Authors: Sergio Chejfec
Now we return to the present. Many years after this “not working,” as he sits in his pensioner’s armchair he inadvertently overhears one of his sons allude to Einstein’s train. He could understand the idea—the logic was fairly simple—and it seemed to be the best explanation for the anxiety he would feel when he thought the contents of the wheelbarrow might spill on him. At that moment he came to suspect that the fields, the house, his family, his chores, and even he himself were inside the rail car that the genius had used to explain his theory. The example had an immediate retroactive effect: entire blocks of memory were dislodged in the way that, when you forget one language, your former life is translated into a new tongue. Just as when he was a boy, he liked nothing more than to eavesdrop; not because he was drawn to the shameful or the improper, but because something within his bleak interior needed that complement to life found only in secrets. As he listened to his son, the man came to understand that it was not simply one of those ingenious paradoxes of the mundane; more than that, it was the explanation that allowed him to understand his origins and his new life, as he called it, in contrast the one he had led in the village where he was born. And so his memories, which could be transported back and forth from oblivion, did not belong entirely to him; they were part of the multi-purpose car that contained his family and the land. At some point he had gotten off the train, and since then had occupied his own, autonomous time. The multi-purpose car: it was an idea particularly well suited to what it was meant to communicate, a collective journey. The man was surprised to have reached old age and to have retained of his past only a simple token, devoid of value, and proof only of itself. One question had always unsettled him: What could have made him casually blot out entire parts of his life? Now he understood that the mistake lay in trying to find causes or reasons. Trains serve many purposes; the answer could be found right there in the son’s example. It was a simple comparison, an established metaphor—somewhat worn, but for this very reason, effective…
The problem was that, though the argument allowed him to understand and justify his new beginning, it also showed him that it was not new: the metaphor revealed his former life, erased until that moment. He sensed in his body, shall we say, the different accelerations that something as ethereal as time can produce. As he sat in his reduced state in the armchair that had over decades come to resemble the walls around it, listening to the uneven murmur of the voices of his sons, who were almost certainly unaware of him, the man revisited his afternoons as an accelerated stream, a continuum of eating and sleeping. The protagonist wondered about the meaning of these events, whether they might be a sign that the end was near. Each breath, every mouthful of air drawn deep, brought with it the scent of the dusk from his childhood. The same thing happened with sounds. He would have to take the wheelbarrow several times to the pit, which would later be covered over once and for all with dirt. This annual task, of resounding simplicity, seemed now to be the most decisive act of his life. One can imagine: rural time, a fixed cycle as precise as the solar year, as discrete as a whisper, and as encompassing as the world. But it wasn’t only that. That sense of time had been broken when the child had left—or, rather, been torn away—and there was no way for it to keep moving forward. He was caught in his memory of the past; the story was compressed until it reached a speed at which it occupied a single moment, beginning and end, something living that resembled an intangible trace, as ethereal yet verifiable as a shadow. So if I were to say, “That man is me,” my meaning would be clear: in life, one occupies different times.
Delia did not work for long after she got pregnant. The stony-faced workers, as I’ve described them before, would collect money in order to help the child along. A nebulous emotion filled the hearts of many of them, something between compassion and solidarity. On one hand, the group was making the necessary preparations so that its newest member—one of their own, most likely a future worker—would face the fewest possible challenges. On the other, there were plenty of occasions to curse the world and pity the child who would be born into it so insignificant a thing, a solitary castaway. From one moment to the next, the orphan would enter into a reality that was not only hard or merciless but was, above all, incomprehensible. Delia’s fellow workers could not understand it. “Another one,” they would say, “another mouth to feed.” And, a few years later, there would be two more hands that would have to add themselves to the collective labor. Thinking of it that way, as if it lasted only the flutter of an eyelid, time seemed to pass more slowly in the abstract than in practice. And yet it was shocking to see it all laid out in advance, as though life were just a day in the factory, waiting for the years to pass the way one waits between one blink of the eye and the next. Anyway, while the workers muttered about the child’s arrival and secretly organized donations to help Delia out with a few things, I spent most of my time shut away in Pedrera. Like everything else around there, like everything everywhere, the buildings were laid out in a way that was not only imprecise and arbitrary, but also inconsistent and extremely dense. This became even more obvious when you had to cross through one house to get to another, when you wanted to leave Pedrera, or when you ended up in a space that, though it was private, belonged to several houses at once. For example, my bed was next to a hallway that joined two rooms to a bathroom, which, for its part, had to be passed through to reach a cluster of houses that had been built on the far side. Sometimes I’d think about the geography of the place and find no words for the binding and eccentric routes it imposed on those who lived there, as though the simple act of walking through it were a ritual of submission to its authority. From my bed, I would watch people pass with astronomical regularity, day after day, as persistent as ants. I thought: I, who have always so admired the working class, was heartlessly abandoning the weakest representative of the species as though I were intent on its extinction. It was an idea that did not lead to any other; it lingered only as long as it took to smoke a cigarette or hung there for a moment as the voices of passersby distracted me. It was an inert phrase that did not lend itself to replies or associations, nor did it translate into words, and even less so into actions.
