Tony’s death was a confusing episode, but Luca was sure that Yoshio wasn’t the murderer. Luca shared Croce’s theories. He was sure that they’d cede the money to him without any problems as soon as he showed the court the papers and the certified withdrawal statements from Summit Bank.
“Let’s go downstairs and see the installations,” Luca said.
“My mother says that reading is thinking,” Sofía said. “Not that we read and then we think, but rather that we think something and then we read it in a book as if it were written by us, although it’s not written by us. Rather, someone in another country, in another place, in the past, writes it like a thought that hasn’t been thought yet, until, by chance, always by chance, we find the book that clearly expresses what had been, confusingly, not yet thought by us. Not every book, of course, but certain books are destined for us, certain books seem like objects of our own thoughts. A book for each one of us. To find it, there must be a series of accidentally interrelated events, until in the end you see the light you’re looking for, without even knowing you were looking for it. In my case it was the Me-Ti, or The Book of Changes. A book of maxims. I love the truth because I’m a woman. I trained with Grete Berlau, the great German photographer who studied in the Bauhaus, she used the Me-Ti as a photography manual. She came to the college because the Dean thought that an agricultural engineer should learn with pinpoint accuracy to distinguish the different kinds of grasses that grow on the estancias. ‘In the countrysides nobody sees a ting, therre’s no borrderrs therre.33 To see you must cut. Photogrraphy is like trracking and raking.’ That’s how Grete spoke, with a heavy accent. I remember one time she put me and my sister together and took a series of photographs, and for the first time you could see how different we were. ‘You can only see what you have photogrraphed,’ Grete used to say. She was friends with Brecht, she’d lived with him in Denmark. They said she was the Lai-tu of the Me-Ti.34
30 “Democritus, in Antiquity, already pointed out that: Mother earth, when made fruitful by nature, gives birth to harvests that serve as food for men and beasts. Because what comes from the earth must return to the earth, and what comes from the air must return to the air. Death does not destroy matter, it breaks up the union of its elements so they may be reborn in other forms. Very different from industry, etc…” (Report by Mr. Schultz).
31 “He works uninterrupted, for many hours on end, at night and in the afternoon, never allowing himself any slowdowns, with great effort, through great fatigue. He demonstrates unbreakable confidence in the ‘immensurable value’ of his work. He never lets himself be brought down by the difficulties and he never admits the possibility of failure for any of his endeavors. He does not accept the least bit of criticism, he has absolute confidence in the destiny in store for him. For these reasons, he does not care about recognition. ‘We are concerned with praise and recognition in the exact measure to which we are unsure about our work. But he who, like us, is sure — absolutely sure — of having produced a work of great value, has no reason whatsoever to care about recognition. Such a person, like us, will feel indifferent to all worldly glory’” (Report by Mr. Schultz).
32 “I am too curious and too clever and too proud to behave like a victim” (Dictated to Mr. Schultz).
33 “The pampas presents a privileged medium for photography because of the distances, its folding effects, and the intense plenitude lost in the non-space of visual deprivation” (Note by Grete Berlau).
34 Two years after the events recorded in this story, on January 15, 1974, Grete Berlau drank one or two cups of wine before going to bed, and there, lit a cigarette. There was a fire, and she suffocated in the burning room. She may have dozed off while she was smoking. “We have to do away with the habit of speaking about things that cannot be said by speaking,” was one of the sayings of Lai-tu that Brecht recorded in the Me-ti, or The Book of Changes.
17
They walked down the interior stairwell and into the main part of the factory, where they toured the industrial plant and were surprised by the elegance and spaciousness of the building.35 The indoor garage was nearly two blocks in length, but it looked like a place that had been suddenly abandoned, right before some imminent disaster. A general paralysis had fallen over the steel accumulated there, much like a stroke leaves a man — who has drunk and fornicated and lived life to the fullest until the fatal instant when, from one second to the next, an attack immobilizes him forever — dry and lifeless.
Frozen assembly lines; a stretched-out section of upholstery with the dyed leather and the seats waiting on the floor; rims, wheels, stacked tires; a shed, its door and windows covered with canvases; inside the shed, metal sheets and cans of paint; tools and mechanical pieces, wheels, pulleys, and small measuring instruments on the floor of the garage; tires with Stepney wood crossbeams; Hutchinson pneumatics; a Stentor horn; an ingenious turbine to inflate tires, activated by the output from the exhaust pipe; a cigüeñal crankshaft with its strange bird-name; a long workbench with adjustable bench vices, optical apparatuses, and gauging devices. The feeling of sudden abandonment was like a cold draft coming off the walls. The steel guillotine shear and the Campbell automatic folding machine, both purchased in Cincinnati, were in perfect condition. Two partially assembled automobiles had been left elevated above the service pits in the middle of the garage. Everything seemed to be in a suspended state, as if an earthquake — or the gray, viscous lava of an erupting volcano — had frozen the factory during an average workday, at the precise moment of its freezing. April 12, 1971. The calendar with naked women from a tire shop in Avellaneda, the old wooden box radio plugged into the wall, the newspapers covering the broken glass windows: everything pointed to the exact moment when time had stopped. A blackboard hanging by a wire still had the call to assembly from the plant’s internal commission. There was no date on that, but it was from the time of the conflict. Fellow workers, there will be a general assembly tomorrow to discuss the situation of the company, the new conditions, and our battle plan.36 The electric clock on the back wall had stopped at 10:40 (but was it am or pm?).
After a while they were able to discern the signs of Luca’s more current activity. Spherical and curved objects set up on the floor, like animals from a strange mechanical bestiary; a device with wheels, gears, and pulleys, which seemed recently finished, painted in bright red and white paint; a small bronze plate that read: The wheels of Samson and Delilah; the diagrams and plans for a monumental construction, fragmented in small, circular models, laid out on a drafting desk. A garage where one hundred workers were once employed, now occupied by a single man.
“We have resisted,” Luca said, then switched to the second person singular. “No one helps you,” he said. “They make everything difficult. You get taxed before you’ve even produced anything. This way, please.”