The Dark

by Sergio Chejfec

  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…

  There was a certain irony to Delia. Looking out over the landscape, as that more or less harmonic arrangement of natural contrasts is called, a knowing smile would creep across her face, as though no truth found there could be new to her. A barely perceptible, though eloquent, expression that combined affinity and indifference, withdrawal and understanding. I’m under the impression that it was precisely her daily exposure to production and raw materials on a large scale in the factory that turned her into a being that saw magnitude as a cause not for admiration, but for acquiescence. Of course, this was a trait that she shared with the other workers. Neither landscapes, nor natural scenes had an effect on her, her internal fibers did not stir at any of it, natural or artificial. On the contrary, the humming of the machines: that was their lingua franca, and they turned to it in order to decipher the outside world. This might seem superficial, and also arbitrary, but in any event it was part of what, as I have said, made the workers the guarantors or supports of the world. Just as they did with their heroic legend, they returned to this language when they least expected it, even when they thought they were speaking another. It just so happens that workers, like almost everyone else, have been shaped by ideas and actions that are, in a way, external to them. I say “in a way” because no one, of course, could deny the interiority of their thoughts or the practical trance under which they acted; nonetheless, external things manifest themselves through people’s ideas and actions. It’s never the other way around: people do not express themselves outward; it is instead the outside world that manifests itself through individuals. I’ll give an example: one of Delia’s fellow workers. By chance, the two of them always ended up on the same shift. Another detail, far from insignificant, is that they were the same age; seeing them together brought to mind a brother and sister carried by destiny toward the machines. This person, G, did not stand out at all from the rest of the workforce. An invisible cable connected them all, through which a certain pace and level of exertion was transmitted; though it wasn’t always the same rhythm, it was always shared. Despite the fact that he was still practically a boy, G worked with remarkable focus, similar to the concentration that took Delia miles from the factory, though even in those moments no world or sounds existed to her but those produced by her own labor.

  G could sometimes be seen crossing the yard in a threadbare coverall with shiny buttons while the other workers formed groups over by the giant metal crate. Delia would already have climbed onto it and balanced at its highest point. He looked so adrift at those moments, an unformed consciousness taking the effects of its contact with the machines, under whose alienating influence he had been for hours on end, out for a walk in the scant nature of the yard. A few crumbs from his meager breakfast remained in his breast pocket; at his tender age, G had gotten in the habit of searching them out with his fingers and lifting them unconsciously to his mouth, lost in his thoughts. When the whistle sounded the end of the break, G was the first to go back inside the factory. He had to let his eyes adjust to the shadows; this took him only a few moments, and then he regained the determined gait with which he always approached the machine. The empty workstations looked like a life without life to him, and he was sad that he had left during the break. Like many others, it was only through participating in and leaving his mark on production at the machine that he found a tenuous, but profound, justification for his existence. G was in no position to recall his first day of work at the factory, but he sensed that life had not been real until that moment; he remembered it as a waiting period, an antechamber. Life before the factory was a fiction, not because it really was, but because that was the way he remembered it. Now, on the other hand, he was in the domain of reality. G obviously didn’t expect it to end; fiction has a finale, reality does not. But these categories were about to change places, all that remained was for the drama to unfold. It happened suddenly one day, when he arrived at his workstation to find two machines; not the one he was used to, but two others. The marks of the old one were etched into the floor: deep, permanent traces that suggested the passage of time and a weight that was no longer there. At first, he thought the new machines would have the same functions as the other, and that he’d be able to work with them in the same way. But when he realized this was not the case, quite the opposite, that he couldn’t have imagined anything further from the old equipment, he refused to work. The factory faltered in its daily operations; the vibrations of the machines, the robotic clatter of the assembly line, and the tireless whirring of the conveyor belts could all be heard as a symbol of the ceaseless labor of industry, but G remained immobile, transfixed by the old marks. It goes without saying that they fired him without the slightest hesitation; according to the factory, an “example” needed to be made for the other operators. A machine taken out of circulation created an obstacle: an obsolete worker. In this case it was G, from many perspectives the best in the factory: young, healthy, and disciplined.