The morning I heard, in passing, the words “There goes Delia, the girl from the factory that got knocked up,” the certainty that something had changed shook me like a bolt of lightning. I was walking along Los Huérfanos; it was afternoon, and people were lingering in the vacillations of the siesta. At some point, from among a group of men leaning against a wall emerged the voice that said, “There goes Delia…” I looked up and down the street but didn’t see her; not then, nor when I ran to the corner. I didn’t know what to think, but I remember what I felt: instead of doubting the comment, I felt that not finding Delia right then confirmed it was true. She was hiding from me. The afternoon came to a stop; time was an ellipse in the middle of a void. It seemed as though the world were falling apart and that Delia had gone over to the side of evil. To this day I have no memory of the route I took on my way back. Who knows where I ended up wandering, I must have gotten lost looking for impossible shortcuts. If anyone had seen me arrive at Pedrera, they would have said that I wasn’t so much walking as dragging myself along. Not long after, I would be subjected to another blow, which, by the cruel mechanisms of pain, modified the first: I found the neighborhood, and especially the area around my house, steeped in humiliating normalcy. There was no sign of my tragedy there—life was content to go on in its distracted way. It was at that moment, just as I was about to reach my front door, when I felt that hand from another planet touch my body. Delia belonged to the past. The vision I described earlier, the worker who watched years unfold in the blink of an eye, was the same vision that told me that Delia belonged to a past that was at once recent and unfathomable. I said just now that she had gone over to the side of evil. This belief has stayed with me, though now, due to the obvious workings of time and memory, that evil might seem less evil and more innocent. But, then again, there’s something hidden behind all that, isn’t there? Something that makes it ominous: Delia’s innocence was a form of giving herself over to what might lie in store for her, including, obviously, my own actions. Because of this, the depth of her innocence made the evil that I inflicted upon her all the more definitive. These were the things that caused me the most grief. I wanted to sink into my sagging bed, wanted the furrow in my mattress to be a bottomless pit from which the smoke from my cigarettes spilled incessantly, like breath from the mouth of a volcano. And that’s what it was to live: passing from one embittered trance to the next. My life scanned out to a meter of minor, insignificant actions. For example, every pack of tobacco was important, every cigarette unique; every movement of my hand was categorical, every exhalation of smoke definitive; every trip to the bathroom the last, and so on. I know the syntax of despair, not unlike that of disorientation. The world feeds on fantasies, bitter ones; people spend years believing in something, an illusion that comforts, rescues, or excites. As you can see, I was thinking like someone in a state of collapse.
There was something about Delia’s situation that, though it did not contradict her becoming a mother, did contradict my unexpectedly becoming a father. It was the fact that she was a worker. This may seem outrageous, but it seemed to me that the world had thus inflicted another injury, in this case the second, upon her through me. That she, an innocent victim incapable of rebelling, had been conquered by evil despite her natural condition, which fell within the realm of good. There may be few things less worthy of mention than the injustices of the world; these are ideas that don’t generally soften the heart. For this reason, I have not found a way to explain that things should have been different with Delia. The fact that she was a worker, as I said before, was not particularly objectionable to me; to me it was part of the order of things, an order that sometimes appeared cruel, as it did now, though there was always a certain wisdom to it. But when Delia became a mother, her condition as a worker would become secondary, the hidden backdrop of her persona. Her proletarian virtue would remain a virtue, but it would fall under the shadow of another, terminal condition. And I, who had always dreamed of passing through life without leaving any trace, saw in Delia’s position as a factory worker a good match, precisely because it meant being with someone who lived on through objects but only on the provision of effacing herself, of slowly becoming nothing as her exhaustion and the part of herself that she gave over to her work increased and her energy waned; I, who had always trusted in these things, discovered, in a treacherous twist of fate, that it would not be so, that the child would live on. That was my side of it, which might seem a bit selfish. On her side, things were probably no better: we all know how it goes for mothers who work in factories, in a world made for doing one thing at a time and, in fact, for being only one thing in life.
