its grass like a young colt that no evil wind can ever bring down. The mother did know about his close friendship with Hugo Fernando, the classmate in question. And unlike the other mothers of their school, she didn’t forbid it, when the father of that sullen, taciturn boy fell into disgrace and was put in prison, and the scandal of his life in the

shadows occupied the front pages of the newspapers. It was another sign of her wisdom and goodness. The son was filled with gratitude and guilt, and tried to mitigate his lies with half-truths and unnecessary precisions. He supplied her with a wealth of details about Hugo Fernando’s eccentric family and their extravagant and opulent way of life. Hugo Fernando’s mother was obsessed with caring for her skin and body. His sister, Evelyn, was twelve years old; mutinous, coppery hair crowned her round face. Her eyes were green and lively, her skin smooth and pure. But she was always deeply immersed in her own thoughts. She was a nervous girl, and people said she was crazy, because all she ever talked about were the UFOs and aliens that visited her. To complete the family, a number of “uncles” came and went all the time. Even after the scandal, the family lived in an enormous house in a valley near the city, with two swimming pools, two tennis courts and a soccer field equipped with electronic scoreboards, so that Hugo Fernando’s expensive toys—motorcycles and so on—and the uncles’ flashy cars, seemed as appropriate to the scene as flowers to a garden. Apart from certain particular details (among which had to be included the fact that Evelyn had once nonchalantly kissed him on the mouth and then fled to hide in the woods), the son thought that after his father’s death, nothing very important would alter the exact, natural and eternal form of his life: a smooth movement of time flowing, tame and forseeable, like a river whose course was well known. The mother thought the same way. Or nearly the same way. For her, life was like a drum with a tight cellophane head that would remain shiny and transparent unless an excessively hard blow came to break it. To keep the cellophane intact, to keep her life smooth and unchanged, without surprises or misfortunes, it was necessary to avoid fire and strong blows, nothing more. One day without warning the cellophane broke. Like an avalanche, like a volcanic eruption, like an earthquake, like the crash of a young summer wind through the trees in the heights of the Andes, love came to the mother’s frozen heart. In vain she looked at herself again and again in the mirror, trying to recover the cautious and lucid woman she had been just a few weeks before. In vain she appealed to the emotional balance that had been her heritage and her strength and was now gone. In vain she tried to rid herself of the feelings of irritation that her son would sometimes

unexpectedly provoke in her. The madness of love had taken possession of her completely. The woman of reason was simply not the same person as the woman of passion. Although the one had killed the other in the mind, the other had been reborn, furious, in the eyes and body. From her shadow, the son watched her. From one day to the next she had changed, like day to night. After four weeks of delirious euphoria, her soul became bitter and violent. Something was devastating her. The son had no way of asking her about it, because when she was home, she would lock herself in her room, sometimes to talk on the phone, sometimes to cry for hours. One night, the son did something he’d never done before. He listened on the extension to one of his mother’s telephone conversations. As often happens with people we love, the mother had attributed to the son certain imaginary limits which she thought he would never break. So when she heard the soft click of the other receiver being lifted, she thought it was just a problem with the connection. Also, it was three in the morning, and she believed he was sleeping like a log after a whole day of sports. Instead, he was wide awake and had just broken through his own limits forever. Hiding the sound of his breath, he listened with a mixture of rage, stupefaction and guilt as his humiliated mother pleaded with an arrogant man who replied in foreign-accented monosyllables. She told the man he had come into her life like an angel into the desert, to awaken her hot and eager sex and fill up her body with sensations she had nearly forgotten. The mother’s hoarse voice mixed sublime promises with obscenities the son had never imagined hearing from her lips. He didn’t have the strength to hang up the phone, and continued listening, in a fog, as if he were on the other side of the world, separated by continents and oceans, so that when what might have been the final blow came, he barely even understood it. “Do whatever you want,” she said. “I’ll leave him in a home and go with you wherever you take me. I swear I will.” At dawn, the son sped on his bike down to the nearby valley and his friend’s house. The guards and the dogs let him pass. Evelyn met him with a smile that went out as soon as he told her he wanted to talk to Hugo Fernando in private. It was a conversation between two people who knew very well what they loved and hated in the world, and whose decisions were well thought out and final. Hugo Fernando listened and understood, and agreed to help him follow through with his plan. How could he not understand? He had recently formed a piece of wisdom about the

world, that vengeance was the ultimate meaning and goal of existence. The hang glider meant nothing to him. He had another. And he had a further compelling reason, which he stated concisely: “The judges say they’re going to take away everything we have.” The son’s plan was laid out clearly. It was the precise repetition of a dream he had had the night of his last birthday. He had dreamt then that at the darkest hour of the night, he ascended the peak that the flying men of the city used to launch themselves in their hang gliders, and he flew out over the city toward a green light that signaled his mother’s house (in the dream, it was a house, not an apartment). It all happened in slow motion, and very smoothly. The smooth maneuvers over the sleeping city, the smooth way he smashed through the plate glass window of the living room, the smooth way his mother discovered him there like a broken bird and embraced him like a newborn baby. Two days later, the foreigner made his first official visit to the apartment. The day after that, he brought an expensive, brand-name mountain bike as a gift to the son. A week later, after a moment of shock at being found out, the mother got tangled up in confused explanations as to why the man had slept in the apartment. That night, the son watched from his room as the building’s night watchman handed the brand new bicycle, which he had deliberately left out on the sidewalk, to someone who drove off with it in a pickup truck. Meanwhile, the waxing moon was swelling up in the sky. That was important for a technical reason that Hugo Fernando took pains to explain carefully: “It’s very hard to fly at night in this city. During the day, the air currents lap up the mountain, always rising, but at dusk they cool down, change direction and descend the slope. They won’t hold up a hang glider. You have to wait until the moon is full. In the dry season, it sometimes forms rising currents that you might be able to use.” Whether this was true or not, it was reason enough for the son to listen

