Текст книги "The Dark"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

Stepping away from the window, I turned out the light and started writing in the dark. At first I leaned forward, out of habit, to see what I was doing. Predictably, I noticed that I saw less than if I looked straight ahead. Looking down, the shadow was darker; looking straight ahead a weak reflection could offer at least the illusion of depth. Because depth is found not in darkness, but in contrast. And so, closing my eyes, then looking straight ahead so as not to see anything but vague outlines and shadows in motion, I started to write. Without the vigilance of my gaze, first my hand and then the letters, instrument and result, seemed more autonomous than usual. I would set down a phrase and immediately feel it break free, as happens with landscapes once we pass through them. This is why it occurred to me, while describing Delia’s embrace, so urgent and yet so profoundly feeble, why it occurred to me that freedom is always linked to brevity. Duration prolongs, enslaves – itself, first and foremost. These phrases, written blindly, passed in a moment; because of this, their life was not only transient, but also hasty. The notebook, the smooth pages, my arm resting on the paper, weaving the dream of my hand. I had barely written anything when I heard another murmur at the window. It’s me, I said to myself, I’m hearing things. I’ve read many novels in which the dark has its own consequences: a character sinks into bitterness and pessimism, or into his negative thoughts until he is gripped by despair and the most destructive kind of suffering. And yet in reality, or rather, in this sleepless state, this nocturnal energy is quickly snuffed out; the mystery that the night represents, which gives rise to a wide range of metaphysical implications and philosophical deliberations, does not last; it’s like a flame that ignites and consumes itself. As I thought this, there was a change in the density of the air: imperceptible though it was, the light that came in through the window showed itself in all its variations. And so it goes, I thought, breathing in the subtle variations. After writing for a while in the dark, I realized it had other effects. The phrases appeared and disappeared, as I said, like the landscape through which we advance; thanks to this cumulative, or anti-cumulative, movement forward, I encountered the nature of waiting where I least expected to find it, and in a different form. One is used to waiting for things: mealtimes, the following day, the next event – actually, not much more than that; in general, anticipation constitutes itself by situating an event on the horizon. Well, the waiting that night was pure, made of nothing and without promise of any kind. I remembered the cast of shadows surrounding the Barrens in a silence so dense with anticipation that it took on a single, shapeless form. Hidden in the half-light, Delia’s body shrank further still until it reached an immaterial state, her slight form growing more tenuous as it was infected by the weightlessness of the dark. In my room, I thought: the shadows then, the shadows now. The ingredients that make up every life are repeated time and again, I said to myself, like right now: having met Delia, in a manner of speaking, thanks to the dark, years after abandoning her I was once again finding some part of that truth in different, though similar, shadows.

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.

The menacing presence of the creditors had become inescapable: it could be sensed throughout the day and had a hypnotic effect on F, leaving him with just enough of a grip on reality to keep the production line running. According to Delia, several of the moneylenders were former factory workers. She said this in her half-whispered voice without any hint of emotion, but hearing it stopped me in my tracks; the solitary night emptied out even more. How was it possible that a worker, having fought so long and so hard to control his disdain for money, having spent so much of his life in a forced coexistence with its effects, how could that person end up reproducing it with such enthusiasm? Delia couldn’t answer this question, nor was it likely that she’d understand it, so I didn’t ask her. A former worker had a real advantage, she explained. He knew his ex-colleagues, and they knew him; even more importantly, he had experienced the religious fear that the working class had of money. By resisting, and in his talent for mimesis, F was a setback to the moneylenders, though in one of life’s ironies he was unintentionally getting the best possible training for that far-off day when, as the saying goes, he would cross the fence. Many of the other workers worried about F, but most of them just seemed stunned. Seen from the outside, life in the factory might have appeared normal; only someone on the inside would have been able to sense the disturbance. And yet, the typical distinction between “inside” and “outside” was itself confusing and fairly useless, as was proven by the fact that I, on the outside, was totally unaware of what was going on, while the moneylenders standing next to me on the far side of the fence all those afternoons not only knew everything, but also played a central role in the situation.

