The Dark (8 page)

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 the sound of bodies in their rooms at night. At one point, the man changed position, reclining a bit further. The wall in his room was an ashy color that may once have been white. It was striking to watch his minuscule movements, barely perceptible and yet somehow eloquent, like the way he would delicately lean one side of his body against the wall as though he relied on every particle of the building in order not to collapse entirely. My mind turned to the work of disease: a defenseless body in the middle of the night, waiting for the illness to cease or at least to rest, to be present for the story’s final moment. For his part, outside that room but also in darkness, someone next door is thinking of the ailing man. On one hand, the depths of this illness, which expressed itself through the torment of the body, on the other, the night following its steady course in the middle of the vast expanse. I imagined that there was a message addressed to me in this convergence, and that I had only a limited time, the duration of the night, to interpret it. Meanwhile, a few faceless men hovered around the door, waiting for a sign to enter. They were standing vigil around the patient, or closing in on the condemned. Soon they would be doing the same with the deceased. I stared at his window; after a while it seemed that his body began to dwindle, its light fading from within, his skin grew duller still and his meager clothes lost their form, as though they lacked flesh to cover. I hadn’t taken notice of the person himself and it was startling that now, in spite of the circumstances, I could see these details. It’s probably because of the dark, I thought; the idea passed without leaving a trace. A path cut across his room, the marks of steps taken in life. A trail that indicated an old habit and a single destination, the diagonal line that stretched to the window from near the bed where the victim now lay. I was left thinking about that, and about the night, about the whim of the heavens and the resolve of that window, which combined to show more than was visible. The world could come tumbling down, I said to myself as I faced the darkness, and we would still be held up by the light coming from a room. My thoughts turned to animals: what does a beast feel when it encounters another life in the middle of the expanse? I don’t mean the reflexes of a species, the operations that regulate action and passivity, but rather the moment of tension when the profound solitude of the animal gives way to the realization it is not alone. At that first moment, I said to myself as I stood at the window, the animal feels sustained by this other life, because it knows that the pulse that gives it strength is shared between them. The terminally ill man realizes the same thing, I continued, because anyone about to die recovers that original insight, his primal instinct. In any case, the night continued along its course layered with deep breaths, changes in temperature, and involuntary tremors, like when a nocturnal bird nearly flies into us and beats the air with its wings.

Writing about that night, as I am doing now, and remembering those spent around the Barrens are two steps of the same movement. Before, I slid into the depths, unwarily following my course. Now I pause, frozen. It would be a mistake to call this a comparison, nor is it an association, but rather something more autonomous, a nucleus of memories made up of two parts, without either of which it is nothing. Something like the two faces of a medal or a coin. From then on, thinking about any aspect of what we call night—certainly as abstract as the day—has meant reclaiming a time in which my encounters with Delia unfolded according to a stealthy, clandestine, and anonymous order. We’d lose ourselves in those immense wastelands, visible only because we were together, walking side by side through inconceivably vast territories only to learn, with a mix of pleasure and surprise, that an invisible guide had led us back to our usual lot and the shack built on it with enough time to embrace and do something at once furtive and precise; on these occasions we would sense that, though it existed outside of time, the night had a measure, a magnitude that was patiently and laboriously abandoned in the attempt not to mark the hours. I don’t know what effect this had on Delia, but it gave me pause; though I was pretty sure that I wasn’t causing any harm, I was afraid that I was committing an ill-defined act, one somehow gratuitous and cunning, selfish and merciless. In the night, that mass of dark and unknown substances, as I said above, Delia offered herself up with the bewildered trust of an animal, so much so that it would be easy to think of her as a defenseless victim. Still, even if the opposite were true, it would be hard to say it was otherwise. Delia would clutch at me in a way that was agitated, urgent; a way that, by its very nature, couldn’t last without exhausting its intensity. One could say it was love, or the anxiety produced by the night, I don’t know, or that it was a burning, deep, and avid passion trying to break free, her way of submitting to the darkness and renouncing the factory, and so on. In the shack in the Barrens, I was well aware of the moment when Delia stopped hearing the murmur of things, the drops of rain on the sheet metal roof, or the furtive scurrying of vermin. She was entirely open, turned inside out like a glove and detached from herself as she waited for something that might be fleeting or definitive, but was always overwhelming. In those moments, when Delia gave in to abandon with the urgent need to receive, I felt extraneous, as though I controlled nothing; it had been enough for me to take that first step, and now I was on the outside. From a certain perspective, my intervention might seem essential, but if it had any effect over Delia’s actions, these excluded me, turning me into something at once transitory and abstract, though, as one might imagine, these were moments of tremendous physical agitation. It might sound exaggerated, but I felt further from her in those moments than I did when I would stand outside the factory and watch her during her break. In this way, Delia never ceased to be enigmatic to me, regardless of whether she really was, or ever wanted to be.

