When I left Pedrera, much of what had happened with Delia seemed impossible to me. Certain ideas stay with us all the time, like the combined proofs that tells us where we are and, oh, what we represent at any given moment. And yet, after my period of isolation there was no rule, no signs, that could help me understand what had happened. I mentioned before what goes on in someone’s mind when they say “I didn’t see anything,” or “I wasn’t thinking about anything,” and so on. Well, something like that happened to me as I peered through the window, out of sight and not looking at anything in particular, checking the typical landscape of abrupt and asymmetrical elements, an ever changing, ever incomplete panorama; something like that happened to me as I leaned against the glass and repeated to myself, “I can’t believe it.” I, who had always felt such disdain for the tragic, even unconsciously, both as a way of connecting with it and a means of denying my own nature, which saw its own reflection there, now had it right in front of me, with no alternatives or chance of escape. While I was confined to my bed, my tragedy had presented itself like the repeated actions of a bad dream. Episodes whose intensity had faded emerged from the monotony of half-sleep and, spent and discolored by repetition, called into question the truth of the very thing they were meant to convey. But when I left… It was another thing entirely to step out into the street, into the neighborhood, into the open. I felt as though the whole world were pointing at me. Not just as the man responsible for a cruel and depraved act, but as the person who found, in that act, the ultimate justification of his days. Neither forgiveness, nor censure, but something simpler: an identity. That was how Delia would become a part of my time, I realized that futile morning I stepped out into the street.

I’ve read more than one novel in which misfortune helps someone’s bad luck along; I mean, there are people in these novels whose luck is worse than they deserve. This excess of adversity, like a surplus of evil, frees one’s character of contradictions: the innocent become more innocent, the conniving more conniving; the lazy man is driven to the heights of laziness. Nuances and traits are, in the end, redundant: to give a simple example, it is of little use to the generous man to be uniquely benevolent if he ultimately turns out to be at the mercy of his luck. What I mean is, what happens in novels is deceptive. This story probably should have been much more awful than it seems, and is certainly much truer than it makes itself out to be, because the one thing I know is that, from the beginning, I felt myself involved in a tragedy without a statute of limitations. It is so easy to seek forgiveness, and so difficult to attain it, even when it is offered by the victim. For example, sometimes I wonder whether Delia ever forgave me; I immerse myself in the idea and go over the different forms of forgiveness, all of which are, in one way or another, misleading. There’s something there that doesn’t quite convince me, I think, these thoughts are a useless indulgence. Because Delia doesn’t have anything to forgive me for. From one point of view, yes, but, I don’t know, maybe she’s better off because I abandoned her; at the same time, no, because my actions weren’t directed at her or anything else in particular. This is why forgiveness is impossible, because it has nowhere and no one from which it can originate, or anything upon which it can sustain itself. An ideal system would be like that of the workers, I remember thinking to myself as I lay on my bed. When F had his problem, they started collecting money in silence, ashamed. And through this ritual of delegation, in the name of something abstract, like the threat posed to the class, or its pride, each made a contribution so that F could escape the threat of the moneylenders. A system like that would be ideal, because it absolved through the distribution of sacrifice, rather than guilt.

There was a practice among the workers, largely forgotten and rarely enacted, that was sometimes invoked in extreme cases, like that of F. An untold collective consciousness set off a mechanism lost in the reaches of memory, communal heritage, or the straightforward, but profound empirical memory of the workers. It consisted of leaving behind small sums of money, without any apparent reason or obvious logic, in places where the others would know to look for them in order to help a worker who had fallen into misfortune. These were not anonymous operations. Everyone had a role in them: the worker who cautiously approached to leave his contribution was the same person who would hurry back, strangely remorseful, to the normalcy of the corner where he worked. This made the ritual more effective, and more lasting. Because each lost himself, without compromising his identity, in the hope of a collective salvation, embodied in this case by F. Earlier, I mentioned the care he took with disguises once the moneylenders started trying to catch him. Now I think it’s an exaggeration to call them disguises. Like Delia, F was always aware of his difference, even when it took the form of the smallest, simplest thing, the most elementary detail. This difference could serve, as it usually did, as a distinguishing mark, but it also inspired a deeper — and, as I said, simpler — feeling tied to the simplicity of the disguise. As workers, one of their deepest and most personal convictions was that of being different. The consequence of this was twofold: their identity set them apart all the time, and nearly any attire, in the broadest sense of the term, other than their factory uniform transfigured them momentarily. It was an inevitable disguise: a simple and natural costume, but impossible to change if the workers wanted to keep the face that was the source of their true nature hidden. It’s hard to know when clothes become a complement of the truth; attire is an unnoticed trait that people adopt. And so the disguise came to permeate F’s actions and his disposition beyond the appearance of the garments themselves.

I have little that belonged to Delia — mostly random, incidental things that on their own seem incomprehensible and useless: a dial, the clasp from a bra, a plastic lid. I also have a small button from her work uniform. I don’t remember why she gave it to me; I suppose it probably wasn’t on purpose. I do know that one morning, as I dug around looking for change, it turned up in the bottom of my pocket. I can hazard a guess or imagine something to take the place of this mystery. Something like a button, simple and superfluous in many circumstances, became, in the context of Delia’s uniform, part of the factory’s surveillance and control. One of the most humiliating tasks the workers were forced to perform centered on these minor objects. Since the factory sought an exemplary sort of discipline, it concentrated on accessory items and things of little significance. In this way, the company saw to it that nothing, no matter how small, escaped its control. It would have been easy to focus on the operators’ attire, for example, through daily inspections of their uniforms, especially their work shirts, and so on. And yet the process was inappropriately complex for the circumstance, especially when it came to the inspection of the rubbings that the workers were supposed to have prepared in advance. They were rubbings that looked like the ones I had seen at Delia’s friend’s house. The only difference was that, instead of copying stones or the ground, these pictures were supposed to be of the design on their buttons. It was disconcerting to know that, once a week, an entire relatively qualified workforce was turned into a group dedicated to activities that seemed, at first glance, infantile. At home or on the corner, before they went into the factory, each one of them had to place a sheet of paper across the buttons of their uniform and run a pencil over it, then show the rubbing at the entrance. Obviously, each button was unique; if it wasn’t, at least the workers believed it was. That’s what had happened to Delia’s button. It had probably fallen off during one of these weekly inspections and that night after work, as often happens between lovers, it had passed from her pocket to mine.