Delia was tired when she got off the bus; the factory consumed the workers’ strength slowly, patiently. The machine that she, in a sense, operated was hundreds of times her size. Beside it, she appeared still more vulnerable and slight. Off to one side there was some sort of workstation or counter, this was where Delia was supposed to work with several pieces at once while the machine ran smoothly, without her needing to attend to it. Given that it was doing Delia’s work, it was logical to assume that the machine was a kind of substitute, but, on the contrary, the fact that she hung on its every noise, observed its operations, corrected any irregularities and adjusted its mechanical movements from time to time together made Delia feel as though she were the auxiliary component. This muddled sense of responsibility exhausted her: it was the machine that was in charge, that set the pace, so to speak. Standing before something so coarse and rudimentary, Delia also had to perform an archaic task: that of monitoring, though some of the processes and most of the details were beyond her. Given its tremendous dimensions, it seemed incongruous that a being as small as Delia could operate it. She was able to tell by the noises it gave off whether everything was running as it should; its clattering, like that of an old train, would mingle with its pneumatic convulsions; its uniform whirring, which sounded more like a whine or the whistled language of sea creatures, indicated that a fluid was circulating through the machine: not only that which powered it, but also another, some raw material. The machine consumed many things, aside from the workers’ labor, Delia would say. Energy, raw materials, time, effort, and so on. As the machine performed its task, Delia would perform hers, which was twofold: to listen and observe, and to sit at her workstation and put her hands to use while the formidable clanging of enormous hammers emanated from every corner of the factory and mingled with the general din. Just below where the factory ceiling met the wall, there was a window. Light filtered through the entire factory from that single point, making visible the particles that floated in the air. One night, a little while after getting off the bus, Delia told me that she couldn’t remember how she had started working there. This made sense, given that she considered anything related to the factory to be a virtue; it was a point of pride and was doubtless what endowed her with her fullest and most complete identity, the trait that allowed her to feel like herself when confronted by the outside world, without shame. A feeling akin to omnipotence, or something like it: the world could threaten to end, to stop existing from one moment to the next, and the worker would be the figure best suited to prevent its collapse.
I’ve read many novels in which people live in a world without time; I mean, one without linear, psychological, or cosmological time, or any other kind. Reduced to acting on a few instincts, an animal of any species has a more tangible effect on time than man does. A person closes a book and is surprised by the abyss of the day to day, with the varying scales and speeds of time, fast or slow, which leave a fine, invisible layer on the surface of things. Like dust in an empty room, these layers settle uniformly and without hurry; the difference is that they accumulate without building up, so they are always the same thickness and can be lifted as one, regardless of how much time has passed. Like time, which cannot be seen, these are invisible layers that cannot be touched. I’ll give you an example. The character in this book is an immigrant laborer who has reached his twilight years. In his home country, he worked from the time he was a child, but a complex process of mental ellipsis has led him to believe that he only started doing so after he emigrated. The fact that, from the time he was eight, he left his soul on the bleached, unpredictable soil of his village from Monday to Sunday, is stored in his memory in a different form, not under the heading “work.” He thinks, for example, of the wheelbarrows of shit he used to have to cart around, and what they evoke isn’t the hardship — the missteps, the frustration, the cold, the dark — but rather the time that, suspended, refused to pass. It was a rickety old wheelbarrow, heavier than what it could carry, overflowing with whatever his family had unloaded into the latrine over the course of the year. He knew that his father’s steps had left their mark on the path, prints too big for his own feet. Each time he stumbled, the experience confirmed that he was walking a course someone, none other than his father, had followed before, leading him to think that time advanced only through the repetition of actions. These were not the repeated actions of the deranged, the absentminded, or the desperate, but rather a repeated representation, the footstep that conceals the one before it and anticipates the one that follows. As though the subject were the action itself (carting shit, chopping wood, weeding the garden, and so on), and not the person who carried it out. This gave the boy the feeling of inhabiting a static, lasting, monotonous time. Nonetheless, he realized that this immobility was relative, because just a bit farther ahead he would use the last of his strength to tip out the contents of the wheelbarrow. This thought, simple and undeveloped from various perspectives, indicated to him that irreversibility permeated the base and the sublime in equal measure. It wasn’t that he was especially moved by cyclical things — seasons, gradual variations in the landscape, work in the fields — it was that he felt himself part of a time that was free, compact, and tightly bound; impossible to break apart.
Now we return to the present. Many years after this “not working,” as he sits in his pensioner’s armchair he inadvertently overhears one of his sons allude to Einstein’s train. He could understand the idea — the logic was fairly simple — and it seemed to be the best explanation for the anxiety he would feel when he thought the contents of the wheelbarrow might spill on him. At that moment he came to suspect that the fields, the house, his family, his chores, and even he himself were inside the rail car that the genius had used to explain his theory. The example had an immediate retroactive effect: entire blocks of memory were dislodged in the way that, when you forget one language, your former life is translated into a new tongue. Just as when he was a boy, he liked nothing more than to eavesdrop; not because he was drawn to the shameful or the improper, but because something within his bleak interior needed that complement to life found only in secrets. As he listened to his son, the man came to understand that it was not simply one of those ingenious paradoxes of the mundane; more than that, it was the explanation that allowed him to understand his origins and his new life, as he called it, in contrast the one he had led in the village where he was born. And so his memories, which could be transported back and forth from oblivion, did not belong entirely to him; they were part of the multi-purpose car that contained his family and the land. At some point he had gotten off the train, and since then had occupied his own, autonomous time. The multi-purpose car: it was an idea particularly well suited to what it was meant to communicate, a collective journey. The man was surprised to have reached old age and to have retained of his past only a simple token, devoid of value, and proof only of itself. One question had always unsettled him: What could have made him casually blot out entire parts of his life? Now he understood that the mistake lay in trying to find causes or reasons. Trains serve many purposes; the answer could be found right there in the son’s example. It was a simple comparison, an established metaphor — somewhat worn, but for this very reason, effective…