Читать книгу The Dark - Sergio Chejfec - Страница 6

It has always unsettled me that geography does not change with time, with the changes that take place within it, within us. We retain something immaterial, similar to that something retained by geography, also immaterial. And yet, though it remains unaltered, geography is the measure of change. Just as happens with the temperature of a body, the trace it retains of its former heat allows it to continue being itself, yet this trace marks a difference. Bodies are and are not; they are at once more and less than. The same is true of geography, that is, it’s unruly. I’ve read many novels in which the protagonist returns to a forgotten place. It doesn’t matter whether the landscape is urban or rural. The slope of the hills won’t have changed, but the green will be different, or the mountains, if they’ve kept their color, will disappoint with domesticated angles, not nearly as steep as remembered. The same goes for the city: the old corner has been restored, destroyed, abandoned, and so on. The protagonist is left with a residue, a mixture of reality and oblivion, something elusive drawn from his surroundings, the contradictory signs of which, along with his disappointment and resolve, allow him to recognize places. And so some characters, in order to uncover what lies hidden, latch on to the superficial.

This is exactly what is happening to me now. I go back to where I used to meet Delia and see that much has changed, while remaining in place. This warehouse used to be an empty lot half a block wide where wildflowers would grow unchecked, floating lazily on a sea of thistles. Delia would tell me how the lot, also known as the thistle barrens, used to give her nightmares, before we—she, with her childhood barely behind her, and I, eager for her to forget it all the more quickly—pressed ourselves against the brick wall that surrounded it. The streets around there were gently sloped, and the buildings, I remember, gave the impression of having been constructed at random. Large industrial compounds bordered houses just over fifteen feet high, arranged in rows but crammed together—here the lines grew irregular, congested—to make the most of the elevation. The opposite was also true: a steel shed, no more than a large room, housed a factory with day and night shifts while, further off, a solitary residence rose up in the middle of a sprawling lot and was swallowed by the expanse. And yet, differences in size seemed irrelevant to Delia and me, as did spatial relations. Even the idea of “place” was called into question by our daily routine. There were no places, no confines; space was neither empty, nor full. Immune to all influence, nothing could contain us. The work of ages that defines the city, even the newer parts, did not exist to us. Distinctions were blurred; on our walks we could sense unfinished business, something just constructed or about to be abandoned, like a campsite taken down in a rush, something peaceful, rural and undefined that nevertheless seemed more lasting than the land itself. The solitude of the streets would attract distant sounds. For example, we would continue to hear the bus that had just left the corner of Los Huérfanos after letting Delia off, though it was headed in the opposite direction and kept moving further from us. But a place could be absent or effaced and still be sensed by some part of ourselves, in our bodies, perhaps: as we neared the thistle barrens, Delia would begin to sweat, almost imperceptibly. The sheen transformed her face, now paler than before, and turned her hands and arms to ice. She would tremble, youthful fear and adult desire joined in her agitation. Although attraction and resistance were no longer in opposition, she retained the memory of both, and the struggle between these recollections pushed her toward the brink. And so she got confused, not as a result of ignorance, inconsistency, or insecurity, but because she instinctively sensed that things on a threshold tend to remain incomplete. And Delia lived on a threshold: on the psychological border of her youth, and the physical one of her family.

