Authors: Sergio Chejfec
Delia said something like “I walked back from the factory.” Only then did I realize that I’d been waiting longer than I should have, that the beasts and workers loading and unloading had distracted me. The light shone directly on the animals’ bodies, while the men’s shadows snaked around their feet. Scattered on the ground, discarded merchandise that would soon be forgotten completed the scene of measured, or at least engrossing, activity. A rudimentary task, I thought: lifting and moving, loading and unloading. Why are we so easily distracted by elementary things, like fire, for example? There I stood, with my head in the clouds, as they say, looking at the sidewalk across the way, when suddenly Delia appeared and—without even having entirely arrived, emerging from the evening like a shadow—transported me to a parallel dimension, a complement reality, before I’d had a chance to get over my surprise. “It’s nothing, I came from the factory on foot,” her smile repeated. I didn’t manage to get a question out at the time, but it was all very unusual. She turned and circled around in front of me; without saying a word, she took my left arm, ready to start walking—or rather, in her case, to keep walking. Had I asked, Delia could have responded truthfully, but I didn’t, and so to this day I have no idea what she was not telling me. A payday pushed back, a transportation strike, lost money; there were numerous possible explanations, many of them plausible. Sometimes one doesn’t ask for fear of ruining things, other times reality seems to conform to one’s expectations, and questions seem unnecessary. And sometimes, as I said before in different words, one doesn’t ask the question in order to avoid the answer one already knows. At the time, I knew very little about Delia, yet it never occurred to me to ask her questions. Questions frightened her, and perhaps made her weakness more evident. There’s no need to repeat that Delia expressed herself in long silences, or that, when she did speak, her words always seemed to be too few. Not so much because what she said was incomplete, but rather because you got the impression that during the brief time you had been hearing her voice, which was itself weak, something that had been on the verge of being said had taken on a different form, one that was just as communicative as words or gestures, but of another kind of eloquence. It was a negative eloquence, the realm of the anti-word, at the opposite end of the spectrum from silence. Her reserve was that of a worker, which makes sense. A muteness made of nothing, but categorical nonetheless. It is often thought that the most hermetic types live in rural areas: the shepherd who says no more than he must, the silent islander, the inscrutable farmer. People of an arboreal silence that is perceived as being profound. I think that the silence of people from the country is a reluctance to talk, a kind of ignorance or shyness; that of the worker, heir to the other side of muteness, however, is a complex silence run through with intrigue and contradictions, developments, distractions, and, above all, moral implications. The worker’s silence—I know this because of Delia—is static; unlike rural silence, it transmits nothing, or very little, and when it does, its complexity makes it a contradictory form of communication. This lack of expressiveness becomes a stumbling block that disorients us, offering incongruent yet mutually reinforcing messages that can’t be understood as a group, but don’t exist separately, either.
