Free The Dark by Sergio Chejfec Page B

don’t know whether workers have a particular idiosyncrasy to them, though after meeting Delia and a few of her colleagues I tend to think that they do. In any event, I use the phrase as a simple association: the detachment in certain fundamental situations, like that of being at the machines, repeated itself in Delia in a number of different circumstances. A kind of absence, perhaps related to the quantitative actions that workers perform. Earlier I said that quantity, to a worker, is a quality stripped of calculation: the pieces can multiply infinitely, the operations divided into their most minimal expressions, yet they will always be the object of non-material thoughts—not of the factory’s inventory or the company’s gains, but of the abstract nature of accumulation, something akin to the science of numbers. Regardless of its scale, this numerical sequence projected its imprecise condition onto the objects themselves and, through them, directed itself first at the consciousness of the workers, and then to the world at large, the time of the everyday. In this way, Delia remained herself even though we were miles from the factory; an invisible thread connected one to the other. She turned her gaze to a copse of trees that, silent until that moment, suddenly came to life and stood out against the landscape; as the trees became more visible, it was Delia who began to disappear. The same thing happened with the stones and the animals we came across from time to time, and with other things, as well. She had a special capacity for imparting an overabundance of being; not a longer life, but rather a more emphatic presence. This quality, by a predictable mechanism of compensation, tended to distance her, dilute her, and make her nearly transparent, like I’ve said, just as happened every day when she took her place at the machines. In short, to continue with the comparison, this is precisely what workers do: they infuse the objects upon which they fix their attention with an excess. I don’t know if these additions improve the objects in any way, nor does it really seem worth thinking about; in any event, as Delia proved, they do make things more apparent.
     
    It is night. Until a few moments ago, I was sitting on the bed, looking at the floor and not thinking of anything in particular. I was beginning to sense that time of waiting that amasses in the middle of the night, formed of drowsiness and stifled sounds, when something like a sign brought me to my feet and over to the window. Once there, I saw the silence before I saw the dark: a false murmur floated across the air, a hollow reverberation that came from nowhere in particular, but rather from the night as black as pitch. It’s true, what I said above, that nature rules the darkness; one felt that if anything came from this void, it was a combination of the varied and the indifferent. Those moments that are often called, in novels, “the pulse of the night.” The world rests, the night churns; the day shudders, the world goes to work. For obvious reasons, the night is more profound and more cosmic than the day, but it’s also the moment when the scent of the earth, from elemental waste to the scents brought out by the dew, prepares to reveal itself. And it’s this combination of opposites—the breadth and impassivity of the celestial sphere, the galaxy following its distant course at full speed through the middle of the universe, and the singular labor of the earth, opening seeds and decomposing bodies, as persistent as an obsession—that is sometimes called the murmur, or the pulse, of the night. As such, I’m not sure I could say that anything in particular “called” to me. Somewhere in that night as solid as a trench carved out of darkness, I happened upon the light of a window suspended in the air. An old man was lying in bed. The lamp mounted on the wall lit one side of his body. Meanwhile, behind me was that other murmur, the hallway that absorbed