Authors: Sergio Chejfec
I should say that I knew Delia would lend me life as soon as I laid eyes on her. I write this in a figurative, rather than a literal, sense. I was able to confirm this premonition; it is a fact that stays with me to this day, so long after the last time I saw her. I’m not referring to the enhancements that come with the circulation I just described, but rather to something more, a supplementary vitality, a fantasy made real that, in its realization, sets itself outside of time and above all other things, beyond what we take in with our eyes. I’ll give an example. Right now I’m holding my pencil over my notebook, under the light, and the shadow—a slim pointer—crosses the blank lines of the yellow paper. Just like this shadow, with the depth and nuance it adds while reducing the color where it falls, Delia exerted a similar influence, faint yet absolute, over me. It doesn’t matter whether she was aware of this or not—perhaps if she’d known, she might not have done it. In any event, though it may sound vague, I’ll say it just the same: Delia cast a benevolent shadow over me. Like the tip of the pencil on the page, which not only writes but also projects a restless shadow that leaves no trace, or at least no visible one, I believe there were things Delia did that were meant to last, “to leave a mark” on me, and others that went unnoticed at the time and reappeared later, or were forgotten, and so on. In the first place, as is always the case, there were the memories, which require no proof. I won’t say anything about their quality; there are few things less exact. On the other hand, to talk about all this would be to talk about the form it took, and all I would be able to salvage of that would be my own vacillation. At times like this, one tries to find those essential elements; obeying the law of memory, one focuses on the detail in an attempt to read the marrow hidden at its core, within its nucleus of wisdom. But only conventional elements can be salvaged this way, primarily physical details recovered in the form of faces, figures, limbs, and so on. What I mean is that, in order to salvage the past, to salvage that which is hidden behind things, we also need the concrete and mechanical objects and situations that give us life to this day; it is this past that sustains us, but it abandons us if we recover it exactly as it was. There is a lesson in this, to which we should submit ourselves with humility and patience. And all the more so in Delia’s case, who, as I’ve said, folded in on herself even as she made her presence felt. A weakness that was part of her constitution made her tremble like the leaves. Upon finding herself exposed, generally after reacting to something, Delia would close herself off inside a delicate silence tinged with anticipation, like the moment before a glass breaks or the hunter attacks. These things were more than just bodies and faces, though they were, of course, expressed through them, making them conventional supplements. Something similar happened when her friend found herself exposed, both when I found her rubbings and when the man on the train handed her the distorted portrait. A reaction that lasts the briefest of moments, and for this reason might seem inappropriate or the result of some kind of disruption, but which leaves an enduring mark.
One day we saw F’s children in an empty lot scattered with debris. Then, too, they were lost in contemplation. A few silent bags of trash had caught the brothers’ attention. They stood there, motionless, looking down; after a while, one would lift his head and stare out toward the horizon, then immediately back at the pile in search of answers. Delia told me that looking at garbage was often a way of exercising the imagination, “What they don’t have,” she added. I didn’t respond. My whole life, I had watched the same ceremony, and may even have practiced it myself, but it was only through one of those strange mechanisms of memory or conscience that, as I observed F’s boys in action, their staring organized into periods of rest and concentration, I was able to recognize it as an act whose unusual meaning, if it could still be said to have one, was rich with local custom. The pastime consisted of unraveling the past: imagining the source of the trash—which was varied, that is, in the different substances themselves—and what had been done with it before it had been discarded. It was something that was done every day, an unexceptional exercise to which only F’s boys, and only on that morning, could have drawn my attention. There were those who thought the garbage spoke, that it revealed a hidden truth through messages organized like that, like trash, the sole purpose of which was to be deciphered. And included in this “sole purpose” was the specific language required to read and observe them, which was activated by the analysis itself. The trash could be rural, domestic, or industrial. This collective exercise might have been an extension of the ancient tradition of reading the future in a system of signs, but which at some point had been inverted, and from that moment on was used to unravel the past. Was this further proof that the future no longer mattered? Perhaps the locals were rebelling against the linear, “historical” time that had so punished them, choosing instead the alternatives they