Delia and I were walking around the perimeter of one of these neighborhoods or slums when along one corridor, or street, rather, we saw countless marks, people’s footprints in the dust. One is used to coming across different kinds of tracks, so one could also get used to seeing, as in this case, many footprints. But there was something puzzling about this image of multitude that gave us pause; so many people walking, who knows where. We pondered this for a long time, surrounded by a silence barely broken by the sounds typical of the place. The street sloped unevenly toward us. When we realized where the mystery lay, what surprised us most was that it was something so obvious, and yet so strange: all the footprints went in the same direction. This might have been nothing more than a curiosity had we not found, a little farther along, a similar street with footprints headed in the opposite direction. Walking around that place meant passing through its houses or, as I said before, crossing through a single house divided into multiple versions of itself. The walls had, at some point, all had their corresponding windows; they — the walls — were made from a wide variety of materials. Just then we ran into several old men who seemed to be headed to wherever they gathered every day. People walked in groups there, but always in silence, at the most muttering something in that language shared by families or tribes, a language made of exclamations, usually unconscious and unintelligible to outsiders, sometimes deaf as well as mute. We saw a dog asleep in the shadow of an old sign. It was still a long time before nightfall, so Delia and I ended up walking around the ample perimeter of the neighborhood before turning onto a road that would take us to the Barrens. I remember that, a little while after leaving the neighborhood behind us, we turned and looked back. A disorderly cluster of houses could just barely be seen above a dense crop of bushes growing in a hollow almost at the horizon. The setting sun illuminated each differently, according to the materials that had been used to build it. In this way, each seemed to obey its own measure of time. Some were still in daylight, while others were already in darkness; they belonged to an immediate future, a recent past, or to ancient history. Later that day, after we left the Barrens and the deserted shack where we would hide, we walked a bit farther until we were a few yards from Delia’s house; there the silence was deepened by sporadic barking, and the darkness seemed to tremble, its rhythm marked by the pulse of the surrounding countryside.

Footsteps, tracks, paths. Delia and I tirelessly recombined these words; walking was, for me, an obvious and practical extension of her company. Because of this, when I’d walk without her I felt I was doing something else, distancing myself from what I was born to do. It was the absence of something that belonged to and defined me, the feeling that something was missing and that I, also, was less. While Delia was at the factory, I was present in the world, or rather, I “witnessed” everyday life, observed people’s habits, like talking in the morning, checking the time, and so on, and it seemed incredible to me that everything should appear to go on as usual when that which ultimately held up the world, Delia, was far from there. Actually, I could understand this behavior in people who were able to go about their normal activities because they knew nothing of Delia; what was beyond me was my own passivity in the face of such appalling ignorance. It might seem paradoxical, but Delia’s absence kept me from taking action, from taking part in anything other than my habitual, useless, and ultimately dispassionate meditations. Delia influenced me despite the distance that separated us, much as she did at her workstation: thoughtful, absent, introspective, isolated, this is how I often imagined she controlled the factory. The way she acted gave the impression that she organized and directed every detail of the collective labor. Perhaps this was the only impression that could be drawn from work like that, which brought the rhythms of machines and of people together in a way that was at once harmonious and rushed. In any event, Delia, with her restraint and her focus, overshadowed and almost hidden behind her workstation, seemed to be the neural center of the community. Her influence, that force that emanated outward from Delia, its epicenter, extended first throughout the factory, as I said, organizing its rhythms and production; it also passed through the walls and expanded beyond them, insinuating itself into people’s lives without their ever knowing it. Meanwhile, Delia went on as usual with her half words. Her language had an eloquent sparseness to it. I would listen to her speak, and think that her intermittent and, for all intents and purposes, inaudible, way of expressing herself confirmed her deep proletarian identity; on the other hand, she seemed like one of those characters in a novel who, with their one expression and few words — words that are often said by others, and are rarely their own — are able to move between books and endure in someone’s memory. There was a law she obeyed: that of intermittent speech. But “law” does not entirely convey it, primarily because it was not in response to any mandate.

That afternoon, as we circled the camp after discovering the alleys with the footprints headed in the same direction, Delia told me that she thought she’d seen G, the worker who had been fired for rejecting his new machine. She had only seen him for a few moments, but it had been enough for her to recognize the terrible effect his dismissal had on him. Delia was making one of her habitual journeys for a piece of clothing, either to pick something up or to return it, an expedition that could last half a day or certainly several hours, taking unreliable transportation or, most of the time, walking. She was distracted, thinking of the appealing secret of clothing: the fact, paradoxical from many points of view, that getting dressed meant putting on a disguise, expressing something profound, or at least something that wasn’t on the surface, through the illusion of hiding oneself; Delia was distracted, thinking of these things, when she saw G standing motionless on some corner or another, not waiting for anything in particular, his hands hanging at his sides like weights. A few seconds were enough. She saw his childlike face hardened, overcome by dejection; he was probably miles away from where he stood at that moment. It was enough to show her how the lack of specific knowledge or a special skill, could, for a worker, be a deficit that translated into an advantage. Another worker who didn’t know how to work the old machine and had never become one with it wouldn’t have had any trouble adapting to the new one. In this way, G’s aptitude became an obstacle. It’s a hardship for a worker to know something, Delia told me, you can’t imagine how much more useful they are, the less they know. The work isn’t always coarse and brutish, but a lack of skill is often required to carry out their partial, or truncated, tasks, which have no justification outside the context of the production line. G was a perfect example of this. His wanderings through the lots around the city, which Delia imagined to have no particular purpose, were an attempt to return to an original lack of skill. The slightest ability beyond what was absolutely necessary was enough to render the worker irredeemably useless, because everything extra that he knew meant a potential expense and a real loss for the factory. Delia probably said these things in different words, but putting it like this seems closer to her actual thoughts. It wasn’t the typical sort of ignorance, the lack of knowledge, experience, or whatever, but rather a positive ignorance, a combination of naivety and contrition. Anyone who wants to become a factory worker knows that he will have to forget many of his skills and acquire others, which belong to a limited sphere and relate to a series of repetitive and relatively simple tasks. I should also say that this renunciation of the self, this “abandonment,” was one of the things that made the worker, in my opinion, that which holds up the world. And so, within the parable that G’s life had become, just like F’s before it, the time had come to move from one place to another, to wander along lonely paths and through neighborhoods that in some cases had fallen into neglect, with the intention, not always entirely clear and categorical, of dropping the deadweight, of losing the old knowledge that had brought on such an unfortunate end, and, with a little luck, of recovering some general aptitude, a null skill set that would make it possible to embark, from the beginning, on a new phase as a machine operator. G was certainly in this trance when Delia saw him standing on that corner made of nothing, an intersection of dirt and gravel, like someone who had forgotten who he was.