Authors: Sergio Chejfec
A few hours later she passed the same place on her way back. Before reaching the corner where she had seen G, Delia wondered if he’d still be there, and if so whether it might not be a good idea to talk to him, if only to see how much he still remembered of that other world. But when she got there, G was gone. A distant breeze carried with it the delicate scent of a lot that had once been used to cultivate, I don’t know, fruits and vegetables, for example. Now, plants grew there in disarray, in shapes and with smells that, though they alluded to a former domestic use, revealed first and foremost the force of the wild. It was strange to see the way people needed to go back to nothing to reach something that would serve as their refuge from a lack of purpose. Out of an original nothing, like birth, for example, they passed through situations that supplied them with knowledge, habits, and experiences, yet the most likely outcome was that a moment would come when they would have to shake off all they had acquired and start again from zero, that is, to go back to a different nothing and start over. On the way, G could be seen standing on the corner, waiting for something more or less fundamental; he was the epitome of childlike unawareness and, in a certain sense, proletarian naivety. Accustomed to the mechanical commotion of the factory, its world of transmissions, pulleys, and gears, he couldn’t figure out what it would take to adapt to his new life of unemployment. But, then, when he really thought about it, he realized that he hadn’t really understood the former one, the world of the factory, either, because if he had he would never have been banished. Delia returned with her borrowed clothes, or maybe after restoring them to the collective reserve that provided the community with its best attire; she had completed her errand, but there was no sign of G on the corner…
A metal placard, dulled and ravaged by the passage of time, barely visible among the vegetation, belatedly announced that there was “Land for Sale.” Actually, the announcement was more primitive than belated; the land had clearly not been for sale for a long time. These places were full of signs just like it; there was no need for Delia to tell me so. At one point, we found ourselves on that corner. She showed me the placard, which was obviously still there, and the exact spot where G had stood, waiting for a sign. To see it, one had to press into the brush, almost colliding with the ancient piece of metal, which had evidently been used for target practice. It was easier to see from a distance when there was a breeze, since the movement of the bushes, and especially their crests, would intermittently reveal it. For some reason I still do not understand, its lettering seemed to Delia to be a proof, presumably of G’s opportune presence that afternoon. Seeing G, discovering the sign, not seeing G, forgetting the sign; this had been the succession of Delia’s thoughts that afternoon, on this topic, at least. The placard had become the only object that confirmed her version of the story. The land to which the notice referred could have been as vast as the planet itself. Its limits were not visible, at least, not at the time. And so the two of us, but not only us, were at the mercy of contradictory signs in which the recent and distant past intermingled with the long-term and the immediate future, the ephemeral present, and an intolerable perpetuity. I should say that I’ve never again felt the presence of time so deeply. Sometimes it seemed as definitive as the heavens: implacable, permanent, and constant. Other times it could slip, or string itself out like a lie, a hurried vertigo of contradictory associations. Time was a black hole; it tore us apart and then consumed us, only to leave us—though there was no way to prove this—in the same place from which we were taken.
I could imagine Delia’s sadness when she returned to find that G wasn’t on the corner anymore. While other people saw the two of them like siblings forced toward the factory by destiny, as I indicated before, Delia saw it differently, though of course with the same intensity. She sensed that something united them, though she didn’t know whether it was their age, or another condition. In any event, she was certain that the factory, in banishing him, was responsible for breaking this harmony. And so a set of contradictory feelings was stirred that, resurfacing more intensely at times, stayed with her for a long while. Delia and her peers could feel somewhat responsible for G’s absence, but they knew that the ultimate cause was not their factory in particular. The problem lay with the world of the factory as a whole, which did whatever it took to make the workers feel a collective debt for the slightest deviation from the norm, even though in reality it was a world that did as it pleased, followed its own laws, and used machines and workers alike as props in the staging of its own truth. I don’t want to abuse the simile, but just as the night was a black hole to those who walked through it, the factory was a black hole to the worker. After isolating, evaluating, and determining what profit could be drawn from them, it hired them, consumed them, and returned them to a life of repetitive actions. One word gives a particularly good sense of it: “exploitation,” hiring someone in order to subject them body and soul to a job and, in so doing, squeeze every last drop from them. Delia remembered a gesture: G would unconsciously run his hand through his hair, which meant that something was bothering him. It could be an unusual noise coming from the machine, a lack of coordination among the other workers, or a sudden loss of power: in any event, before looking up or directing his body toward a response, he would lift his right hand—the same one he used to search for crumbs in his breast pocket—and run it through his hair as though he were trying to fix it. And precisely because he was so absorbed, he was making the same gesture when he caught Delia’s attention as she passed him on the corner. It’s strange that the people closest to Delia, the ones I know, at least, like her friend, should all make that same distinct gesture. Her friend, for example. It was a fluid, rolling movement meant to make the serious less so, to smooth out complexity, and to push affliction, or at least worry, quickly out of mind. It was also a movement meant to conceal surprise. And yet, it was a gesture to which Delia only occasionally resorted.
