Текст книги "The Dark"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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I had been mistaken about the phrase “pick up some clothes,” the same way I had been about what I’d wanted to see and not to see when I discovered where Delia caught the bus. “Picking up some clothes” meant, to me, “picking up some clothes I lent someone.” This was evidently a specific reading, not exactly wrong, but incorrect. It was also less straightforward than the one I had not wanted to imagine, but which was true all the same: that Delia needed to borrow clothes because there were times when she had nothing else to wear. I discovered this a few days later, under sad circumstances, when she had to return what she’d borrowed. We were walking along a dirt road. It had rained the day before, and as the earth dried out, the steam that rose from the puddles smelled of mud, a scent that called to mind roots, leaves, fruit, and animals or insects, all mixed together. The smell was strong, unmistakable; it felt like being within centimeters of the ground, to that height just above the surface where the particles float at the mercy of the air, the weather, and the movements of the earth, which lift them and then let them fall again, forming a crust in a state of permanent suspension, a halo of proximate gravity. Anyway: we were walking along, upright, as saturated with the humid scent of the mud as if we had been close enough to taste it, when Delia suddenly said, “I hope a car doesn’t splash me, I have to return this skirt tomorrow.” The skirt was dark, blue or black, depending on the light. I had been reflecting on the skirt all along, since I noticed that it made Delia’s hips, so attractive in their innocence and the harmony of their shape, more attractive still. As she walked, her legs seemed to be holding up a mystery, a bud waiting for the right moment to burst open and unfurl. What I mean is that the skirt seemed to have been made for Delia, that its essence or meaning was only fully realized when, as is always said of the primary function of attire, it shielded her from the elements. But this impression crumbled as soon as I heard her remark. It took me a while to understand that such loans could belong to an order as natural as any other – possession, for example; the idea that the skirt had been made especially for Delia was no less true because she could only wear it when it had been lent to her. This gave the loan a new significance: it was the alias fate had chosen to reveal a truth, in this case one that involved Delia, which otherwise would have remained hidden.

That afternoon, I also discovered that the concept of a loan might encompass different, even contradictory, meanings. A loan, a debt. I’ve read several novels that try to determine the meaning of these words. I don’t know if they succeed; in any event, none present a model of loans or debt that resembled the way Delia seemed to see them. Delia believed that a loan could never be repaid in full, that the loan itself brought about a decisive change in the general course of events, and therefore that the idea that giving something back was a repayment, compensation, or a return to normal was misguided and incomplete. She believed that the loan remained active over time, even after it was paid back. This was because the object, in this case a skirt, retained traces of its various owners, or rather, of the various people who had used it over time. These marks, which made the objects unique and unmistakable, were invisible to the average person yet were indelible in the eyes of the community. With each new loan, the collective appreciation of the object – here, the skirt – grew. The article of clothing itself could deteriorate with use and circulation, but this damage was mitigated by the greater care everyone would take of it. As such, time limits were rarely imposed on these loans. Not because there was no pressure to return the item, but because, since the object was marked by each custody, the debt was reproduced in the memory of the community. That was debt, according to Delia: a repayment that was both unnecessary and always deferred. It was clearly a definition far removed from material concerns, at least, as these are generally understood. And this in spite of the fact that she lived, as perhaps I’ll describe later, with the daily reminders of that other, broader type of loan, the kind geared toward profit. It’s true that even before that moment, it had been obvious that the skirt could not have belonged to Delia; still, my surprise when I discovered it wasn’t hers was an effect of that part of the obvious we don’t want to acknowledge. The obvious side of things seems innocent, insubstantial, there for the sole purpose of holding up the hidden face of what is not obvious. And yet, the world organizes itself according to what is revealed. In this way, Delia’s comment about the loan added a measure of truth to what was already evident, and the weight of this reality became more pronounced.

