I said before that this development surprised me; I should also say that, later, it seemed predictable. By triggering a secret mechanism, Delia and I made it possible for the group to appear. The photo had to choose and it chose them, salvaging the more primitive scene. The remote, the archaic, often imposes itself of its own accord. But it’s also true that, of the two “scenes,” both presented serious difficulties. There was the group of six or seven figures contemplating something, absorbed: garbage, in this case. This is what makes it “primitive”—this withdrawn stance seems less mundane than the one adopted by Delia and I as we tried to find the best pose or angle with our minds on the future, or our own photographic vanity. But it’s also true that, from a different perspective, our attitude was spontaneous, simpler and, because of this, more ancient or primitive: we wanted to endure. The six or seven of them had been there for a while; the earth showed their footprints and where they had come from, each one different from the next. Their faces could not be made out, but they were all looking intently down and, though this can’t be proven, were clearly deaf to the noise around them. The generality, among other things, to which all waste aspires is overturned by its contemplation: the garbage did not inspire indifference, but rather fascination, conveying its significance to those who observed it. In this way, the group was superior to us in more than just their number. It’s very likely that more than one of them thought, before lowering their eyes again, that a father was being photographed with his daughter — a natural distortion upon seeing us together — and then went back to their series of associations. This is why people had such contradictory reactions to us when presented with the truth. Later, I might describe these expressions as surprise or confusion. For now I’ll simply say that these reactions reached us — Delia and me, but especially me — as a reminder of what we were and what we were not, of what we could be and what we were allowed to be. It turns out that love is a great equalizer. Like our faces in the photo her friend took of us, the differences between Delia and I were blurred. But many saw our equality, something so obvious to the two of us, as impossible. Things that are but do not seem to be, or the opposite: the darkness that seems to be light, the favorable sign taken as a disaster, and so on; all this has been the subject of many novels. At first glance, things appear obvious, natural; they always seem to be something they are not, not just different, base, or irrelevant.
Now I look at the crust of hair standing at the mirror, the bulbous stomach working its way downward in search of more body, more space; I see all this and it’s hard for me to believe that I’m the same person who, for example, took that picture with Delia. As I realized too late, some did not see Delia and I as being alike; we could seem to be many things, but never two people who were, shall we say, equals. On the contrary, the differences were often more obvious. As I said before, there are novels in which people face adversity according to the strength of their convictions and the measure of their passion, in which reality reveals itself through risk: the world is a formless precipice; unquantifiable, transcendent and, as though that weren’t enough, one that seems to obey a central command. It goes without saying that this was not the case with me, and not only because I’ve distanced myself from the reality of novels. Delia and I felt united, made equal in our distinct but equivalent natures, by a general sense of indifference. The group reacted like stones or plants; nothing drew their attention from the unfocused contemplation into which they sank for hours at a time, just as nothing could compare to the distraction, that is, the neglect, transmitted by their actions in general. Nonetheless, it was true that we were subject to a form of surveillance that was at once vigilant, patient, and offhand.
Delia and I relied on the indifference of others in order to blur the line between us and, at the same time, to make ourselves disappear; as such, we looked at the outside world in the same way. There was an ideal we never put into words, though we always thought about it, according to which we had to let ourselves dissolve, eliminate what was unique to each of us and become something else, something unintelligible to others, but clear to us. Delia, the factory worker; me, the anonymous man. As a couple, we should have been transparent, embedded in the invisible backdrop of the landscape. But, as I wrote above, what one doesn’t want to know is often exactly what is. The things we fear and willfully ignore, what we turn our backs on because we’d rather not know, the infinite facts we avoid and want to do away with, choosing ignorance instead; what ends up happening is that all this comes back to surprise us in the moment of our greatest solitude. Well, in the end, Delia and I were surprised to find ourselves marked, accused by all of being different, or maybe just unusual, but definitely not a part of the lethargy and indecision around us. I don’t mean to say that we were special; on the contrary, our inertia was absolute, lassitude had taken us over. The endless walks we took were one proof of this: imperturbable and immune to exhaustion, we expended no effort. Nature, deceptive, had enlisted us to its cause, turning us into misleading creatures. For example, I’d look at the mud on rainy days and the first thing that would come to mind, after Delia, of course, would be whether that essential — in the way all mud is — mixture might not originally have been destined to form the foundations of another world, other people, or to mold a different nature. I’m not talking about primordial conditions, which have never interested me much; what I mean is that I wondered whether the mud might not have been called upon to hold up neighborhoods, events, a series of things completely different from those that had taken shape in reality; and whether, in that case, it might not have better fulfilled its role.
Mute as it is, one can’t expect eloquence of mud. It expresses itself through quantity: colossal masses of material, or earth, which give form to the planet, the mountains, producing landslides, accumulations of sediment, and so on. But my question was directed at the unit, at the fistful of mud. I asked that absurd and arbitrary part of the whole — for example, what is left behind by a pair of shoes and later hardens — what those traces really mean. Of course, it was a question I never formulated, and to which I didn’t expect an answer. It was the rhetoric of reflection; I asked about Delia, that other part of the whole, the same way. Accustomed to industrial controls, complex processes, and large quantities, Delia was unmoved by nature’s extravagance. A passivity that could also be understood as a profound affinity, a level of acquiescence or solidarity aspired to only by those who are marked or chosen — not chosen by anyone or anything in particular, but rather are endowed with a unique sensitivity to their surroundings. In Delia’s case, I believe this was intimately tied to her work in the factory: through mechanisms that were in one sense abstract, and in another sense not unlike the processes of production to which her own hands lent continuity, Delia made herself a protagonist of the perennially incomplete and apparently delicate machine of industry. This intimacy had the paradoxical effect of distancing her more and more from the things that occupied her thoughts and movements and, over time, resulted in a kind of ironic distance regarding anything that might be considered staggering or weighty, as nature often presented itself to be. It’s true that I mentioned similar traits before, loosely calling them Delia’s “proletarian disposition.” But when faced with the natural landscape, the vast expanses of countryside, topography, or changes in the weather, this sensibility was not expressed solely as withdrawal or detachment, as was the case with all other things, but rather, as I just said, as deaf indifference, as an abandonment…