Текст книги "The Dark"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

As Delia and I left the damp earth around the gully behind us, I wondered what F’s children were looking for among the weeds. Maybe it was a screw, I said to myself, or a broken drill bit that was the reason for the search. Materials gone missing, a hammer without a grip hidden among the stalks. Boys: eight, ten years old. A span of time that might seem, were one to think about it, like the blink of an eye meant, in the case of F’s children, two pulsing lives with a good deal of time behind them. As Delia and I walked along in silence, breathing in the listless summer air, in which humid scents mingled with the smell of plastic, I thought something like, “The girl that is Delia could give me a child.” It was a spontaneous thought, as though something had just been shaken loose. It wasn’t the desire to possess her, it was something more than that: the need to conquer, overwhelm, destroy, annihilate. I felt that Delia had something that belonged to me, and that if I didn’t take it from her when I had the chance, I was never going to get it. The feeling was completely different from desire, and of course from passion, though I admit it contained a certain amount of the latter. It was seeing Delia as my enemy: only by at once destroying and worshiping her could I get what I needed, a sacrifice. The black hole that the fields became once the sun set – a barren stretch of land, a cave made of darkness that lasted until the next day – reproduced itself and followed its natural course – that of the night’s advance and the astral movements one senses while looking at the stars – together with its counterpart, the pits of shadow along the ground that the light from the night sky doesn’t reach; this black hole reproduced itself and followed the natural course of the night and all that it implies, on one hand, and on the other it showed itself to be mute, and most likely deaf, inside Delia. I’m not saying that figuratively. I mean “inside” Delia: literally, in her internal parts, her innards, as they say. The immense night, devouring light and time at a relentless pace, and Delia’s belly, waiting to feed on my strength in order to dispossess me of something that did not yet exist.

The night was completely silent; the shadowy outline of the trees could be seen at a distance in the semidarkness of the starlit sky, like the contorted figures of an artificial landscape. I – or both of us, I think – felt we lived in a place that didn’t really exist. A place you can walk through and find nothing but crumbling ruins and abandoned lots can’t be called a city, but a territory so marked by improvisation and indolence couldn’t be called the countryside. You could say a land like that, with its provisional nature and words that allude to nothing, would do no more than encourage depravity and animalistic behavior in its inhabitants. But we only felt the first impulse of this animalism, which in any event was fairly weak; an opposing force immediately restrained us, like a calm voice whispering into the ear of a raging man until he lowers his head in a gesture of resigned understanding. How was it possible to receive signs so contradictory that they would, under different circumstances, be mutually exclusive? I think it was because everything there combined to form a cluster of debris that was, ultimately, the remnants of nothing at all. One could trace the progression of one of these truncated signs: the fossilized flowerbeds, for example, in Delia’s friend’s “garden,” which were really nothing more than little mounds barely raised above the forgotten terrain, marks left there as proof of a will to do something, but which now showed less the hand that had made them than the state in which they had been forgotten. This is what I meant by remnants of nothing, these superposed layers of inaction and neglect. The neglect was visible, though, masked as it was by the neutral workings of time, it could hardly be taken as a sign. And for one reason or another, the truth is that this stirred neither feelings, nor thoughts in me. This is what people really mean when they say “I didn’t see anything” or “I wasn’t thinking about anything.” Incongruous complexities in which mutually exclusive cues meet emotions that are too vague, or too faint, to allow for any real judgment: this is when people opt for indecision.

F’s boys were probably no more than a few hundred feet behind us; the question was whether they would still be staring fixedly into the weeds in spite of the dark, waiting for a mystery to be revealed there that almost certainly would not. There they were, dispossessed of everything and preparing themselves, in their way, for the bitterness of their adult lives, when that savage impulse I tried to explain earlier made me grab Delia by the shoulders and push her down with all my strength into the darkest part of the vegetation. I threw myself on top of her. Along with her lingering cry of surprise, as I hit the ground I felt an animal quickly scuttle off. I know what happened next, but am still ashamed to recall it. I can say that it seemed as though I were standing at the edge of an abyss, and that Delia was my only salvation. I would be lost in time, or rather, in oblivion; I’d vanish and, because all I had was the ephemeral imprint of a footstep or a glance to cling to, nothing solid would point back to me. It seemed this verification could only come from Delia, that is, from my actions toward her, which overpowered her will and, of course, her body. It was the child I was after: a wild animal howled, securing its bloodline. The feeling was completely different from the erotic attraction that joined us in the thistle barrens. I didn’t care about loving her. I was driven by a more savage, more predatory impulse that I can explain, but find increasingly hard to understand. Delia came out of that scene in a terrible state. An innocent soul, or a wise one, she bore the shock and violence like one of those small animals that curls up in a ball when it realizes there is no escape. I remember wanting to go even further. I held her down, determined to cross through her, to feel her come apart in my hands. I wanted to split her in two, to feel her dissolve and slide through my fingers, but only so I could catch her, trap her, and subject her more forcefully still. Meanwhile the night went on, indifferent. Delia’s terror had fallen silent, and in that silence the nameless flourish nature adopts in the dark could be heard. At one point I thought that the steady course of night was less human than it was irrational, that there was a good deal of madness, or rashness, or I don’t know what, to the peace we call night, which was anything but peaceful. And it was that madness, which created the illusion of harmony in order to fight it, that had taken me over and confirmed, by some astronomical sense of justice, that what I was doing was, if not right, then at least fair. I thought of Delia as something incorporeal, a being whose mass of flesh vacillated between denying its depth and forgetting its material condition, and on whose breath floated something more than air: the encoded message by which she, as the ideal representative of her species, would perpetuate herself. I don’t know why, but this quality of her breath was most fully realized when the denial of her body – in the sense of subjugation, conquest, domination – was at its most pronounced.