The animal feels sustained by the life of the other, I repeated, standing at the window. Night, I thought, the depths. I’ve read many novels in which the truth reveals itself during the night. But it is a conditional truth, because it relies on the threat of daybreak to show itself without reservation. At night we’re the center of things, just as happens when we look into the past. I turned away from the window and sensed, as keen as a dagger, the pressure of a gaze on my back. Hidden out there, in the dark, someone was watching me. I wanted to know who, from where, and why. These were the questions of someone sustained by another life. I looked down, not knowing how to react. Animals do this, too, when they find themselves momentarily at a loss for a response. I saw marks on the floor that reminded me of those in the other room: I was another of those who etched little paths in the floor. As in nature, these tracks spoke of habits, repetition, and direction. The path, definite and well-worn, started at the door of my room, but split two steps later along predictable courses: the window, the bed, and the wardrobe. The path to the dresser was the first leg of the journey toward the window; the main one, as well, given that it was longer. For its part, the path toward the bed was a second detour, though it was actually more of an estuary: a broad and undefined, though discernible area which, though it did not lead anywhere in particular, spread like a stain made of light toward the wardrobe. Suddenly, the memory of that other room made me wonder whether this whole scene was not meant specifically for me. Something unusual had just happened, I thought; naturally, if I was the only one to notice it, it must have been directed at me.

This is the room I walk around every day. Before, Delia and I used to walk through the city and its surroundings; now I keep to these four walls. Sometimes the memory of Delia comes to me like something not of my waking mind. Not something from the world of dreams, about which we know little, but from that rarely accessed part of reality in which something is about to happen, but ultimately never does. There’s no need to give examples of the supernatural, the magical, or the everyday; I know many novels that already concern themselves with that. I often think of Delia as someone, something, that pulled back just as it was about to take on another form, one thing on its way to being another. And so everything I’ve said, and memories in general, are more a mystery than they are a matter of nostalgia. Because I always end up with the same inconsequential, imprecise result: a memory that is more or less accurate—the events, the endless series of actions and circumstances—but is vague when it comes to the true meaning of things. There could be many reasons for this, though all begin, develop, and conclude with Delia. As I might explain later on, Delia generally appeared as an enigma. I have never seen anyone make their presence felt when so clearly trying to do the opposite, to disappear, splinter among the many objects that surround and threaten us. And Delia did this without trying. Silent, remote, and distracted, she always seemed one step behind the present. It came naturally to her: she was at once effective and incomprehensible, and, of course, invisible to the rest of the world. How could this be? Though I don’t really have an explanation, I am going to attempt one: Delia was someone who pulled back. For her, time did not advance, and though it clearly didn’t move backward, either, it occupied contiguous dimensions in which progress and retreat, or even slowness and speed, were eliminated as practical possibilities. This state of “pulling back” also meant that she always occupied an earlier moment, almost never the present. Contact was unattainable, as was gleaning a sense of this difference. It was a gift that allowed her to be absent, as I have described several times before, without being entirely gone. But, of course, this “earlier” moment was misleading, since she was obligated to participate in the same time as everyone else. And so, in order for this and its opposite to occur, Delia employed an impressive number of involuntary skills that, one way or another, always ended up suggesting absence and regression.