It all began on the corner of Los Huérfanos, where I would watch her get off the bus. Delia would arrive as evening fell, place one foot on the pavement, and head straight for her house. Later on, I’ll say more about the way she took that first step. I remember that someone would eventually turn up to wait for her. A woman would appear ten minutes before the bus and look down the road, intent on its arrival. Sometimes her impatience would show; she would clench her fists until they were red and fleshy, her hands eager to be doing something else. She’d greet Delia brusquely, take her arm, and the two of them would leave the corner and head down a side street. I always watched her get off the bus—the same foot, the same movement, the same air—until one day, by chance, I found out where she got on, and this meant guessing her occupation. The truth is, I don’t remember the day or the circumstances, but I know that it happened like this: I was taking the bus in the opposite direction and saw someone standing just ahead with one arm raised. I recognized her back, her neck, her fingertips, the outline of her childish form carved out against the fading afternoon light. A few blocks to the east there was a school, a small, dilapidated structure that had been there for a hundred years. Surely Delia was a student there. All of the town’s battered pride converged on this school: there wasn’t an older or more distinguished building around, and none was better suited to facing, by virtue of its presence alone, the pervasive feeling of adversity. Today, for example, I walked past and saw that it hasn’t changed at all. At the appointed hours, students would spill from its doors and onto the streets, hungry and unaware of the deeper meaning, if there was one, of their routine. The girl who was Delia, at the time still nameless to me, presumably went into that building every day to, as they say, acquire knowledge. Then she would leave and begin the journey home, the culmination of which I knew well: the moment she stepped down onto the pavement on the corner of Los Huérfanos. The school radiated students, and Delia was one of its innumerable rays. Part of this routine was that the students would circulate aimlessly, carefree and unselfconscious, though everyone else was quite conscious of them. But unwanted knowledge often comes to us, anyway. I forgot in that first moment that just two blocks in the other direction, to the west, there was a factory. Unlike the school, the factory could go unnoticed by someone who didn’t want to see it, and yet the truth lay there, and I’m not just talking about Delia. I mean that power emanated from the factory, authority; something at once imposing and caustic.

I disliked the fact that Delia worked, but it was an idea that had no clear shape. Contrary to what one might think, it was not a sentimental qualm or a matter of denouncing an injustice, at least, not in that sense. I disliked the fact that Delia worked for the most obvious of reasons; paradoxically, for the very circumstance that made her do so: because it turned her into something else, something outside herself, setting her feet on yet another border. Delia was probably no less innocent, if one can speak of innocence, than was normal for someone like her, but she did have different habits, a different routine. At any rate, she probably “knew” more, and different, things than other people her age. What she knew was what we don’t want to know, but is, just the same. Still, later on, when we would spend nights walking along deserted streets, I felt a certain pride to know that the hands that sometimes touched me were the same ones that, hours earlier, had been operating machinery, handling tools, or moving future merchandise. These activities, designed primarily to make use of her physical strength—and, in the end, to sap it entirely—nonetheless granted her an immense vigor, in the form of an abundance or zeal that could overcome great adversity and moments of misfortune. Every so often I would think of the circle Delia represented: from the innocence I attributed to her at the beginning, to the strength of character one imagines the working class to have, then back to the simplicity of someone who considers her work to be essentially individual, so subjective it is invisible even to her. Delia was like that. This conviction could, in fact, have been grounded in profound wisdom, but it manifested itself in such a straightforward and constant way that it closed the circle perfectly, connecting the experiences and the sojourns of her spirit. The discovery that she worked in a factory, though it surprised me, was what made me fall in love with her. I can say, without exaggeration, that it was the mark that distinguished her from the rest of the human race, the condition that made her stand out from all other women. “Look at her… and a factory worker, at that…” I would think, assigning her a double density. As a thought it was empty, almost meaningless, but its shortcomings were compensated by the eloquence of the word and the circumstance: “worker.” A silvery ring seemed to surround her, announcing her condition and emphasizing it among other occupations and the titles these carry with them. And so each of her movements, even the mechanical one of stepping down with her right foot onto the corner of Los Huérfanos, took on another meaning. Although I didn’t know her—she and I had never actually exchanged words, nor had I ever had the chance to observe her carefully, up close—Delia already embodied the most desirable, the most complete ideal of a woman. In this fragmentary, accidental way, all my senses were focused on her, trying at first to get their bearings as they received the signs of her movements each afternoon. When they finally achieved this, evidently, it was forever.