  But his reaction, though it originated inside him, took its shape from the outside: it was the old machine saying no that spoke through G, and to do so it chose the silence, or rather the stillness, of the boy. This was how the outside world, in this case the machine, expressed itself. G remained motionless in front of the marks on the floor and, though it had only been a few days, the memory of the old device came to him as the image of a distant labor: a singular, vague idea disfigured by time and enhanced by its simplicity. In that earlier time, harmony was, shall we say, an expression of brutality. It’s hard to stop the labor of the workers when they are inspired, because each one senses the work of the others; it’s a collective feeling that renews their drive and redoubles their efforts. He didn’t know why, but in his reverie G remembered an old math problem from the factory: if a worker needed two days to make, for example, a hammer, how many hammers could ten workers make in four days? The workers would laugh at the way the question was phrased, in large part because of the emphasis it put on the number. The answer might be a quantity, in fact it might be much higher than what mere arithmetic might indicate, but what mattered to them was the advancement of the action, that is
, the measure of activity combined with the passing of the day. Above, I suggested that the worker can’t measure his own work; here I should add that this is because his work, and especially the product, the result, seems abstract, somewhat irrational to him, due to the repetitive nature of his labor; yet for this reason, it is also tangible, even weighty. The worker, a consummate expert in material transformation, is baffled by any attempt to translate the value of his work into an order external to the factory, like money or time. Their salary meant a lot to the workers because it was what allowed them to survive; at the same time it represented little, because they didn’t know what effect their physical effort had on what they received or, for that matter, on what they were producing. This impossible translation was the source of the power that emanated from the factory and extended not only to the workers, but also to the true outside world, that is, the nearby streets and the community in general, reaching even those who were unaware of the existence of Delia’s factory, in particular.

  Stripped of the instrument that supplied his identity, G was forgotten by the other workers long before he physically left the factory. On that fateful morning, his presence took on an additional quality: that of a stigma. While his thoughts, as he stared at the marks left by the machine, seemed lost in that outdated labor, the other workers fixed their gaze on his expression, captivated by the threat it represented. In G they saw a likely future and a sorrowful past; though they may not have wished it, and though it wasn’t entirely true, that was where they all came from; G represented some part of what they were trying to escape, to erase from their minds with one quick stroke. But they understood that the boy’s troubles were not connected to linear time, that neither he, nor his “problem” represented a retreat or an advance, and so his refusal—and his very presence—were rendered abstract. G’s was the worst kind of threat, because it took root so near at hand. More than a possible future or a forgettable past, which could have been tolerated with a bit of resolve, G was the tragic scene that held the proletarian life of the community together. From one day to the next, the boy had become the inverse of the factory as a whole, and his mind could not take it; in the same way, the workers found that part of their immediate world had turned itself inside out like a glove, bringing into view that which the choreography of the factory, the activity of the machines, the skilled movements of their hands, and the contortions of their bodies had always tried to keep from sight. As Delia would explain, one morning G did not show up at his former machine, or rather, at the new ones that were unable to hide the marks of the old. Though he had always been the first to arrive, during the crisis he showed up even earlier, only to leave long before his shift was over. It was strange to see how life outside the factory went on as usual while this tragedy unfolded inside. I say strange in order to be able to say something; in fact, it was devastating. The truth is that everything was the same inside the factory, too, aside from the moral threat posed by G and suffered by his fellow workers. But if many of the causes and effects of this anomaly were unknown on the inside, where it was produced, they were monumentally ignored on the outside. And this sparked a certain bitterness, because the world went on turning, unaware of G’s terrible experience—either its beginning or its end. How many anonymous victims like him does the world produce every day? This is the true factory of man, though saying it in these words might seem inappropriate.

  Delia and G. I’ve often thought that the connection between them—that concrete and enduring bond so pronounced that at first glance they seemed to be brother and sister—remained vital despite G’s dismissal and the different paths their lives took. The boy ended up being abandoned by the factory just like Delia was abandoned by me. The factory dismissed him for the distress he showed when faced with the new machines, filling him with even more suspicion and mistrust; in that same way, I turned my back on Delia and left her in the most painful state of abandonment. I recently mentioned the interior of the factory and the outside world, how one was unaware of what was going on in the other; now I want to describe how something similar occurred between the world in general and Delia’s interior. However barbaric and cruel, my abandoning Delia did not disrupt the course of the world, which went on in spite of her suffering. The world also turned its back on something else that Delia and I knew: the cell of life that had recently settled inside her. This is how both of them ended up as victims, though of different things and under different circumstances. I remember Delia’s expression: she couldn’t believe it. To put it simply, she took it like a swift and fatal blow. Her eyes revealed her shock, opening wide with fearful uncertainty; she couldn’t react, which was a form of reaction in and of itself. I also remember what she said, which was, as always, appropriate. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. Now, writing these words, I remember the other two I wrote above, also in reference to Delia: the victim’s “Please, no.” I am unable now, as I was then, to make it better. It was not only Delia’s eyes, but also her voice that had changed. It seemed to come from somewhere behind her throat, and sounded as though it belonged to someone else, a cracked and pitiful murmur. And I remember that, in spite of this, she struggled to preserve its inflection: it was she who spoke, though she seemed to be on the verge of becoming someone else. She took my hand. “Don’t leave me,” she repeated. Perhaps, without realizing it, she meant to underscore her feelings, which were already eloquent in themselves. Like G, Delia reacted spontaneously. This was surely due to their youth; they were both practically children. The problem with reactions is that they are never clear in the real world: contrary to what happens in novels, where the most unexpected or complex action provokes, in the other characters, a reading or reaction that corresponds to its supposed obscurity. That’s not what happened in my case. Delia and I once went for a walk. I’ve already said that there were uninhabited and diffuse territories that nonetheless had some form of community life. Then there was the opposite case, hybrid spaces that were less a neighborhood than an area that seemed to be made up of one multi-family dwelling: the streets were hallways that could only be traveled on foot, the plazas were no larger than patios. Similarly, there were also shared dining areas, often exposed to the elements, and a few sheet metal doors distributed around the perimeter of the neighborhood were the only way in. As was the case in Pedrera, once inside, things turned out not to be as they appeared from the outside…