had at hand. And so waste, material that had reached the end of its usefulness in the minds of many, had a bit of life breathed back into it: future or past, better or worse, it didn’t matter; what mattered was that it was different. It’s easy to imagine the limited repertoire of trash in a community so marked by privation, yet that was precisely why this was a favorite pastime: because the likelihood of finding something unexpected, a surprise, was minimal. People feel a need to study the signs left by others; in this space of scarcity, there were plenty such traces to be found in the trash. They stopped to contemplate and compare. One thing with another, what was seen yesterday with what was there today, and these with something discovered a month earlier; an illusion of continuity maintained by the population because it lightened the load of the day-to-day. But it was evident that, like all others, this custom contained within it the seed of delirium. And it would probably take very little to bring it out: the slightest deviation in the routine, an unexpected combination, anything. Because the seed is a mechanism that waits for the right moment. So, for example, the whole of reality could be seen as a universe of garbage cast adrift, or like a choice or object that has been “wasted” relative to everything else, to what might have been, and so on. The traces, or rather, the marks of waste. Because ultimately this is an ancient endeavor, isn’t it? There has always been something to decipher, a message waiting to be released.
In the thistle barrens, after we made love, Delia would sleep for three minutes, or maybe five. She closed her eyes, her body, and her mind, fully letting go of herself only once all activity had ceased. Afterward, she woke just like she did every morning, opening her eyes suddenly, before she was awake. Her eyes got ahead of themselves somehow; they were what woke her, not her mind. Once she was awake, we feigned a few playful movements as though we were going to start up all over again, but then immediately stood and left the Barrens, sometimes to continue on a walk that would last almost until dawn, sometimes to go back to her house and say our goodbyes a few feet from the door, where the latent presence of the others made itself felt, though it did not seem to be affected by ours. There were dogs around that could have been from anywhere, and a few lights shone so faintly that they seemed forgotten even to themselves, on the verge of going out as they cast their glow over an endless space impossible to illuminate. Delia’s house, like everything about her, felt unique to me. As it had been from the moment it first sheltered the person who was, to me, a marvel of tenderness and beauty, who enhanced everything she touched, every space she inhabited. The signs of deprivation, how hard it was to carry on, and so forth, were visible in the house; these marks were indications of its admirable characteristics of autonomy and constancy, not of its abandonment. What I mean is that, if there were something exemplary to all this, the poverty of Delia’s house was exemplary in the way it was indifferent to itself: a veneer made of silence and determination, exposed to the greatest neglect.
A light in the distance, a flickering streetlamp, marked the highest point in Delia’s neighborhood, an elevation that suggested something historical, yet forgotten, both topographical—obviously—and undefined; more than anything, though, it gave the neighborhood a concrete identity, just like the corner of Pedrera did, where I lived. I’ve often thought these neighborhoods could never be the substance of a novel; even if someone were to join them together, one by one, like dominoes, or the way they appear on maps, until they became a single, vast amalgam of neighborhoods, even then, they would still lack the density required to be represented, if not to positive effect, then at least with some degree of conviction. On my earliest visits, it seemed that the wasteland in which Delia lived underscored her unique qualities. Like those deities who reign in solitude, her sublime beauty grew amid the greatest neglect. Sometimes her house seemed like a shack, other times like a collection of materials and random artifacts, arbitrary and unnatural at first glance, but consolidated through use and the passage of time. This continued use turned these objects into different ones: time dignified things that at first, I think, could have seemed incongruous, happenstance, or even unnatural. From this fact, as one might imagine, other lessons could be drawn. I am not going to summarize the materials and objects that made up Delia’s house; I will not, for example, say cardboard, zinc, PVC, or sheets of plastic. Today, in the cold, I saw a dwelling the size of a person: two cardboard boxes bound together that, of course, ended up resembling a coffin. The cardboard was paper-thin, but in that moment was as resilient as stone. This was also true of Delia’s house, the materials of which drew their strength from the need and the steadfastness of its residents. The past of these objects was forgotten forever, predictably, only to be recovered when they were no longer part of the house. But it was an illusory sort of forgetting, because it was only from this past that they derived their value as part of a dwelling.