I saw her several times in her uniform when she went out to what the workers called the yard, the perimeter around the factory where the patchy grass was a surreal shade of gray. I’d watch Delia from the other side of the wire fence during her afternoon break: always wearing the same nondescript clothes in the same drab color, sometimes sitting on the crate. Like the clothing of her fellow workers, Delia’s was inseparable from what it represented, from the function it served, had served, and would always serve. A kind of nakedness manifested itself through these clothes. A nakedness that made the skin seem useless, inexpressive. I watched her cohort: a gray, formless mass among which Delia was a twinkling star, a light on the verge of being absorbed, or of breaking free in the form of its own miniature. Workers gathered during the break, silent and barely moving. I remember them looking resigned, dressed in the same color and covered by a shadow that moved over them slowly, like a cloud. That mix of shadow and light, an effect that at first appeared random, but which followed a mysterious order, was the only noticeable movement. There was nothing to be revealed there, apart from the hum of the group, the glimmer of Delia, and the factory’s imposing presence. A few of the workers had their own habits and customs; still, I don’t think I would be doing them any great injustice if I said they behaved like a herd. They kept to the furthest corner of the yard, reached by a worn dirt path. Even the short break the factory allowed them was long enough to make them restless; one could sense their discomfort, the impatience that united them, but against which they also needed to defend themselves. As Delia once explained to me, this was because they spent most of their time in the factory, focused on their machines, surrounded by the metal particles that floated in the air and that constant, loud clanging. And yet, I thought as I observed Delia and her fellow workers from outside the fence that surrounded the factory, what would under different circumstances mean standing out – doing something unusual, stepping outside one’s habitual environs – was precisely what made them nebulous, what reduced them. From a distance, they seemed to withdraw into themselves, huddled together against the surrounding expanse. This amorphousness united them, underscored their status as part of a group rather than as people. There is an expression, which is perhaps a bit harsh and also fairly ambiguous, but is illustrative in this case: “collective body.” That is, not something connected with institutions or hierarchies, like a labor union in a factory, but rather a being made up of numerous identical individuals with a molecular life of its own. Some of the workers moved in orbits around the rest, others followed a more complex trajectory, passing in front of some and behind others without a clearly defined course. Then there were the individual movements: someone would lower his head, rest his hands on his hips or shoulders, and so on. In any event, the observer was witness to an unclear and vaguely theatrical scene, in which the gray uniforms of the workers, distorted by variations in the light, fused the movements of the group and revealed them as mere concentrations of color and depth.

I would be standing at a distance from them, on the other side of the fence – today that wire mesh has become a dense, solid grille – or even on the other side of the street, in fact, and notice that I was not the only one transfixed by the scene. Little by little, the corner filled with people who stood watching the formless tribe and its smooth, controlled movements, just as I did. I think the sensation of witnessing a special kind of ceremony – in this case, the rudiments of a rite celebrating idleness; a scene that unfolds only insofar as it is observed, that has neither beginning nor end, but rather has the steady temperament of animals, undistracted and uninterrupted – I think this sensation of confronting an excess of nature derived in large measure from their attire. Fat or thin, tall or short, the whole group wore its uniform like a second skin. I’ll talk later about the connection the workers had to this second skin, about the cruel paradox it inflicted upon them when they had to choose between saving themselves and remaining themselves. For now I’ll just say that the uniforms collectively evoked the most obvious thing, that is, the clothing of prisoners and so on; on another level, though, repeated across the bodies of Delia and her peers, creating the play of light and movement I described earlier, they produced a different effect: a sense of exaggerated volume, a mass, like a topographical feature that had emerged out of nowhere.