Delia lay there defenseless for a long time, as though unconscious. The moonlight made the scene more moving; I sat beside her body while she came to. She was not the victim of love, or passion; she looked more like the victim of a rape. I watched the insects that appeared out of nowhere settle on Delia’s small buttocks, attracted by the glistening arches suddenly presented to them. Or maybe it was her body heat, I thought. I began to hear, once I had been freed of the crickets and the frogs, the monotonous trickle of the stream. Something began to flow again; the night settled in. Delia and her body. Subdued and so slight, it seemed impossible that moments earlier it had been the incarnation of a force that challenged me, an infinity that could not be contained or dominated. I thought: what’s left of the city becomes more and more a part of the country at night, and not all the terrain that was lost is recovered the next morning. After what happened I felt sad and listless, and it occurred to me that this tableau, with Delia in it, epitomized the primitive charge of the scene. I felt a bitterness that was not unlike regret. I don’t say this to excuse myself; it wasn’t even a full sense of regret, but rather the selfish reflex of acknowledging, though it might sound pretentious, that after what had happened I was already condemned, that there was no turning back. Still, I thought, there in the night, one rarely experiences an emotion fully, these things are always approximations. Emotions can be sincere, but never exact. Delia’s only reactions had been surprise, at first, then fear; later, pain and, at the end, shock. No signs of anger, nothing that would indicate resistance, or any sort of reproach afterward. I would have liked to know if this was an effect of her nature as a girl or as a woman. But they were both present in such equal measure, even mixed together, that I wondered whether the difference was, in a sense, illusory. On the other hand, since Delia was a factory worker, the difference was also irrelevant, as I’ve already explained several times; in fact, if the question continued to nag at me, it said more about me than it did about Delia. She was a nebulous being, to a great extent insubstantial, whose identity I needed to define.

The day came when I crawled out of my hole and back into the world. But “crawled out” implies a series of spatial maneuvers, and one might move around all the time and still be, in a figurative sense, in the same place. What I mean is that nothing had changed by the end of my seclusion; its only modest purpose had been to hide me, from myself most of all, though ultimately it only succeeded in making my ruin more complete. In any event, I had no idea what I was hoping to achieve. Apart from the reaction I described earlier – how, when I found out that Delia was expecting, I turned and ran like a man who had lost his mind, like someone who had experienced a terrible misfortune and was trying to protect himself without knowing how – beyond this reaction of walking blindly until I happened upon my own room, I didn’t have the faintest idea of what I planned to do. This is what ruin is, this not knowing… It is a ruin I have never overcome. It doesn’t matter whether my descent was fast or drawn out, unexpected or predictable, what made me miserable was how far I had fallen, that I had toppled from the heights of the most certain – though clearly not the longest lasting – happiness, to end up buried in my mattress. In the course of one short afternoon, I had descended to unspeakable depths. I’ve read novels that describe similar situations, which always seem trite, and probably are. Well, that’s how I felt: I felt as though I were acting out the most pathetic scene in a story that relied on sentimentality to, as they say, breathe through its skin and unfold to the fullest. I thought, we are forged by the shapes of our emotions, even when these belong to someone else. I had made a child and then rejected its mother. That mother was a woman, a factory worker who had only just left her own childhood behind her, who had gotten me to adopt her world as my own without ever meaning to do so. And now I spent my days walking around my neighborhood, kicking stones, down streets and alleys along the sides of which windows opened onto people who had been lost in the furrow of their mattresses for all time. Windows covered by strips of fabric, pieces of cardboard, clothes hung out to dry. I knew very well how little darkness could be found in those houses, the static, buzzing heat of the afternoon that came in through the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, along with that resilient, intolerable light. The same thing happened with the cold. It was then, as I turned the page between paralysis and tedium, that I began to make out the voices of the children, a music that had always been available to me, but to which I had never really listened. In Pedrera, the cries, exclamations, and wails of the little ones spread according to their intensity.

