The Wall

Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Erik Noonan

They finished about a week ago. This morning one of the old men made a sort of hole between two bricks, but he couldn’t see through to the other side. He poked around with his finger and then with a branch he’d cut from the willow; the mortar must have dried from the outside in, because he was at it for half an hour, to no avail.

Being able to see the street is a great thing. People pass and gesture and laugh and sometimes wave to each other and every so often trucks and buses pass and one time a jockey on a sorrel went by, which was a luxury. I’ve seen a lot of riders in my life, but none like this one: with a colorful jacket and cap, standing high in the stirrups, propped up on a thoroughbred that passed at a trot as if he was getting ready to take off. There’s no track nearby and there used to be stables at the Turdera Downs, but it’s been years, much less a horse like this one, impossible to find in the street, on the asphalt. What a jockey would be doing in this area I never figured out. He continued at a trot, calmly, and smiled when he saw me as if he knew who I was then said something to me that I didn’t catch. I can’t recall if I was alone or which way the horse came from. An advertising truck passed by right after it with loudspeakers on the roof, so maybe the horse had been a way to get people’s attention, but I don’t know. I think of the jockey, small as a monkey, in contrast with the truck, which was a Ford 28, with a sort of tower with a sign announcing an auction. I think about this and about the horse’s eyes that watched in fright as if it were lost among people.

But at times I get to thinking the jockey never went past and I dreamt it just the way two out of three times I dream I’m operating the 239, a new engine that must be rusty by now, buried in some shed in Escalada, who knows.

What I want to say is, sitting here watching people and trucks going by or the wind lifting bits of paper, the day goes fast; no sooner do you want to remember than it’s night and there’s no time left to think about anything.

While the fence was still made of privet, people, trucks, and even the jockey were blobs when they passed by, nothing but blobs, and it was boring to watch them, every one the same. To be able to see something you had to plant yourself there, halfway bent over, peering through the twigs at a piece of street the size of a tile. Anyway, no one held out for long, stooped with their face scratched by twigs and an ache in their back.

Until the workmen arrived and began to dig up the privet. I couldn’t believe it: they never do what you need around here. The workmen dug a pit around the lot, a sort of ditch that surrounded the whole facility. Then the privet came down and the street appeared: you could see to about midway down the block. From the corner to half a green house, two stories with a sort of garden, three by six at most, with a pine tree that they must have built the house around.

The guy who lives in that house must have a strange job. He goes out when it’s almost dark, right about now, and I’ve seen him come back in the morning. I’ve seen him two or three times when I get up before the bells chime. I don’t linger in bed when I wake up; I’d rather get up even if there’s still an hour left before the bell and the yard and halls are empty and dark. The others struggle to stay a little bit longer, like children. They pretend to be asleep and groan every time the staff calls them. For more than thirty years I got up at four to get to Escalada before six. And if you get up at the same time every day you get used to it and you can’t sleep no matter how much you toss and turn in bed. That’s why when I wake up it’s hard to tell where I am, and sometimes it’s like I have to get up and go out in a hurry to catch the 4:40 train and the guys are already there in the garage drinking mate while the boilers warm up. Sometimes I hear the noise of the engines and once the Englishman came and told me to keep working; then I was off again lickety split with the 239, as if I hadn’t smashed it to bits against some crappy freight train in ’forty two.

But it seems as if I dreamt this. Like the jockey.

But I remember now, I was talking about the workmen. They worked on and on till dark. And it was as if they were never going to finish.

I would stand next to the ditch to chat. Because sometimes you feel the need to talk and you can’t with the old men. They pass the time not moving and half asleep, looking for sunshine and saying the same things over and over. That’s why I spent afternoons chatting with the workmen; I explained how a 239 or a 442 works. I told them how it felt to be on top of an engine going at full blast, hear the whistle blowing, the boiler spewing sparks, so crammed with coal it seems like the train cars are going to jump the rails and shoot off into the fields. One afternoon I told them about the crash of the 239, the freight and the whole mess with the English, when they started saying my eyesight was poor, I hadn’t seen the signals, this that and the other, and finally they retired me. The workmen laughed as if I’d told them a joke and went on working and shouted things at women. I said things to girls too, crossing the street with skirts up to their knees and tight blouses. I looked at them, I said, “She’s a looker,” so the workmen would hear me, but the truth was, I felt nothing.