Delia stood out in this anonymous, yet paradigmatic, scene. Things took on a greater value with her; if there was a general air of indifference, she was the most indifferent of all, and where there was grace to be found, it obviously came from the most graceful person present: Delia. She moved among the rest like one more member of the family, but also like someone who knows she’s one of the chosen few. In this case, the distinction was even greater, because she was also “my” chosen one. Through her clothing, Delia showed signs of the work she did in the factory. And though sometimes these marks made me think she did work unsuited to a body like hers, I should say that, at other times, I felt a vague sense of satisfaction – something between pride and compassion – at the wounds that appeared on her second skin. When the whistle sounded and Delia rolled down her sleeves to go out to the yard, the part that covered her forearms revealed the shirt’s former appearance. In the contrast between the protected and the exposed fabric, one could imagine the time she spent at the machines. This was one way of knowing what went on inside the factory, one way of glimpsing that hidden truth. We can read or hear about life in a factory, learn about the work that’s done there, the processes that are carried out, the rules that are followed, and so on, but the fact that we receive each new detail greedily, always hungry for more, is proof of how little we really know. In that same way, I pored over Delia’s uniform when she lowered her sleeves: I wanted to find the detail, the accidental mark that, together with clues I had received earlier, would allow me to reconstruct her shift. Clothes are particularly good for this, aren’t they? I’ve read many novels in which characters study the clothing of others to learn something about them, something their words don’t say and their actions don’t reveal. There are even novels in which someone is fooled by clothing, though they know it to be a prime form of trickery. This was not the case with Delia. Much is written about the accessory, but very little about the essential. Earlier I said that when the workers gathered in the yard, the light reflecting off their worn clothes was like that of a cloud blanketing the sky and covering the bodies below with the fleeting memory of ash. Well, I was wrong: it was actually that their silhouettes were suspended in a translucent liquid, as though enveloped by a shadow projected from the ground. The movements of this reflected light deformed their bodies, and yet one could also say it gave them life, in that it was these variations that made them visible. Put like this, I’m not sure the metaphor reveals anything; still, there is little to reveal. One doesn’t write to uncover what is hidden, but rather to obscure it further. If that is what I’m doing now, it is because everything about Delia and all the rest of it speaks for itself with absolute clarity; given the eloquence of the events themselves, I can fall silent.

I remember one afternoon, they saw me from the yard. The sun hit the ground with a sudden and tremendous force, discrediting the millions of miles that separated one from the other. My thoughts wandered between the workers and our distance from the sun; I got distracted by ideas of a basic symbolism, like the paradox that, since all the energy in nature is derived from the sun, the workers embodied a power that holds reality up and drives it forward. The group acknowledged me, not as Delia’s boyfriend, but rather as a passer-by – they had to call me something – straining to see them, whose attitude fell somewhere between admiration and shock. The observer dreams of being anonymous, as everyone does. I felt exposed when they noticed me; for a moment it seemed as though their clothes were no longer the reflection of something else. Something told me there was no reproach in their silence, and that they were willing to do whatever was necessary – if they were called upon and knew what to do – to ensure that my contemplation of them would not be interrupted. No one looking in from the outside would have noticed anything unusual, and the truth is that nothing unusual was going on. Though the sum of its parts confirmed that this was, in fact, what I was seeing, the slightest disruption of any detail could have changed the situation entirely. For example, it could have been a party out in the country, with farmhands about to down their umpteenth drink while the country girls breathed in their desire, as they had already been doing for some time. But the group of workers was more than the sum of its parts; embedded within it were the elements that I, summoned for no apparent reason and with little enthusiasm to this factory rite, had added. At some point it occurred to me that they were waiting for me to decide the show was over, turn, and continue on my way. Just as I had invented them as a herd or a choreographed troupe, as an object to be observed and examined, I would imagine their existence had come to an end, like someone getting up to shut off a television set. Of all the different kinds of uniform, that of a worker is the most necessary, the most natural. I’ve seen people become workers the moment they put on that uniform for the first time. And so Delia, I said to myself, was one of them. I mentioned her uniform earlier, calling it her second skin, the garment that allowed a deeper essence to show through. Now it seems more like a first, rather than a second, skin; that there was more truth in the clothing than in the skin itself.

