Authors: Sergio Chejfec
The menacing presence of the creditors had become inescapable: it could be sensed throughout the day and had a hypnotic effect on F, leaving him with just enough of a grip on reality to keep the production line running. According to Delia, several of the moneylenders were former factory workers. She said this in her half-whispered voice without any hint of emotion, but hearing it stopped me in my tracks; the solitary night emptied out even more. How was it possible that a worker, having fought so long and so hard to control his disdain for money, having spent so much of his life in a forced coexistence with its effects, how could that person end up reproducing it with such enthusiasm? Delia couldn’t answer this question, nor was it likely that she’d understand it, so I didn’t ask her. A former worker had a real advantage, she explained. He knew his ex-colleagues, and they knew him; even more importantly, he had experienced the religious fear that the working class had of money. By resisting, and in his talent for mimesis, F was a setback to the moneylenders, though in one of life’s ironies he was unintentionally getting the best possible training for that far-off day when, as the saying goes, he would cross the fence. Many of the other workers worried about F, but most of them just seemed stunned. Seen from the outside, life in the factory might have appeared normal; only someone on the inside would have been able to sense the disturbance. And yet, the typical distinction between “inside” and “outside” was itself confusing and fairly useless, as was proven by the fact that I, on the outside, was totally unaware of what was going on, while the moneylenders standing next to me on the far side of the fence all those afternoons not only knew everything, but also played a central role in the situation.
In the end, a collection was organized; anonymously, so that no one would have to feel ashamed for contributing. As one might imagine, Delia handed over the money she had for the bus trip home; this was why she returned on foot. Her regret was immediate, a sense of remorse that lasted for weeks, as I clearly recall. Not for having helped F, but for having succumbed to the monetary order stamped onto all of history, and into that instance in particular. Delia remembered F’s pained expression when a few of his colleagues gave him the money on behalf of everyone—though only a few had actually contributed, in this case the word “everyone” was not meant to extend the solidarity, but to dilute the dishonor. The debtor was shocked, his reaction half-concealed by a smile; though he was not aware of this, his trance needed to come to an end as quickly as possible. The delegation of workers formed a semicircle; F felt himself at the center of a false, poorly organized, and inappropriate procedure, a failed scene. He would rather have been dreaming and have woken to the menacing presence of an army of creditors. After the most extravagant and dramatic incidents, what remains with us of other people is always a face etched in the dark. Not in real darkness, but in the dark of evocation. Memories, strangely enough, have no light of their own. F’s face, after weeks of pretending, received the unsettling news that it could—and should—stop doing so; this required a complex adjustment. It was impossible to know what was going through his mind. Though this could be said of anyone, it was confirmed in this case by observing the movements of F’s face. A nervous smile searching for that unknown point where it could find balance, Delia told me; obviously neither relief nor joy, neither confidence nor vanity, radiated from it. The members of the delegation were not having any better a time. They stood motionless and silent around the debtor as though he were the center of an inconvenient cult imposed on them by circumstance. It would be easy to speak of donations, offerings, and so on. The workers adapting a domestic ritual enacted so many times in private, when they distributed what little money there was among the members of their family. These workers were absolving a guilt that could become intolerable at times, so they did something “bad,” that in practice translated, as in this case, into something “good.” And all of this was due to the fact that F, in a moment of insecurity some time in the past, had needed more to get by; one evening the money ran out and he needed to wait until the next morning to approach the lenders. In this simple paradox, I think, resides a large part of the silent wisdom that sustained Delia’s fellow workers. In some way, this is what I meant when I wrote a few pages back that, in their way, workers suffer the world. I’m not talking about injustice in the abstract, which is always present, or about any concrete injustice, which can sometimes extend so far it becomes part of nature itself, but rather about a driving force: movable barriers that were sometimes invisible, and other times insuperable, stood between good and evil. The workers were compelled to move between the two, unable to change them, but intuitively aware of their existence.
From the first time he sets foot in the factory, the worker is bound to a “good,” but lives with the contradiction that practically everything he might do while away from his machine will fall under the category of “evils.” Of course, the names of these categories did not come from the workers, having been classified and assigned by the time they appeared. At one point, the workers realized this and rebelled; the way they saw it, the fault lay with the machinery. So they decided to destroy those imposing, intricate masses of metal. They gathered the strength of their own weakness and struck out against them. That the machines buckled as though they were made of cardboard was no small surprise; at first, the workers were shocked—without realizing it, they had passed into a supernatural, magical world—the machines fell like a house of cards, and what just a moment earlier had represented the reign of force, a world that advanced according to the simple but efficient logic of the cog, now crumbled at the first blow; where they stood close together, they fell in succession, one after the other. Many of the workers were reminded of their own homes, their humble shacks, flattened by the wind on stormy days. But it seemed impossible that they should be witnessing something similar happen to the machinery. This could be interpreted as further proof of the frailty of the good and the indomitability of evil, but the workers perceived it in the opposite way: it was the instability of evil in the face of an immutable good. This relatively heroic legend was etched in the ageless memory of Delia’s peers. And though many had no recollection of it or even any idea it existed, they were nonetheless under its influence—sometimes protective, sometimes innocuous or even destructive—and organized their work and way of life accordingly. Stories like F’s arose, developed, and drew to a close against the backdrop of this legend. At first glance, the workers at their stations might appear to be practical and detached, but they were not pragmatic enough to be immune to contradictions or avoid second thoughts. Each payment received, every coin, represented to them the dominance of the machines. At the same time, they were not so naïve as to think that this perception was entirely real; they knew that their wages were only one part of the ultimate value of their work, and that they didn’t come from the machines themselves. Nor were they unaware that the labor produced by their own strength was of little value in and of itself; that without all the rest, which was complementary but decisive, it ended up being insignificant and quite probably useless. To this natural complication were added other unknowns, familiar and widespread in their way. For example, there were those who worked without working. It’s not that they were inactive, nor were they without responsibilities. They were simply people who did not consider what they did day after day to be work, despite the fact that it was similar to, or more difficult and complicated than, the work of others.