During our walks, Delia would ask how I really felt about her. Accustomed to the world of the factory, where truth is measured, counted, and classified, she was confused by the thought of becoming the object of something at once definite and intangible, as emotions tend to be. Because everything that can be counted is untrue. To confuse her further still, and to show her the absurdity of her misgivings, I told her that my words might be untrue but our experiences together were real; or, the other way around, that truthful words were driving us toward false actions. What I meant was that truth and falsity were terms that had no place in our world. How was Delia’s way of thinking, which relied on accumulation and modification to measure change, distinct from that of a merchant, whose work is defined by the notion of difference? As a worker, Delia was in direct contact with the results of her labor: something was altered, a commodity was produced, or a piece was moved one step closer to completion. The merchant’s way of thinking was different, being based on a change in category rather than a change in condition. In any event, Delia didn’t own the things that passed through her hands, so her idea of measurability and concreteness was less calculated. As a worker, her position relative to these objects was at once subaltern and essential. The commodity determined her identity, it defined her as a worker; that same commodity also took her over, setting her apart by immeasurable distances as though she were from another world. Like geography, this movement is static, though this may seem contradictory: its meaning does not lie in change or circulation, in the idea of progress or a final objective, but rather in a movement that itself confers identity, like hours passing or, more appropriately, like those industrial pistons that do nothing but move back and forth. Delia’s hands, then, were the surface upon which production attained the status of a commodity. I’ve read many novels in which the protagonist can’t tell the difference between what is true and what is false—there is truth and falsehood in all things: people have true and false sides; someone chooses one part of a room as false and the other as true, and so on. I’ve even read an untrue book, or rather, a book falsified by circumstance, which described events that could have been real but eventually proved not to be. These events were both black and white; that is, they were neither. They were either outrageously false, or outrageously true. But with Delia, I was able to prove that these confusions meant nothing. Though she was sometimes at a loss for words, her expression was always appropriate, and no hint of ambiguity clouded her behavior. Coming from her, silence was something living, eloquent—it seemed crafted with the patience of stones, able to reveal the obvious without naming it.

One night, instead of walking around the Barrens, we crossed through them. Delia and I headed toward a house, a shack that bordered the street on the far side of the lot and in which reverberated the murmur of open spaces and unobstructed silence. We opened the door and the echo reached us before we set foot inside. It was the same as we walked in: the sound of each step bounced off the walls and returned to us before we had time to take the next one. Once more, without trying to, I was able to distinguish Delia’s scent, which came to me mixed with those of the vegetation that surrounded us beyond the makeshift walls. Just as we had heard our footsteps before taking them, Delia’s scent reached me as a premonition: I sensed it before my body was, as they say, joined to hers. In that moment, something was interrupted: time stood still, unable to contain what was happening. A jumble of scents, at times sharp and enigmatic, at times elusive, emanated from her. Later, I suppose, I’ll describe Delia’s scent, that invisible insignia, which in her case tended to fold in on itself and withdraw toward the greatest depths. Delia was timid, but never indecisive; her restraint was an indirect form of resoluteness, a deferral. The way she looked at me always unsettled me; her gaze was steady, true, and expressed itself only in terms of its depth, like wells do. What at first appeared to be caution was, in Delia, assurance, and what I interpreted as inhibition she experienced as desires that threatened and confused her in ways similar only in their urgency. What I mean is that Delia did not understand her desire—she was aware of it only as an assortment of vague ideas that she, nonetheless, was forced to obey as it pursued its own fulfillment.

I remember how we crossed the terrain. From the thicket of the night we stepped into another realm, thicker still: the Barrens, through which we haltingly felt our way, using our feet like hands. I walked ahead of Delia. The scents and vapors followed their individual paths, approaching one another, meeting and intermingling, showing that nature was still at its continuous, indolent work. Every so often a leaf would brush against our skin, leaving a slight irritation that burned when it came into contact with the air. Had we paused in that moment to examine our own actions, we wouldn’t have known how to explain them: though it may be hard to believe, we were driven by instinct, not will, and certainly not conscience. It was as though I were being propelled by the same force that pressed the scents around us upward, something that gave the impression of being natural and abstract, but which nevertheless was directed toward a decisive end; at the same time, I could feel Delia pulling me along, even though she was behind me. Once inside the shack, we felt the walls recede. It was not my mouth that kissed her, not her hands that clutched at me. I looked at her without eyes and touched her without fingers. And that wasn’t all: just as the memory of my hands on her breasts is the memory of my hands holding up the world, so too were the lips that kissed her not my own, but those of someone to whom I was joined, someone who surpassed me in every possible way, and under whose control I was given access to an abundance I would never have had otherwise. Delia’s breasts were delicate and, obviously, small. I remember the sense of intoxication that came over me as I held them, those times they pointed downward, feeling the seed of her nipple in the center of my palm; I had only to lift them to be reminded of how absurdly light they were, like petals. Before stepping inside, Delia had begun to tremble. “It’s the cold, the night air,” she lied. At first I was taken aback, but immediately told myself that if Delia lied, then so must the night, the dew, the stars, and the thistles. A unanimous lie turned into truth. I remember the afternoon I first approached her; before saying a word, Delia looked at me in a way that suggested her response, not in words, but through her disposition. It said something like, “I am completely attentive to whatever you might say, and am determined to respond sincerely.” Her eyes made this promise. She had barely stepped onto the corner of Los Huérfanos when I approached her and she met me in the way I just described, with her transparent gaze. I, who already knew her secret, thought to myself that only a worker could respond that way. The proof of Delia’s earnestness was precisely this: the fact that she was answering me before a question was ever asked.