Delia was worried that a car might splash mud on her skirt, though it was obvious that it would be days before a car passed through there. That street typically didn’t see traffic for weeks at a time; the tracks left by the vehicles gradually wore away, leaving behind shallow grooves where water collected, a record of the infrequent transit. We got to the house where Delia was supposed to return the skirt, isolated in the middle of what was theoretically a block, though it had no visible borders. The lots were marked by wire, dilapidated fences, or piles of stones and broken cinderblocks meant to suggest walls. There were no other structures, though I have a memory of walking along a corridor. There were no trees, either, just a few prickly shrubs and a bit of grass that grew precariously between them. The narrow, winding path was a rift worn by footsteps headed toward the house, which rose from the middle of the vast lot as though it were the center of the universe. As we walked, I thought about the night and, obviously, the thistle barrens, remarking to myself that differences mean less in the dark. Creatures of the light, humans need to adjust themselves to the night. The little path that led to the house was like one you might find in a forest, but there were no trees to be seen; it seemed extravagant in its simplicity, gratuitous in that it crossed nothing worth crossing. The owner of the skirt, who needed it that night, was waiting at the other end. The house was a hovel; in this, too, it resembled the thistle barrens. Delia opened the door without knocking or saying a word, and we stepped into a large, empty room. Dirt floors, rickety furniture, scattered appliances spotted with rust that was a deeper red than the ground. I won’t elaborate on the scene; I’ll add only that the windows were holes with sharp and irregular borders punched out of the walls, the kind you see in a poorly cut piece of sheet metal. My mind turned to the house, the neighborhood, to the poor sort of poetry that emerged from them; it was a scene that at first glance appeared weak, worn, on the verge of collapse. At one point, Delia stepped out to get changed. She came back in an old pair of pants, which I recognized, with the skirt tucked under her arm. She wasn’t gone long, no longer than it would take anyone to take off a skirt and put on a pair of pants, but it was long enough for me to think that the house – and not just the house, but the whole area – lacked both a past and a future. I could see traces of the labor of man, of the distracted signs of routine, the growth of a community, and so on; still, these were the marks of an invisible labor as accidental as that of nature. People working diligently, like ants, without a clear purpose and at the mercy of chance…

When Delia’s friend stepped out a little while later to try on the skirt, or simply to put it on, I wondered whether we didn’t pass through this world as anonymous beings, driven by a force at once innocent, merciless, and brutal. Delia felt protected from this power and, thanks to her condition – as a woman and a worker – resisted its influence. I have often thought that it is workers, with their bodies and the force they exert at the expense of their own energy, who atone for our indifference toward the world; that first, foremost, and in a literal sense, they pay out in labor what they receive as wages – an amount never equal to the true value of their efforts – but also that they pay for that which has no price, that is, for the infinite debt racked up by humanity. I was familiar with the operations whereby Delia’s friend would take off her clothes and put on the skirt: universal maneuvers that, in this particular case, were meant to confirm that it still looked good on her, as they say. The friend was out there somewhere, barely protected from prying eyes by the walls of the shack, or in the narrow bathroom, where the absence of light could be misleading: mistaking darkness for size, one ended up banging one’s feet and elbows against the walls. The kitchen was in one corner of the house; within its limited radius, a dense concentration of objects alluded to constant and, though it may seem contradictory, discontinuous actions. Delia was silent; she seemed to be thinking only of the imminent return of her friend. This was not exactly a thought, but it would be excessive to call it a premonition. We were taking part in one of the millions of micro-scenes that everyone enacts, all the time. The movement of the air could be heard, punctuated occasionally by drafts that whistled through the walls when the breeze picked up. At that moment there was little to say, so we didn’t speak for a while. In one corner, a gas burner rested unstably on the cylinder that fed it, surrounded by a jumble of pots, pans, and jugs, each set in the exact spot dictated by its use; this space was the origin of the invisible thread that tied the home together. It was palpable: the heat that warmed milk for the little ones, food for the adults, and so on, extended throughout the home and the time that existed within it, leaving its indelible mark. It was the presence that, for example, would allow the blind child to know that this was the interior of his own home, where his family lived. The rest of the dwelling was in shadow, and though the darkness was similar to that of the kitchen, everything in it was harder to see, more confused; the tangle of blankets, mattresses and pieces of foam rubber thrown together at absurd angles, like fallen dominos, belonged – or seemed to follow – to a logic that differed from, or contradicted, that of the kitchen. Whereas the kitchen signified a concentrating force, the rest of the house suggested a force of diffusion. It was there that dreams and desires went about their work, the space, even, in which bodies tried to escape themselves. At that instant, the two orders stood at bay, coexisting in an unconditional peace; this was the resonance of the moment. One could picture two sleeping armies unaware of their own weakness, their own narcissism and, most of all, their respective opponents.