I trusted that the meaning of those silences would come to me, to no avail. The scent of summer, which lingered into that autumn due to a persistent wind from warmer parts, brought with it the self-fulfilling promise of the seasons. The scent of water, of gradual decomposition, and of spontaneous rebirth. When Delia arrived and took me by the arm I understood, as soon as I heard her remark, the extent to which she occupied a different time, one that had not caught up to the present moment. This, as I said before, was one of the traits that made her unique. The subtle way she occupied a slight afterwards, to put it one way, or a slight before, a sort of chronological “barely.” It was from this delay that she spoke; perhaps this is why her voice sounded so weak and why her words referred to something on the verge of being left behind, something that never took place at that precise moment. That was how she moved, along two different tracks. She would be with me, for example, she could have felt herself entirely at my side, and yet there would be a part of her that wasn’t there. And when I say a part, I’m talking about time, not space. This, of course, might be hard to take literally, but I can’t say it any other way. Before, I suggested that Delia had a number of simultaneous existences. One of these stood out: the one that was true, the product of her work in the factory. That building, which seemed so solid but was in fact old and in ruins, radiated one of the few forms of truth, that is, being the place where things were transformed, where human labor combined with inert materials to produce merchandise, those objects one later buys, if one can. That coarse yet important structure was also a ferment of emotions, almost always individual, which were experienced in that unique dose of existence characteristic of the worker, who was often unaware of them. This did not make them any less natural, though they could occasionally seem artificial. Some time later, the mystery of Delia’s return from the factory on foot would be revealed. We were listening to the first stirrings of the birds as night came to an end; we had left the Barrens behind us and were walking along streets so dark it seemed as though, in that place, the night were nothing more than a vast and inevitable black hole—undivided, as Borges would say—when Delia began to explain to me, in her fine thread of a voice, why she had walked back from the factory that day. It turned out to be a long story. What started as just another comment made after a couple has walked a long time, sated by love and confused by weariness, became an actual story that Delia had to recount over the course of several encounters. A person, whom we’ll call F, had been caught in the net of accumulated interest imposed by the moneylenders who surrounded the factory. Not all the workers had been able or willing to help, and what they had scraped together hadn’t been enough to pay off the debt. F had felt it necessary to wear a disguise every day on his way in to the factory, and to leave wearing a different one: it was his only option. Sometimes the disguise was a stratagem, other times a theatrical ruse enacted against the backdrop of the wide gates of the factory in order to avoid being recognized by his creditors. He was in no position to head out to the yard during the break, either; F had to stay inside then, hidden, observing the movements of his fellow workers and the watchful eyes of the moneylenders, who would gather on the other side of the fence to wait for the day to end and, in the process, for him to appear.
Workers, Delia told me, are not always paid enough to cover the things they need. That’s why there are people who make loans, because when Tuesday comes around and the worker has to make do until he is paid on Friday, often not even having enough to cover transportation, the extreme, and sometimes only, option is to turn to them. These are subsistence loans: they might amount to the value of a few round-trips or food to last a couple days. And because of this, because they aren’t considered “meaningful investments,” just as those who take them out aren’t about to mount large-scale operations, they are charged the highest interest rates. Ten can turn into twenty over the course of five days, Delia told me. The smaller the loan, the higher the interest. There was a sort of penalty for taking out small loans; the moneylenders probably had no other way of guaranteeing their business, which was almost certainly limited. But then, there was also their tactic of harassing the indebted worker. Delia had to borrow once. It was a Thursday morning (the moneylenders go every morning except Fridays, payday, when they show up in the evening). She needed money to buy a bar of soap, which had run out earlier than planned. Faced with the alternative of not being able to bathe for a day, the household preferred that she take out a loan. Sometimes it’s easier to go into debt that way than it is to ask something of someone who won’t charge interest, Delia told me. It wasn’t a matter of pride: if I understood correctly, it was an act imposed by collective thinking. Since money was a scarce good among the working class, it could not circulate in a non-utilitarian way, that is, in a way that did not satisfy a need. Goods that had no exchange value, like clothes, tools, or utensils, or even materials and labor, could change hands, but rarely food and never money. The proof that this was the effect of more than just the law of scarcity (that which is not abundant does not circulate) lay in the fact that the workers were ashamed to ask for money. Paradoxically, this led to their misreading the behavior of the moneylenders, whose onerous interest was viewed as a punishment, harsh but fair. Just like their proletarian identity, which is only acquired under certain circumstances, this concept of money belonged to the worker alone, contributing to the personal mythology of each and shaping the way their families thought about the world.