When I left Pedrera, much of what had happened with Delia seemed impossible to me. Certain ideas stay with us all the time, like the combined proofs that tells us where we are and, oh, what we represent at any given moment. And yet, after my period of isolation there was no rule, no signs, that could help me understand what had happened. I mentioned before what goes on in someone’s mind when they say “I didn’t see anything,” or “I wasn’t thinking about anything,” and so on. Well, something like that happened to me as I peered through the window, out of sight and not looking at anything in particular, checking the typical landscape of abrupt and asymmetrical elements, an ever changing, ever incomplete panorama; something like that happened to me as I leaned against the glass and repeated to myself, “I can’t believe it.” I, who had always felt such disdain for the tragic, even unconsciously, both as a way of connecting with it and a means of denying my own nature, which saw its own reflection there, now had it right in front of me, with no alternatives or chance of escape. While I was confined to my bed, my tragedy had presented itself like the repeated actions of a bad dream. Episodes whose intensity had faded emerged from the monotony of half-sleep and, spent and discolored by repetition, called into question the truth of the very thing they were meant to convey. But when I left… It was another thing entirely to step out into the street, into the neighborhood, into the open. I felt as though the whole world were pointing at me. Not just as the man responsible for a cruel and depraved act, but as the person who found, in that act, the ultimate justification of his days. Neither forgiveness, nor censure, but something simpler: an identity. That was how Delia would become a part of my time, I realized that futile morning I stepped out into the street.

I’ve read more than one novel in which misfortune helps someone’s bad luck along; I mean, there are people in these novels whose luck is worse than they deserve. This excess of adversity, like a surplus of evil, frees one’s character of contradictions: the innocent become more innocent, the conniving more conniving; the lazy man is driven to the heights of laziness. Nuances and traits are, in the end, redundant: to give a simple example, it is of little use to the generous man to be uniquely benevolent if he ultimately turns out to be at the mercy of his luck. What I mean is, what happens in novels is deceptive. This story probably should have been much more awful than it seems, and is certainly much truer than it makes itself out to be, because the one thing I know is that, from the beginning, I felt myself involved in a tragedy without a statute of limitations. It is so easy to seek forgiveness, and so difficult to attain it, even when it is offered by the victim. For example, sometimes I wonder whether Delia ever forgave me; I immerse myself in the idea and go over the different forms of forgiveness, all of which are, in one way or another, misleading. There’s something there that doesn’t quite convince me, I think, these thoughts are a useless indulgence. Because Delia doesn’t have anything to forgive me for. From one point of view, yes, but, I don’t know, maybe she’s better off because I abandoned her; at the same time, no, because my actions weren’t directed at her or anything else in particular. This is why forgiveness is impossible, because it has nowhere and no one from which it can originate, or anything upon which it can sustain itself. An ideal system would be like that of the workers, I remember thinking to myself as I lay on my bed. When F had his problem, they started collecting money in silence, ashamed. And through this ritual of delegation, in the name of something abstract, like the threat posed to the class, or its pride, each made a contribution so that F could escape the threat of the moneylenders. A system like that would be ideal, because it absolved through the distribution of sacrifice, rather than guilt.

There was a practice among the workers, largely forgotten and rarely enacted, that was sometimes invoked in extreme cases, like that of F. An untold collective consciousness set off a mechanism lost in the reaches of memory, communal heritage, or the straightforward, but profound empirical memory of the workers. It consisted of leaving behind small sums of money, without any apparent reason or obvious logic, in places where the others would know to look for them in order to help a worker who had fallen into misfortune. These were not anonymous operations. Everyone had a role in them: the worker who cautiously approached to leave his contribution was the same person who would hurry back, strangely remorseful, to the normalcy of the corner where he worked. This made the ritual more effective, and more lasting. Because each lost himself, without compromising his identity, in the hope of a collective salvation, embodied in this case by F. Earlier, I mentioned the care he took with disguises once the moneylenders started trying to catch him. Now I think it’s an exaggeration to call them disguises. Like Delia, F was always aware of his difference, even when it took the form of the smallest, simplest thing, the most elementary detail. This difference could serve, as it usually did, as a distinguishing mark, but it also inspired a deeper – and, as I said, simpler – feeling tied to the simplicity of the disguise. As workers, one of their deepest and most personal convictions was that of being different. The consequence of this was twofold: their identity set them apart all the time, and nearly any attire, in the broadest sense of the term, other than their factory uniform transfigured them momentarily. It was an inevitable disguise: a simple and natural costume, but impossible to change if the workers wanted to keep the face that was the source of their true nature hidden. It’s hard to know when clothes become a complement of the truth; attire is an unnoticed trait that people adopt. And so the disguise came to permeate F’s actions and his disposition beyond the appearance of the garments themselves.