I’d had nothing to say earlier, either, when Delia went to take off the skirt and I found myself alone with her friend. She was almost certainly waiting for a platitude, some incidental remark (even if nothing I said could be described as such), but I felt that the person who united us, Delia, was also the line that divided us, a barrier that could not be crossed. The walls were more articulate: the corner where the kitchen stood, as dark and cluttered as a shrine, said more than the distracted silence of Delia’s friend. It was into the hands of this transparent being that Delia would deposit that most delicate and flattering of skirts, I thought; the article of clothing that made her even more unique, that made her stand out to me as my chosen one and made the strongest case for the natural quality of her beauty. This could be understood as another of the paradoxes imposed on us by the notion of property: things don’t always belong to the right person; aside from those who have very little, most people don’t feel they have enough. They always want more, or different, things. I’ve read many novels that turn a blind eye toward property; characters come and go, or stay, forget one another, carry on. The same goes for actions. But this omission of property is a mistake, because the universe built around it is taken for granted as natural. This might have been a good topic for breaking the silence with Delia’s friend, but I missed that opportunity as well. I have forgotten her name but still recall the image of her fingers playing with the hem of the shirt she wore that afternoon. It was green with little pictures of dried fruits, walnuts, chestnuts, and so on printed on it. When its owner’s fingers closed around the fruits as though naïvely trying to pick them, they revealed the unexpected, though logical, justification of the pattern.

Though according to Delia they were the same age, her friend looked older. Like everyone else in that meager community, she had been born in the provinces. When she was still a girl, her mother’s brother sent for her. Someone, she did not remember who, took her to the station to put her on a train. On the platform, she saw men smoking cigarettes that were remarkable for their whiteness. She had always been fascinated by the things with which men surrounded themselves. Whether these were handkerchiefs, key rings, or cigarettes, Delia’s friend revered them in a way that was passing only insofar as it moved from one object to immediately settle on another. During the trip she watched someone smoke in an enclosed space for the first time, but what really startled her was the flash of something shiny one man held to his chest. He was sitting with his back to her at the other end of the car. To catch a glimpse of the metallic object without knowing what it was, to worship it as an element of the masculine, but not to recognize it: this threefold sensation multiplied her anxiety. The next morning the passenger took a swig from it and she discovered that it was a flask. Now she knew what the object was, but still wondered what its name could be. This renewed ignorance doubled the mystery and increased her fascination. For the rest of the trip she had thoughts, daydreams, like these; if there was something worth knowing it was these objects of men and the promise they held of lasting happiness, not the sad life out in the country. When the train arrived at its destination, Delia’s friend readied herself to get off. She grabbed her bundle of clothes and her little suitcase, looked at her shoes, and paused. She felt she should prepare herself, that after so many days the moment had finally come. Though he had gone to meet her, her mother’s brother hid when he saw her standing alone on the platform. She sensed a presence, the weight of a gaze upon her, but did not know where it was coming from. Her mother’s brother never did reveal himself, but he went on observing her. He had no particular reason for doing this; his behavior was the product of a vague idea regarding family: that it was at once a lasting bond and a connection always on the verge of being lost. Because danger lies hidden where security takes root. And there is nothing more dangerous than a niece, thought the man. The girl stood on the platform until nightfall. There are many novels that say: One never stops waiting, though a lifetime may go by. She was already homesick; this was clear to her even though she was generally used to ignoring her feelings. But what kept her from turning back was the same force that had driven her forward and not, ultimately, the presence of her uncle, whom she imagined was still waiting for her. To her, waiting was a state that never ended. And so the two of us waited patiently for Delia to return, wearing her regular clothes, with the flattering skirt tucked under her arm.

