no. Democracy, well, let’s see. They would have killed me. And it would have been a good thing. Cowards. They’ve abandoned me to chance. To the elements. To anonymity. I heard them: If we leave him without a name, he’ll be taken in, someone will feel sorry for him. His very name is cursed. And he spatters it on the rest of us. He’s our yellow star. The cross of our calvary. We’re doing him a favor. If nobody knows who he is, they’ll feel compassion for him. They’ll take him in. They’ll give him the care we neither can nor want to give him. Let someone else deal with him. Hypocrites. Sons of bitches. No, not that. They’re Camelia’s children. She was a saint. But you can be the child of a saint and still be a bastard. The children of wretchedness, that’s who they are. What can be going through their heads that they’d do this to an old man, their father? What’s wrong with the world? What has broken? Nothing, I tell myself. Everything’s the same. Ingratitude and rage aren’t something new. There are many kinds of abandonment. There are many orphans. Young and old. Children and even the dead. I wish I could ask Camelia if she remembers. What did we do to our children that they should treat me this way? There must be something I’ve forgotten. Something not even they recall. Something so much a part of our blood that neither they nor I know what it is. A fear perhaps. Perhaps neither the hospital nor the home nor the union would slam the door in my face. Perhaps it’s just my children’s idea of fun. They find excuses. They want to do what they’ve done. It gives them satisfaction. It makes them laugh, they get even, they feel the itch of the worst of all evils. Gratuitous evil — because it has no price, it makes a little circus of pleasure in the gut. I’m one more orphan. The orphan of evil. The orphan of my own children, who may well merely be lovers of comfort rather than perverse. Indifferent but not exactly cruel. I can no longer do anything. Even speak. Even move. I can barely see. But the sun’s coming up. The night was more generous than the day. It allowed itself to be watched. The dawn blinds me. I think about orphans. Young and old. Children and even the dead. I hear them. Their sounds reach me. The noise of feet. Some bare. Others strong, stamping the heels of their boots. Others scrape their toenails. Others are silenced by rubber soles. Others mingle with the earth. The sound of a huarache. A sound without huaraches. Chihuahua, how many Apaches, how many Indians, without huaraches. Never take a step without huaraches, my father would say. I hear the footsteps and I’m afraid. I’m going to pray again, even if I pee. Blessed be the soul and the Lord who gives it to us. Blessed be the day and the Lord who gives it to us. Sunrise. The run rises with silhouettes I watch from my chair. Posts and cables. Barbed-wire fences. Pavements. Dung heaps. Tin roofs. Cardboard houses perched on the hillsides. Television antennas scratching the ravines. Garbagemen. Infinite numbers of garbagemen. Plantations of garbage. Dogs. Don’t let them come near me. And the sound of feet. Swift. Crossing the border. Abandoning the earth. Seeking the world. Earth and world, always. We have no other home. And I sit here immobile, abandoned at the line of oblivion. Which country do I belong to? Which memory? Which blood? I hear the footsteps around me. Finally I imagine everyone looking at me and, as they look, inventing me. I can no longer do anything. I depend on them, the ones who run from one border to the next. The ones I defended all my life. Successfully. Unsuccessfully. Both. They must look at me now to create me with their stares. If they stop staring, I’ll become invisible. I have nothing left but them. But they, too, tell me that I do not look at them, because I don’t name them. But I already told them. I can’t know the names of the millions of women and men. They respond as they pass, fleeting, swift: Say the name of the last one. Call the last woman lovingly. That will be the name of everyone — a single man, a single woman, they are all men and all women. The day is reborn. Will it bring my own name among its promises? I’ve been talking to myself all night. Is this the perfect state of truth, of comprehension? The solitary man who speaks only to himself? The night comforted me by making me think so. By day I plead for someone to come say something to me. Anything. Help me. Insult me, as long as he named me. Mud name. Mud soul. Muddy. Camelia, my wife. Leonardo, my brother. I’ve forgotten the names of my children and grandchildren. I don’t know the name of the last man who names all men. I don’t know the name of the last woman who loves in the name of all women. Still, I do know that in this final name of the final man and in this final tenderness of the final woman lies the secret of all things. It isn’t the final name. It isn’t the final man. It isn’t the last woman and her warmth. It’s only the last being who crosses the frontier after the one who went before him but before the one who follows. The sun comes up and I look at the movement on the frontier. Everyone crosses the line where I am stopped. They run, some in fear, others in joy. But they don’t begin or end. Their bodies follow or precede. Their words as well. Confused. Unintelligible. Is that what they want to