I have little that belonged to Delia – mostly random, incidental things that on their own seem incomprehensible and useless: a dial, the clasp from a bra, a plastic lid. I also have a small button from her work uniform. I don’t remember why she gave it to me; I suppose it probably wasn’t on purpose. I do know that one morning, as I dug around looking for change, it turned up in the bottom of my pocket. I can hazard a guess or imagine something to take the place of this mystery. Something like a button, simple and superfluous in many circumstances, became, in the context of Delia’s uniform, part of the factory’s surveillance and control. One of the most humiliating tasks the workers were forced to perform centered on these minor objects. Since the factory sought an exemplary sort of discipline, it concentrated on accessory items and things of little significance. In this way, the company saw to it that nothing, no matter how small, escaped its control. It would have been easy to focus on the operators’ attire, for example, through daily inspections of their uniforms, especially their work shirts, and so on. And yet the process was inappropriately complex for the circumstance, especially when it came to the inspection of the rubbings that the workers were supposed to have prepared in advance. They were rubbings that looked like the ones I had seen at Delia’s friend’s house. The only difference was that, instead of copying stones or the ground, these pictures were supposed to be of the design on their buttons. It was disconcerting to know that, once a week, an entire relatively qualified workforce was turned into a group dedicated to activities that seemed, at first glance, infantile. At home or on the corner, before they went into the factory, each one of them had to place a sheet of paper across the buttons of their uniform and run a pencil over it, then show the rubbing at the entrance. Obviously, each button was unique; if it wasn’t, at least the workers believed it was. That’s what had happened to Delia’s button. It had probably fallen off during one of these weekly inspections and that night after work, as often happens between lovers, it had passed from her pocket to mine.

When Delia told me about those weekly inspections, I wondered if there was a certain group of beings whose mission it was to leave “rubbings,” collections of marks akin to the things of the world itself. It would be a peculiar sort of “mission,” given that its meaning would be unknown to those who carried it out; but perhaps for precisely this reason it would reach deeper, be more real, evidence of an original, powerful skill, an instinctive gift. At the end of the day, without these proofs and anonymous records – those made by anonymous beings, and those we all leave behind, which are anonymous in their own right – the world would be unbearable. I’m not saying that everyone should write or trace whatever they want – it’s both good and logical that nearly everything is ultimately lost – or that the vast quantity of novels that exist should be some kind of substitute for Delia’s friend’s papers, or for the little round pictures the workers were expected to make of their buttons to show that all were where they belonged, that none were missing and that, ultimately, one presumes, no error or threat hovered over the factory. I’m not saying any of that. On the contrary, a while back it occurred to me that the marks anonymous people leave on the world, including those made on paper, are meant to oppose the written word; the novel, first and foremost. This conflict is not fought out in the open, it’s not that one denies what the other asserts, rather, it is a secret and mutually unacknowledged fight. Among the infinite number of paths that exist, there are two that never meet. On one hand we have the world of marks per se – actions and events in general – and on the other we have the written word, epitomized by the novel. These two elements, like adversaries in perpetual battle, are precisely what lie hidden beneath the surface of fables. The marks of experience seek to eradicate, or at least diminish, the emphasis on the written word, which in turn tries to escape the redundancy of the marks (this is why it presents itself as a version). It is a fruitless contest about which we as individuals, as representatives of the species, have little to say beyond our anonymous contributions to the world of marks. It was likely that the pictures made by Delia’s friend were also subject to some sort of periodic review. A game among family members, a community ritual, the proof of having been in one place and not another, a collective record (“the relics of the tribe,” one might say), and so on; this is probably why she regretted my presence when I found them among the tangle of sheets: things like that weren’t meant for the eyes of an outsider…