From then on, it was not uncommon to see groups of people or solitary observers transfixed by garbage being stirred by the wind. One day a photo was taken in the street, or something like a street. It was a sunny afternoon; Delia must have been enjoying one of the rare days off that the factory gave her. We had been walking for a while; I was looking at the ground, the worn dirt path made of pebbles and little chunks of other objects, broken down by time and use; I saw these things and thought that the ground was as it should be, certainly as it had been for a long time and would be for a long time to come, but that Delia’s presence added something special to it, a secret message shaped and revealed by her alone, which ennobled it. As I stared at the ground and kicked stones, sometimes without meaning to, she explained the rules of an unusual game they played at the factory: what it was called, how it consisted of dividing time into the smallest units possible. Since the appeal of this game was grounded in division rather than variation, the intervals got shorter and shorter, and were eventually impossible to verify. When they got to that point, the players started over. But the participants gained a skill through playing: they must have sensed it in the way the units got smaller and smaller, and so something originally begun as a means of killing time, in all the diverse implications this might have for a worker, became a reflex, a sixth sense set in motion on its own when the group’s desire to play was stirred, usually by chance. It seemed to me that Delia took part in these games as a worker, like everyone else, but also as a girl: as a worker she needed to have control over time, to subjugate and incorporate it within her own nature so that, once hers, she could transfer it to the factory, which in turn converted it to a completed task. As a girl she was after something similar: to lay out the different dimensions of time so that, later on, she could reject them as untenable. In this way, the game found in her a dual, and complete, form.
Anyway, as we walked Delia explained the rules, the surprise and anticipation, the spontaneous synchronization, how the game was won, or rather, the fact that it was abandoned before a winner was declared, and so on; as Delia described all this to me, her friend emerged from the bushes—a few squat, dense tufts that formed an island that seemed darker than its surroundings—walking toward us as though she were stepping onstage. We stopped; she approached without ever taking her eyes off Delia. “Hi,” “How are you,” “Fine,” they said. I remember she was wearing the shirt with fruits on it, and that she fiddled with the fabric in a moment of vacillation, just as she had before. Delia’s friend had a camera with her that she was about to return; she wanted to take the opportunity to photograph us. Delia resisted, but without any real conviction. The photo should be pasted here, on the page, as proof of that afternoon. Delia’s friend got us into position, moving our bodies with her frail arms as though she wanted to mold us into a different form; later, as she held the camera ready to take her shot, she found time to gesture to us with the other hand while asking us, quietly, to face forward and look at her. Delia and I stood side by side, with our arms around one another, wanting the camera to register that singular truth about to be set free, if only for a moment. I remember how Delia’s smile was shy and anxious, and that her skin, as opaque as wood, was glossy in advance of the print. We didn’t know it at the time the photo was taken. Only later, when we actually saw it, did we notice the people standing around a pile of something behind us. We had looked around for a while to find the best angle, and had found an ideal one: a gentle slope that suggested silence and neglect, a panorama that was ideal in its meager, but essential, symbolism. The silhouette of a factory could be seen in the background, a detail that couldn’t have been absent, as present as it was in Delia’s life. And halfway between there and the foreground, one could see the land descend along a slope that grew steeper and ended in a space the camera would never capture, a sad little dried-up lake. Posed there in our loving embrace, happy, enthusiastic, content, and so on, Delia and I looked at the camera as though “forward” were another way of saying “toward the future.” Delia’s friend lifted her arm, wanting to say something without saying anything. It was a blotch crossing the sky. I remember that the sun was in front of us, and that we had to squint while we waited for her to take the picture. The friend said something I didn’t hear, of course, but this time it was because the sun blocked out the sound. An instant later, at a moment Delia and I didn’t know to expect but which we recognized all the same, the afternoon stopped and we heard the camera take its shot.