What Delia was trying to tell me was that the world of the factory was a special one. Irrational from one perspective, incomprehensible from another, and always that way. When things fell apart, as the saying goes, there would be nothing unusual about seeing the workers as a tribe of eccentric beings intent on getting through their shifts, keeping the drills calibrated and becoming one with raw materials and stages of production. But Delia saw in this routine, which had come to seem excessive, the bleak origin of the current state of confusion. She said this to me in different words, often in the form of silences and distracted phrases that in fact referred to other things, most of which were simple and even trivial, but which allowed me to imagine a substantive, though irrevocably hidden, order of thought. It goes without saying that these conclusions were always hypothetical, tenuous to the point of not having anything to do with Delia at all. I’ve read many novels in which characters draw arbitrary conclusions about other people. These ideas may be wrong, in fact, they almost always are, and so they generate all manner of irreparable misunderstandings, suspicions, and opinions. This, which is so common in novels, is even more so in real life. We live with our mistaken ideas about other people; life goes on as it always has until one morning, or any other hour of the day, some unexpected sign shakes us up, and we’re left puzzled, aware that we had been in the grip of errors and falsehoods all along. At night, F was ashamed to go home. His family waited for him with their usual offhand acquiescence; a quiet shadow that disperses at the start of a new day and returns with the lull of the evening. F’s shame had a single root, money, and two causes: having needed to borrow it and now needing to pay it back; like all good workers, he was horrified by the thought. All he wanted was to restore the peace that was living, doing his job, and, through a baffling economic operation that he found both strange and complicated, making enough to survive—to live badly, but to survive—as he often thought to himself at night, overcome by an absurd and redemptive hope for the coming day. Like their father, F’s children were quiet people. Before he came home, they could be seen standing around in silence, as though in a trance. One might think that they were listening to sounds or words coming from within them, and that their skin, so delicate and pale it was translucent, was the outward sign of a desire to disappear, to dissolve into the landscape. Delia pointed them out to me once, a while after the episode of the loan, as we walked along a path we thought would cut through an endless field. We ran into F’s boys where the path formed a corner with a dirt road that came to an end after a few purposeless twists and turns in a gully not much further along. It was strange, I thought, that the street should behave like a stream while the stream itself ran straight, the way streets usually do. Had she not known them, I imagine that Delia would have recognized F’s children, anyway, because they carried themselves like their father; inscrutably, for lack of a better word. They stared down into the weeds, but didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. It would have been easy to imagine those boys as future workers, I thought. The example set by their father, though somewhat hermetic, had certainly left its mark on the day to day of family life. Just as the farmer’s body announces the work to which generations of his family have dedicated themselves, I sometimes thought I could detect, as I did in these boys, a “vocation” to the labor that they had been called upon to realize more fully in the future. One of them must have been about eight years old, the other not much more than ten. And even though I’d seen so much, when Delia told me that they had both been working in the factory for some time I felt, as one might imagine, a vague sense of surprise, a combination of disappointment and relief, of disenchantment and validation. She herself was practically the same age as the older of the two, though she had, until then, belonged to the world of adults, and not only because she was with me. With this revelation, F’s children, too, stepped into our realm as the newest gods of the real, even as their bodies carried out childlike movements. Delia told me that the youngest workers were observed as they performed their tasks, that older ones were put to work at the machines, while the eldest were introduced to the world outside the factory—the moneylenders, for example. These stages made up the worker’s education.
As Delia and I left the damp earth around the gully behind us, I wondered what F’s children were looking for among the weeds. Maybe it was a screw, I said to myself, or a broken drill bit that was the reason for the search. Materials gone missing, a hammer without a grip hidden among the stalks. Boys: eight, ten years old. A span of time that might seem, were one to think about it, like the blink of an eye meant, in the case of F’s children, two pulsing lives with a good deal of time behind them. As Delia and I walked along in silence, breathing in the listless summer air, in which humid scents mingled with the smell of plastic, I thought something like, “The girl that is Delia could give me a child.” It was a spontaneous thought, as though something had just been shaken loose. It wasn’t the desire to possess her, it was something more than that: the need to conquer, overwhelm, destroy, annihilate. I felt that Delia had something that belonged to me, and that if I didn’t take it from her when I had the chance, I was never going to get it. The feeling was completely different from desire, and of course from passion, though I admit it contained a certain amount of the latter. It was seeing Delia as my enemy: only by at once destroying and worshiping her could I get what I needed, a sacrifice. The black hole that the fields became once the sun set—a barren stretch of land, a cave made of darkness that lasted until the next day—reproduced itself and followed its natural course—that of the night’s advance and the astral movements one senses while looking at the stars—together with its counterpart, the pits of shadow along the ground that the light from the night sky doesn’t reach; this black hole reproduced itself and followed the natural course of the night and all that it implies, on one hand, and on the other it showed itself to be mute, and most likely deaf, inside Delia. I’m not saying that figuratively. I mean “inside” Delia: literally, in her internal parts, her innards, as they say. The immense night, devouring light and time at a relentless pace, and Delia’s belly, waiting to feed on my strength in order to dispossess me of something that did not yet exist.