Trust by Hernan Diaz

Author:Hernan Diaz [Diaz, Hernan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

4

The line started moving. Because we were admitted in groups, rather than slowly shuffling forward, we took several steps every five or ten minutes. There was something exaggeratedly liberating in these short walks. As we reached the entrance, I saw applicants going into the building but never coming out of it. I assumed (and later confirmed) they were dismissed through a back door, probably to prevent us from learning anything from those who were done.

If we had, for the most part, remained quiet during our wait, the closer we got to the door, the more the silence tightened. We were on our own. And, although there was no sense of hostility in the air, against one another.

The doorman, wearing a brass emblem of Bevel Investments as if it were a medal, counted to twelve by pointing at our heads with his index finger as we were let into the reception. We were told to wait by a desk. The walls of green marble vanished toward a remote ceiling. What was not made of stone was made of bronze. Nothing shone but everything emitted a pale glow. Sounds had a tactile quality, and we all did our best not to litter the space with any audible objects of our own. A man appeared behind the desk and, like the doorman, pointed at us, one by one, with his pen. We understood he wanted our names. “Ida Prentice,” I said, feeling the blood throbbing in my cheeks as it always did whenever I used this fake name.

The two eldest women in our group, together with a young thickset girl, were shown to a side door; the rest of us were led to an elevator.

We were let off on the fifteenth or seventeenth floor. Looking out at the gridded pattern of streets full of silent little cars, the river with its tugboats and, beyond it, the docks and Brooklyn’s modest skyline, I realized I had never been so high up. The city seemed so tidy and hushed from above. Later I would learn the building was seventy-one stories tall.

A set of double doors at the end of the reception hall opened to reveal a large space saturated with the angry, precise clatter of hammers and the dark, oily smell of ink. All the employees were women. Although I had worked in some typing pools, none of them came close to this in size. It is hard to recall the exact figures, but there must have been at least six rows of about eight desks each. And at each desk, a girl roughly my age, her head slightly cocked to better see the page she was copying. In fact the whole trunk was shifted to the right, dissociated from the hands, which remained centered. The center was the typewriter.

I had never seen so many women working under one roof.

We were led down the aisle between two rows of desks and turned the corner to find, again, six rows of eight desks each. At each desk, again, a secretary absorbed in her work.

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