Текст книги "The Dark"

Автор книги: Sergio Chejfec

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There are dogs that will carry their quarry around for days. Though long dead, the prey seems to retain something vital for the hunter – if it didn’t, it would have been forgotten, as happens when there is nothing left of the victim but a sad tatter of hide. Sometimes I imagine a brief dialogue, a diminutive fable without lasting significance: the prey says, “Please, no,” and the hunter responds, “Yes” and carries out his plan. I don’t know where these sudden thoughts come from, though the situations to which they seem to allude are often fairly obvious. In the universal language of entreaty, “Please, no” is a last request, already denied, made when the end is near. In the real world, this “Please, no” is almost certainly the most-repeated final plea in history. I think the reason the hunter does not abandon his prey, even when it’s no more than a strip of leather, is that in it the scene of the “Please, no” lives on. On the vast plains, the steepest precipices, the solitary steppe, it’s always the same. As Delia and I walked along, I suddenly wondered who was leading whom. Some part of what she offered meant everything to me; this is sometimes summed up by the word “love,” though it’s also true that a word can mean many things at once, and that these meanings are usually different and contradictory. At the same time, as I said above, I never knew exactly what it was that I gave to her. It can also happen that the hunter needs to drag the remains of the victim around because it is the only thing that allows him to forget the nature that surrounds him, the blind and bestial world he cannot escape. With its compulsory passivity, the former prey condenses the details of the scene, bringing together all the qualities of their surroundings; the lifeless victim is thus the hunter’s talisman, an anti-heroic “trophy.” This interpretation may seem somewhat mystical, but I haven’t found one that describes the situation better. Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Shedding light, sitting down to find an explanation that gives the question meaning. The definitive thing about magic is not that it proves the implausible can occur, and therefore that it exists, but that it attempts to show that the implausible relies on magic to announce that it is improbable. But sometimes the unforeseen does take us by surprise, not so much because it is unexpected, but because it is irrational. I’ve read many novels that try to present the supernatural as natural. A reality that had been concealed until that moment, lying in wait, reveals itself; nature is concerned only with hiding itself while characters submit to, are torn apart by, and retreat from its unfamiliar laws, and so on. The problem is that nature never alludes to itself, and the supernatural is the most innocent way it makes its presence felt. As we know, the prey gives life to the hunter.

Earlier, I mentioned the meaning loans tended to have for Delia. The ownership of a thing was a secondary quality, one that might have a negative or restrictive effect, though this could easily be resolved by lending it out. Within the community of workers, or the social order of the neighborhood, objects sometimes attained collective ownership. The “owner” of something became its guardian, to put it one way, and everyone knew that they could use it whenever they needed, if not immediately, then at least without complications. This was expressed in everyday life, in even the most minor details and mundane circumstances. And so, eventually owning everything, or the greatest possible number of things, continued to be a dream for many or most of the workers, who knew very well how society in general functioned, but for whom all that had long ago turned into a mirage they recognized as useless. I think that, by lending these objects out, the workers were able to increase their density; to the material existence and primary function these things had, say, “at first glance,” was added an unexpected relevance that was multiplied through their circulation and exchange: the objects became more useful the more often they changed hands. And this turned out to benefit the workers, whose own existence was lean and whose belongings, as we know, were few. Just as the prey gives life to the hunter, loans enhance the identity of objects. A hammer, for example, becomes more of a hammer the more often it is lent out. But the hunter gives nothing back; at least, not to the prey. If he does give something back, he does so in such an ambiguous way that only an arduous process of investigation and verification could confirm it. One of the most significant differences is that the hunter believes he is taking what belongs to him; he feels something like entitlement, which helps him spot, give chase, corner, and so on, and finally kill. Another fable, slightly longer than the last, might clarify this difference. In the community of workers, for example, “Please” sets their exchanges in motion; the prey says, “Please, no,” while the hunter, as always, resorts to the habitual language of his monosyllabic “Yes.”