I’ve come back from the bathroom, from the mirror in which I observe my belly, indifferent and marked by the years, not unlike the trunk of an old tree. I believe that other people’s gestures cling to us like stains, figures left at random on a surface and preserved in our memory through coincidence, unlike the many that are not. I returned to my room with a glass of water; my battered wardrobe faced me from the estuary that opened up at the foot of my bed. I thought about Delia, about the people who were near her, or at least as near to her as I was, and without realizing it, I ran my hand through my hair. What was I after, with this movement? Was I was hoping to uncover something hidden? It’s strange; I find that action to be extraordinarily sweet, now. Before, I saw only impatience, vacillation, the urgent sort of nervousness that can be resolved with a gesture, and a theatrical one, at that. Now, though, I see this automatic and therefore invisible movement as an effect of feelings as trite, but from another point of view, as true, or at least lasting, as shyness, pride, humility, and innocence. I see an automatic movement by which the species defends itself, brandishing, shall we say, its dignity. Delia’s friend lifted her hand that same way when I found her drawings, and then time and again when she thought, as we waited for Delia, that some indiscretion of mine might slip in through the silence; this was why it was necessary to speak: to keep me from scrutinizing her home. But, as I said earlier, she couldn’t find the words. G, too, lifted his hand as he stood alone on that corner: to forgive the afternoon hours that insisted on not passing, to momentarily forget the nothingness that invaded him from below, from the roots under the weeds and the expressionless landscape to every side of him. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I see that it would have been a miracle if things had been otherwise, if the two of them had not lifted their hands that way in response to something that overwhelmed them, I mean, to something that set them outside themselves, not in the sense of being unaware of their actions, but rather the opposite: of holding those actions up against the awareness that they were acting while only gradually realizing what was happening around them. It should be said that Delia, too, lifted her hand that way, though only a few times, and for a different reason, one somehow less direct and, like everything about her, more complex, sinuous, delicate, and certainly wise.
Delia’s friend lifted her hand to her hair on another occasion. It was during that legendary journey, when the man on the train showed her the photo. She made that unusual gesture, which for her only reflected her vacillation, but which the man took as the proof he was waiting for: the figure in the portrait was making a similar one. Seen in that way it seemed like an experiment or a theatrical gesture, which, in a sense, is the nature of photos, thought the man. The problem was that it revealed the full extent of its truth when confronted with reality, that is, when it was set alongside Delia’s friend as she enacted the same movement. The performance could have remained a simple performance, but instead it recovered its status as a real act in two senses: that of the person who lifted her hand, even if it was only so that the picture could be taken that way, and that of the person who chose that gesture and no other because it had a specific meaning that she wanted to transmit. And it was this last part, the dual motivation behind both the image and the reality (Delia’s friend), that confirmed for the man that they were the same person. G also made the gesture on two definitive occasions. The other one was that ill-fated morning, right after he got to the factory. At first, the young worker didn’t understand what was going on, he thought he was in the wrong place, at the wrong workstation, even at the wrong factory. Thinking like a child gradually leaving his infancy behind him, he thought it might have been an innocent prank, a game, but this idea only lasted a moment. If it was a game, it was a short-lived one that ended the moment he realized that its effects would probably last a long time. That was when he ran his hand through his hair. It would be an exaggeration to say that work in the factory came to a halt for a moment, but it would also be a graphic description of what happened. As soon as G lifted his hand to his head, his fellow workers understood that he would leave his post sooner rather than later. Simple and fleeting, though it was also habitual, in this context it was the gesture of someone who could not adapt. The operators who had taken away the old machine and installed the two new ones the night before had made the same gesture more than once during the process, just as thousands of workers do every day. But, as is always the case, a specific set of circumstances distinguished this instance from all others. Perhaps G had only wished to pause at the surprise, the way some people sigh before exerting energy; even so, it was an act that revealed more than it concealed. He made the gesture and began to withdraw. Just as he did on that corner, when it meant that he had withdrawn from everything.
