My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec

probably ate their lunch on that bench every day and always arrived at the same hour, getting together to meet and speak of their families and their memories of the East, and that I had played the role of a quickly remedied setback. Yet another of those visitors who occasionally erred and sat down on their bench . . .
    So I wondered whether the old man approaching me now, in flight from the sun with his last reserves of strength, wasn’t the customary occupant of the bench. In that case, I could say: in the south of Brazil there’s an old man who every afternoon sits on the same bench in the shade. Just before he took a seat, he greeted me with a nod that for a moment seemed dismissive, though it sufficed to make me forget my displeasure. And after he settled in as far away from me as possible, on the opposite end of the bench, he took a deep breath and began to untie his shoes. He didn’t take them off at first, but merely loosened them. Then he stretched his legs, rested his hands over his stomach, and appeared to sleep. A bit later, with a deft motion of his heels, he did what was necessary to take off his shoes. What with the muffled shouts that arrived from the distance, the trill of the birds, the constant hum of the bustling city and, in particular, the turbulent fountain with its endlessly spurting water, I was astonished to be able to hear my benchmate let out a sigh.
    Early that same morning, shortly after leaving the hotel, I’d been strolling along the river, on the other side of town. The day was just getting started, and the traffic on the avenue next to the river seemed unusually sparse, so sparse that the timing of the traffic lights caused the few cars or buses to travel in herds, one after the other, as if they were families of vehicles. In the intervals a silence would fall, during which one could look at the water, at the opposite bank, sharply defined and wild, and cheer up on feeling that a moment from the past had been slipped into the present. It’s odd, I thought, how one abandons the future and seeks to recover the past. But recover wasn’t the word. I didn’t want much, barely a glimpse. Any trace I could discover would be a revelation to me, from the fragile, petrified branch of a fallen tree to a landscape remembered from childhood, though I might never have been there. As is perhaps becoming clear, everything in Brazil was pushing me into the past. Into a hazy past, pre-cerebral, which clouded my perceptions and affected my judgment, demolishing it.
    During one of the lulls in traffic, while I was leaning against the railing of a broken-down iron pier that jutted out over the river, I had a sort of revelation. The past, like myself an itinerant, acted like a meander, with no precise, let alone predetermined, direction, which could absorb all our free time, or might simply leave us cold. What’s more, like a sleepwalker who’s forgotten his dream and doesn’t know whether he’s awake. I was in the process of turning into one of its perhaps exemplary victims, and consequently ending up bogged down in sterility. I was just then presenting the first symptoms, I thought: the absence of a desire to know. I had the city at my back, each particle of it like a cell of an immense country, and nevertheless, there I was, stuck on the far end of the ruined pier trying to elicit anything at all from the dense, hazy bush on the opposite bank. This feeling, I can now state, wouldn’t leave me for the rest of that day, or on the ones that followed.
    I left the old pier—I recall how the hanging structure trembled with each new footfall, as it had when I’d first stepped onto it—and set off along the path beside the river. Beyond the sidewalk, and before the avenue next to the river, was a spacious parking lot, most likely full on the weekends. In the distance you could make out a group of people, some fifty meters ahead, who seemed to be waiting for more people to arrive, though of course I