Authors: Sergio Chejfec
I have little that belonged to Delia—mostly random, incidental things that on their own seem incomprehensible and useless: a dial, the clasp from a bra, a plastic lid. I also have a small button from her work uniform. I don’t remember why she gave it to me; I suppose it probably wasn’t on purpose. I do know that one morning, as I dug around looking for change, it turned up in the bottom of my pocket. I can hazard a guess or imagine something to take the place of this mystery. Something like a button, simple and superfluous in many circumstances, became, in the context of Delia’s uniform, part of the factory’s surveillance and control. One of the most humiliating tasks the workers were forced to perform centered on these minor objects. Since the factory sought an exemplary sort of discipline, it concentrated on accessory items and things of little significance. In this way, the company saw to it that nothing, no matter how small, escaped its control. It would have been easy to focus on the operators’ attire, for example, through daily inspections of their uniforms, especially their work shirts, and so on. And yet the process was inappropriately complex for the circumstance, especially when it came to the inspection of the rubbings that the workers were supposed to have prepared in advance. They were rubbings that looked like the ones I had seen at Delia’s friend’s house. The only difference was that, instead of copying stones or the ground, these pictures were supposed to be of the design on their buttons. It was disconcerting to know that, once a week, an entire relatively qualified workforce was turned into a group dedicated to activities that seemed, at first glance, infantile. At home or on the corner, before they went into the factory, each one of them had to place a sheet of paper across the buttons of their uniform and run a pencil over it, then show the rubbing at the entrance. Obviously, each button was unique; if it wasn’t, at least the workers believed it was. That’s what had happened to Delia’s button. It had probably fallen off during one of these weekly inspections and that night after work, as often happens between lovers, it had passed from her pocket to mine.
When Delia told me about those weekly inspections, I wondered if there was a certain group of beings whose mission it was to leave “rubbings,” collections of marks akin to the things of the world itself. It would be a peculiar sort of “mission,” given that its meaning would be unknown to those who carried it out; but perhaps for precisely this reason it would reach deeper, be more real, evidence of an original, powerful skill, an instinctive gift. At the end of the day, without these proofs and anonymous records—those made by anonymous beings, and those we all leave behind, which are anonymous in their own right—the world would be unbearable. I’m not saying that everyone should write or trace whatever they want—it’s both good and logical that nearly everything is ultimately lost—or that the vast quantity of novels that exist should be some kind of substitute for Delia’s friend’s papers, or for the little round pictures the workers were expected to make of their buttons to show that all were where they belonged, that none were missing and that, ultimately, one presumes, no error or threat hovered over the factory. I’m not saying any of that. On the contrary, a while back it occurred to me that the marks anonymous people leave on the world, including those made on paper, are meant to oppose the written word; the novel, first and foremost. This conflict is not fought out in the open, it’s not that one denies what the other asserts, rather, it is a secret and mutually unacknowledged fight. Among the infinite number of paths that exist, there are two that never meet. On one hand we have the world of marks per se—actions and events in general—and on the other we have the written word, epitomized by the novel. These two elements, like adversaries in perpetual battle, are precisely what lie hidden beneath the surface of fables. The marks of experience seek to eradicate, or at least diminish, the emphasis on the written word, which in turn tries to escape the redundancy of the marks (this is why it presents itself as a version). It is a fruitless contest about which we as individuals, as representatives of the species, have little to say beyond our anonymous contributions to the world of marks. It was likely that the pictures made by Delia’s friend were also subject to some sort of periodic review. A game among family members, a community ritual, the proof of having been in one place and not another, a collective record (“the relics of the tribe,” one might say), and so on; this is probably why she regretted my presence when I found them among the tangle of sheets: things like that weren’t meant for the eyes of an outsider…
