Authors: Sergio Chejfec
Sometimes a person overcomes this; places, whether they are natural or artificial landscapes, have a harder time outlasting their inhabitants. When a character is lost, abandoned, or simply dead, little remains of him as a sign or promise of his passage through the scene. And when something does remain, it ends up disappearing sooner rather than later. I’ll give an example. It involves a man and a woman. She’s at an age when most people go to school, but she works in a factory. He’s much older, old enough to be her father, though, for a variety of reasons, he never could be. The man has all the typical traits of someone in a novel: undefined age and all that; his character is just a vague impression, as are, shall we say, his voice—in the broadest sense of the word—and his origins. Insignificant beings limited by a complex series of circumstances, they fall in love. But the word “love” is not strong enough. They idolize and worship one another, when they are apart they feel incomplete, that things are less beautiful, happiness unattainable, and so on. During their extended courtship, they discover the vitality of a landscape that had been hidden before, at least to them. It’s not so much that they like it, but rather that it seems like the only thing they are in a position to appreciate, or enjoy. The geography is like them: conventional yet difficult to define, somewhere between a half-constructed city and half-cultivated fields, left half completed, abandoned, despondent. The people there seemed to be living in a void. Everything looked as though it had been made with scant resources, grudgingly and from materials that seemed inappropriate at first glance, better suited to be given up than to remain. Both walk through these spaces as solitary beings and, though they’re not aware of it, the world watches them. They could go on living this life of nothing forever, but the thing that will inevitably drive them apart is already on its way: she is expecting a child. It’s likely that, even without the existence of this child, his abandoning her was already inscribed in the moment they met. Whatever the case, their story takes a significant turn: the man decides to distance himself from the factory worker and, with this, the landscape that served as their backdrop is spent, becoming a useless ornament once the curtain has closed; not unrecognizable, but prosaic. This is what I’ve been getting at. Is there a way to step outside all this and say, for example, “No, I don’t care about the end of the story, their separation, and so on. What I want is for geography to continue on its course until it fully reveals itself, expressing its value in its own terms”?
Walking along those streets that weren’t streets and seeing those structures that were either about to become, or to cease being houses, Delia and I were intrigued by the nature of our surroundings. The places we visited, our daily strolls, the passing seasons and the labors of man, and change in general; all this helped prove the reign of the permanent over the variable. Still, we couldn’t help but sense the theatricality of those cycles, especially given the regularity with which we frequented those spaces. Here or there, day or night, every place we left felt like a theater set receding behind us, eager to dissolve, sleep, or pause until Delia and I decided to give it life again by returning. This was our impression, which was real, though it ultimately proved false or mistaken. The visits I make now from time to time in the hope of recovering something are a belated indication that this was not the case, that nature did not dissolve or fold in on itself when we abandoned it. The truth is that everything seems more or less the same, recognizable and precise in its simple, natural way. As I said at the beginning, it is unsettling that geography does not change, despite the passage of time; there is something essential about it that remains forever. Many travel diaries and novels, even those that are hundreds of years old, retain an evocative fidelity: there is that tree, that column still stands, the bridge that greets the traveler, the inn that bids him farewell, the marks of the landslide that buries him. The swelling of the river repeats itself, as do the signs of the labors of man. Delia and I saw all this, too; neither of us would have denied the independent existence of reality, and yet we didn’t feel the need to believe in it, because every new day and the repetition of every night felt like the first to us. At the same time, by a predictable process of deduction that followed a simple order and an unconscious logic, if every time was the first, there must have been one right before it that had just faded into nothingness. This is why I said before that I never waited for Delia; she was always there, like a heartbeat, being sensed and fading away until the appointed time came and she appeared, small, lovely, and all-encompassing as she was, at my side. Sometimes, as she slept for those few minutes in the shack in the Barrens, I would bury my face in her armpit, also hirsute, into her intoxicating scent. They were categorical smells, strong and differentiated. There was the scent of her body, of course, the most astounding I’ve known: to say that hers was an animal scent would hardly express it; it blended the smell of a beast in the wild with the sweat of a hard day’s work. Her scent could be broken down in several ways, and by breathing each of these in, I felt I had accessed a truth that otherwise would have remained hidden. I found traces: the fabric of her uniform, a substance she worked with in the factory; I even recognized the aroma of a meal, which mixed with and was altered by the taste of her skin. I could hide in the forest of Delia’s armpit, I thought. To say nothing of that other, denser, foliage between her legs. Insofar as it centered on abundance, my admiration might seem primitive or elementary, but quantity was only a pretext for my amazement; the truth is that I was transfixed by it as by proof of the divine. I was astonished by the copiousness of Delia’s hair, which managed to expand beyond the territory assigned to it, and also by the dark density of the hair itself, which covered her skin so completely that my first response was to wonder what was hidden underneath. And then there was its coarseness, the way it stood on end with the lightest touch like, I don’t know, like fine-gauge wire. So it is, I thought as Delia slept, distant from herself: we are replaced by our parts, the fragments better represent the whole of each of us…
