Authors: Sergio Chejfec
As I said, when Delia told a story she grew even more distant from her surroundings; she’d get so immersed in what she was saying that she couldn’t be torn from her thoughts. Something might interrupt her, anything, but Delia would immediately pick up where she left off, more insistent and engrossed than before the distraction. This was not stubbornness, but rather a unique form of persistence; one more trait I have since been unable to find in anyone other than her. As soon as she left it in the hands of her friend, Delia forgot about the skirt. An article of clothing traveled from person to person, place to place, sometimes worn—in Delia’s case, in the ideal way—other times inside packages or bags, wrapped in paper, folded or rolled up in purses or backpacks. An untethered object exposed to the elements that, contrary to what might be expected, was not reduced by its circulation, but rather acquired greater meaning and renown because of it. No one cared who owned the skirt; this followed from a certain truth, which is that no one did. Its mandate was simply that it be returned. This may seem emblematic or symbolic of something else and, basically, it is; but it’s also true that this was how it happened in real life.
As we felt our way along in the dark of the neighborhood, we were covered by the starry night sky. The heavens were so flecked and the earth so black that it felt as though we were at the bottom of a cosmic well. I thought of Delia’s friend within the simple walls of her home and convinced myself that, in her way, she was still guiding our steps. At one point, I remember, some drawings left scattered on the sheets had caught my eye. I leaned in to get a better look and Delia’s friend made a gesture of irritation; she tried to hurry over to hide them from me, and was embarrassed to find that she was too late. I examined them. More than figures, the drawings represented movement; for example, the movement of a hand rubbing across paper on a dirt floor. I don’t know why, after showing me so many things, the lady of the house would rather I didn’t see these pictures. The first thing that struck me was that, if the marks depicted anything, it was largely the processes that produced them. Some of the images were faint, others less so, and their texture was varied or consistent depending on what they had been pressed against; others were delicate, a single upward stroke: perhaps someone had rejected the instrument—the ground in general—and held the paper up to the edge of a stone… I thought that the precise and extravagant surfaces were trying to say something, but that they were employing a language, a form, unknown to me. And because of this they remained mute, at first glance, like Delia’s friend. I imagined the children and adults of the household occasionally spending time tracing its surfaces, choosing a patch of ground and making a print of the pressure they exerted on the earth. The paper, a few pages carelessly torn from a school notebook, would remain as records of a certain time, a relatively limited one, considering the duration of the world. But in their simplicity, which translated into a sort of eloquence, they seemed immortalized as the symbol or incantation of something that, though it hadn’t happened yet, already manifested itself as evidence of what was to come. Perhaps I’ll return to these tracings later on. Anyway, as I was saying, on those walks through the outlying neighborhoods I confirmed that nature holds greater sway in the dark, just as beauty does. If we employed all our senses, we could hear the crackle of ants marching across the ground, the same way the smell of food, though faint, indicated what was being cooked inside the invisible houses. I don’t know. What I mean is that we were humbled by those nights: in the face of such immensity, anything we might do would simply be a consolation or an illusion.
I don’t know. I’m standing in front of the mirror now, in silence. One can search for a sign, just as Delia’s friend did for hours on end, then find it one afternoon and not understand how it could have remained hidden for so long. I remember the day I happened upon the low mirror. That’s all this place needed to feel like a hotel, I had thought. That morning I had woken up with Delia on my mind, probably a thought that had been dragged over from sleep. I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet and, as always, I was already entertaining some trivial idea. I thought: it must be morning for Delia, too. That was all, there wasn’t much more to it. That sort of banality was enough to create the illusion of a routine. As I walked to the bathroom, I listed Delia’s possible activities: waking up early, having a bite to eat, thinking about the factory and about the child, and so on. By then, I knew nothing of her life, and yet it was her, the memory of her, that rescued me every morning from complete indifference. That day, then, temporarily spared from the swirling waters into which I would sink when evening came, I went into the bathroom, stood before the mirror, and was surprised not to see my face. Reality had shifted, and no one had noticed. For a moment, an absurd idea came over me: I was afraid that the bathroom had moved. The mirror reflected a stomach, serious and expressionless. It was my bulbous abdomen, in appearance not unlike a barrel: swollen and stout, dense with skin and hair. And I had to acknowledge that, though startling, reality had been fair in its dealings, that the mirror’s new position was not a threat, just a warning, obviously from the past. I thought, immediately, how thoughts of the future have been abandoned, how everything is a struggle over what has happened, or what no longer does. I thought of the child, who would one day contemplate his own round belly, a belly not unlike this one that had pressed against Delia’s with the unexpected, though predictable, effect of conceiving him.