tell me? That there is no beginning, no end? Is that what they’re saying in not looking at me or speaking to me or paying any attention to me: Don’t worry? Nothing begins, nothing ends. Is that what they’re telling me? We recognize you in not acknowledging you, not noticing you, not addressing you? Do you feel exceptional, seated there, paralyzed and mute, with no labels to identify you, with a diaper and an open fly? You’re our equal. We’ll make you part of us. Another one like us. Our interminable origin. Our interminable destiny. Are these the words of freedom? And what freedom is that? Will they thank me for it? Will they recognize that I helped them achieve it? What freedom is that? Is it the freedom to fight for freedom? Even if it’s never attained? Even if it fails? Is that the lesson of these men and women who are running, taking advantage of the first light to cross the line of oblivion? What do they forget? What do they remember? What new mixture of oblivion and remembrance awaits them on the other side? I am between earth and world. To which did I belong more when I was alive? To which do I belong more now that I am dead? My life. My struggle. My conviction. My wife. My children. My brother. My brothers and sisters who cross the line even if they’re killed or humiliated. Give a name to the person who wanted to give them a name. Give a word to the person who spoke in their defense. Don’t abandon me as well. Don’t avoid me. I’m still inevitable. Despite everything. In that I resemble death. I am inevitable. In that I’m also like life. I’m possible only because I’m going to die. It would be impossible if I were mortal. My death will be the guarantee of my life, its horizon, its possibility. Death is already my country. What country? What memory? What blood? The dark earth and the world that dawns commingle in my soul to formulate these questions, mix them, solder them to my most intimate being. To what I am, to what my parents were or what my children will be. The feet run, crossing the line. There is no reason to fear their sound. What do they take, what do they bring? I don’t know. What’s important is that they take and bring. That they mix. Change. That the world doesn’t stop moving. An old man, immobile, mute, tells them so. But he’s not blind. Let them mix. Let them change. That’s what I fought for. The right to change. The glory of knowing we’re alive, intelligent, energetic, givers and receivers, human containers of languages, bloods, memories, songs, forgotten things, things avoidable and not, of fatal angers, of hopes reborn, of injustices to be corrected, work to be compensated, dignity to be respected, of dark earth here and there, that world created by us and by no one else — here or there? I don’t want to hate. But I do want to fight. Even if I’m immobile, in a mute chair, without any identification. I want to be. My God, I want to Be. Who will I be? Like a stream their names enter my gaze, my eyes, my tongue, crossing all the borders of the world, breaking the crystal that separates them. They come from the sun and the moon, from the night and the day. With difficulty I raise my face to look at the face of the sun. What falls on my forehead is a drop. And then another. Harder and harder. A downpour. A harsh rain, here where it never rains. The feet hurry. The voices grow louder. The day I expected to be bright becomes cloudy. The men and women run, cover their heads with newspapers, shawls, sweaters, jackets. The rain drums on the tin roofs. The rain swells the mountains of garbage. The rain pours down the ravines, washing them clean, runs along the canyons, rinsing them, pulling along whatever it finds — a tire, a porch, a pot, a cellophane wrapper, an old sock, a rush of mudslide, a cardboard house, a television antenna. The world seems dragged along by the water, flooded, companionless, divorced from the earth … I think we’re going to drown. I think it’s the second deluge. The incessant rain washes away the line where I’m stopped. The swift feet leave tracks on the pavement as if it were sand. They approach. I hear the howling of the sirens. I hear the loud voices, shocked, beneath the rain. The swift wet footsteps. The hands that search me. The lights of the ambulances. Questioning, uncertain, spinning, wandering, groping, seeking… An old man, they say. An immobile old man. An old man who doesn’t speak. An old man with an open fly. An old man with a urine-soaked diaper. An old man with very old, very wet clothes. An old man with sturdy shoes, the kind that leave a mark on the pavement as if it were a beach. An old man with clothing whose labels have been torn off. An old man without a wallet. An old man with no identification: no passport, no credit cards, no voter registration card, no social security card, no calendar for the new year, no green card to cross frontiers. An old man with no plastic. An old man with a stiff neck. An old man with clear eyes open to the heavens, eyes washed by the rain. An old man with his ears open, his earlobes dripping rain. An abandoned old man. Who could have done this? Doesn’t he have children, relatives? Something’s funny here. Where do we take him? He’s going to get pneumonia. Put him in the ambulance quickly. He’s old. Let’s see if we can find out who he is. Who the miserable bastards can b