Silence · fiction
The silence that lives in the middle of the noise
A story: amid two hundred calls a day, a Colombian call center agent sees a bird on the ledge and goes back, for a second, to her grandmother's porch.
A vision — a short story.
Two hundred calls a day. She counted once, on a Monday, and never wanted to count again.
The agent worked in a glass building in a big city in Colombia, on a floor where three hundred people spoke at the same time, each with a headset on, each apologizing to a stranger for a billing mistake she hadn't made. The noise of the floor was a sea without waves: constant, lukewarm, without pause. Sometimes, at night, at home, she could still hear that sea in her ears.
There was no silence at home either. Her younger brother played games on his phone with the volume up. Her mother watched television. The upstairs neighbor dragged furniture at eleven at night, every night, as if moving house without ever leaving.
She was twenty-six and felt she hadn't thought a whole thought since she was nineteen.
One ordinary day, between one call and the next, it happened.
A customer was shouting at her. Shouting because his service had been cut off, because he had a sick child, because no one ever fixed anything. She listened and, while listening, glanced without meaning to at the building's glass wall. Outside, a little bird had landed on the ledge. Still. Completely still, the wind ruffling its feathers.
And, for a second, she no longer heard the customer.
She didn't hear the floor, nor the headset, nor the lukewarm sea of three hundred voices. She heard only the space between her and the bird, and that space was enormous. A whole childhood fit inside it.
She saw herself as a girl, on her grandmother's farm, lying in the hammock after lunch, when even the chickens slept and the world stood still in the heat. She saw her grandmother shelling corn on the porch, one kernel at a time, in no hurry at all, as if each kernel were a prayer. She saw that the farm's silence had never gone away. It was stored in a place inside her where the noise didn't get in, like a room in the house you forget you have.
The second ended. The bird flew off. The customer was still shouting.
But she was no longer the same person who had picked up the call.
"Sir," she said, in a voice so calm she didn't recognize it as hers, "I'm here. I'm going to stay on the line until it's fixed."
The man stopped shouting. On the other end, she heard a child crying softly, and then his breathing, slower.
"Sorry," he said. "It's not you."
"I know."
That night, at home, the neighbor dragged the furniture as always. Her brother played. Her mother watched television. She lay down and, instead of fighting the noise, closed her eyes and looked for the forgotten room. The hammock, the corn, her grandmother.
It was there.
She discovered that silence wasn't a place you go to. It was a place you come from. You only need to remember the way, one second at a time.
The next day, she made two hundred calls again. But, between one and the next, she closed her eyes for a second and went back to her grandmother's porch. One kernel of corn. Then the next call.
Bairo describes an inner search, at rock bottom, in which he says he saw his best version. Read: The God of the impossible.
The way forward
Silence can be a place inside you, not only outside; sometimes it fits in a second. Look for a memory of true calm and return to it between one task and the next. When the noise outside can't be switched off, the noise inside can be turned down.