The trouble is, they finally left and here I had no one to talk to anymore. Lonely as a cloud watching the old men who spend their time going back and forth in the yard as if they didn’t know which way to turn. But be that as it may, it’s better here than at my son’s house. Here you can sit for as long as you like, from morning till night, without them circling around and whispering and shifting you here and there like a piece of furniture. That’s why I came. I don’t need to be told what to do and my son is a bum and his wife is a shrew. That’s why I collected my things, put them in a trunk, and came here to the facility. I rang the bell. The privet fence was still there: “My son went on a trip, I want to stay for a while,” I began to explain to the person who was helping me, but the guy seemed deaf and did nothing but make hand signs and inside I had to repeat the same thing to the person in charge, who was drinking mate. A while, not like the ones who stay here till they die. I’d like to walk a little better, wait till my hands stop shaking, so I can pick up some kind of work. Who knows what, something or other. It would be great to open a kiosk. A sheet metal kiosk, on a street corner, painted yellow …

For all those things it helped a lot to see the street. Between staring at this or that, looking out for buses and people-watching, when you least expect it, the schoolchildren go by making a racket and the church bells ring but can barely be heard, mixed up in the street noise. That’s why what they did disturbs me. Most of all afterwards, at night, when I’m alone in the dark and my head is empty because nothing happened all the livelong day. A fear of sleep comes over me then. I stay still, very still, with my eyes open, and I listen to the old men breathing and groaning and sometimes I can hear a train far off and I don’t want to shut my eyes because if I sleep I won’t wake up again …

This fear does me in now more than anything. Before, at times, I would sometimes remember the curve and dark bulk of the freight coming toward me, I’d remember the crash and I’d wake up in a sweat then force myself to think about what I’d seen during the day, I’d remember each thing, one by one, and it was like seeing them in that very moment until suddenly, without realizing, I’d fall asleep. But now I don’t have anything to think about and that must be why every now and then the old lady appears to me dressed all in green like the day I met her; I remember all the funny things: she wore a ribbon in her hair that was half unknotted and hung to one side, all afternoon I wanted to tell her, “Your bun is coming loose,” but I didn’t dare. Surely if she had lived she would have said no, that was a different day or it was a hat and not a ribbon or whatever she’d make up to contradict me. Because it was as if it were her duty to contradict. Surely if she were here and I told her how I’ve begun to remember her more and more she wouldn’t believe me. But that’s how it is. Now, since the workmen have gone, I’ve been thinking more and more about the old lady and all the things I used to do. It must be because there’s nothing to do in here and nothing happens. At first, for better or worse, if I stood on tiptoe, I managed to glimpse the roofs of the buses, the eaves of the houses, but one morning I crossed the yard, sat down here as I did on every other day, and when I saw them lay the last row of bricks I couldn’t believe it, as if they were about to knock it all down and say to me, “The old man gets the joke…” But they finished the mortar, cleaned the last spills off the ground, gathered up their tools, and left. That’s when I began to remember everything, the afternoon I started work at the railroad, the day I got married and it was raining like hell and the old lady jumped over the puddles lifting her skirt with one hand and holding her hat with the other, a black hat with feathers that looked so funny. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it because it’s as if there’s nothing left but to think about the things she used to do. There’s nothing left but to stay here sitting on this bench, quiet as a mouse, with nothing around that moves but the leaves on the trees up there when there’s wind and the old men pacing this way and that, looking for sunshine. Spending my days doing nothing but staring at the wall I already know by heart, the mortar between the bricks and all the pockmarks and that streak that goes up all crooked and looks like a road seen from very far away, when you’re in the engine compartment and the two tracks meet and seem like a single one, a long streak that goes up and up, all crooked …