Delia’s friend lifted her hand to her hair on another occasion. It was during that legendary journey, when the man on the train showed her the photo. She made that unusual gesture, which for her only reflected her vacillation, but which the man took as the proof he was waiting for: the figure in the portrait was making a similar one. Seen in that way it seemed like an experiment or a theatrical gesture, which, in a sense, is the nature of photos, thought the man. The problem was that it revealed the full extent of its truth when confronted with reality, that is, when it was set alongside Delia’s friend as she enacted the same movement. The performance could have remained a simple performance, but instead it recovered its status as a real act in two senses: that of the person who lifted her hand, even if it was only so that the picture could be taken that way, and that of the person who chose that gesture and no other because it had a specific meaning that she wanted to transmit. And it was this last part, the dual motivation behind both the image and the reality (Delia’s friend), that confirmed for the man that they were the same person. G also made the gesture on two definitive occasions. The other one was that ill-fated morning, right after he got to the factory. At first, the young worker didn’t understand what was going on, he thought he was in the wrong place, at the wrong workstation, even at the wrong factory. Thinking like a child gradually leaving his infancy behind him, he thought it might have been an innocent prank, a game, but this idea only lasted a moment. If it was a game, it was a short-lived one that ended the moment he realized that its effects would probably last a long time. That was when he ran his hand through his hair. It would be an exaggeration to say that work in the factory came to a halt for a moment, but it would also be a graphic description of what happened. As soon as G lifted his hand to his head, his fellow workers understood that he would leave his post sooner rather than later. Simple and fleeting, though it was also habitual, in this context it was the gesture of someone who could not adapt. The operators who had taken away the old machine and installed the two new ones the night before had made the same gesture more than once during the process, just as thousands of workers do every day. But, as is always the case, a specific set of circumstances distinguished this instance from all others. Perhaps G had only wished to pause at the surprise, the way some people sigh before exerting energy; even so, it was an act that revealed more than it concealed. He made the gesture and began to withdraw. Just as he did on that corner, when it meant that he had withdrawn from everything.

I’m back in my room with a glass of water. I walked down the long hallway of cold tiles, hearing voices through the walls — alert, perhaps because of my footsteps — though the doors remained closed. I went into my room and paused at the estuary, in front of the inlaid panels of my wardrobe doors. A spurious thought came to mind, the slightest of redundancies: I thought something like, “I’m drinking water at the estuary.” On the corner of Los Huérfanos, a few feet from where the loading and unloading would take place, there were men who seemed to have trouble walking because of the weight of the merchandise they carried. Sometimes this idea was called into question, when, after one operation and before the next, some would return with their hands empty and an obvious limp. Meanwhile, the animals remained impassive, occasionally letting out a vaporous sigh that became their own measure of time. As I described earlier, it was on this corner that I would wait for Delia every day, wait for her to get off the bus with her uncertain, but firm step. I’d get more anxious with every passing minute; in one of those vagaries of emotions, which themselves can be so muddled, I was afraid she’d never arrive. It was a groundless fear, since no force could divert her; this was proven on several occasions, like when she had to make her way back on foot. I’ve wondered, sometimes, about my real feelings during those waits. Fear, anxiety, impatience, and so on. Until one afternoon I realized that there was nothing singular about those moments, that the force that made me look forward to the appearance of the bus in the distance, on the corner of Los Huérfanos, was the same one that carried me, in my thoughts, to Delia at every moment. I had fallen into the trance of a continuous date with Delia that she couldn’t cancel but which, at any time, some quirk of fate might keep her from attending. At daybreak, just as soon as I had said goodbye to her a few feet from her house, I was already waiting for her, looking forward to seeing her, wondering what I could do to make the time pass quickly and smoothly, that is, without stopping entirely before our next encounter. To say that I waited for her at the corner of Los Huérfanos isn’t entirely accurate because, in reality, I was always waiting for her, every minute of every day. Delia was the axis of my thoughts and of my actions, and I existed only insofar as my life related to her. And so, as I observed the efforts of man and beast with their loads, I was overcome by the happy anxiousness of knowing that in just a few moments, my endless waiting, which on days when the hours refused to pass could be bitter and anguished, would be temporarily rewarded.