Meanwhile, the startled reaction of Delia’s friend seemed, through a quick shift in perception, to be similar to, and almost connected with, the way Delia expressed surprise. It often happens that affinities make themselves known through similar gestures and inflections. It certainly seemed so that evening; in the way she fiercely defended her secret, which did not, or could not, rely on words, I recognized Delia’s expression of surprise when she realized she had been found out, though I can’t imagine two people who seem more different from one another. There’s no need to explain that, just as Delia’s friend seemed to be about to say something the whole time we were alone, her house, too, offered contradictory signs; these were sometimes obvious and occasionally vague or tenuous, even apparently irrelevant, which made the message they supposedly contained hard to decipher—if there was, actually, anything there to decipher. As corresponded to this art of selecting unexpected objects from the cumulative chaos around her, Delia’s friend performed her magic trick with the skill of someone who had learned it amid adversity and neglect. The main purpose of this maneuver, which might also be assigned the term “custom”—being oriented, among other things, toward exhibition—must have been to repeat and perfect itself. It was a talent that suffused her other customs and actions, starting with the most immediate, then the loosely connected, and finally the furthest removed. An example of this was, I think, the hesitancy I described earlier: always being about to say something, but never saying a word. In this way and without realizing it, Delia’s friend manifested the surprise she so masterfully performed when it came to presenting objects. Because showing something the way that she did, with mechanical precision but holding the gesture there for approval, or at least some kind of recognition, revealed the depths of her vacillation. I’ll give an example. Earlier I mentioned the tin of combs, the roundabout way she had of showing me the pots, and her discreet annoyance when I found her tracings: I was violating the sincere—though limited—trust she had placed in me. I tried to connect her irritation with the meaning those pages held, or promised, but from then until the moment Delia returned, pushing the door open with her shoulder with the skirt tucked under her arm, nothing was the same. This phrase, which seems routine, is the essence of what happened. I’ve read many novels in which events bear no relation to what is described: novels that don’t organize reality but, on the contrary, look to reality to organize their words. Nothing was the same with Delia’s friend, though in what little remained of my visit nothing different, the same, or verifiable could have happened. Delia came back with the skirt, the friend stepped out to try it on and, as I said, we left right away. I didn’t say anything then or later about the ideas I had at the time, but this clearly made a lasting impression. Around Delia’s friend, her fellow workers, F’s children when we saw them so engrossed, and everyone else associated with her—around practically everyone, at the end of the day—I always felt as though I occupied a place on the outside, that my role was to register things and draw conclusions from what I saw, whatever the circumstance. This quality was so strong in me that I gave the impression of being some kind of investigator, or very jealous. Still, though it was part of my own story, this world rejected me and so I observed it from a distance, feeling myself surrounded by and drawn toward a vague and impenetrable frontier: as I said a little while ago, a world that made up for its coarseness and extreme simplicity by the force of its eloquence.
Delia offered her world to me, while I, on the other hand, gave her little in return. But it would be a mistake to frame all this in terms of compensation, particularly with regard to Delia, who, as a worker, knew little of the typical utilitarian calculations that define most people’s daily lives. As I’ve mentioned several times before, even something external to us like the landscape, in the most neutral sense, took on uncommon qualities when Delia and I passed through it, and this could only be attributed to her. The pockets of darkness were just as deep as always, but now they consisted of a reverse depth that neither folded in on itself, nor grew; I mean that they presented, let’s say, a transparent darkness. There was a logic one always associated with the dark, a logic that proved, thanks to Delia, inappropriate and contrary to the true meaning of the word, which itself was also useless. Though she could not have known what she was doing, Delia showed me a new world, or rather, one that was renewed every night. This world, of course, had its own actors and its own rules. First, there were the factory workers, who yielded without resistance to the mechanical order of the line, and second, the factory protocols themselves, designed to optimize their productivity and make the most of their physical demeanor, which meant it was necessary to regulate both. Delia had the mysterious quality of concealing and revealing the things that, as they say, made up her world, without any apparent reason and according to a logic that at first glance seemed incidental. Actually, calling it “her world” is sort of redundant: it was a whole that formed part of Delia; she was made up of each element, no matter how distant, small, or superfluous. I don’t know if this was due to some other logic of the proletariat, but I do know that I felt more and more that reality, in all its manifestations and circumstances, reached me having passed first through Delia as though through a sieve; everything brought her to mind, mostly because in Delia I had found a way to see everything anew. This had its consequences: if, on the one hand, the feeling was becoming more and more constant, it also multiplied the signs of a repetitive world stripped bare that highlighted Delia’s absence, that is, her negative proliferation. And so, on that afternoon as we walked away from her friend’s house, I got the strange feeling that I was leaving part of Delia behind. We followed a trail that tried to pass as a road, and were soon outside the lot that belonged to Delia’s friend. I remember an air of stillness, something like anticipation or a predisposition to inactivity; in other words, the light grew thicker, night fell, and the earth began to breathe.