A disguise, a visual alibi. A word is not always just that one word, as many novels show. In his difficult situation, anything that could hide him took on the quality of a disguise for F, whether or not it had to do with his apparel. The moneylenders searched for him among the crowd, but eventually gave up thanks to the mimetic talents of the workers: dressed almost identically, their bodies had been worked over in similar ways by the similar movements they performed, and the way they all stood around, facing the street and the world beyond; these were things that effaced individual differences. As a group, they didn’t look like anything in particular, though they were marked by their lack of differentiation. F’s problems went on for a long time, but not long enough to serve as a lesson to his peers. Their exact duration was hard to discern, since they scanned out in trials and tribulations more than in events as such. At one point, the moneylenders threatened to stop making loans entirely if F did not pay off his debt, which had swelled over time. For his part, F never considered leaving the factory in an attempt to avoid payment; his alternatives were more radical. Taking his life, for example. The thing is, the worker is ashamed to be in debt, he feels it calls his very nature into question. In certain cases, like that of F, the inability to pay added a layer of tragedy because, deep down, he didn’t see suicide as a last resort to avoid the problem, but rather as a payment in full. In a completely literal sense, he was capable of feeling that he should “pay with his life.” The lender would probably not recoup his investment this way, but would be compensated by being proved right. And so, the meaning of money would once again be revealed through death. Extensive experience with loans, diverse and sometimes inconsistent feelings toward his debtors—a long history of managing such things had taught the moneylender to gauge the subtlest of reactions, and in this case he knew that F’s evasiveness was not just a matter of not being able to pay, it was also due to his having discovered “the debtor’s truth,” as the lenders called it, which was that death was the ultimate guarantor. For their part, the other workers, aware of F’s practical options and emotional dilemma, grew worried. The suicide of a worker meant the sacrifice of the archetypal member of the species, or the class, in this case. It’s not that F stood out in any particular way; on the contrary, each individual needed to possess a degree of neutrality if he wanted to belong to the tribe, yet there are certain actions that plant themselves like flags, assuming a level of representation that had not existed before. It was precisely this circumstance, that the representation would inevitably be passive, as it was embodied by a dead colleague, that the factory workers feared.
As Delia recounted all this, I realized that I must have seemed like another moneylender when I would stand by the fence to watch her during the break. As I wrote earlier, I noticed that I was surrounded by people whom I took to be curious onlookers. Perhaps the movements of the workers, that close, deliberate choreography that had seemed like some eccentric ritual, those steps that caught my attention for being so minute and insubstantial; perhaps those movements were part of the ruse, the disguise, meant to keep F hidden. The moneylenders stared intently at the group, just as I did when looking for Delia. And yet, as I recall, the gaze with which the workers met ours was somewhat ambiguous, at once an entreaty and a sign of indifference; there was no hint of defiance or indignation, nor, though this may be hard to understand, were they trying to deceive. It was the gaze of someone who just looked away but is still glancing sidelong to see whether or not they’ve remained the focus of attention. As is so often the case, it’s at the point nearest innocence that the most vile or insidious scenes are produced, or at least the ones most difficult to assimilate or understand in the most general sense—that is, if they’re not entirely incomprehensible. And so, the meaning of those moments escapes me now as it did then, though for other reasons. The scene witnessed from the other side of the fence, which to me was about the interest a few workers could spark during their break, as they dedicated themselves to the idleness permitted them by the factory rules, which were otherwise very strict, turned out to be scenes of surveillance and, in some ways, evasion. Delia already knew quite well that life isn’t easy; young as she was, she also understood that things could always be worse. The only thing she hadn’t yet discovered was that passivity can be limitless, and F showed her this. There was a strange approachability to the way F avoided his pursuers, which he did without really putting anything into it, as though it were a bleak and arbitrary procedure executed for reasons unknown. Proof of this was the listless or, rather, inexpressive demeanor with which he made only the slightest attempt to dissolve among so much matter. Few things generated a response in him; since every day he retreated a bit further into his withdrawal, this surprised no one. And so, F displayed certain qualities characteristic of the worker in a casual but pronounced way. Most notable among these was the pressure traditionally put on the worker to become one with his machine, not necessarily that he should join himself to it but rather, and more simply, that he should become its agent. I mentioned all this briefly with regard to Delia—her practical simplicity, her mental distance; in a way, these qualities found their fullest expression in F.