Free The Dark by Sergio Chejfec

the neighborhood, and especially the area around my house, steeped in humiliating normalcy. There was no sign of my tragedy there—life was content to go on in its distracted way. It was at that moment, just as I was about to reach my front door, when I felt that hand from another planet touch my body. Delia belonged to the past. The vision I described earlier, the worker who watched years unfold in the blink of an eye, was the same vision that told me that Delia belonged to a past that was at once recent and unfathomable. I said just now that she had gone over to the side of evil. This belief has stayed with me, though now, due to the obvious workings of time and memory, that evil might seem less evil and more innocent. But, then again, there’s something hidden behind all that, isn’t there? Something that makes it ominous: Delia’s innocence was a form of giving herself over to what might lie in store for her, including, obviously, my own actions. Because of this, the depth of her innocence made the evil that I inflicted upon her all the more definitive. These were the things that caused me the most grief. I wanted to sink into my sagging bed, wanted the furrow in my mattress to be a bottomless pit from which the smoke from my cigarettes spilled incessantly, like breath from the mouth of a volcano. And that’s what it was to live: passing from one embittered trance to the next. My life scanned out to a meter of minor, insignificant actions. For example, every pack of tobacco was important, every cigarette unique; every movement of my hand was categorical, every exhalation of smoke definitive; every trip to the bathroom the last, and so on. I know the syntax of despair, not unlike that of disorientation. The world feeds on fantasies, bitter ones; people spend years believing in something, an illusion that comforts, rescues, or excites. As you can see, I was thinking like someone in a state of collapse.
     
    There was something about Delia’s situation that, though it did not contradict her becoming a mother, did contradict my unexpectedly becoming a father. It was the fact that she was a worker. This may seem outrageous, but it seemed to me that the world had thus inflicted another injury, in this case the second, upon her through me. That she, an innocent victim incapable of rebelling, had been conquered by evil despite her natural condition, which fell within the realm of good. There may be few things less worthy of mention than the injustices of the world; these are ideas that don’t generally soften the heart. For this reason, I have not found a way to explain that things should have been different with Delia. The fact that she was a worker, as I said before, was not particularly objectionable to me; to me it was part of the order of things, an order that sometimes appeared cruel, as it did now, though there was always a certain wisdom to it. But when Delia became a mother, her condition as a worker would become secondary, the hidden backdrop of her persona. Her proletarian virtue would remain a virtue, but it would fall under the shadow of another, terminal condition. And I, who had always dreamed of passing through life without leaving any trace, saw in Delia’s position as a factory worker a good match, precisely because it meant being with someone who lived on through objects but only on the provision of effacing herself, of slowly becoming nothing as her exhaustion and the part of herself that she gave over to her work increased and her energy waned; I, who had always trusted in these things, discovered, in a treacherous twist of fate, that it would not be so, that the child would live on. That was my side of it, which might seem a bit selfish. On her side, things were probably no better: we all know how it goes for mothers who work in factories, in a world made for doing one thing at a time and, in fact, for being only one thing in life.
     
    One day, some time after returning the skirt, we walked for an