Once accustomed to the smells inside the shack, one could make out the scent of the wilderness, or at least certain scents associated with something called the wild. From one direction came a moist, warm vapor heavy with sharp odors and unclassifiable particles; from another, the familiar smell of turned dirt, a combination – cold, in this case – of roots and stones that one immediately associated with darkness and depth. These smells were the only commonplace things there. What I mean is that they were the only things that indicated the presence of a known, familiar world. I could say, though the statement might seem a bit outrageous, that it was only because of these smells that I was in “my country.” They made their way in and lingered, vanishing only when a new set of odors took their place. I’ve read many novels in which scents allow lost memories to be recovered, showing that stronger, truer connections reveal themselves when consciousness gives itself over to chance. But those novels don’t talk about familiar smells, or rather, those of recent memory, the ones that appear more predictably than the sun to remind us of the circular patterns in which we are immersed. The smells in Delia’s friend’s house were neither one, nor the other; there was no truth behind them, just a few longstanding convictions that couldn’t be sustained without outside intervention. As I’ve mentioned, a severed landscape could be seen through the window. No matter how idyllic they might be, the things beyond it forced their way through its jagged opening in little bites. We know the landscape never speaks with just one voice, and not only because no two gazes are alike. The window invited one to look outward; it was the element that made the house real. The inside of the house belonged to one dimension, the exterior to another. The precariousness of the window that separated the two spheres revealed the general sense of uncertainty. At that point, another episode in the life of Delia’s friend came to mind, something that happened on the train that took her from her place of birth: as she thought devotedly about men’s belongings, she was mistaken for someone else. (Delia’s friend went over to one of the beds, produced a notebook and, opening it, showed me a photo in which she was younger, almost a child, and wore a restrained expression that concealed reserve and promised boldness.)

As she headed toward the unknown, she had to confront a greater, more complex, abstraction. A few hours before the episode, the train had stopped at a remote station. The platform was stone gray with a faded white border, the remnants of a coat of whitewash. The building gave the impression of being low to the ground; the shabbiness of its walls seemed to reduce its height. While she waited, Delia’s friend had ample time to study the platform, which could only hold two cars. The sun set unimpeded, and the few trees that flanked the building caught no light. Their green was starting to fade; they’ve lost their strength, she thought. If someone had suddenly caught a glimpse of the scene they would have thought it had been staged: a girl standing at the window of a train car, looking out. Delia’s friend was distracted by shapeless ideas that were replaced by others before they could be fully formed, or which returned unexpectedly after having been left incomplete. She thought, for example, about how the train’s shadow disregards the tracks. The silhouette of the cars rests on the station floor, sketching out a step as it climbs the platform and continues, uninterrupted, before descending into the wild on the other side. This fact, the forceful contour of a shadow, left Delia’s friend deep in thought for a long time. She sensed that nature tended to be arbitrary, but preferred to reveal itself with caution. Her experience back home had taught her this, and the events that followed – like the dull sun above her, the silence of the station – and the things around her – arranged precisely to appear and break her attention – only confirmed it. She thought: “It’s not so bad, being alone,” or something like that. She was looking out the window and repeating this idea until something startled her: someone was watching her from nearby. She felt she was in danger, but her fear quickly subsided. She was pleased that she had caught the eye of a stranger: at least one thing in this overwhelming, though static, situation was directed at her. Later, she would remember the man’s steps as he approached, without being able to assign them any particular tempo: they were either innumerable or too few, but never the two things at once. She was confused, unsure what her reaction should be, when something else unsettled her even more: the stranger was carrying a small photo, from which he didn’t lift his eyes. She thought she heard a noise, maybe they were hitching another car to the train. The man finally reached her and stood in silence. A silence that said little, but which had the unmistakable eloquence of anticipation.