I should say that I knew Delia would lend me life as soon as I laid eyes on her. I write this in a figurative, rather than a literal, sense. I was able to confirm this premonition; it is a fact that stays with me to this day, so long after the last time I saw her. I’m not referring to the enhancements that come with the circulation I just described, but rather to something more, a supplementary vitality, a fantasy made real that, in its realization, sets itself outside of time and above all other things, beyond what we take in with our eyes. I’ll give an example. Right now I’m holding my pencil over my notebook, under the light, and the shadow – a slim pointer – crosses the blank lines of the yellow paper. Just like this shadow, with the depth and nuance it adds while reducing the color where it falls, Delia exerted a similar influence, faint yet absolute, over me. It doesn’t matter whether she was aware of this or not – perhaps if she’d known, she might not have done it. In any event, though it may sound vague, I’ll say it just the same: Delia cast a benevolent shadow over me. Like the tip of the pencil on the page, which not only writes but also projects a restless shadow that leaves no trace, or at least no visible one, I believe there were things Delia did that were meant to last, “to leave a mark” on me, and others that went unnoticed at the time and reappeared later, or were forgotten, and so on. In the first place, as is always the case, there were the memories, which require no proof. I won’t say anything about their quality; there are few things less exact. On the other hand, to talk about all this would be to talk about the form it took, and all I would be able to salvage of that would be my own vacillation. At times like this, one tries to find those essential elements; obeying the law of memory, one focuses on the detail in an attempt to read the marrow hidden at its core, within its nucleus of wisdom. But only conventional elements can be salvaged this way, primarily physical details recovered in the form of faces, figures, limbs, and so on. What I mean is that, in order to salvage the past, to salvage that which is hidden behind things, we also need the concrete and mechanical objects and situations that give us life to this day; it is this past that sustains us, but it abandons us if we recover it exactly as it was. There is a lesson in this, to which we should submit ourselves with humility and patience. And all the more so in Delia’s case, who, as I’ve said, folded in on herself even as she made her presence felt. A weakness that was part of her constitution made her tremble like the leaves. Upon finding herself exposed, generally after reacting to something, Delia would close herself off inside a delicate silence tinged with anticipation, like the moment before a glass breaks or the hunter attacks. These things were more than just bodies and faces, though they were, of course, expressed through them, making them conventional supplements. Something similar happened when her friend found herself exposed, both when I found her rubbings and when the man on the train handed her the distorted portrait. A reaction that lasts the briefest of moments, and for this reason might seem inappropriate or the result of some kind of disruption, but which leaves an enduring mark.

One day we saw F’s children in an empty lot scattered with debris. Then, too, they were lost in contemplation. A few silent bags of trash had caught the brothers’ attention. They stood there, motionless, looking down; after a while, one would lift his head and stare out toward the horizon, then immediately back at the pile in search of answers. Delia told me that looking at garbage was often a way of exercising the imagination, “What they don’t have,” she added. I didn’t respond. My whole life, I had watched the same ceremony, and may even have practiced it myself, but it was only through one of those strange mechanisms of memory or conscience that, as I observed F’s boys in action, their staring organized into periods of rest and concentration, I was able to recognize it as an act whose unusual meaning, if it could still be said to have one, was rich with local custom. The pastime consisted of unraveling the past: imagining the source of the trash – which was varied, that is, in the different substances themselves – and what had been done with it before it had been discarded. It was something that was done every day, an unexceptional exercise to which only F’s boys, and only on that morning, could have drawn my attention. There were those who thought the garbage spoke, that it revealed a hidden truth through messages organized like that, like trash, the sole purpose of which was to be deciphered. And included in this “sole purpose” was the specific language required to read and observe them, which was activated by the analysis itself. The trash could be rural, domestic, or industrial. This collective exercise might have been an extension of the ancient tradition of reading the future in a system of signs, but which at some point had been inverted, and from that moment on was used to unravel the past. Was this further proof that the future no longer mattered? Perhaps the locals were rebelling against the linear, “historical” time that had so punished them, choosing instead the alternatives they had at hand. And so waste, material that had reached the end of its usefulness in the minds of many, had a bit of life breathed back into it: future or past, better or worse, it didn’t matter; what mattered was that it was different. It’s easy to imagine the limited repertoire of trash in a community so marked by privation, yet that was precisely why this was a favorite pastime: because the likelihood of finding something unexpected, a surprise, was minimal. People feel a need to study the signs left by others; in this space of scarcity, there were plenty such traces to be found in the trash. They stopped to contemplate and compare. One thing with another, what was seen yesterday with what was there today, and these with something discovered a month earlier; an illusion of continuity maintained by the population because it lightened the load of the day-to-day. But it was evident that, like all others, this custom contained within it the seed of delirium. And it would probably take very little to bring it out: the slightest deviation in the routine, an unexpected combination, anything. Because the seed is a mechanism that waits for the right moment. So, for example, the whole of reality could be seen as a universe of garbage cast adrift, or like a choice or object that has been “wasted” relative to everything else, to what might have been, and so on. The traces, or rather, the marks of waste. Because ultimately this is an ancient endeavor, isn’t it? There has always been something to decipher, a message waiting to be released.