I’m back in my room with a glass of water. I walked down the long hallway of cold tiles, hearing voices through the walls—alert, perhaps because of my footsteps—though the doors remained closed. I went into my room and paused at the estuary, in front of the inlaid panels of my wardrobe doors. A spurious thought came to mind, the slightest of redundancies: I thought something like, “I’m drinking water at the estuary.” On the corner of Los Huérfanos, a few feet from where the loading and unloading would take place, there were men who seemed to have trouble walking because of the weight of the merchandise they carried. Sometimes this idea was called into question, when, after one operation and before the next, some would return with their hands empty and an obvious limp. Meanwhile, the animals remained impassive, occasionally letting out a vaporous sigh that became their own measure of time. As I described earlier, it was on this corner that I would wait for Delia every day, wait for her to get off the bus with her uncertain, but firm step. I’d get more anxious with every passing minute; in one of those vagaries of emotions, which themselves can be so muddled, I was afraid she’d never arrive. It was a groundless fear, since no force could divert her; this was proven on several occasions, like when she had to make her way back on foot. I’ve wondered, sometimes, about my real feelings during those waits. Fear, anxiety, impatience, and so on. Until one afternoon I realized that there was nothing singular about those moments, that the force that made me look forward to the appearance of the bus in the distance, on the corner of Los Huérfanos, was the same one that carried me, in my thoughts, to Delia at every moment. I had fallen into the trance of a continuous date with Delia that she couldn’t cancel but which, at any time, some quirk of fate might keep her from attending. At daybreak, just as soon as I had said goodbye to her a few feet from her house, I was already waiting for her, looking forward to seeing her, wondering what I could do to make the time pass quickly and smoothly, that is, without stopping entirely before our next encounter. To say that I waited for her at the corner of Los Huérfanos isn’t entirely accurate because, in reality, I was always waiting for her, every minute of every day. Delia was the axis of my thoughts and of my actions, and I existed only insofar as my life related to her. And so, as I observed the efforts of man and beast with their loads, I was overcome by the happy anxiousness of knowing that in just a few moments, my endless waiting, which on days when the hours refused to pass could be bitter and anguished, would be temporarily rewarded.
There were evenings when walking was a pretext not even worth mentioning, because Delia and I were simply waiting for the dense night to fall so we could head to the Barrens. But even though they were a pretext, these aimless strolls had their own weight; they meant more than just the time they passed. I said earlier that to walk with Delia was to witness a change in geography; that nothing was actually altered, and that this made the change all the more evocative and extravagant. It was the same thing that happened with borrowed objects, which increased in value each time they changed hands. As I also wrote before, when Delia wore one particular skirt, whoever saw her would get the impression that it had been made especially for her. The loan flattered her and brought out her best. In a sense, I think, the cut of the skirt was secondary; Delia needed the clothes she wore not to belong to her because that way her own beauty stood out even more. Well, the geography around us was also like this. I would walk along at her side and look at her thick eyebrows, a dense forest in miniature, and then at the other landscape of real trees, the houses, gullies or, in general, the unfinished projects of nature and man; elevated by and more evocative because of Delia’s presence, the landscape seemed flawless to me. In short, she was “lending” geography a quality that was then returned to her as though by a mirror, and much to her advantage. It happened with clothing, and it was what happened with the landscape, at the factory, or in any other situation. When Delia wasn’t there, the factory seemed empty. The rest of the workers might be at their posts, doing their jobs at the machines, but it would seem like an unplanned strike or a catastrophe had emptied them of meaning and left them spinning their wheels over a void; or the opposite, that the factory had been completely deserted, even though everyone, except Delia, of course, was inside. I’ve read novels in which places disappear once the character, or protagonist, abandons them. This, which might be called one of the laws of art, can sometimes leave one profoundly uneasy, among other things because geography is never simply a backdrop; the movement of people through it, even when this falls in the realm of fiction, is what marks the variability and the persistence of the world.