In the end, a collection was organized; anonymously, so that no one would have to feel ashamed for contributing. As one might imagine, Delia handed over the money she had for the bus trip home; this was why she returned on foot. Her regret was immediate, a sense of remorse that lasted for weeks, as I clearly recall. Not for having helped F, but for having succumbed to the monetary order stamped onto all of history, and into that instance in particular. Delia remembered F’s pained expression when a few of his colleagues gave him the money on behalf of everyone – though only a few had actually contributed, in this case the word “everyone” was not meant to extend the solidarity, but to dilute the dishonor. The debtor was shocked, his reaction half-concealed by a smile; though he was not aware of this, his trance needed to come to an end as quickly as possible. The delegation of workers formed a semicircle; F felt himself at the center of a false, poorly organized, and inappropriate procedure, a failed scene. He would rather have been dreaming and have woken to the menacing presence of an army of creditors. After the most extravagant and dramatic incidents, what remains with us of other people is always a face etched in the dark. Not in real darkness, but in the dark of evocation. Memories, strangely enough, have no light of their own. F’s face, after weeks of pretending, received the unsettling news that it could – and should – stop doing so; this required a complex adjustment. It was impossible to know what was going through his mind. Though this could be said of anyone, it was confirmed in this case by observing the movements of F’s face. A nervous smile searching for that unknown point where it could find balance, Delia told me; obviously neither relief nor joy, neither confidence nor vanity, radiated from it. The members of the delegation were not having any better a time. They stood motionless and silent around the debtor as though he were the center of an inconvenient cult imposed on them by circumstance. It would be easy to speak of donations, offerings, and so on. The workers adapting a domestic ritual enacted so many times in private, when they distributed what little money there was among the members of their family. These workers were absolving a guilt that could become intolerable at times, so they did something “bad,” that in practice translated, as in this case, into something “good.” And all of this was due to the fact that F, in a moment of insecurity some time in the past, had needed more to get by; one evening the money ran out and he needed to wait until the next morning to approach the lenders. In this simple paradox, I think, resides a large part of the silent wisdom that sustained Delia’s fellow workers. In some way, this is what I meant when I wrote a few pages back that, in their way, workers suffer the world. I’m not talking about injustice in the abstract, which is always present, or about any concrete injustice, which can sometimes extend so far it becomes part of nature itself, but rather about a driving force: movable barriers that were sometimes invisible, and other times insuperable, stood between good and evil. The workers were compelled to move between the two, unable to change them, but intuitively aware of their existence.

From the first time he sets foot in the factory, the worker is bound to a “good,” but lives with the contradiction that practically everything he might do while away from his machine will fall under the category of “evils.” Of course, the names of these categories did not come from the workers, having been classified and assigned by the time they appeared. At one point, the workers realized this and rebelled; the way they saw it, the fault lay with the machinery. So they decided to destroy those imposing, intricate masses of metal. They gathered the strength of their own weakness and struck out against them. That the machines buckled as though they were made of cardboard was no small surprise; at first, the workers were shocked – without realizing it, they had passed into a supernatural, magical world – the machines fell like a house of cards, and what just a moment earlier had represented the reign of force, a world that advanced according to the simple but efficient logic of the cog, now crumbled at the first blow; where they stood close together, they fell in succession, one after the other. Many of the workers were reminded of their own homes, their humble shacks, flattened by the wind on stormy days. But it seemed impossible that they should be witnessing something similar happen to the machinery. This could be interpreted as further proof of the frailty of the good and the indomitability of evil, but the workers perceived it in the opposite way: it was the instability of evil in the face of an immutable good. This relatively heroic legend was etched in the ageless memory of Delia’s peers. And though many had no recollection of it or even any idea it existed, they were nonetheless under its influence – sometimes protective, sometimes innocuous or even destructive – and organized their work and way of life accordingly. Stories like F’s arose, developed, and drew to a close against the backdrop of this legend. At first glance, the workers at their stations might appear to be practical and detached, but they were not pragmatic enough to be immune to contradictions or avoid second thoughts. Each payment received, every coin, represented to them the dominance of the machines. At the same time, they were not so naïve as to think that this perception was entirely real; they knew that their wages were only one part of the ultimate value of their work, and that they didn’t come from the machines themselves. Nor were they unaware that the labor produced by their own strength was of little value in and of itself; that without all the rest, which was complementary but decisive, it ended up being insignificant and quite probably useless. To this natural complication were added other unknowns, familiar and widespread in their way. For example, there were those who worked without working. It’s not that they were inactive, nor were they without responsibilities. They were simply people who did not consider what they did day after day to be work, despite the fact that it was similar to, or more difficult and complicated than, the work of others.

