There was a certain irony to Delia. Looking out over the landscape, as that more or less harmonic arrangement of natural contrasts is called, a knowing smile would creep across her face, as though no truth found there could be new to her. A barely perceptible, though eloquent, expression that combined affinity and indifference, withdrawal and understanding. I’m under the impression that it was precisely her daily exposure to production and raw materials on a large scale in the factory that turned her into a being that saw magnitude as a cause not for admiration, but for acquiescence. Of course, this was a trait that she shared with the other workers. Neither landscapes, nor natural scenes had an effect on her, her internal fibers did not stir at any of it, natural or artificial. On the contrary, the humming of the machines: that was their lingua franca, and they turned to it in order to decipher the outside world. This might seem superficial, and also arbitrary, but in any event it was part of what, as I have said, made the workers the guarantors or supports of the world. Just as they did with their heroic legend, they returned to this language when they least expected it, even when they thought they were speaking another. It just so happens that workers, like almost everyone else, have been shaped by ideas and actions that are, in a way, external to them. I say “in a way” because no one, of course, could deny the interiority of their thoughts or the practical trance under which they acted; nonetheless, external things manifest themselves through people’s ideas and actions. It’s never the other way around: people do not express themselves outward; it is instead the outside world that manifests itself through individuals. I’ll give an example: one of Delia’s fellow workers. By chance, the two of them always ended up on the same shift. Another detail, far from insignificant, is that they were the same age; seeing them together brought to mind a brother and sister carried by destiny toward the machines. This person, G, did not stand out at all from the rest of the workforce. An invisible cable connected them all, through which a certain pace and level of exertion was transmitted; though it wasn’t always the same rhythm, it was always shared. Despite the fact that he was still practically a boy, G worked with remarkable focus, similar to the concentration that took Delia miles from the factory, though even in those moments no world or sounds existed to her but those produced by her own labor.
G could sometimes be seen crossing the yard in a threadbare coverall with shiny buttons while the other workers formed groups over by the giant metal crate. Delia would already have climbed onto it and balanced at its highest point. He looked so adrift at those moments, an unformed consciousness taking the effects of its contact with the machines, under whose alienating influence he had been for hours on end, out for a walk in the scant nature of the yard. A few crumbs from his meager breakfast remained in his breast pocket; at his tender age, G had gotten in the habit of searching them out with his fingers and lifting them unconsciously to his mouth, lost in his thoughts. When the whistle sounded the end of the break, G was the first to go back inside the factory. He had to let his eyes adjust to the shadows; this took him only a few moments, and then he regained the determined gait with which he always approached the machine. The empty workstations looked like a life without life to him, and he was sad that he had left during the break. Like many others, it was only through participating in and leaving his mark on production at the machine that he found a tenuous, but profound, justification for his existence. G was in no position to recall his first day of work at the factory, but he sensed that life had not been real until that moment; he remembered it as a waiting period, an antechamber. Life before the factory was a fiction, not because it really was, but because that was the way he remembered it. Now, on the other hand, he was in the domain of reality. G obviously didn’t expect it to end; fiction has a finale, reality does not. But these categories were about to change places, all that remained was for the drama to unfold. It happened suddenly one day, when he arrived at his workstation to find two machines; not the one he was used to, but two others. The marks of the old one were etched into the floor: deep, permanent traces that suggested the passage of time and a weight that was no longer there. At first, he thought the new machines would have the same functions as the other, and that he’d be able to work with them in the same way. But when he realized this was not the case, quite the opposite, that he couldn’t have imagined anything further from the old equipment, he refused to work. The factory faltered in its daily operations; the vibrations of the machines, the robotic clatter of the assembly line, and the tireless whirring of the conveyor belts could all be heard as a symbol of the ceaseless labor of industry, but G remained immobile, transfixed by the old marks. It goes without saying that they fired him without the slightest hesitation; according to the factory, an “example” needed to be made for the other operators. A machine taken out of circulation created an obstacle: an obsolete worker. In this case it was G, from many perspectives the best in the factory: young, healthy, and disciplined.
But his reaction, though it originated inside him, took its shape from the outside: it was the old machine saying no that spoke through G, and to do so it chose the silence, or rather the stillness, of the boy. This was how the outside world, in this case the machine, expressed itself. G remained motionless in front of the marks on the floor and, though it had only been a few days, the memory of the old device came to him as the image of a distant labor: a singular, vague idea disfigured by time and enhanced by its simplicity. In that earlier time, harmony was, shall we say, an expression of brutality. It’s hard to stop the labor of the workers when they are inspired, because each one senses the work of the others; it’s a collective feeling that renews their drive and redoubles their efforts. He didn’t know why, but in his reverie G remembered an old math problem from the factory: if a worker needed two days to make, for example, a hammer, how many hammers could ten workers make in four days? The workers would laugh at the way the question was phrased, in large part because of the emphasis it put on the number. The answer might be a quantity, in fact it might be much higher than what mere arithmetic might indicate, but what mattered to them was the advancement of the action, that is, the measure of activity combined with the passing of the day. Above, I suggested that the worker can’t measure his own work; here I should add that this is because his work, and especially the product, the result, seems abstract, somewhat irrational to him, due to the repetitive nature of his labor; yet for this reason, it is also tangible, even weighty. The worker, a consummate expert in material transformation, is baffled by any attempt to translate the value of his work into an order external to the factory, like money or time. Their salary meant a lot to the workers because it was what allowed them to survive; at the same time it represented little, because they didn’t know what effect their physical effort had on what they received or, for that matter, on what they were producing. This impossible translation was the source of the power that emanated from the factory and extended not only to the workers, but also to the true outside world, that is, the nearby streets and the community in general, reaching even those who were unaware of the existence of Delia’s factory, in particular.