Her growing belly did not stop her. To me she seemed sweeter, rounder, and — as often happens with pregnant women — lovelier, holding up her pregnancy on legs as straight as sticks, always waiting, always with the same wistful expression. There was bewilderment in her gaze, that much was easy to see, but it was also free of demands. It was simply a gaze that wanted to be told that it was all just a bad dream, a storm that was slow to pass. Her wisdom consisted of this, and it was this that ended up making me feel ashamed. Because she made no demands of me, it was as though she were turning the other cheek while her swelling stomach offered growing proof of her dignity. She would show up alongside the thistle barrens, across from the bus stop on the corner of Los Huérfanos, just a few feet from the gully where we had seen F’s boys, on the corner (if it could be called that) of her friend’s house, and so on. As though Delia, in her need to get my attention back, understood that she needed to bring geography up to date: these were no longer the places we visited together, but rather where she had ended up waiting for me, day after day. I should also say that her strength and determination flustered me, and I responded viscerally, abruptly; I wanted the earth to swallow me whole and I fled without knowing where I was headed, only that I needed to get out of there, to get far away.
This might sound a little inappropriate, but I don’t think I’m far from the truth when I say that if Delia acted this way, it was because of her proletarian nature. As I said, few human tasks have turned resignation or waiting into an essential trait, a virtue, even. Yet this is the first thing one notices in the worker, and it is what endures in them. People often talk about the patience of farmers, the endless periods of waiting that the land endures, of the seasons weaving themselves together into a single era in which we are no more than a grain of sand in the universe, and so on, but they rarely mention the infinite patience of the worker and the intractable presence of the machines. This is because of their operational cycles, which are always visible and always repeated, and because of the transmission of energy, which, by translating itself into force, imposes the idea of a process that is unstoppable, endless, and above all, unfathomable. The legends that depict the fragility of machines, like the one in which they are destroyed by nothing more than the carelessness of those operating them, actually draw attention to the opposite, to the continuity of the machinery, which is its greatest strength, in the face of which all else recedes. The land is always telling us that it could disappear at any time, that the ground is no more solid than our perception of it. Industry, on the other hand, promises to operate forever, imposing itself on everything associated with it. Anyway, whether it is a force the worker assigns to the machines or a force that flows in the opposite direction, from the machine to the mind of the worker, what is certain is that, while the strength Delia showed by waiting any and everywhere, regardless of the weather, could be attributed to the surprise she carried in her heart — to put it one way — but it was also nourished by that intractable strength that came from her proletarian condition. Because she had a talent for showing up right in front of me, and because I obviously had to see her before I could avert my eyes, I was able to see how evenly her belly was growing. She was so young that the pregnancy paradoxically emphasized her innocence, making her seem like a girl who had discovered the secret of the game, or like prey that was not granted the hunter’s mercy. And so Delia’s belly grew and grew. Toward the end, I’d see her waiting for me, leaning up against whatever was at hand — a post, a tree, a fence, or a wall — until one day, feeling my shame ebb away, I noticed that she wasn’t there. She and the child had stepped into the dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. He currently teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at NYU. His novels, The Planets (a finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in fiction) and My Two Worlds, are both available from Open Letter in English translation.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Heather Cleary is a translator of fiction, criticism, and poetry, whose work has appeared in journals including Two Lines, Habitus, The Coffin Factory, and New York Tyrant, and in the edited volumes Revealing Mexico and The Film Edge. In 2005, she was awarded a Translation Fund grant from the PEN America Center for her work on Oliverio Girondo’s Persuasioón de los días. She is also the founding editor of the Buenos Aires Review. In addition to The Dark, she translated Chejfec’s The Planets.
ABOUT OPEN LETTER
Open Letter — the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press — is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.
Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and poetry, and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.
Current and forthcoming titles from Open Letter include works from Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Russia, and many other countries.
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