Meanwhile, the startled reaction of Delia’s friend seemed, through a quick shift in perception, to be similar to, and almost connected with, the way Delia expressed surprise. It often happens that affinities make themselves known through similar gestures and inflections. It certainly seemed so that evening; in the way she fiercely defended her secret, which did not, or could not, rely on words, I recognized Delia’s expression of surprise when she realized she had been found out, though I can’t imagine two people who seem more different from one another. There’s no need to explain that, just as Delia’s friend seemed to be about to say something the whole time we were alone, her house, too, offered contradictory signs; these were sometimes obvious and occasionally vague or tenuous, even apparently irrelevant, which made the message they supposedly contained hard to decipher – if there was, actually, anything there to decipher. As corresponded to this art of selecting unexpected objects from the cumulative chaos around her, Delia’s friend performed her magic trick with the skill of someone who had learned it amid adversity and neglect. The main purpose of this maneuver, which might also be assigned the term “custom”—being oriented, among other things, toward exhibition – must have been to repeat and perfect itself. It was a talent that suffused her other customs and actions, starting with the most immediate, then the loosely connected, and finally the furthest removed. An example of this was, I think, the hesitancy I described earlier: always being about to say something, but never saying a word. In this way and without realizing it, Delia’s friend manifested the surprise she so masterfully performed when it came to presenting objects. Because showing something the way that she did, with mechanical precision but holding the gesture there for approval, or at least some kind of recognition, revealed the depths of her vacillation. I’ll give an example. Earlier I mentioned the tin of combs, the roundabout way she had of showing me the pots, and her discreet annoyance when I found her tracings: I was violating the sincere – though limited – trust she had placed in me. I tried to connect her irritation with the meaning those pages held, or promised, but from then until the moment Delia returned, pushing the door open with her shoulder with the skirt tucked under her arm, nothing was the same. This phrase, which seems routine, is the essence of what happened. I’ve read many novels in which events bear no relation to what is described: novels that don’t organize reality but, on the contrary, look to reality to organize their words. Nothing was the same with Delia’s friend, though in what little remained of my visit nothing different, the same, or verifiable could have happened. Delia came back with the skirt, the friend stepped out to try it on and, as I said, we left right away. I didn’t say anything then or later about the ideas I had at the time, but this clearly made a lasting impression. Around Delia’s friend, her fellow workers, F’s children when we saw them so engrossed, and everyone else associated with her – around practically everyone, at the end of the day – I always felt as though I occupied a place on the outside, that my role was to register things and draw conclusions from what I saw, whatever the circumstance. This quality was so strong in me that I gave the impression of being some kind of investigator, or very jealous. Still, though it was part of my own story, this world rejected me and so I observed it from a distance, feeling myself surrounded by and drawn toward a vague and impenetrable frontier: as I said a little while ago, a world that made up for its coarseness and extreme simplicity by the force of its eloquence.

Delia offered her world to me, while I, on the other hand, gave her little in return. But it would be a mistake to frame all this in terms of compensation, particularly with regard to Delia, who, as a worker, knew little of the typical utilitarian calculations that define most people’s daily lives. As I’ve mentioned several times before, even something external to us like the landscape, in the most neutral sense, took on uncommon qualities when Delia and I passed through it, and this could only be attributed to her. The pockets of darkness were just as deep as always, but now they consisted of a reverse depth that neither folded in on itself, nor grew; I mean that they presented, let’s say, a transparent darkness. There was a logic one always associated with the dark, a logic that proved, thanks to Delia, inappropriate and contrary to the true meaning of the word, which itself was also useless. Though she could not have known what she was doing, Delia showed me a new world, or rather, one that was renewed every night. This world, of course, had its own actors and its own rules. First, there were the factory workers, who yielded without resistance to the mechanical order of the line, and second, the factory protocols themselves, designed to optimize their productivity and make the most of their physical demeanor, which meant it was necessary to regulate both. Delia had the mysterious quality of concealing and revealing the things that, as they say, made up her world, without any apparent reason and according to a logic that at first glance seemed incidental. Actually, calling it “her world” is sort of redundant: it was a whole that formed part of Delia; she was made up of each element, no matter how distant, small, or superfluous. I don’t know if this was due to some other logic of the proletariat, but I do know that I felt more and more that reality, in all its manifestations and circumstances, reached me having passed first through Delia as though through a sieve; everything brought her to mind, mostly because in Delia I had found a way to see everything anew. This had its consequences: if, on the one hand, the feeling was becoming more and more constant, it also multiplied the signs of a repetitive world stripped bare that highlighted Delia’s absence, that is, her negative proliferation. And so, on that afternoon as we walked away from her friend’s house, I got the strange feeling that I was leaving part of Delia behind. We followed a trail that tried to pass as a road, and were soon outside the lot that belonged to Delia’s friend. I remember an air of stillness, something like anticipation or a predisposition to inactivity; in other words, the light grew thicker, night fell, and the earth began to breathe.