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.