In the thistle barrens, after we made love, Delia would sleep for three minutes, or maybe five. She closed her eyes, her body, and her mind, fully letting go of herself only once all activity had ceased. Afterward, she woke just like she did every morning, opening her eyes suddenly, before she was awake. Her eyes got ahead of themselves somehow; they were what woke her, not her mind. Once she was awake, we feigned a few playful movements as though we were going to start up all over again, but then immediately stood and left the Barrens, sometimes to continue on a walk that would last almost until dawn, sometimes to go back to her house and say our goodbyes a few feet from the door, where the latent presence of the others made itself felt, though it did not seem to be affected by ours. There were dogs around that could have been from anywhere, and a few lights shone so faintly that they seemed forgotten even to themselves, on the verge of going out as they cast their glow over an endless space impossible to illuminate. Delia’s house, like everything about her, felt unique to me. As it had been from the moment it first sheltered the person who was, to me, a marvel of tenderness and beauty, who enhanced everything she touched, every space she inhabited. The signs of deprivation, how hard it was to carry on, and so forth, were visible in the house; these marks were indications of its admirable characteristics of autonomy and constancy, not of its abandonment. What I mean is that, if there were something exemplary to all this, the poverty of Delia’s house was exemplary in the way it was indifferent to itself: a veneer made of silence and determination, exposed to the greatest neglect.

A light in the distance, a flickering streetlamp, marked the highest point in Delia’s neighborhood, an elevation that suggested something historical, yet forgotten, both topographical – obviously – and undefined; more than anything, though, it gave the neighborhood a concrete identity, just like the corner of Pedrera did, where I lived. I’ve often thought these neighborhoods could never be the substance of a novel; even if someone were to join them together, one by one, like dominoes, or the way they appear on maps, until they became a single, vast amalgam of neighborhoods, even then, they would still lack the density required to be represented, if not to positive effect, then at least with some degree of conviction. On my earliest visits, it seemed that the wasteland in which Delia lived underscored her unique qualities. Like those deities who reign in solitude, her sublime beauty grew amid the greatest neglect. Sometimes her house seemed like a shack, other times like a collection of materials and random artifacts, arbitrary and unnatural at first glance, but consolidated through use and the passage of time. This continued use turned these objects into different ones: time dignified things that at first, I think, could have seemed incongruous, happenstance, or even unnatural. From this fact, as one might imagine, other lessons could be drawn. I am not going to summarize the materials and objects that made up Delia’s house; I will not, for example, say cardboard, zinc, PVC, or sheets of plastic. Today, in the cold, I saw a dwelling the size of a person: two cardboard boxes bound together that, of course, ended up resembling a coffin. The cardboard was paper-thin, but in that moment was as resilient as stone. This was also true of Delia’s house, the materials of which drew their strength from the need and the steadfastness of its residents. The past of these objects was forgotten forever, predictably, only to be recovered when they were no longer part of the house. But it was an illusory sort of forgetting, because it was only from this past that they derived their value as part of a dwelling.