Earlier, I mentioned the way she would set her foot on the pavement as she got off the bus. Now I’ll describe it: it was like that of someone who spends their life crossing thresholds. The steps on buses, factory gates, the space between cobblestones, fences, doorways, the edge of a path. In her lightness, Delia never seemed able to access the memories she had so carefully gathered; she was there, but she gave the impression of having taken a long time to arrive. I said something above about a psychological border; it’s basically the same thing. Watching her at her workstation, her concentration was obvious, and yet she handled the pieces with a distant, withdrawn air. She situated herself either in a before or an after, but never in that exact moment. The part of the factory to which Delia was most drawn was, precisely, its edge: the perimeter where discarded materials were scattered across the sparse and neglected grass, and where the weary curve of the fence still served as a boundary. The workers would go out there during their breaks to enjoy the space, in search of some distraction. Delia didn’t need to be out there to appreciate it: long before the whistle sounded, she had already mentally taken her place on a large metal crate covered by a brown mat. On sunny days, four or five workers would climb up onto it. The holes in the mat, worn by time, allowed glimpses of the cold shine of metal that had once been meant for another purpose. Delia would start at the crate’s lowest point and work her way up to the highest, conquering the slope. She would picture this before the whistle blew; it was what she did when she drifted off. She’d roll down her sleeves and, thus prepared for the outdoors, head for the perimeter, from where she would look out over the thick, high walls of the workshops that reflected the light like mountains. The slat windows that looked so small from outside filled the interior, as she well knew, with a harsh light, like powerful little suns. As might be expected, the grass grew thicker alongside the crate; as she sat, Delia would dangle her feet among the weeds.

Of all the novels I have read, I can’t recall a single one that has taken the side of truth; at most, a few of them manage to uncover the trace of something concrete, definitive, but this is like the tip of an iceberg, hinting at all it conceals. The hidden part is a secret, or a threat that hangs over mariners. The same is true of names. Ships sail blindly through a night rife with danger, never knowing the risks hidden beneath the surface. I remember reading, once, about a crossing during which no one slept for a week. In the same way, I say “Delia” now and am overcome; I cannot speak her name, yet little happens when I write it. Writing is one thing, speaking, another. I remember the murmur, impossible to capture with words: “Delia, my Delia, it’s me.” The strokes required to trace out those five letters don’t compare with the fleeting whisper, the fraction of a breath it took to say her name. Writing just one name or word involves a tremendous balancing act in which complex mental, motor, and visual operations come into play: an effort far greater than is required to pronounce them. In part because the written word is meant to endure. And yet we are weakest when faced with the temporary, with something whispered, spoken. Now, for example, when I say “Delia” under my breath, I tremble at the invocation because when I hear my own voice I feel as though I were calling her, or talking with her as I did years ago, as though she were just about to turn her attention to me. I am left defenseless. What I mean to say is that there is more to Delia than just the woman, the worker, the person without whom I was unable to wake or to function; there are also the symbols and the forces hidden within her name. It may sound a bit esoteric, but that’s how it is.