One day, some time after returning the skirt, we walked for an entire afternoon without speaking. It goes without saying that walking was a dance imposed on us. It’s the most lasting and accessible pastime, and the one that requires the least money. The desperate walk, but so do the free. Nor is it worth mentioning that, until night fell and the Barrens opened themselves up to us, we had nowhere to go. Delia and I looked like a couple of lunatics, walking from one place to another down paths that led nowhere in particular. Sometimes we’d see dead cats in the lots as we walked along side roads; the lighter ones could be made out from a distance, the effect of their bodies crushing the tall grass into the ground. This suggested that a force greater than their own—greater than their weight, in any event—had flung them down in the vegetation. I’ve read many novels in which death cannot impose itself over nature, despite its attempts. In these scenes, however, it had succeeded: the silent bodies of the animals that, through the detritus that surrounded them, announced that their last act had been that of being tossed. As for the rest of it, as our silence grew longer, the landscape showed us its unchanging face. Delia saw no mystery in the indistinguishable structures that, solitary, imposed themselves in the middle of the lots as a mass of bricks, iron, stone, and prefabricated parts within which a second nature, different from the natural one and unique to this kind of material, seemed to act.
We followed a fence that surrounded an endless field; off to one side there was a pond no more than nine feet across that had been given the exaggerated name of “the lake.” I thought to myself that Delia’s silences proceeded from her thoughts, and that those were of the factory. I thought that, just as Delia passed her energy into every object that moved through her hands, infusing each one with a bit of her own essence, so too did the factory, as a thought, claim a small but meaningful space in her memory, if only to remind her that it was an inalienable part of her identity. There are mental states more static than thinking or sleeping; in fact, they are even more passive than what is known as having one’s mind “go blank.” Such was the single notion that occupied Delia’s thoughts as an idea of the factory. The alienation of manual labor has been widely discussed; its causes, forms, and consequences have been analyzed time and again. Still, alienation is not quite the word for the floating, yet sharp concentration that seemed to be meant as a defense against nothing in particular for Delia’s passivity, with regard to her own mechanical movements. She transported herself with her mind, just as she seemed to be somewhere else now, as she walked beside me. And it was this gift, this ability to withdraw without absenting herself, to abandon me without leaving my side, that was most aligned with her nature. That evening, the fields that stretched out to our right and our left as we walked seemed like rustic parks with an unfinished plaza set haphazardly in the middle of each. Anyone could see in it the hand of man and notice straightaway how deficient the endeavor was in such an open, listless expanse; the hurried, half-finished labor that confronted the steady growth of the vegetation shrank before the renewed proliferation of the land. But the hands of that someone who wanted to plant a garden probably never existed; we had come up with the idea of a garden ourselves when we discovered these lots that seemed to have been built up and abandoned at the same moment, as if by someone not really there. And so, Delia’s unique absence during that walk was like her torpor in the factory; they were variations on the same disposition, simply applied to different situations. To save myself the trouble of finding what might perhaps be more appropriate—but less expressive—words, I’ll call this torpor or absence of Delia’s her “proletarian disposition.” The truth is that I don’t know whether workers have a particular idiosyncrasy to them, though after meeting Delia and a few of her colleagues I tend to think that they do. In any event, I use the phrase as a simple association: the detachment in certain fundamental situations, like that of being at the machines, repeated itself in Delia in a number of different circumstances. A kind of absence, perhaps related to the quantitative actions that workers perform. Earlier I said that quantity, to a worker, is a quality stripped of calculation: the pieces can multiply infinitely, the operations divided into their most minimal expressions, yet they will always be the object of non-material thoughts—not of the factory’s inventory or the company’s gains, but of the abstract nature of accumulation, something akin to the science of numbers. Regardless of its scale, this numerical sequence projected its imprecise condition onto the objects themselves and, through them, directed itself first at the consciousness of the workers, and then to the world at large, the time of the everyday. In this way, Delia remained herself even though we were miles from the factory; an invisible thread connected one to the other. She turned her gaze to a copse of trees that, silent until that moment, suddenly came to life and stood out against the landscape; as the trees became more visible, it was Delia who began to disappear. The same thing happened with the stones and the animals we came across from time to time, and with other things, as well. She had a special capacity for imparting an overabundance of being; not a longer life, but rather a more emphatic presence. This quality, by a predictable mechanism of compensation, tended to distance her, dilute her, and make her nearly transparent, like I’ve said, just as happened every day when she took her place at the machines. In short, to continue with the comparison, this is precisely what workers do: they infuse the objects upon which they fix their attention with an excess. I don’t know if these additions improve the objects in any way, nor does it really seem worth thinking about; in any event, as Delia proved, they do make things more apparent.