  Delia and I were walking around the perimeter of one of these neighborhoods or slums when along one corridor, or street, rather, we saw countless marks, people’s footprints in the dust. One is used to coming across different kinds of tracks, so one could also get used to seeing, as in this case, many footprints. But there was something puzzling about this image of multitude that gave us pause; so many people walking, who knows where. We pondered this for a long time, surrounded by a silence barely broken by the sounds typical of the place. The street sloped unevenly toward us. When we realized where the mystery lay, what surprised us most was that it was something so obvious, and yet so strange: all the footprints went in the same direction. This might have been nothing more than a curiosity had we not found, a little farther along, a similar street with footprints headed in the opposite direction. Walking around that place meant passing through its houses or, as I said before, crossing through a single house divided into multiple versions of itself. The walls had, at some point, all had their corresponding windows; they—the walls—were made from a wide variety of materials. Just then we ran into several old men who seemed to be headed to wherever they gathered every day. People walked in groups there, but always in silence, at the most muttering something in that language shared by families or tribes, a language made of exclamations, usually unconscious and unintelligible to outsiders, sometimes deaf as well as mute. We saw a dog asleep in the shadow of an old sign. It was still a long time before nightfall, so Delia and I ended up walking around the ample perimeter of the neighborhood before turning onto a road that would take us to the Barrens. I remember
that, a little while after leaving the neighborhood behind us, we turned and looked back. A disorderly cluster of houses could just barely be seen above a dense crop of bushes growing in a hollow almost at the horizon. The setting sun illuminated each differently, according to the materials that had been used to build it. In this way, each seemed to obey its own measure of time. Some were still in daylight, while others were already in darkness; they belonged to an immediate future, a recent past, or to ancient history. Later that day, after we left the Barrens and the deserted shack where we would hide, we walked a bit farther until we were a few yards from Delia’s house; there the silence was deepened by sporadic barking, and the darkness seemed to tremble, its rhythm marked by the pulse of the surrounding countryside.

  Footsteps, tracks, paths. Delia and I tirelessly recombined these words; walking was, for me, an obvious and practical extension of her company. Because of this, when I’d walk without her I felt I was doing something else, distancing myself from what I was born to do. It was the absence of something that belonged to and defined me, the feeling that something was missing and that I, also, was less. While Delia was at the factory, I was present in the world, or rather, I “witnessed” everyday life, observed people’s habits, like talking in the morning, checking the time, and so on, and it seemed incredible to me that everything should appear to go on as usual when that which ultimately held up the world, Delia, was far from there. Actually, I could understand this behavior in people who were able to go about their normal activities because they knew nothing of Delia; what was beyond me was my own passivity in the face of such appalling ignorance. It might seem paradoxical, but Delia’s absence kept me from taking action, from taking part in anything other than my habitual, useless, and ultimately dispassionate meditations. Delia influenced me despite the distance that separated us, much as she did at her workstation: thoughtful, absent, introspective, isolated, this is how I often imagined she controlled the factory. The way she acted gave the impression that she organized and directed every detail of the collective labor. Perhaps this was the only impression that could be drawn from work like that, which brought the rhythms of machines and of people together in a way that was at once harmonious and rushed. In any event, Delia, with her restraint and her focus, overshadowed and almost hidden behind her workstation, seemed to be the neural center of the community. Her influence, that force that emanated outward from Delia, its epicenter, extended first throughout the factory, as I said, organizing its rhythms and production; it also passed through the walls and expanded beyond them, insinuating itself into people’s lives without their ever knowing it. Meanwhile, Delia went on as usual with her half words. Her language had an eloquent sparseness to it. I would listen to her speak, and think that her intermittent and, for all intents and purposes, inaudible, way of expressing herself confirmed her deep proletarian identity; on the other hand, she seemed like one of those characters in a novel who, with their one expression and few words—words that are often said by others, and are rarely their own—are able to move between books and endure in someone’s memory. There was a law she obeyed: that of intermittent speech. But “law” does not entirely convey it, primarily because it was not in response to any mandate.