Heading north, the corner after Los Huérfanos was Pedrera. Delia and I rarely went that way, even though, as everyone who hung around Los Huérfanos knew, that was precisely where I came from; not exactly from that corner, but from that general direction. It’s strange how ambiguous places and bearings can be. Pedrera wasn’t the border of anything, and yet it was the start of something that actually began several blocks later, a fanning out of streets with no other name than just “past Pedrera,” as it was called. To the inconclusiveness of place, then, was added the ambiguity of names: why should it be called “past Pedrera” if there were other streets with names of their own closer to—and therefore better suited to describing—what was “past” them? As I said, Delia and I almost never went in that direction, even though that was where I came from every afternoon and where I returned in the dark, in the small hours of the morning, her touch still fresh in my mind. The pressure Delia applied with her hands was something inhuman, even supernatural. It was the right and proper amount of pressure, at once premeditated and innocent, and I’m not just talking about her caresses. Delia’s touch left a memory on the skin that would last for hours, and even then would only appear to fade: it might return as its reflection, an imagined graze of the fingertips that would leave one disoriented and defenseless because, in spite of its concrete origin, Delia, it could travel block after block through the darkness. These reflected touches manifested as a slight burn, like the sensation caused by contact with a thistle, and were concentrated around things that were, at that moment, intangible—the tautness of Delia’s skin, the heat emanating from her body, the agitation caused by having her near—as though they were part of some gravitational field intent on testing its strength. And so, what I had felt as a pressure that, let’s say, began with or was born of her hands, became, in her absence, the pressure exuded by the memory of her touch. Perhaps because of her age, Delia’s pores breathed more than average. Her skin was dewy; it consoled and protected, but there was also something disconcerting about it. This is why I wrote earlier that I thought she was supernatural, because it felt as though I were touching an inscrutable surface that was neither smooth nor rough, nor was it opaque, translucent, or glistening. As with other mysteries from which one can only retreat, it never occurred to me to ask her about the strange quality of her skin. This confirms, I think, her enigmatic nature, though it also speaks to her utter simplicity, which presented itself as categorically as truth.

Delia was someone who never needed to be asked anything because she took it upon herself to respond before anything was said. I’m obviously talking about a certain kind of question, since some can only be asked and answered with words. There are those who think that the essential, precisely because it is so fundamental, can remain unspoken; that words attach themselves to and distort the truth. On the other hand, I’ve read many novels in which words are capable of revealing all, first hiding the truth under different layers of meaning, then revealing it the way the layers of an onion protect its core. And yet, when we get to the center, we find that there’s nothing there, that the work of the onion was to justify itself and, in so doing, create itself. Are human lives just as useless and as self-contained? That’s what novels ask. Delia was both a promise and the fulfillment of that promise. She occupied a neutral territory. The first time she asked me to do something for her, I noticed her tendency to disappear, to dissolve among people and things, leaving apparently incidental traces behind her in what is known as the day-to-day world, the indifferent witness to her movements and actions. I may return to this idea later, this double inclination of Delia’s: to disperse and distribute parts of herself while remaining distant, contracting and expanding at once.

For a long time, as I said, we would take the same route every night through the thistle barrens and the surrounding area. One evening, though, Delia wanted to make a detour and asked me if I wouldn’t mind going a few blocks further with her. Given how I felt at the time—how I still feel—I said of course, anything, whatever she wanted. Delia explained that she had to pick up some clothes. We didn’t head toward Pedrera, or toward her place; we went to a neighborhood full of half-built houses inside which packs of children played. At night it was hard to tell if the structures were ruins, or if something was being built there: a neighborhood, a settlement, a community, individual houses, and so on. That’s what I thought—or what Delia and I thought—at the time; now I don’t think there’s much of a difference. Everything built is the promise of a future ruin, even new constructions. We live surrounded by debris; living in a house means inhabiting a ruin—and I don’t mean this only in a literal sense. The children’s arms and faces could be seen through the holes left for windows; sometimes they would try, unsuccessfully, to hide behind the thin concrete columns that held nothing up. I remember those faces, lit by the moon, furtive like the animals. Never before had a place seemed so entirely left to the mercy of God, though I had seen worse. It was the sense of incompletion, the feeling that nature neither offered resistance—because no one had challenged it—nor made any demands; it wanted only to affirm its presence in the face of the man-made world. We walked in silence for more than an hour; the night passed while the landscape stayed the same. Though impossible, this happened as if it were true. And this was because we belonged to a misleading order of things: it was not that the landscape didn’t change, but rather that it didn’t matter to Delia or to me. My “landscape” was at my side: it was her, a face that presented itself for contemplation freely and without discomfort, partly confident and partly indifferent to those who fixed their attention on it. Just as the wind suggests the activity of the world by stirring the leaves, the breeze that ran through Delia’s hair exhibited her concentration, which I’d almost describe as a withdrawal, a surrender unique in that she was not giving up anything in particular. These waves, the work of the wind in her hair, were yet another sign of how entirely fitting her presence was. As in a classical image, depth and mystery emanated from this movement, yet it was a contradictory sort of mystery because it relied on a superficial instrument like the air to manifest itself. In the same way, just like at work, Delia surrendered a part of herself when she withdrew; someone observing her might think that at any moment she might cease to be herself, that she might succumb to a force that would isolate and take over her body. But something kept her from crossing that threshold, and this was how Delia was able to maintain the delicate balance between absence and communion.