At times I’ve thought that if I’d heard about the child from Delia, I wouldn’t have left her. Though this is no excuse, if there should be an excuse at all, the way we learn about something inspires our reaction, whatever the facts may be. I’ve read many novels in which this happens. When I found out about the child, I withdrew past the corner of Pedrera. It was a truth so unbelievable, so unjust. Finding out from someone else made me realize that I had abandoned Delia long ago, and that reality was simply reading my indifference, prior even to this outcome, assigning a greater significance to my actions than I believe they actually had. So I turned my back on the matter and dedicated myself to that train of thought, that “reading” of reality. Although my involvement had been decisive—I was, after all, the child’s father—I felt removed from it in a way that would have been inconceivable a few days earlier. I felt the touch of an invisible hand on my skin, a hand from another planet that marked and condemned me. The first thing I thought was that I should apologize. If it was impossible to heal the wound, then I should at least do what was necessary to dispel it quickly in the day-to-day of these earthly confines. But, since I couldn’t see the hand that touched me, there was no way for me to know of whom I should be asking forgiveness. That hand, I thought, came from the future; it was the touch of the entire species. As such, there was no one in particular who could pardon me… Before that day, if anyone had told me that I was about to give her up, to abandon her, erase her from my world and cut off all contact, I would have been outraged and not believed a word of it. Delia was everything; she occupied every emotion and thought, at all hours, guiding every act and digression without meaning to. But the fact remains that I used the nine months the child needed to take shape, grow and emerge from the mother to distance myself, to avoid and pity her. This may seem contradictory, but that’s how it was; pity and obliteration, or the other way around, if you prefer. Either way, it was what I imposed on myself. From that moment on, there would be two: Delia on one hand, and the mother on the other. The mother of the child, and Delia, the subject that preceded the mother. What began as a tremor within her, probably in the empty shack in the Barrens, had, ultimately, turned into a child.
By then the woman who would meet Delia on the corner of Los Huérfanos, a neighbor or a relative who lived with her, I think, had stopped going to wait for her; I did, instead. In winter, when it grew dark earlier, or when Delia had to work a late shift at the factory, a building a few yards from the corner would emit a steady white light, uncommon in those parts, which was made use of in the loading and unloading of cargo and the transportation of merchandise from one truck to several carts drawn by mules or horses, or from several carts to one truck. There were pushcarts with four wheels, which they called shuttles; these were used to move merchandise from one vehicle to another without having to lift it. This was the use made of light at Los Huérfanos: the moving of goods. One truck, two or three carts alongside it. The men moved in silence, their backs bent, while the animals waited, impassive. Strangely, the light didn’t reach the opposite sidewalk (or what passed for a sidewalk), that is, where I would wait for Delia; this produced an effect that resembled stage lighting, as though the work were the focal point of some sort of performance. When she got off the bus, Delia would place her foot precisely at the edge of that light. Right then the shadow of the bus confused everything, making the night seem darker than it was, but as it faded into the distance Delia’s feet would remain close to the border. I spoke before of her natural tendency to occupy frontiers, thresholds and transitional spaces; the placement of her foot was a rehearsal of this trait. Similarly, she’d occupy the periphery of the group when she went out to the yard with the other, stony-faced, workers. It was a physical periphery, because she ended up situating herself at the furthest edge of the group, barely a distant satellite, the presence of which is purely coincidental and which obeys forces beyond the immediate scope of the gathering, but it was also a symbolic periphery, the result of her being a woman, or a belated girl, among men hardened by physical labor. I remember how the deliberate bustle of unloading, the effort, the halting steps of those who moved between animal and truck, were to me a precursor of the leisurely pace we would soon settle into when Delia stepped off the bus. A few yards from Los Huérfanos began the black hole of the darkened street, confined to a realm of junk, the promise of houses and imagined cross-streets. The bus, which had just dropped Delia off and was still clearly audible despite its growing distance from us, was nearly the only trace that spoke, for lack of a better phrase, of a community. To be there was to witness the early attempts at a collective will, the rudiments of a coming-together that, through some strange paradox, contained within it the impossibility of its realization. Had they read these signs in time, the few settlers of the area would have known that they would never amount to anything as such, that is, as settlers.