patiently. Finally, the moon rose like a creamy balloon over the sharp, black, velvety profile of the mountains. And it spread its silvery light over the city and the landscape, lighting up the sky with a celestial splendor that drowned out the twinkling of the dimmer stars. By its light, the son could see how Hugo Fernando’s jeep drew up and parked silently in front of the apartment building, with the hang glider wrapped in itself like a lance. He turned on the green lamp and left it by the window and went down to the jeep. He couldn’t hide his irritation at seeing Evelyn there next to his friend. “I couldn’t leave her behind,” said Hugo Fernando. “I had to tell her everything. We have a blood pact, we swore to share secrets. But don’t worry, she hasn’t told anyone.” Evelyn sat in silence. They headed west across the city. And ascended, with headlights on low, the steep road that led to the north peak. Silverplated by moonlight, the eucalyptus and the dwarf oaks murmured in the summer breeze like a mountain stream. The jeep dodged ruts in the road and navigated sharp turns. From time to time a night bird flapped across the road and vanished in the scrubby vegetation. On an inclined curve a small animal ran through the headlight beams. In the jeep no one spoke. They left behind the eucalyptus, the fence they had opened and passed through, the place of the radio and television antennas, and the shining field of tall coarse grass. They came to the peak. Below, in the abyss, the city was stretched out between the mountains like a skin bristling with lights. As they had done so many times before, they set up the glider and tested the cables and rigging. As she helped him into the harness, Evelyn lost her eternally absentminded air and began to cry. Apart from that detail, everything felt very unreal. Because, in the son’s mind, the idea that at that moment his mother was doing with the foreigner everything she herself had explained that people who love each other do kept torturing him with images, and the voices he had heard on the telephone deep in that hellish night kept coming back.

The appropriate current was blowing and it was time to run to the edge of the cliff. Still holding up the left corner of the glider, Hugo Fernando managed to shout: “If you change your mind, we’ll be waiting for you on the field in the park!” He added another “We’ll be waiting for you,” but it was too late, because the hang glider was already swaying in a fast descent to the city. Suspended in it, the son thought for a moment that he wasn’t going to be able to control it. And the fear of suffering a useless death slapped his face like a rude, icy hand. Actually, it wasn’t just the fear. It was also the cold August air that shook the fabric of the kite. At last he got control. A powerful gust of wind lifted him for several minutes. Instinctively, as he had done so many times before, he rode it upwards in circles to gain all the altitude he could. From there he could see the jeep heading back down the road, at high speed, with all its halogen lights blazing, like a star. He gyred above the peak he had launched himself from and saw, at a distance, beyond the sandy ground, pallid against the velvety sky, the high barbaric peak of the old volcano. Then he headed for the city. He descended quickly. It seemed to him that the neighborhoods and streets had enlarged and multiplied by themselves. From the heights, he was barely making any progress across them. If he kept on like that, he might not reach the east side of the city. He decided to slow down and gain altitude. He used the first warm current he met to rise, spiralling up again. Only then, for the first time, did he realize the splendor of the universe that shone, below and above, with millions of glittering lights and that tremendous moon that illuminated even the edges of the Andean range with its enormous dark mountains and five snow-covered peaks that glowed so bright they seemed radioactive. He tried to get his willpower back. “I’ve got to do it,” he told himself. “I can’t chicken out now. I’ve got to do it.” His hands were numb with cold. And his clothing seemed to have stuck with moisture to his body. “I’ve got to do it,” he repeated. But there, down below, the city bristled with two million defiant lights. Each one of them meant a home, a sad problem, a pain. And even a bit of joy.

And up above, the infinite proliferation of infinite stars, and planets that might be inhabited like ours. In the huge sky of August, meteors were tracing their vertiginous wakes with some frequency. Were they all meteors? In his mind, as if coming from the other side of the universe mixed with the roar of the wind that chilled his face, the nearly unknown voice of his father echoed: “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Then he saw—thought he saw? Wanted to see?—the sudden streak of a meteor passing low above the fabric of the hang glider. Did he see it, or just think he saw it? Was it really that close? Was suffering making him, like Evelyn, see things that weren’t there? Was it just a shooting star? It would have been good to have Evelyn at his side then. He felt like he could barely breathe. Had he broken the deadly 4500-meter limit? Was it just a shooting star? Maybe not, because near him, now, something else was shining, circling him like an escort. Was it a vision? A UFO? Was he blacking out? Inevitably, he remembered the legend of Icarus and his father Dedalus, which the flight instructors were always repeating. Was he going to lose control and crash? Was his father’s the last human voice he would ever hear, as Icarus’s father’s had been for him? The sweat seemed to have frozen on his face. With a supreme effort of will, he drew the direction bar toward him and began to descend. When his mind cleared, so many things had taken place in his heart that the decision to repeat in reality the dream he had had two weeks before seemed so distant that he couldn’t recognize it as his own. He thought how strange the human mind was to be able to change so completely, so quickly, almost like it became a different mind, as soon as something made it see things from another point of view. That’s what had happened to his mother. And that’s what had happened to him as he glided over the sleeping city like a bird that had strayed from its flock. “I won’t do it,” he said to himself as he headed for the great rectangular shadow of the park. On the other side were the rows of

buildings, one of which had a green light in its window. He didn’t want to look for it. Instead, he descended in smooth spirals to the soccer field where the jeep signaled to him with its halogen headlights. It was a perfect landing, the gentle perch of a nocturnal bird. As he thought about everything he had to tell Evelyn, he saw her running toward him with Hugo Fernando to help release him from the harness that still tied him to the hang glider.