One day we saw F’s children in an empty lot scattered with debris. Then, too, they were lost in contemplation. A few silent bags of trash had caught the brothers’ attention. They stood there, motionless, looking down; after a while, one would lift his head and stare out toward the horizon, then immediately back at the pile in search of answers. Delia told me that looking at garbage was often a way of exercising the imagination, “What they don’t have,” she added. I didn’t respond. My whole life, I had watched the same ceremony, and may even have practiced it myself, but it was only through one of those strange mechanisms of memory or conscience that, as I observed F’s boys in action, their staring organized into periods of rest and concentration, I was able to recognize it as an act whose unusual meaning, if it could still be said to have one, was rich with local custom. The pastime consisted of unraveling the past: imagining the source of the trash — which was varied, that is, in the different substances themselves — and what had been done with it before it had been discarded. It was something that was done every day, an unexceptional exercise to which only F’s boys, and only on that morning, could have drawn my attention. There were those who thought the garbage spoke, that it revealed a hidden truth through messages organized like that, like trash, the sole purpose of which was to be deciphered. And included in this “sole purpose” was the specific language required to read and observe them, which was activated by the analysis itself. The trash could be rural, domestic, or industrial. This collective exercise might have been an extension of the ancient tradition of reading the future in a system of signs, but which at some point had been inverted, and from that moment on was used to unravel the past. Was this further proof that the future no longer mattered? Perhaps the locals were rebelling against the linear, “historical” time that had so punished them, choosing instead the alternatives they had at hand. And so waste, material that had reached the end of its usefulness in the minds of many, had a bit of life breathed back into it: future or past, better or worse, it didn’t matter; what mattered was that it was different. It’s easy to imagine the limited repertoire of trash in a community so marked by privation, yet that was precisely why this was a favorite pastime: because the likelihood of finding something unexpected, a surprise, was minimal. People feel a need to study the signs left by others; in this space of scarcity, there were plenty such traces to be found in the trash. They stopped to contemplate and compare. One thing with another, what was seen yesterday with what was there today, and these with something discovered a month earlier; an illusion of continuity maintained by the population because it lightened the load of the day-to-day. But it was evident that, like all others, this custom contained within it the seed of delirium. And it would probably take very little to bring it out: the slightest deviation in the routine, an unexpected combination, anything. Because the seed is a mechanism that waits for the right moment. So, for example, the whole of reality could be seen as a universe of garbage cast adrift, or like a choice or object that has been “wasted” relative to everything else, to what might have been, and so on. The traces, or rather, the marks of waste. Because ultimately this is an ancient endeavor, isn’t it? There has always been something to decipher, a message waiting to be released.
In the thistle barrens, after we made love, Delia would sleep for three minutes, or maybe five. She closed her eyes, her body, and her mind, fully letting go of herself only once all activity had ceased. Afterward, she woke just like she did every morning, opening her eyes suddenly, before she was awake. Her eyes got ahead of themselves somehow; they were what woke her, not her mind. Once she was awake, we feigned a few playful movements as though we were going to start up all over again, but then immediately stood and left the Barrens, sometimes to continue on a walk that would last almost until dawn, sometimes to go back to her house and say our goodbyes a few feet from the door, where the latent presence of the others made itself felt, though it did not seem to be affected by ours. There were dogs around that could have been from anywhere, and a few lights shone so faintly that they seemed forgotten even to themselves, on the verge of going out as they cast their glow over an endless space impossible to illuminate. Delia’s house, like everything about her, felt unique to me. As it had been from the moment it first sheltered the person who was, to me, a marvel of tenderness and beauty, who enhanced everything she touched, every space she inhabited. The signs of deprivation, how hard it was to carry on, and so forth, were visible in the house; these marks were indications of its admirable characteristics of autonomy and constancy, not of its abandonment. What I mean is that, if there were something exemplary to all this, the poverty of Delia’s house was exemplary in the way it was indifferent to itself: a veneer made of silence and determination, exposed to the greatest neglect.