Delia was tired when she got off the bus; the factory consumed the workers’ strength slowly, patiently. The machine that she, in a sense, operated was hundreds of times her size. Beside it, she appeared still more vulnerable and slight. Off to one side there was some sort of workstation or counter, this was where Delia was supposed to work with several pieces at once while the machine ran smoothly, without her needing to attend to it. Given that it was doing Delia’s work, it was logical to assume that the machine was a kind of substitute, but, on the contrary, the fact that she hung on its every noise, observed its operations, corrected any irregularities and adjusted its mechanical movements from time to time together made Delia feel as though she were the auxiliary component. This muddled sense of responsibility exhausted her: it was the machine that was in charge, that set the pace, so to speak. Standing before something so coarse and rudimentary, Delia also had to perform an archaic task: that of monitoring, though some of the processes and most of the details were beyond her. Given its tremendous dimensions, it seemed incongruous that a being as small as Delia could operate it. She was able to tell by the noises it gave off whether everything was running as it should; its clattering, like that of an old train, would mingle with its pneumatic convulsions; its uniform whirring, which sounded more like a whine or the whistled language of sea creatures, indicated that a fluid was circulating through the machine: not only that which powered it, but also another, some raw material. The machine consumed many things, aside from the workers’ labor, Delia would say. Energy, raw materials, time, effort, and so on. As the machine performed its task, Delia would perform hers, which was twofold: to listen and observe, and to sit at her workstation and put her hands to use while the formidable clanging of enormous hammers emanated from every corner of the factory and mingled with the general din. Just below where the factory ceiling met the wall, there was a window. Light filtered through the entire factory from that single point, making visible the particles that floated in the air. One night, a little while after getting off the bus, Delia told me that she couldn’t remember how she had started working there. This made sense, given that she considered anything related to the factory to be a virtue; it was a point of pride and was doubtless what endowed her with her fullest and most complete identity, the trait that allowed her to feel like herself when confronted by the outside world, without shame. A feeling akin to omnipotence, or something like it: the world could threaten to end, to stop existing from one moment to the next, and the worker would be the figure best suited to prevent its collapse.
I’ve read many novels in which people live in a world without time; I mean, one without linear, psychological, or cosmological time, or any other kind. Reduced to acting on a few instincts, an animal of any species has a more tangible effect on time than man does. A person closes a book and is surprised by the abyss of the day to day, with the varying scales and speeds of time, fast or slow, which leave a fine, invisible layer on the surface of things. Like dust in an empty room, these layers settle uniformly and without hurry; the difference is that they accumulate without building up, so they are always the same thickness and can be lifted as one, regardless of how much time has passed. Like time, which cannot be seen, these are invisible layers that cannot be touched. I’ll give you an example. The character in this book is an immigrant laborer who has reached his twilight years. In his home country, he worked from the time he was a child, but a complex process of mental ellipsis has led him to believe that he only started doing so after he emigrated. The fact that, from the time he was eight, he left his soul on the bleached, unpredictable soil of his village from Monday to Sunday, is stored in his memory in a different form, not under the heading “work.” He thinks, for example, of the wheelbarrows of shit he used to have to cart around, and what they evoke isn’t the hardship—the missteps, the frustration, the cold, the dark—but rather the time that, suspended, refused to pass. It was a rickety old wheelbarrow, heavier than what it could carry, overflowing with whatever his family had unloaded into the latrine over the course of the year. He knew that his father’s steps had left their mark on the path, prints too big for his own feet. Each time he stumbled, the experience confirmed that he was walking a course someone, none other than his father, had followed before, leading him to think that time advanced only through the repetition of actions. These were not the repeated actions of the deranged, the absentminded, or the desperate, but rather a repeated representation, the footstep that conceals the one before it and anticipates the one that follows. As though the subject were the action itself (carting shit, chopping wood, weeding the garden, and so on), and not the person who carried it out. This gave the boy the feeling of inhabiting a static, lasting, monotonous time. Nonetheless, he realized that this immobility was relative, because just a bit farther ahead he would use the last of his strength to tip out the contents of the wheelbarrow. This thought, simple and undeveloped from various perspectives, indicated to him that irreversibility permeated the base and the sublime in equal measure. It wasn’t that he was especially moved by cyclical things—seasons, gradual variations in the landscape, work in the fields—it was that he felt himself part of a time that was free, compact, and tightly bound; impossible to break apart.