What Delia was trying to tell me was that the world of the factory was a special one. Irrational from one perspective, incomprehensible from another, and always that way. When things fell apart, as the saying goes, there would be nothing unusual about seeing the workers as a tribe of eccentric beings intent on getting through their shifts, keeping the drills calibrated and becoming one with raw materials and stages of production. But Delia saw in this routine, which had come to seem excessive, the bleak origin of the current state of confusion. She said this to me in different words, often in the form of silences and distracted phrases that in fact referred to other things, most of which were simple and even trivial, but which allowed me to imagine a substantive, though irrevocably hidden, order of thought. It goes without saying that these conclusions were always hypothetical, tenuous to the point of not having anything to do with Delia at all. I’ve read many novels in which characters draw arbitrary conclusions about other people. These ideas may be wrong, in fact, they almost always are, and so they generate all manner of irreparable misunderstandings, suspicions, and opinions. This, which is so common in novels, is even more so in real life. We live with our mistaken ideas about other people; life goes on as it always has until one morning, or any other hour of the day, some unexpected sign shakes us up, and we’re left puzzled, aware that we had been in the grip of errors and falsehoods all along. At night, F was ashamed to go home. His family waited for him with their usual offhand acquiescence; a quiet shadow that disperses at the start of a new day and returns with the lull of the evening. F’s shame had a single root, money, and two causes: having needed to borrow it and now needing to pay it back; like all good workers, he was horrified by the thought. All he wanted was to restore the peace that was living, doing his job, and, through a baffling economic operation that he found both strange and complicated, making enough to survive — to live badly, but to survive — as he often thought to himself at night, overcome by an absurd and redemptive hope for the coming day. Like their father, F’s children were quiet people. Before he came home, they could be seen standing around in silence, as though in a trance. One might think that they were listening to sounds or words coming from within them, and that their skin, so delicate and pale it was translucent, was the outward sign of a desire to disappear, to dissolve into the landscape. Delia pointed them out to me once, a while after the episode of the loan, as we walked along a path we thought would cut through an endless field. We ran into F’s boys where the path formed a corner with a dirt road that came to an end after a few purposeless twists and turns in a gully not much further along. It was strange, I thought, that the street should behave like a stream while the stream itself ran straight, the way streets usually do. Had she not known them, I imagine that Delia would have recognized F’s children, anyway, because they carried themselves like their father; inscrutably, for lack of a better word. They stared down into the weeds, but didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. It would have been easy to imagine those boys as future workers, I thought. The example set by their father, though somewhat hermetic, had certainly left its mark on the day to day of family life. Just as the farmer’s body announces the work to which generations of his family have dedicated themselves, I sometimes thought I could detect, as I did in these boys, a “vocation” to the labor that they had been called upon to realize more fully in the future. One of them must have been about eight years old, the other not much more than ten. And even though I’d seen so much, when Delia told me that they had both been working in the factory for some time I felt, as one might imagine, a vague sense of surprise, a combination of disappointment and relief, of disenchantment and validation. She herself was practically the same age as the older of the two, though she had, until then, belonged to the world of adults, and not only because she was with me. With this revelation, F’s children, too, stepped into our realm as the newest gods of the real, even as their bodies carried out childlike movements. Delia told me that the youngest workers were observed as they performed their tasks, that older ones were put to work at the machines, while the eldest were introduced to the world outside the factory — the moneylenders, for example. These stages made up the worker’s education.
As Delia and I left the damp earth around the gully behind us, I wondered what F’s children were looking for among the weeds. Maybe it was a screw, I said to myself, or a broken drill bit that was the reason for the search. Materials gone missing, a hammer without a grip hidden among the stalks. Boys: eight, ten years old. A span of time that might seem, were one to think about it, like the blink of an eye meant, in the case of F’s children, two pulsing lives with a good deal of time behind them. As Delia and I walked along in silence, breathing in the listless summer air, in which humid scents mingled with the smell of plastic, I thought something like, “The girl that is Delia could give me a child.” It was a spontaneous thought, as though something had just been shaken loose. It wasn’t the desire to possess her, it was something more than that: the need to conquer, overwhelm, destroy, annihilate. I felt that Delia had something that belonged to me, and that if I didn’t take it from her when I had the chance, I was never going to get it. The feeling was completely different from desire, and of course from passion, though I admit it contained a certain amount of the latter. It was seeing Delia as my enemy: only by at once destroying and worshiping her could I get what I needed, a sacrifice. The black hole that the fields became once the sun set — a barren stretch of land, a cave made of darkness that lasted until the next day — reproduced itself and followed its natural course — that of the night’s advance and the astral movements one senses while looking at the stars — together with its counterpart, the pits of shadow along the ground that the light from the night sky doesn’t reach; this black hole reproduced itself and followed the natural course of the night and all that it implies, on one hand, and on the other it showed itself to be mute, and most likely deaf, inside Delia. I’m not saying that figuratively. I mean “inside” Delia: literally, in her internal parts, her innards, as they say. The immense night, devouring light and time at a relentless pace, and Delia’s belly, waiting to feed on my strength in order to dispossess me of something that did not yet exist.