Sergio Chejfec - The Dark

At times I’ve thought that if I’d heard about the child from Delia, I wouldn’t have left her. Though this is no excuse, if there should be an excuse at all, the way we learn about something inspires our reaction, whatever the facts may be. I’ve read many novels in which this happens. When I found out about the child, I withdrew past the corner of Pedrera. It was a truth so unbelievable, so unjust. Finding out from someone else made me realize that I had abandoned Delia long ago, and that reality was simply reading my indifference, prior even to this outcome, assigning a greater significance to my actions than I believe they actually had. So I turned my back on the matter and dedicated myself to that train of thought, that “reading” of reality. Although my involvement had been decisive — I was, after all, the child’s father — I felt removed from it in a way that would have been inconceivable a few days earlier. I felt the touch of an invisible hand on my skin, a hand from another planet that marked and condemned me. The first thing I thought was that I should apologize. If it was impossible to heal the wound, then I should at least do what was necessary to dispel it quickly in the day-to-day of these earthly confines. But, since I couldn’t see the hand that touched me, there was no way for me to know of whom I should be asking forgiveness. That hand, I thought, came from the future; it was the touch of the entire species. As such, there was no one in particular who could pardon me… Before that day, if anyone had told me that I was about to give her up, to abandon her, erase her from my world and cut off all contact, I would have been outraged and not believed a word of it. Delia was everything; she occupied every emotion and thought, at all hours, guiding every act and digression without meaning to. But the fact remains that I used the nine months the child needed to take shape, grow and emerge from the mother to distance myself, to avoid and pity her. This may seem contradictory, but that’s how it was; pity and obliteration, or the other way around, if you prefer. Either way, it was what I imposed on myself. From that moment on, there would be two: Delia on one hand, and the mother on the other. The mother of the child, and Delia, the subject that preceded the mother. What began as a tremor within her, probably in the empty shack in the Barrens, had, ultimately, turned into a child.

By then the woman who would meet Delia on the corner of Los Huérfanos, a neighbor or a relative who lived with her, I think, had stopped going to wait for her; I did, instead. In winter, when it grew dark earlier, or when Delia had to work a late shift at the factory, a building a few yards from the corner would emit a steady white light, uncommon in those parts, which was made use of in the loading and unloading of cargo and the transportation of merchandise from one truck to several carts drawn by mules or horses, or from several carts to one truck. There were pushcarts with four wheels, which they called shuttles; these were used to move merchandise from one vehicle to another without having to lift it. This was the use made of light at Los Huérfanos: the moving of goods. One truck, two or three carts alongside it. The men moved in silence, their backs bent, while the animals waited, impassive. Strangely, the light didn’t reach the opposite sidewalk (or what passed for a sidewalk), that is, where I would wait for Delia; this produced an effect that resembled stage lighting, as though the work were the focal point of some sort of performance. When she got off the bus, Delia would place her foot precisely at the edge of that light. Right then the shadow of the bus confused everything, making the night seem darker than it was, but as it faded into the distance Delia’s feet would remain close to the border. I spoke before of her natural tendency to occupy frontiers, thresholds and transitional spaces; the placement of her foot was a rehearsal of this trait. Similarly, she’d occupy the periphery of the group when she went out to the yard with the other, stony-faced, workers. It was a physical periphery, because she ended up situating herself at the furthest edge of the group, barely a distant satellite, the presence of which is purely coincidental and which obeys forces beyond the immediate scope of the gathering, but it was also a symbolic periphery, the result of her being a woman, or a belated girl, among men hardened by physical labor. I remember how the deliberate bustle of unloading, the effort, the halting steps of those who moved between animal and truck, were to me a precursor of the leisurely pace we would soon settle into when Delia stepped off the bus. A few yards from Los Huérfanos began the black hole of the darkened street, confined to a realm of junk, the promise of houses and imagined cross-streets. The bus, which had just dropped Delia off and was still clearly audible despite its growing distance from us, was nearly the only trace that spoke, for lack of a better phrase, of a community. To be there was to witness the early attempts at a collective will, the rudiments of a coming-together that, through some strange paradox, contained within it the impossibility of its realization. Had they read these signs in time, the few settlers of the area would have known that they would never amount to anything as such, that is, as settlers.

Delia was tired when she got off the bus; the factory consumed the workers’ strength slowly, patiently. The machine that she, in a sense, operated was hundreds of times her size. Beside it, she appeared still more vulnerable and slight. Off to one side there was some sort of workstation or counter, this was where Delia was supposed to work with several pieces at once while the machine ran smoothly, without her needing to attend to it. Given that it was doing Delia’s work, it was logical to assume that the machine was a kind of substitute, but, on the contrary, the fact that she hung on its every noise, observed its operations, corrected any irregularities and adjusted its mechanical movements from time to time together made Delia feel as though she were the auxiliary component. This muddled sense of responsibility exhausted her: it was the machine that was in charge, that set the pace, so to speak. Standing before something so coarse and rudimentary, Delia also had to perform an archaic task: that of monitoring, though some of the processes and most of the details were beyond her. Given its tremendous dimensions, it seemed incongruous that a being as small as Delia could operate it. She was able to tell by the noises it gave off whether everything was running as it should; its clattering, like that of an old train, would mingle with its pneumatic convulsions; its uniform whirring, which sounded more like a whine or the whistled language of sea creatures, indicated that a fluid was circulating through the machine: not only that which powered it, but also another, some raw material. The machine consumed many things, aside from the workers’ labor, Delia would say. Energy, raw materials, time, effort, and so on. As the machine performed its task, Delia would perform hers, which was twofold: to listen and observe, and to sit at her workstation and put her hands to use while the formidable clanging of enormous hammers emanated from every corner of the factory and mingled with the general din. Just below where the factory ceiling met the wall, there was a window. Light filtered through the entire factory from that single point, making visible the particles that floated in the air. One night, a little while after getting off the bus, Delia told me that she couldn’t remember how she had started working there. This made sense, given that she considered anything related to the factory to be a virtue; it was a point of pride and was doubtless what endowed her with her fullest and most complete identity, the trait that allowed her to feel like herself when confronted by the outside world, without shame. A feeling akin to omnipotence, or something like it: the world could threaten to end, to stop existing from one moment to the next, and the worker would be the figure best suited to prevent its collapse.