The Dark (11 page)

The night was completely silent; the shadowy outline of the trees could be seen at a distance in the semidarkness of the starlit sky, like the contorted figures of an artificial landscape. I—or both of us, I think—felt we lived in a place that didn’t really exist. A place you can walk through and find nothing but crumbling ruins and abandoned lots can’t be called a city, but a territory so marked by improvisation and indolence couldn’t be called the countryside. You could say a land like that, with its provisional nature and words that allude to nothing, would do no more than encourage depravity and animalistic behavior in its inhabitants. But we only felt the first impulse of this animalism, which in any event was fairly weak; an opposing force immediately restrained us, like a calm voice whispering into the ear of a raging man until he lowers his head in a gesture of resigned understanding. How was it possible to receive signs so contradictory that they would, under different circumstances, be mutually exclusive? I think it was because everything there combined to form a cluster of debris that was, ultimately, the remnants of nothing at all. One could trace the progression of one of these truncated signs: the fossilized flowerbeds, for example, in Delia’s friend’s “garden,” which were really nothing more than little mounds barely raised above the forgotten terrain, marks left there as proof of a will to do something, but which now showed less the hand that had made them than the state in which they had been forgotten. This is what I meant by remnants of nothing, these superposed layers of inaction and neglect. The neglect was visible, though, masked as it was by the neutral workings of time, it could hardly be taken as a sign. And for one reason or another, the truth is that this stirred neither feelings, nor thoughts in me. This is what people really mean when they say “I didn’t see anything” or “I wasn’t thinking about anything.” Incongruous complexities in which mutually exclusive cues meet emotions that are too vague, or too faint, to allow for any real judgment: this is when people opt for indecision.

F’s boys were probably no more than a few hundred feet behind us; the question was whether they would still be staring fixedly into the weeds in spite of the dark, waiting for a mystery to be revealed there that almost certainly would not. There they were, dispossessed of everything and preparing themselves, in their way, for the bitterness of their adult lives, when that savage impulse I tried to explain earlier made me grab Delia by the shoulders and push her down with all my strength into the darkest part of the vegetation. I threw myself on top of her. Along with her lingering cry of surprise, as I hit the ground I felt an animal quickly scuttle off. I know what happened next, but am still ashamed to recall it. I can say that it seemed as though I were standing at the edge of an abyss, and that Delia was my only salvation. I would be lost in time, or rather, in oblivion; I’d vanish and, because all I had was the ephemeral imprint of a footstep or a glance to cling to, nothing solid would point back to me. It seemed this verification could only come from Delia, that is, from my actions toward her, which overpowered her will and, of course, her body. It was the child I was after: a wild animal howled, securing its bloodline. The feeling was completely different from the erotic attraction that joined us in the thistle barrens. I didn’t care about loving her. I was driven by a more savage, more predatory impulse that I can explain, but find increasingly hard to understand. Delia came out of that scene in a terrible state. An innocent soul, or a wise one, she bore the shock and violence like one of those small animals that curls up in a ball when it realizes there is no escape. I remember wanting to go even further. I held her down, determined to cross through her, to feel her come apart in my hands. I wanted to split her in two, to feel her dissolve and slide through my fingers, but only so I could catch her, trap her, and subject her more forcefully still. Meanwhile the night went on, indifferent. Delia’s terror had fallen silent, and in that silence the nameless flourish nature adopts in the dark could be heard. At one point I thought that the steady course of night was less human than it was irrational, that there was a good deal of madness, or rashness, or I don’t know what, to the peace we call night, which was anything but peaceful. And it was that madness, which created the illusion of harmony in order to fight it, that had taken me over and confirmed, by some astronomical sense of justice, that what I was doing was, if not right, then at least fair. I thought of Delia as something incorporeal, a being whose mass of flesh vacillated between denying its depth and forgetting its material condition, and on whose breath floated something more than air: the encoded message by which she, as the ideal representative of her species, would perpetuate herself. I don’t know why, but this quality of her breath was most fully realized when the denial of her body—in the sense of subjugation, conquest, domination—was at its most pronounced.