From then on, it was not uncommon to see groups of people or solitary observers transfixed by garbage being stirred by the wind. One day a photo was taken in the street, or something like a street. It was a sunny afternoon; Delia must have been enjoying one of the rare days off that the factory gave her. We had been walking for a while; I was looking at the ground, the worn dirt path made of pebbles and little chunks of other objects, broken down by time and use; I saw these things and thought that the ground was as it should be, certainly as it had been for a long time and would be for a long time to come, but that Delia’s presence added something special to it, a secret message shaped and revealed by her alone, which ennobled it. As I stared at the ground and kicked stones, sometimes without meaning to, she explained the rules of an unusual game they played at the factory: what it was called, how it consisted of dividing time into the smallest units possible. Since the appeal of this game was grounded in division rather than variation, the intervals got shorter and shorter, and were eventually impossible to verify. When they got to that point, the players started over. But the participants gained a skill through playing: they must have sensed it in the way the units got smaller and smaller, and so something originally begun as a means of killing time, in all the diverse implications this might have for a worker, became a reflex, a sixth sense set in motion on its own when the group’s desire to play was stirred, usually by chance. It seemed to me that Delia took part in these games as a worker, like everyone else, but also as a girl: as a worker she needed to have control over time, to subjugate and incorporate it within her own nature so that, once hers, she could transfer it to the factory, which in turn converted it to a completed task. As a girl she was after something similar: to lay out the different dimensions of time so that, later on, she could reject them as untenable. In this way, the game found in her a dual, and complete, form.

Anyway, as we walked Delia explained the rules, the surprise and anticipation, the spontaneous synchronization, how the game was won, or rather, the fact that it was abandoned before a winner was declared, and so on; as Delia described all this to me, her friend emerged from the bushes – a few squat, dense tufts that formed an island that seemed darker than its surroundings – walking toward us as though she were stepping onstage. We stopped; she approached without ever taking her eyes off Delia. “Hi,” “How are you,” “Fine,” they said. I remember she was wearing the shirt with fruits on it, and that she fiddled with the fabric in a moment of vacillation, just as she had before. Delia’s friend had a camera with her that she was about to return; she wanted to take the opportunity to photograph us. Delia resisted, but without any real conviction. The photo should be pasted here, on the page, as proof of that afternoon. Delia’s friend got us into position, moving our bodies with her frail arms as though she wanted to mold us into a different form; later, as she held the camera ready to take her shot, she found time to gesture to us with the other hand while asking us, quietly, to face forward and look at her. Delia and I stood side by side, with our arms around one another, wanting the camera to register that singular truth about to be set free, if only for a moment. I remember how Delia’s smile was shy and anxious, and that her skin, as opaque as wood, was glossy in advance of the print. We didn’t know it at the time the photo was taken. Only later, when we actually saw it, did we notice the people standing around a pile of something behind us. We had looked around for a while to find the best angle, and had found an ideal one: a gentle slope that suggested silence and neglect, a panorama that was ideal in its meager, but essential, symbolism. The silhouette of a factory could be seen in the background, a detail that couldn’t have been absent, as present as it was in Delia’s life. And halfway between there and the foreground, one could see the land descend along a slope that grew steeper and ended in a space the camera would never capture, a sad little dried-up lake. Posed there in our loving embrace, happy, enthusiastic, content, and so on, Delia and I looked at the camera as though “forward” were another way of saying “toward the future.” Delia’s friend lifted her arm, wanting to say something without saying anything. It was a blotch crossing the sky. I remember that the sun was in front of us, and that we had to squint while we waited for her to take the picture. The friend said something I didn’t hear, of course, but this time it was because the sun blocked out the sound. An instant later, at a moment Delia and I didn’t know to expect but which we recognized all the same, the afternoon stopped and we heard the camera take its shot.