The material proof of this can be found in the pieces that passed through Delia’s hands day after day. Each object retained something of her, a quality that would always be a part of it. I’m not talking about anything allegorical or conceptual, but rather something that was absolutely concrete, though it left no perceptible mark. It was the fact of having been created, at least in part, by Delia’s labor. On the average morning she went to work at the factory, she undressed in the narrow hall that served as a changing room, taking off the clothes she had on under her uniform, and walked to her station to carry out the task assigned her. On that morning, as on any other, Delia was resolved to leave a part of herself behind in the fragments and very purpose of her work. Without Delia’s sacrifice—represented by her time, her effort, her energy, her meager wages and her part in the collective labor of the factory—without that sacrifice, there was no way production could go on. It was the mark left by all workers. In this case it was Delia who lived on in the commodity, however intangibly. Like a negative halo, made of shadow. In that darkness was hidden everything Delia and the other workers had not received and had not done in order to be able to give life to the object—along with everything, of course, that they
had
done and received, not only so that it could take on all the properties and qualities of a product, but also so that it could become a piece, fundamental to some, of the economic puzzle of everyday life. All those who aren’t workers recognize this; they perceive, like an anonymous sign or a warning, the mark of the proletariat on the things they own and use. It is an inescapable addition. And yet it’s not an addition, but rather an essential part. Delia knew this, of course. Even if she was unable to argue the point, she understood it through practical knowledge, through experience. This is why objects had a particular nature for her. To give an example, there is the extreme case of the skirt and the fluid nature of property, or the more mundane one of giving up her bus fare home in order to pay, indirectly and symbolically, the weekly installment on a bar of soap. Being unique, objects proliferated through invisible marks; each one was multiplied by the number of instants in a day, a lifetime, and was translated into signs that were often contradictory. The essential nature of commodities was to have a long and complex history, which was, paradoxically, interrupted at their moment of realization; that is, when they became commodities as such. Later, this history lived on in people through these reappearances and symbolic loans. Perhaps this was the source of the collective attachment to objects—the fact that they retained the marks of other ways of being used and handled, both unknown and essential, without which they would lose their true value.
Now that I’m standing at the estuary in my room I remember, through a straightforward association, Delia’s own inverted estuary. It opened like a fan from her anus, ascending her groin and spreading beyond its borders. A dizzying territory. It advanced upward, laying claim to the surface of her skin until it reached its unexpected and, I suppose, astonishing end when, overcome by a sudden weakness, it became a simple and sparse trail of down that slid into her bellybutton, almost entirely spent. Now the wardrobe, the bed, and the chair are there, as is the window that lets in a light as solid and as dense as a block. At nightfall or, rather, sometime after that, in the middle of the night, after taking even more steps across this river of wood, a light will come on in the window where, a few days ago, someone struggled to survive. It has often seemed to me that much of a person’s life is filled with thoughts that have no future. Observing a flickering flame, counting the days left in the week, readying oneself for the shock of cold metal. And this is only the beginning, by which I mean that one could also start from the premise that all thoughts are without a future because they are made to hold up a dead moment; some more obviously than others, though they all end up muddled together in their futility. I can sit on the edge of my bed and wait for night to come while staring at the walls, trying to make out what the voices that can be heard on the other side are saying. On days like this, I’m surprised by the direction my thoughts take, how they shift from one thing to another and, without warning, lead me to wonder about Delia’s fate. The word “fate” has rarely seemed more appropriate to me. I could have written Delia’s “future,” but that future would now be, in the strictest sense, the past. Fate, on the other hand, whether it has been fulfilled or not, always asserts itself as an unknown. I should say that when I left her, Delia’s reaction was so wise that, though it provoked no feeling in me then, it gradually filled me with shame. More and more, in fact; even years later, when it could be said that time should have helped the work of forgetting along, her memory moved me, and then filled me with a burning shame. Still, I had no regrets, nor did I pity Delia. Tenderness, as is well known, does not last long. It’s hard for something like tenderness to endure under any circumstances, even when the tenderest of moments is repeated. But not shame. A well-deserved feeling of shame can stay with us our whole lives, and it’s not uncommon to find shame that has been passed intact from generation to generation. As the verse goes, “The girl held, in the gleam of her dark hair, the trembling gaze that shamed the lad.” Delia took to waiting for me in the most improbable places, though not exactly in order to surprise me. I said a while ago that she was a simple creature, but I also said she was wise. With her silence and her patience she was trying to tell me that she didn’t need to speak, that the place she chose to wait and the openness of her gaze were signs enough. No matter how often this scene was repeated, how many encounters there were just like it, silent and cut short by my flight, the frankness of her gaze was unfailing. She watched for a reaction from me like someone searching for a sign of life. I evaded her, at first with my eyes and then with my body, by changing course. She never spoke; she only followed me with her gaze. She had the deranged air of a victim about her. To a stranger, she probably looked like a lost soul.