Delia lay there defenseless for a long time, as though unconscious. The moonlight made the scene more moving; I sat beside her body while she came to. She was not the victim of love, or passion; she looked more like the victim of a rape. I watched the insects that appeared out of nowhere settle on Delia’s small buttocks, attracted by the glistening arches suddenly presented to them. Or maybe it was her body heat, I thought. I began to hear, once I had been freed of the crickets and the frogs, the monotonous trickle of the stream. Something began to flow again; the night settled in. Delia and her body. Subdued and so slight, it seemed impossible that moments earlier it had been the incarnation of a force that challenged me, an infinity that could not be contained or dominated. I thought: what’s left of the city becomes more and more a part of the country at night, and not all the terrain that was lost is recovered the next morning. After what happened I felt sad and listless, and it occurred to me that this tableau, with Delia in it, epitomized the primitive charge of the scene. I felt a bitterness that was not unlike regret. I don’t say this to excuse myself; it wasn’t even a full sense of regret, but rather the selfish reflex of acknowledging, though it might sound pretentious, that after what had happened I was already condemned, that there was no turning back. Still, I thought, there in the night, one rarely experiences an emotion fully, these things are always approximations. Emotions can be sincere, but never exact. Delia’s only reactions had been surprise, at first, then fear; later, pain and, at the end, shock. No signs of anger, nothing that would indicate resistance, or any sort of reproach afterward. I would have liked to know if this was an effect of her nature as a girl or as a woman. But they were both present in such equal measure, even mixed together, that I wondered whether the difference was, in a sense, illusory. On the other hand, since Delia was a factory worker, the difference was also irrelevant, as I’ve already explained several times; in fact, if the question continued to nag at me, it said more about me than it did about Delia. She was a nebulous being, to a great extent insubstantial, whose identity I needed to define.

The day came when I crawled out of my hole and back into the world. But “crawled out” implies a series of spatial maneuvers, and one might move around all the time and still be, in a figurative sense, in the same place. What I mean is that nothing had changed by the end of my seclusion; its only modest purpose had been to hide me, from myself most of all, though ultimately it only succeeded in making my ruin more complete. In any event, I had no idea what I was hoping to achieve. Apart from the reaction I described earlier—how, when I found out that Delia was expecting, I turned and ran like a man who had lost his mind, like someone who had experienced a terrible misfortune and was trying to protect himself without knowing how—beyond this reaction of walking blindly until I happened upon my own room, I didn’t have the faintest idea of what I planned to do. This is what ruin is, this not knowing… It is a ruin I have never overcome. It doesn’t matter whether my descent was fast or drawn out, unexpected or predictable, what made me miserable was how far I had fallen, that I had toppled from the heights of the most certain—though clearly not the longest lasting—happiness, to end up buried in my mattress. In the course of one short afternoon, I had descended to unspeakable depths. I’ve read novels that describe similar situations, which always seem trite, and probably are. Well, that’s how I felt: I felt as though I were acting out the most pathetic scene in a story that relied on sentimentality to, as they say, breathe through its skin and unfold to the fullest. I thought, we are forged by the shapes of our emotions, even when these belong to someone else. I had made a child and then rejected its mother. That mother was a woman, a factory worker who had only just left her own childhood behind her, who had gotten me to adopt her world as my own without ever meaning to do so. And now I spent my days walking around my neighborhood, kicking stones, down streets and alleys along the sides of which windows opened onto people who had been lost in the furrow of their mattresses for all time. Windows covered by strips of fabric, pieces of cardboard, clothes hung out to dry. I knew very well how little darkness could be found in those houses, the static, buzzing heat of the afternoon that came in through the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, along with that resilient, intolerable light. The same thing happened with the cold. It was then, as I turned the page between paralysis and tedium, that I began to make out the voices of the children, a music that had always been available to me, but to which I had never really listened. In Pedrera, the cries, exclamations, and wails of the little ones spread according to their intensity.