I just mentioned a metaphorical “facing forward.” Well, as it happened, the real “forward” had a “back” to it, invisible at the time. A back that didn’t cancel out the ahead, that is, us, but rather turned it into a degraded image. Weeks, or probably months, later, when looking back on that afternoon would have required an unhurried act of memory, Delia’s friend appeared with the photo. We were walking along when someone called out to us from maybe a hundred feet away; it was her, coming toward us with her hesitant gait, which at first glance simply appeared to be slow, but which was actually all weakness and exhaustion. As we waited, we watched her approach. The only thing she was carrying was the photograph. The way Delia’s friend walked reminded me of her house, and I realized that movements as small as hers unfolded best in confined spaces, that they were more in their element on that scale. When she finally reached us, she held the photo out to Delia. For a while, we didn’t know what had happened. Delia was silent, unable to express herself in words. The thing was, as far as the photo was concerned, we didn’t exist. The sun that, as I said, had blinded us also kept us from appearing in the image. Our bodies were overexposed and only the contours of our faces, or even less, could be seen; our features had been rubbed out by the light. I thought of those paintings in which the artist conceals the face of his subject with a crude, thick brushstroke, a hurried swipe that speaks of a kind of silence, or at least of omission, haste, or the impotence of the image itself; that was what Delia and I looked like. In contrast, the group behind us stood out like a bird silhouetted against the sky. It was easy for them to rise to the occasion; meaning that each one of them showed the best of themselves, or at least the most eloquent part, as they stared at a pile of garbage in a way that resembled a rite performed before an altar or a fire. And there in the foreground were Delia and I with our featureless faces, marked by a stigma yet far removed from any ceremony.

I said before that this development surprised me; I should also say that, later, it seemed predictable. By triggering a secret mechanism, Delia and I made it possible for the group to appear. The photo had to choose and it chose them, salvaging the more primitive scene. The remote, the archaic, often imposes itself of its own accord. But it’s also true that, of the two “scenes,” both presented serious difficulties. There was the group of six or seven figures contemplating something, absorbed: garbage, in this case. This is what makes it “primitive”—this withdrawn stance seems less mundane than the one adopted by Delia and I as we tried to find the best pose or angle with our minds on the future, or our own photographic vanity. But it’s also true that, from a different perspective, our attitude was spontaneous, simpler and, because of this, more ancient or primitive: we wanted to endure. The six or seven of them had been there for a while; the earth showed their footprints and where they had come from, each one different from the next. Their faces could not be made out, but they were all looking intently down and, though this can’t be proven, were clearly deaf to the noise around them. The generality, among other things, to which all waste aspires is overturned by its contemplation: the garbage did not inspire indifference, but rather fascination, conveying its significance to those who observed it. In this way, the group was superior to us in more than just their number. It’s very likely that more than one of them thought, before lowering their eyes again, that a father was being photographed with his daughter – a natural distortion upon seeing us together – and then went back to their series of associations. This is why people had such contradictory reactions to us when presented with the truth. Later, I might describe these expressions as surprise or confusion. For now I’ll simply say that these reactions reached us – Delia and me, but especially me – as a reminder of what we were and what we were not, of what we could be and what we were allowed to be. It turns out that love is a great equalizer. Like our faces in the photo her friend took of us, the differences between Delia and I were blurred. But many saw our equality, something so obvious to the two of us, as impossible. Things that are but do not seem to be, or the opposite: the darkness that seems to be light, the favorable sign taken as a disaster, and so on; all this has been the subject of many novels. At first glance, things appear obvious, natural; they always seem to be something they are not, not just different, base, or irrelevant.