I said before that the landscape mattered little, that my landscape was the one I kept at my side: her. I experienced that long string of ruins—ex-houses or pre-buildings, scattered across the terrain and indifferent to the way people used them—as a kind of delay or postponement, something secondary to what happened in real life, in the true landscape. But what was Delia’s landscape? I was at her side, therefore it was me. This may sound rash, and maybe a bit vain, but I don’t have any memories that would contradict it—much less from that night. In many novels a character’s nature manifests itself through his face; a portrait is read, a soul glimpsed. But the truth is that faces speak of themselves and also of varied, even contradictory things; they never indicate one thing alone. A serene neck tenses suddenly and for no apparent reason; what can be read into this, aside from the anxiety of the observer? The confusion of the person to whom the gesture was directed? A sensual lip twitches not with desire, but disdain; the arch of a forehead promises intelligence, but also hints at the betrayal soon to follow. Sparkling eyes, as big as moons and as deep with sincerity as the wells I mentioned earlier when speaking of Delia, offer themselves up and crumble, emptied out without ever giving what they promised. An imploring brow, innocent cheeks, nostrils flared with passion. And yet faces say the opposite, contradicting their individual parts. The strength that Delia transmitted, that serene focus, was concentrated in her eyebrows. They were thick and bushy, and though they belonged to something as conventional as a face might seem to be, they were the mark of an untamed or savage past; a sign that became a promise that was, nonetheless, fulfilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delia’s friend didn’t know what to do; from the window she could see the faint shadow of the car, the even line of the roof. Just like trains in stations, people leave traces on one another that almost immediately fade away. The thought appealed to her, since she wanted the man to be gone as quickly as possible. She suddenly remembered stories she’d heard; the people from her neighborhood, all of whom were poor, tended to believe in miraculous scenarios in which millionaires unexpectedly find a long-lost daughter living in anonymity and neglect. Her mind raced, it seemed impossible to focus on the urgent thoughts that filled it. The man finally spoke, though it was only to ask her name. Delia’s friend did not know how to answer something so simple. All questions are difficult, but familiar ones are especially problematic. They involve an act of memory, like when an adult calculates his age based on what year it is. In the end, as she said her name, she realized—though she had been aware of this all along—that she was moving farther and farther from home. She knew that her response, though true, broke a bond that had been strong until that moment. The man, for his part, didn’t believe what he’d heard; “It can’t be,” he said, as he turned the photo around so she could see it. Delia’s friend grimaced. Her solitude had been ambushed at the flank where we are all most vulnerable. She saw her own image in the photo, recognized each of her features from the memory, for example, of her fingers touching her face. She repeated to herself that it was impossible, and wondered what the outcome of this adventure might be. In her innocence she thought that if she had lied, none of this would have happened, that the coincidence lay not between the image and her face, but between herself and her name. It should be said that the matter was never resolved. She immediately discovered a new problem that only made the situation worse: there was another difference, which, although it affected the physical resemblance, also emphasized it. The tone of their skin was not the same. Though this was obvious, the stranger did not notice. For Delia’s friend, seeing herself with different skin meant being transported: not to a future or a past, but to a simultaneous, contiguous time.

Later, repeating the story in Delia’s presence, the friend added that the photograph the man had been carrying was actually of a painting, an oval-shaped portrait with a dark background and a fake gold frame. What she had first imagined to be the photograph of a person, as true as a legal document, became a drawing that dissolved into an unimaginable series of mediations. A turn of the screw, she said in different words, that complicated things further still. Because if the evidentiary proof, as they say, was a painting, the model was less important than the hand that had given her form. It seemed that the artist, whether he was right or wrong, had created a patient prophecy: the encounter with the model would eventually take place; the time and distance that needed to be crossed before this occurred were secondary. And so the episode was fixed in Delia’s friend’s past against a backdrop of confusion. It could not be said that she had forgotten it, but the mystery, which still left her anxious and often on the verge of tears, was such that she did not want to remember.