There are dogs that will carry their quarry around for days. Though long dead, the prey seems to retain something vital for the hunter—if it didn’t, it would have been forgotten, as happens when there is nothing left of the victim but a sad tatter of hide. Sometimes I imagine a brief dialogue, a diminutive fable without lasting significance: the prey says, “Please, no,” and the hunter responds, “Yes” and carries out his plan. I don’t know where these sudden thoughts come from, though the situations to which they seem to allude are often fairly obvious. In the universal language of entreaty, “Please, no” is a last request, already denied, made when the end is near. In the real world, this “Please, no” is almost certainly the most-repeated final plea in history. I think the reason the hunter does not abandon his prey, even when it’s no more than a strip of leather, is that in it the scene of the “Please, no” lives on. On the vast plains, the steepest precipices, the solitary steppe, it’s always the same. As Delia and I walked along, I suddenly wondered who was leading whom. Some part of what she offered meant everything to me; this is sometimes summed up by the word “love,” though it’s also true that a word can mean many things at once, and that these meanings are usually different and contradictory. At the same time, as I said above, I never knew exactly what it was that I gave to her. It can also happen that the hunter needs to drag the remains of the victim around because it is the only thing that allows him to forget the nature that surrounds him, the blind and bestial world he cannot escape. With its compulsory passivity, the former prey condenses the details of the scene, bringing together all the qualities of their surroundings; the lifeless victim is thus the hunter’s talisman, an anti-heroic “trophy.” This interpretation may seem somewhat mystical, but I haven’t found one that describes the situation better. Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Shedding light, sitting down to find an explanation that gives the question meaning. The definitive thing about magic is not that it proves the implausible can occur, and therefore that it exists, but that it attempts to show that the implausible relies on magic to announce that it is improbable. But sometimes the unforeseen does take us by surprise, not so much because it is unexpected, but because it is irrational. I’ve read many novels that try to present the supernatural as natural. A reality that had been concealed until that moment, lying in wait, reveals itself; nature is concerned only with hiding itself while characters submit to, are torn apart by, and retreat from its unfamiliar laws, and so on. The problem is that nature never alludes to itself, and the supernatural is the most innocent way it makes its presence felt. As we know, the prey gives life to the hunter.
Earlier, I mentioned the meaning loans tended to have for Delia. The ownership of a thing was a secondary quality, one that might have a negative or restrictive effect, though this could easily be resolved by lending it out. Within the community of workers, or the social order of the neighborhood, objects sometimes attained collective ownership. The “owner” of something became its guardian, to put it one way, and everyone knew that they could use it whenever they needed, if not immediately, then at least without complications. This was expressed in everyday life, in even the most minor details and mundane circumstances. And so, eventually owning everything, or the greatest possible number of things, continued to be a dream for many or most of the workers, who knew very well how society in general functioned, but for whom all that had long ago turned into a mirage they recognized as useless. I think that, by lending these objects out, the workers were able to increase their density; to the material existence and primary function these things had, say, “at first glance,” was added an unexpected relevance that was multiplied through their circulation and exchange: the objects became more useful the more often they changed hands. And this turned out to benefit the workers, whose own existence was lean and whose belongings, as we know, were few. Just as the prey gives life to the hunter, loans enhance the identity of objects. A hammer, for example, becomes more of a hammer the more often it is lent out. But the hunter gives nothing back; at least, not to the prey. If he does give something back, he does so in such an ambiguous way that only an arduous process of investigation and verification could confirm it. One of the most significant differences is that the hunter believes he is taking what belongs to him; he feels something like entitlement, which helps him spot, give chase, corner, and so on, and finally kill. Another fable, slightly longer than the last, might clarify this difference. In the community of workers, for example, “Please” sets their exchanges in motion; the prey says, “Please, no,” while the hunter, as always, resorts to the habitual language of his monosyllabic “Yes.”