Now I look at the crust of hair standing at the mirror, the bulbous stomach working its way downward in search of more body, more space; I see all this and it’s hard for me to believe that I’m the same person who, for example, took that picture with Delia. As I realized too late, some did not see Delia and I as being alike; we could seem to be many things, but never two people who were, shall we say, equals. On the contrary, the differences were often more obvious. As I said before, there are novels in which people face adversity according to the strength of their convictions and the measure of their passion, in which reality reveals itself through risk: the world is a formless precipice; unquantifiable, transcendent and, as though that weren’t enough, one that seems to obey a central command. It goes without saying that this was not the case with me, and not only because I’ve distanced myself from the reality of novels. Delia and I felt united, made equal in our distinct but equivalent natures, by a general sense of indifference. The group reacted like stones or plants; nothing drew their attention from the unfocused contemplation into which they sank for hours at a time, just as nothing could compare to the distraction, that is, the neglect, transmitted by their actions in general. Nonetheless, it was true that we were subject to a form of surveillance that was at once vigilant, patient, and offhand.

Delia and I relied on the indifference of others in order to blur the line between us and, at the same time, to make ourselves disappear; as such, we looked at the outside world in the same way. There was an ideal we never put into words, though we always thought about it, according to which we had to let ourselves dissolve, eliminate what was unique to each of us and become something else, something unintelligible to others, but clear to us. Delia, the factory worker; me, the anonymous man. As a couple, we should have been transparent, embedded in the invisible backdrop of the landscape. But, as I wrote above, what one doesn’t want to know is often exactly what is. The things we fear and willfully ignore, what we turn our backs on because we’d rather not know, the infinite facts we avoid and want to do away with, choosing ignorance instead; what ends up happening is that all this comes back to surprise us in the moment of our greatest solitude. Well, in the end, Delia and I were surprised to find ourselves marked, accused by all of being different, or maybe just unusual, but definitely not a part of the lethargy and indecision around us. I don’t mean to say that we were special; on the contrary, our inertia was absolute, lassitude had taken us over. The endless walks we took were one proof of this: imperturbable and immune to exhaustion, we expended no effort. Nature, deceptive, had enlisted us to its cause, turning us into misleading creatures. For example, I’d look at the mud on rainy days and the first thing that would come to mind, after Delia, of course, would be whether that essential – in the way all mud is – mixture might not originally have been destined to form the foundations of another world, other people, or to mold a different nature. I’m not talking about primordial conditions, which have never interested me much; what I mean is that I wondered whether the mud might not have been called upon to hold up neighborhoods, events, a series of things completely different from those that had taken shape in reality; and whether, in that case, it might not have better fulfilled its role.

Mute as it is, one can’t expect eloquence of mud. It expresses itself through quantity: colossal masses of material, or earth, which give form to the planet, the mountains, producing landslides, accumulations of sediment, and so on. But my question was directed at the unit, at the fistful of mud. I asked that absurd and arbitrary part of the whole – for example, what is left behind by a pair of shoes and later hardens – what those traces really mean. Of course, it was a question I never formulated, and to which I didn’t expect an answer. It was the rhetoric of reflection; I asked about Delia, that other part of the whole, the same way. Accustomed to industrial controls, complex processes, and large quantities, Delia was unmoved by nature’s extravagance. A passivity that could also be understood as a profound affinity, a level of acquiescence or solidarity aspired to only by those who are marked or chosen – not chosen by anyone or anything in particular, but rather are endowed with a unique sensitivity to their surroundings. In Delia’s case, I believe this was intimately tied to her work in the factory: through mechanisms that were in one sense abstract, and in another sense not unlike the processes of production to which her own hands lent continuity, Delia made herself a protagonist of the perennially incomplete and apparently delicate machine of industry. This intimacy had the paradoxical effect of distancing her more and more from the things that occupied her thoughts and movements and, over time, resulted in a kind of ironic distance regarding anything that might be considered staggering or weighty, as nature often presented itself to be. It’s true that I mentioned similar traits before, loosely calling them Delia’s “proletarian disposition.” But when faced with the natural landscape, the vast expanses of countryside, topography, or changes in the weather, this sensibility was not expressed solely as withdrawal or detachment, as was the case with all other things, but rather, as I just said, as deaf indifference, as an abandonment…