What Delia was trying to tell me was that the world of the factory was a special one. Irrational from one perspective, incomprehensible from another, and always that way. When things fell apart, as the saying goes, there would be nothing unusual about seeing the workers as a tribe of eccentric beings intent on getting through their shifts, keeping the drills calibrated and becoming one with raw materials and stages of production. But Delia saw in this routine, which had come to seem excessive, the bleak origin of the current state of confusion. She said this to me in different words, often in the form of silences and distracted phrases that in fact referred to other things, most of which were simple and even trivial, but which allowed me to imagine a substantive, though irrevocably hidden, order of thought. It goes without saying that these conclusions were always hypothetical, tenuous to the point of not having anything to do with Delia at all. I’ve read many novels in which characters draw arbitrary conclusions about other people. These ideas may be wrong, in fact, they almost always are, and so they generate all manner of irreparable misunderstandings, suspicions, and opinions. This, which is so common in novels, is even more so in real life. We live with our mistaken ideas about other people; life goes on as it always has until one morning, or any other hour of the day, some unexpected sign shakes us up, and we’re left puzzled, aware that we had been in the grip of errors and falsehoods all along. At night, F was ashamed to go home. His family waited for him with their usual offhand acquiescence; a quiet shadow that disperses at the start of a new day and returns with the lull of the evening. F’s shame had a single root, money, and two causes: having needed to borrow it and now needing to pay it back; like all good workers, he was horrified by the thought. All he wanted was to restore the peace that was living, doing his job, and, through a baffling economic operation that he found both strange and complicated, making enough to survive – to live badly, but to survive – as he often thought to himself at night, overcome by an absurd and redemptive hope for the coming day. Like their father, F’s children were quiet people. Before he came home, they could be seen standing around in silence, as though in a trance. One might think that they were listening to sounds or words coming from within them, and that their skin, so delicate and pale it was translucent, was the outward sign of a desire to disappear, to dissolve into the landscape. Delia pointed them out to me once, a while after the episode of the loan, as we walked along a path we thought would cut through an endless field. We ran into F’s boys where the path formed a corner with a dirt road that came to an end after a few purposeless twists and turns in a gully not much further along. It was strange, I thought, that the street should behave like a stream while the stream itself ran straight, the way streets usually do. Had she not known them, I imagine that Delia would have recognized F’s children, anyway, because they carried themselves like their father; inscrutably, for lack of a better word. They stared down into the weeds, but didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. It would have been easy to imagine those boys as future workers, I thought. The example set by their father, though somewhat hermetic, had certainly left its mark on the day to day of family life. Just as the farmer’s body announces the work to which generations of his family have dedicated themselves, I sometimes thought I could detect, as I did in these boys, a “vocation” to the labor that they had been called upon to realize more fully in the future. One of them must have been about eight years old, the other not much more than ten. And even though I’d seen so much, when Delia told me that they had both been working in the factory for some time I felt, as one might imagine, a vague sense of surprise, a combination of disappointment and relief, of disenchantment and validation. She herself was practically the same age as the older of the two, though she had, until then, belonged to the world of adults, and not only because she was with me. With this revelation, F’s children, too, stepped into our realm as the newest gods of the real, even as their bodies carried out childlike movements. Delia told me that the youngest workers were observed as they performed their tasks, that older ones were put to work at the machines, while the eldest were introduced to the world outside the factory – the moneylenders, for example. These stages made up the worker’s education.