I can still see Delia coming toward me up the avenue in the strange light of the evening; she is walking along the curb as though she were balancing on it. There’s the faint light of day, already retreating, and that of the streetlamps, which don’t yet illuminate anything. In the useless glow of nightfall, things seem to appear and disappear from one moment to the next, almost certainly at the whim of the air, which grants things a bit more life—that is, it makes them more visible—every time the temperature changes or the wind shifts, until night falls in anticipation of the coming day. Anyway, I can still see Delia in this erratic half-light, which was able to reveal something in the distance and conceal something just a few feet away. I remember her coming up to me, but I don’t see her approach. I’m waiting for the bus to arrive, not thinking of anything else. Sometimes I watch the workers loading and unloading, lifting the heavy crates and walking around the carts; my attention rests on the animals waiting, horses or mules, the empty thoughts that must occupy their minds while the men go about their work. I imagine the smell of the animals, which would, at another time of day, reach me easily. I think of these things, ideas without a larger purpose, as though my mind were playing a game of abstraction. Sometimes an animal flicks its tail in a way that is more, shall we say, instinctive than walking; I look at the lamp that lights the scene and imagine that at least one of them must find it dazzlingly bright. I think of these things over and over again, in a regular cycle, when all of a sudden, as though all my senses were heightened at once, I am startled by Delia’s presence. She is two steps from me, cut out against the darkness, and she pauses before venturing an uncertain smile. I say to myself that it’s not possible, I didn’t see the bus. Men and beasts pause for a moment that could not be described as long or short. Confused and flattered by my consternation, Delia explains that she came from the factory on foot.

Stepping away from the window, I turned out the light and started writing in the dark. At first I leaned forward, out of habit, to see what I was doing. Predictably, I noticed that I saw less than if I looked straight ahead. Looking down, the shadow was darker; looking straight ahead a weak reflection could offer at least the illusion of depth. Because depth is found not in darkness, but in contrast. And so, closing my eyes, then looking straight ahead so as not to see anything but vague outlines and shadows in motion, I started to write. Without the vigilance of my gaze, first my hand and then the letters, instrument and result, seemed more autonomous than usual. I would set down a phrase and immediately feel it break free, as happens with landscapes once we pass through them. This is why it occurred to me, while describing Delia’s embrace, so urgent and yet so profoundly feeble, why it occurred to me that freedom is always linked to brevity. Duration prolongs, enslaves—itself, first and foremost. These phrases, written blindly, passed in a moment; because of this, their life was not only transient, but also hasty. The notebook, the smooth pages, my arm resting on the paper, weaving the dream of my hand. I had barely written anything when I heard another murmur at the window. It’s me, I said to myself, I’m hearing things. I’ve read many novels in which the dark has its own consequences: a character sinks into bitterness and pessimism, or into his negative thoughts until he is gripped by despair and the most destructive kind of suffering. And yet in reality, or rather, in this sleepless state, this nocturnal energy is quickly snuffed out; the mystery that the night represents, which gives rise to a wide range of metaphysical implications and philosophical deliberations, does not last; it’s like a flame that ignites and consumes itself. As I thought this, there was a change in the density of the air: imperceptible though it was, the light that came in through the window showed itself in all its variations. And so it goes, I thought, breathing in the subtle variations. After writing for a while in the dark, I realized it had other effects. The phrases appeared and disappeared, as I said, like the landscape through which we advance; thanks to this cumulative, or anti-cumulative, movement forward, I encountered the nature of waiting where I least expected to find it, and in a different form. One is used to waiting for things: mealtimes, the following day, the next event—actually, not much more than that; in general, anticipation constitutes itself by situating an event on the horizon. Well, the waiting that night was pure, made of nothing and without promise of any kind. I remembered the cast of shadows surrounding the Barrens in a silence so dense with anticipation that it took on a single, shapeless form. Hidden in the half-light, Delia’s body shrank further still until it reached an immaterial state, her slight form growing more tenuous as it was infected by the weightlessness of the dark. In my room, I thought: the shadows then, the shadows now. The ingredients that make up every life are repeated time and again, I said to myself, like right now: having met Delia, in a manner of speaking, thanks to the dark, years after abandoning her I was once again finding some part of that truth in different, though similar, shadows.