Footsteps, tracks, paths. Delia and I tirelessly recombined these words; walking was, for me, an obvious and practical extension of her company. Because of this, when I’d walk without her I felt I was doing something else, distancing myself from what I was born to do. It was the absence of something that belonged to and defined me, the feeling that something was missing and that I, also, was less. While Delia was at the factory, I was present in the world, or rather, I “witnessed” everyday life, observed people’s habits, like talking in the morning, checking the time, and so on, and it seemed incredible to me that everything should appear to go on as usual when that which ultimately held up the world, Delia, was far from there. Actually, I could understand this behavior in people who were able to go about their normal activities because they knew nothing of Delia; what was beyond me was my own passivity in the face of such appalling ignorance. It might seem paradoxical, but Delia’s absence kept me from taking action, from taking part in anything other than my habitual, useless, and ultimately dispassionate meditations. Delia influenced me despite the distance that separated us, much as she did at her workstation: thoughtful, absent, introspective, isolated, this is how I often imagined she controlled the factory. The way she acted gave the impression that she organized and directed every detail of the collective labor. Perhaps this was the only impression that could be drawn from work like that, which brought the rhythms of machines and of people together in a way that was at once harmonious and rushed. In any event, Delia, with her restraint and her focus, overshadowed and almost hidden behind her workstation, seemed to be the neural center of the community. Her influence, that force that emanated outward from Delia, its epicenter, extended first throughout the factory, as I said, organizing its rhythms and production; it also passed through the walls and expanded beyond them, insinuating itself into people’s lives without their ever knowing it. Meanwhile, Delia went on as usual with her half words. Her language had an eloquent sparseness to it. I would listen to her speak, and think that her intermittent and, for all intents and purposes, inaudible, way of expressing herself confirmed her deep proletarian identity; on the other hand, she seemed like one of those characters in a novel who, with their one expression and few words — words that are often said by others, and are rarely their own — are able to move between books and endure in someone’s memory. There was a law she obeyed: that of intermittent speech. But “law” does not entirely convey it, primarily because it was not in response to any mandate.
That afternoon, as we circled the camp after discovering the alleys with the footprints headed in the same direction, Delia told me that she thought she’d seen G, the worker who had been fired for rejecting his new machine. She had only seen him for a few moments, but it had been enough for her to recognize the terrible effect his dismissal had on him. Delia was making one of her habitual journeys for a piece of clothing, either to pick something up or to return it, an expedition that could last half a day or certainly several hours, taking unreliable transportation or, most of the time, walking. She was distracted, thinking of the appealing secret of clothing: the fact, paradoxical from many points of view, that getting dressed meant putting on a disguise, expressing something profound, or at least something that wasn’t on the surface, through the illusion of hiding oneself; Delia was distracted, thinking of these things, when she saw G standing motionless on some corner or another, not waiting for anything in particular, his hands hanging at his sides like weights. A few seconds were enough. She saw his childlike face hardened, overcome by dejection; he was probably miles away from where he stood at that moment. It was enough to show her how the lack of specific knowledge or a special skill, could, for a worker, be a deficit that translated into an advantage. Another worker who didn’t know how to work the old machine and had never become one with it wouldn’t have had any trouble adapting to the new one. In this way, G’s aptitude became an obstacle. It’s a hardship for a worker to know something, Delia told me, you can’t imagine how much more useful they are, the less they know. The work isn’t always coarse and brutish, but a lack of skill is often required to carry out their partial, or truncated, tasks, which have no justification outside the context of the production line. G was a perfect example of this. His wanderings through the lots around the city, which Delia imagined to have no particular purpose, were an attempt to return to an original lack of skill. The slightest ability beyond what was absolutely necessary was enough to render the worker irredeemably useless, because everything extra that he knew meant a potential expense and a real loss for the factory. Delia probably said these things in different words, but putting it like this seems closer to her actual thoughts. It wasn’t the typical sort of ignorance, the lack of knowledge, experience, or whatever, but rather a positive ignorance, a combination of naivety and contrition. Anyone who wants to become a factory worker knows that he will have to forget many of his skills and acquire others, which belong to a limited sphere and relate to a series of repetitive and relatively simple tasks. I should also say that this renunciation of the self, this “abandonment,” was one of the things that made the worker, in my opinion, that which holds up the world. And so, within the parable that G’s life had become, just like F’s before it, the time had come to move from one place to another, to wander along lonely paths and through neighborhoods that in some cases had fallen into neglect, with the intention, not always entirely clear and categorical, of dropping the deadweight, of losing the old knowledge that had brought on such an unfortunate end, and, with a little luck, of recovering some general aptitude, a null skill set that would make it possible to embark, from the beginning, on a new phase as a machine operator. G was certainly in this trance when Delia saw him standing on that corner made of nothing, an intersection of dirt and gravel, like someone who had forgotten who he was.
A few hours later she passed the same place on her way back. Before reaching the corner where she had seen G, Delia wondered if he’d still be there, and if so whether it might not be a good idea to talk to him, if only to see how much he still remembered of that other world. But when she got there, G was gone. A distant breeze carried with it the delicate scent of a lot that had once been used to cultivate, I don’t know, fruits and vegetables, for example. Now, plants grew there in disarray, in shapes and with smells that, though they alluded to a former domestic use, revealed first and foremost the force of the wild. It was strange to see the way people needed to go back to nothing to reach something that would serve as their refuge from a lack of purpose. Out of an original nothing, like birth, for example, they passed through situations that supplied them with knowledge, habits, and experiences, yet the most likely outcome was that a moment would come when they would have to shake off all they had acquired and start again from zero, that is, to go back to a different nothing and start over. On the way, G could be seen standing on the corner, waiting for something more or less fundamental; he was the epitome of childlike unawareness and, in a certain sense, proletarian naivety. Accustomed to the mechanical commotion of the factory, its world of transmissions, pulleys, and gears, he couldn’t figure out what it would take to adapt to his new life of unemployment. But, then, when he really thought about it, he realized that he hadn’t really understood the former one, the world of the factory, either, because if he had he would never have been banished. Delia returned with her borrowed clothes, or maybe after restoring them to the collective reserve that provided the community with its best attire; she had completed her errand, but there was no sign of G on the corner…