The Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

kind you see in a poorly cut piece of sheet metal. My mind turned to the house, the neighborhood, to the poor sort of poetry that emerged from them; it was a scene that at first glance appeared weak, worn, on the verge of collapse. At one point, Delia stepped out to get changed. She came back in an old pair of pants, which I recognized, with the skirt tucked under her arm. She wasn’t gone long, no longer than it would take anyone to take off a skirt and put on a pair of pants, but it was long enough for me to think that the house—and not just the house, but the whole area—lacked both a past and a future. I could see traces of the labor of man, of the distracted signs of routine, the growth of a community, and so on; still, these were the marks of an invisible labor as accidental as that of nature. People working diligently, like ants, without a clear purpose and at the mercy of chance…
     
    When Delia’s friend stepped out a little while later to try on the skirt, or simply to put it on, I wondered whether we didn’t pass through this world as anonymous beings, driven by a force at once innocent, merciless, and brutal. Delia felt protected from this power and, thanks to her condition—as a woman and a worker—resisted its influence. I have often thought that it is workers, with their bodies and the force they exert at the expense of their own energy, who atone for our indifference toward the world; that first, foremost, and in a literal sense, they pay out in labor what they receive as wages—an amount never equal to the true value of their efforts—but also that they pay for that which has no price, that is, for the infinite debt racked up by humanity. I was familiar with the operations whereby Delia’s friend would take off her clothes and put on the skirt: universal maneuvers that, in this particular case, were meant to confirm that it still looked good on her, as they say. The friend was out there somewhere, barely protected from prying eyes by the walls of the shack, or in the narrow bathroom, where the absence of light could be misleading: mistaking darkness for size, one ended up banging one’s feet and elbows against the walls. The kitchen was in one corner of the house; within its limited radius, a dense concentration of objects alluded to constant and, though it may seem contradictory, discontinuous actions. Delia was silent; she seemed to be thinking only of the imminent return of her friend. This was not exactly a thought, but it would be excessive to call it a premonition. We were taking part in one of the millions of micro-scenes that everyone enacts, all the time. The movement of the air could be heard, punctuated occasionally by drafts that whistled through the walls when the breeze picked up. At that moment there was little to say, so we didn’t speak for a while. In one corner, a gas burner rested unstably on the cylinder that fed it, surrounded by a jumble of pots, pans, and jugs, each set in the exact spot dictated by its use; this space was the origin of the invisible thread that tied the home together. It was palpable: the heat that warmed milk for the little ones, food for the adults, and so on, extended throughout the home and the time that existed within it, leaving its indelible mark. It was the presence that, for example, would allow the blind child to know that this was the interior of his own home, where his family lived. The rest of the dwelling was in shadow, and though the darkness was similar to that of the kitchen, everything in it was harder to see, more confused; the tangle of blankets, mattresses and pieces of foam rubber thrown together at absurd angles, like fallen dominos, belonged—or seemed to follow—to a logic that differed from, or contradicted, that of the kitchen. Whereas the kitchen signified a concentrating force, the rest of the house suggested a force of diffusion. It was there that dreams and desires went about their work, the space, even, in which bodies