The Dark by Sergio Chejfec

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,