When I left Pedrera, much of what had happened with Delia seemed impossible to me. Certain ideas stay with us all the time, like the combined proofs that tells us where we are and, oh, what we represent at any given moment. And yet, after my period of isolation there was no rule, no signs, that could help me understand what had happened. I mentioned before what goes on in someone’s mind when they say “I didn’t see anything,” or “I wasn’t thinking about anything,” and so on. Well, something like that happened to me as I peered through the window, out of sight and not looking at anything in particular, checking the typical landscape of abrupt and asymmetrical elements, an ever changing, ever incomplete panorama; something like that happened to me as I leaned against the glass and repeated to myself, “I can’t believe it.” I, who had always felt such disdain for the tragic, even unconsciously, both as a way of connecting with it and a means of denying my own nature, which saw its own reflection there, now had it right in front of me, with no alternatives or chance of escape. While I was confined to my bed, my tragedy had presented itself like the repeated actions of a bad dream. Episodes whose intensity had faded emerged from the monotony of half-sleep and, spent and discolored by repetition, called into question the truth of the very thing they were meant to convey. But when I left… It was another thing entirely to step out into the street, into the neighborhood, into the open. I felt as though the whole world were pointing at me. Not just as the man responsible for a cruel and depraved act, but as the person who found, in that act, the ultimate justification of his days. Neither forgiveness, nor censure, but something simpler: an identity. That was how Delia would become a part of my time, I realized that futile morning I stepped out into the street.

I’ve read more than one novel in which misfortune helps someone’s bad luck along; I mean, there are people in these novels whose luck is worse than they deserve. This excess of adversity, like a surplus of evil, frees one’s character of contradictions: the innocent become more innocent, the conniving more conniving; the lazy man is driven to the heights of laziness. Nuances and traits are, in the end, redundant: to give a simple example, it is of little use to the generous man to be uniquely benevolent if he ultimately turns out to be at the mercy of his luck. What I mean is, what happens in novels is deceptive. This story probably should have been much more awful than it seems, and is certainly much truer than it makes itself out to be, because the one thing I know is that, from the beginning, I felt myself involved in a tragedy without a statute of limitations. It is so easy to seek forgiveness, and so difficult to attain it, even when it is offered by the victim. For example, sometimes I wonder whether Delia ever forgave me; I immerse myself in the idea and go over the different forms of forgiveness, all of which are, in one way or another, misleading. There’s something there that doesn’t quite convince me, I think, these thoughts are a useless indulgence. Because Delia doesn’t have anything to forgive me for. From one point of view, yes, but, I don’t know, maybe she’s better off because I abandoned her; at the same time, no, because my actions weren’t directed at her or anything else in particular. This is why forgiveness is impossible, because it has nowhere and no one from which it can originate, or anything upon which it can sustain itself. An ideal system would be like that of the workers, I remember thinking to myself as I lay on my bed. When F had his problem, they started collecting money in silence, ashamed. And through this ritual of delegation, in the name of something abstract, like the threat posed to the class, or its pride, each made a contribution so that F could escape the threat of the moneylenders. A system like that would be ideal, because it absolved through the distribution of sacrifice, rather than guilt.

There was a practice among the workers, largely forgotten and rarely enacted, that was sometimes invoked in extreme cases, like that of F. An untold collective consciousness set off a mechanism lost in the reaches of memory, communal heritage, or the straightforward, but profound empirical memory of the workers. It consisted of leaving behind small sums of money, without any apparent reason or obvious logic, in places where the others would know to look for them in order to help a worker who had fallen into misfortune. These were not anonymous operations. Everyone had a role in them: the worker who cautiously approached to leave his contribution was the same person who would hurry back, strangely remorseful, to the normalcy of the corner where he worked. This made the ritual more effective, and more lasting. Because each lost himself, without compromising his identity, in the hope of a collective salvation, embodied in this case by F. Earlier, I mentioned the care he took with disguises once the moneylenders started trying to catch him. Now I think it’s an exaggeration to call them disguises. Like Delia, F was always aware of his difference, even when it took the form of the smallest, simplest thing, the most elementary detail. This difference could serve, as it usually did, as a distinguishing mark, but it also inspired a deeper—and, as I said, simpler—feeling tied to the simplicity of the disguise. As workers, one of their deepest and most personal convictions was that of being different. The consequence of this was twofold: their identity set them apart all the time, and nearly any attire, in the broadest sense of the term, other than their factory uniform transfigured them momentarily. It was an inevitable disguise: a simple and natural costume, but impossible to change if the workers wanted to keep the face that was the source of their true nature hidden. It’s hard to know when clothes become a complement of the truth; attire is an unnoticed trait that people adopt. And so the disguise came to permeate F’s actions and his disposition beyond the appearance of the garments themselves.