Einstein’s train. He could understand the idea—the logic was fairly simple—and it seemed to be the best explanation for the anxiety he would feel when he thought the contents of the wheelbarrow might spill on him. At that moment he came to suspect that the fields, the house, his family, his chores, and even he himself were inside the rail car that the genius had used to explain his theory. The example had an immediate retroactive effect: entire blocks of memory were dislodged in the way that, when you forget one language, your former life is translated into a new tongue. Just as when he was a boy, he liked nothing more than to eavesdrop; not because he was drawn to the shameful or the improper, but because something within his bleak interior needed that complement to life found only in secrets. As he listened to his son, the man came to understand that it was not simply one of those ingenious paradoxes of the mundane; more than that, it was the explanation that allowed him to understand his origins and his new life, as he called it, in contrast the one he had led in the village where he was born. And so his memories, which could be transported back and forth from oblivion, did not belong entirely to him; they were part of the multi-purpose car that contained his family and the land. At some point he had gotten off the train, and since then had occupied his own, autonomous time. The multi-purpose car: it was an idea particularly well suited to what it was meant to communicate, a collective journey. The man was surprised to have reached old age and to have retained of his past only a simple token, devoid of value, and proof only of itself. One question had always unsettled him: What could have made him casually blot out entire parts of his life? Now he understood that the mistake lay in trying to find causes or reasons. Trains serve many purposes; the answer could be found right there in the son’s example. It was a simple comparison, an established metaphor—somewhat worn, but for this very reason, effective…
The problem was that, though the argument allowed him to understand and justify his new beginning, it also showed him that it was not new: the metaphor revealed his former life, erased until that moment. He sensed in his body, shall we say, the different accelerations that something as ethereal as time can produce. As he sat in his reduced state in the armchair that had over decades come to resemble the walls around it, listening to the uneven murmur of the voices of his sons, who were almost certainly unaware of him, the man revisited his afternoons as an accelerated stream, a continuum of eating and sleeping. The protagonist wondered about the meaning of these events, whether they might be a sign that the end was near. Each breath, every mouthful of air drawn deep, brought with it the scent of the dusk from his childhood. The same thing happened with sounds. He would have to take the wheelbarrow several times to the pit, which would later be covered over once and for all with dirt. This annual task, of resounding simplicity, seemed now to be the most decisive act of his life. One can imagine: rural time, a fixed cycle as precise as the solar year, as discrete as a whisper, and as encompassing as the world. But it wasn’t only that. That sense of time had been broken when the child had left—or, rather, been torn away—and there was no way for it to keep moving forward. He was caught in his memory of the past; the story was compressed until it reached a speed at which it occupied a single moment, beginning and end, something living that resembled an intangible trace, as ethereal yet verifiable as a shadow. So if I were to say, “That man is me,” my meaning would be clear: in life, one occupies different times.
Delia did not work for long after she got pregnant. The stony-faced workers, as I’ve described them before, would collect money in order to help the child along. A nebulous emotion filled
The problem was that, though the argument allowed him to understand and justify his new beginning, it also showed him that it was not new: the metaphor revealed his former life, erased until that moment. He sensed in his body, shall we say, the different accelerations that something as ethereal as time can produce. As he sat in his reduced state in the armchair that had over decades come to resemble the walls around it, listening to the uneven murmur of the voices of his sons, who were almost certainly unaware of him, the man revisited his afternoons as an accelerated stream, a continuum of eating and sleeping. The protagonist wondered about the meaning of these events, whether they might be a sign that the end was near. Each breath, every mouthful of air drawn deep, brought with it the scent of the dusk from his childhood. The same thing happened with sounds. He would have to take the wheelbarrow several times to the pit, which would later be covered over once and for all with dirt. This annual task, of resounding simplicity, seemed now to be the most decisive act of his life. One can imagine: rural time, a fixed cycle as precise as the solar year, as discrete as a whisper, and as encompassing as the world. But it wasn’t only that. That sense of time had been broken when the child had left—or, rather, been torn away—and there was no way for it to keep moving forward. He was caught in his memory of the past; the story was compressed until it reached a speed at which it occupied a single moment, beginning and end, something living that resembled an intangible trace, as ethereal yet verifiable as a shadow. So if I were to say, “That man is me,” my meaning would be clear: in life, one occupies different times.
Delia did not work for long after she got pregnant. The stony-faced workers, as I’ve described them before, would collect money in order to help the child along. A nebulous emotion filled
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