Free The Dark by Sergio Chejfec Page A

entire afternoon without speaking. It goes without saying that walking was a dance imposed on us. It’s the most lasting and accessible pastime, and the one that requires the least money. The desperate walk, but so do the free. Nor is it worth mentioning that, until night fell and the Barrens opened themselves up to us, we had nowhere to go. Delia and I looked like a couple of lunatics, walking from one place to another down paths that led nowhere in particular. Sometimes we’d see dead cats in the lots as we walked along side roads; the lighter ones could be made out from a distance, the effect of their bodies crushing the tall grass into the ground. This suggested that a force greater than their own—greater than their weight, in any event—had flung them down in the vegetation. I’ve read many novels in which death cannot impose itself over nature, despite its attempts. In these scenes, however, it had succeeded: the silent bodies of the animals that, through the detritus that surrounded them, announced that their last act had been that of being tossed. As for the rest of it, as our silence grew longer, the landscape showed us its unchanging face. Delia saw no mystery in the indistinguishable structures that, solitary, imposed themselves in the middle of the lots as a mass of bricks, iron, stone, and prefabricated parts within which a second nature, different from the natural one and unique to this kind of material, seemed to act.
     
    We followed a fence that surrounded an endless field; off to one side there was a pond no more than nine feet across that had been given the exaggerated name of “the lake.” I thought to myself that Delia’s silences proceeded from her thoughts, and that those were of the factory. I thought that, just as Delia passed her energy into every object that moved through her hands, infusing each one with a bit of her own essence, so too did the factory, as a thought, claim a small but meaningful space in her memory, if only to remind her that it was an inalienable part of her identity. There are mental states more static than thinking or sleeping; in fact, they are even more passive than what is known as having one’s mind “go blank.” Such was the single notion that occupied Delia’s thoughts as an idea of the factory. The alienation of manual labor has been widely discussed; its causes, forms, and consequences have been analyzed time and again. Still, alienation is not quite the word for the floating, yet sharp concentration that seemed to be meant as a defense against nothing in particular for Delia’s passivity, with regard to her own mechanical movements. She transported herself with her mind, just as she seemed to be somewhere else now, as she walked beside me. And it was this gift, this ability to withdraw without absenting herself, to abandon me without leaving my side, that was most aligned with her nature. That evening, the fields that stretched out to our right and our left as we walked seemed like rustic parks with an unfinished plaza set haphazardly in the middle of each. Anyone could see in it the hand of man and notice straightaway how deficient the endeavor was in such an open, listless expanse; the hurried, half-finished labor that confronted the steady growth of the vegetation shrank before the renewed proliferation of the land. But the hands of that someone who wanted to plant a garden probably never existed; we had come up with the idea of a garden ourselves when we discovered these lots that seemed to have been built up and abandoned at the same moment, as if by someone not really there. And so, Delia’s unique absence during that walk was like her torpor in the factory; they were variations on the same disposition, simply applied to different situations. To save myself the trouble of finding what might perhaps be more appropriate—but less expressive—words, I’ll call this torpor or absence of Delia’s her “proletarian disposition.” The truth is that I