The Dark by Sergio Chejfec Page A

that an invisible guide had led us back to our usual lot and the shack built on it with enough time to embrace and do something at once furtive and precise; on these occasions we would sense that, though it existed outside of time, the night had a measure, a magnitude that was patiently and laboriously abandoned in the attempt not to mark the hours. I don’t know what effect this had on Delia, but it gave me pause; though I was pretty sure that I wasn’t causing any harm, I was afraid that I was committing an ill-defined act, one somehow gratuitous and cunning, selfish and merciless. In the night, that mass of dark and unknown substances, as I said above, Delia offered herself up with the bewildered trust of an animal, so much so that it would be easy to think of her as a defenseless victim. Still, even if the opposite were true, it would be hard to say it was otherwise. Delia would clutch at me in a way that was agitated, urgent; a way that, by its very nature, couldn’t last without exhausting its intensity. One could say it was love, or the anxiety produced by the night, I don’t know, or that it was a burning, deep, and avid passion trying to break free, her way of submitting to the darkness and renouncing the factory, and so on. In the shack in the Barrens, I was well aware of the moment when Delia stopped hearing the murmur of things, the drops of rain on the sheet metal roof, or the furtive scurrying of vermin. She was entirely open, turned inside out like a glove and detached from herself as she waited for something that might be fleeting or definitive, but was always overwhelming. In those moments, when Delia gave in to abandon with the urgent need to receive, I felt extraneous, as though I controlled nothing; it had been enough for me to take that first step, and now I was on the outside. From a certain perspective, my intervention might seem essential, but if it had any effect over Delia’s actions, these excluded me, turning me into something at once transitory and abstract, though, as one might imagine, these were moments of tremendous physical agitation. It might sound exaggerated, but I felt further from her in those moments than I did when I would stand outside the factory and watch her during her break. In this way, Delia never ceased to be enigmatic to me, regardless of whether she really was, or ever wanted to be.
     
    The animal feels sustained by the life of the other, I repeated, standing at the window. Night, I thought, the depths. I’ve read many novels in which the truth reveals itself during the night. But it is a conditional truth, because it relies on the threat of daybreak to show itself without reservation. At night we’re the center of things, just as happens when we look into the past. I turned away from the window and sensed, as keen as a dagger, the pressure of a gaze on my back. Hidden out there, in the dark, someone was watching me. I wanted to know who, from where, and why. These were the questions of someone sustained by another life. I looked down, not knowing how to react. Animals do this, too, when they find themselves momentarily at a loss for a response. I saw marks on the floor that reminded me of those in the other room: I was another of those who etched little paths in the floor. As in nature, these tracks spoke of habits, repetition, and direction. The path, definite and well-worn, started at the door of my room, but split two steps later along predictable courses: the window, the bed, and the wardrobe. The path to the dresser was the first leg of the journey toward the window; the main one, as well, given that it was longer. For its part, the path toward the bed was a second detour, though it was actually more of an estuary: a broad and undefined, though discernible area which, though it did not lead anywhere in particular, spread like a stain made of light toward the wardrobe. Suddenly, the memory of that other room made me wonder whether this whole scene was not meant