There were evenings when walking was a pretext not even worth mentioning, because Delia and I were simply waiting for the dense night to fall so we could head to the Barrens. But even though they were a pretext, these aimless strolls had their own weight; they meant more than just the time they passed. I said earlier that to walk with Delia was to witness a change in geography; that nothing was actually altered, and that this made the change all the more evocative and extravagant. It was the same thing that happened with borrowed objects, which increased in value each time they changed hands. As I also wrote before, when Delia wore one particular skirt, whoever saw her would get the impression that it had been made especially for her. The loan flattered her and brought out her best. In a sense, I think, the cut of the skirt was secondary; Delia needed the clothes she wore not to belong to her because that way her own beauty stood out even more. Well, the geography around us was also like this. I would walk along at her side and look at her thick eyebrows, a dense forest in miniature, and then at the other landscape of real trees, the houses, gullies or, in general, the unfinished projects of nature and man; elevated by and more evocative because of Delia’s presence, the landscape seemed flawless to me. In short, she was “lending” geography a quality that was then returned to her as though by a mirror, and much to her advantage. It happened with clothing, and it was what happened with the landscape, at the factory, or in any other situation. When Delia wasn’t there, the factory seemed empty. The rest of the workers might be at their posts, doing their jobs at the machines, but it would seem like an unplanned strike or a catastrophe had emptied them of meaning and left them spinning their wheels over a void; or the opposite, that the factory had been completely deserted, even though everyone, except Delia, of course, was inside. I’ve read novels in which places disappear once the character, or protagonist, abandons them. This, which might be called one of the laws of art, can sometimes leave one profoundly uneasy, among other things because geography is never simply a backdrop; the movement of people through it, even when this falls in the realm of fiction, is what marks the variability and the persistence of the world.

Sometimes a person overcomes this; places, whether they are natural or artificial landscapes, have a harder time outlasting their inhabitants. When a character is lost, abandoned, or simply dead, little remains of him as a sign or promise of his passage through the scene. And when something does remain, it ends up disappearing sooner rather than later. I’ll give an example. It involves a man and a woman. She’s at an age when most people go to school, but she works in a factory. He’s much older, old enough to be her father, though, for a variety of reasons, he never could be. The man has all the typical traits of someone in a novel: undefined age and all that; his character is just a vague impression, as are, shall we say, his voice — in the broadest sense of the word — and his origins. Insignificant beings limited by a complex series of circumstances, they fall in love. But the word “love” is not strong enough. They idolize and worship one another, when they are apart they feel incomplete, that things are less beautiful, happiness unattainable, and so on. During their extended courtship, they discover the vitality of a landscape that had been hidden before, at least to them. It’s not so much that they like it, but rather that it seems like the only thing they are in a position to appreciate, or enjoy. The geography is like them: conventional yet difficult to define, somewhere between a half-constructed city and half-cultivated fields, left half completed, abandoned, despondent. The people there seemed to be living in a void. Everything looked as though it had been made with scant resources, grudgingly and from materials that seemed inappropriate at first glance, better suited to be given up than to remain. Both walk through these spaces as solitary beings and, though they’re not aware of it, the world watches them. They could go on living this life of nothing forever, but the thing that will inevitably drive them apart is already on its way: she is expecting a child. It’s likely that, even without the existence of this child, his abandoning her was already inscribed in the moment they met. Whatever the case, their story takes a significant turn: the man decides to distance himself from the factory worker and, with this, the landscape that served as their backdrop is spent, becoming a useless ornament once the curtain has closed; not unrecognizable, but prosaic. This is what I’ve been getting at. Is there a way to step outside all this and say, for example, “No, I don’t care about the end of the story, their separation, and so on. What I want is for geography to continue on its course until it fully reveals itself, expressing its value in its own terms”?