Her growing belly did not stop her. To me she seemed sweeter, rounder, and—as often happens with pregnant women—lovelier, holding up her pregnancy on legs as straight as sticks, always waiting, always with the same wistful expression. There was bewilderment in her gaze, that much was easy to see, but it was also free of demands. It was simply a gaze that wanted to be told that it was all just a bad dream, a storm that was slow to pass. Her wisdom consisted of this, and it was this that ended up making me feel ashamed. Because she made no demands of me, it was as though she were turning the other cheek while her swelling stomach offered growing proof of her dignity. She would show up alongside the thistle barrens, across from the bus stop on the corner of Los Huérfanos, just a few feet from the gully where we had seen F’s boys, on the corner (if it could be called that) of her friend’s house, and so on. As though Delia, in her need to get my attention back, understood that she needed to bring geography up to date: these were no longer the places we visited together, but rather where she had ended up waiting for me, day after day. I should also say that her strength and determination flustered me, and I responded viscerally, abruptly; I wanted the earth to swallow me whole and I fled without knowing where I was headed, only that I needed to get out of there, to get far away.
This might sound a little inappropriate, but I don’t think I’m far from the truth when I say that if Delia acted this way, it was because of her proletarian nature. As I said, few human tasks have turned resignation or waiting into an essential trait, a virtue, even. Yet this is the first thing one notices in the worker, and it is what endures in them. People often talk about the patience of farmers, the endless periods of waiting that the land endures, of the seasons weaving themselves together into a single era in which we are no more than a grain of sand in the universe, and so on, but they rarely mention the infinite patience of the worker and the intractable presence of the machines. This is because of their operational cycles, which are always visible and always repeated, and because of the transmission of energy, which, by translating itself into force, imposes the idea of a process that is unstoppable, endless, and above all, unfathomable. The legends that depict the fragility of machines, like the one in which they are destroyed by nothing more than the carelessness of those operating them, actually draw attention to the opposite, to the continuity of the machinery, which is its greatest strength, in the face of which all else recedes. The land is always telling us that it could disappear at any time, that the ground is no more solid than our perception of it. Industry, on the other hand, promises to operate forever, imposing itself on everything associated with it. Anyway, whether it is a force the worker assigns to the machines or a force that flows in the opposite direction, from the machine to the mind of the worker, what is certain is that, while the strength Delia showed by waiting any and everywhere, regardless of the weather, could be attributed to the surprise she carried in her heart—to put it one way—but it was also nourished by that intractable strength that came from her proletarian condition. Because she had a talent for showing up right in front of me, and because I obviously had to see her before I could avert my eyes, I was able to see how evenly her belly was growing. She was so young that the pregnancy paradoxically emphasized her innocence, making her seem like a girl who had discovered the secret of the game, or like prey that was not granted the hunter’s mercy. And so Delia’s belly grew and grew. Toward the end, I’d see her waiting for me, leaning up against whatever was at hand—a post, a tree, a fence, or a wall—until one day, feeling my shame ebb away, I noticed that she wasn’t there. She and the child had stepped into the dark.