Stripped of the instrument that supplied his identity, G was forgotten by the other workers long before he physically left the factory. On that fateful morning, his presence took on an additional quality: that of a stigma. While his thoughts, as he stared at the marks left by the machine, seemed lost in that outdated labor, the other workers fixed their gaze on his expression, captivated by the threat it represented. In G they saw a likely future and a sorrowful past; though they may not have wished it, and though it wasn’t entirely true, that was where they all came from; G represented some part of what they were trying to escape, to erase from their minds with one quick stroke. But they understood that the boy’s troubles were not connected to linear time, that neither he, nor his “problem” represented a retreat or an advance, and so his refusal — and his very presence — were rendered abstract. G’s was the worst kind of threat, because it took root so near at hand. More than a possible future or a forgettable past, which could have been tolerated with a bit of resolve, G was the tragic scene that held the proletarian life of the community together. From one day to the next, the boy had become the inverse of the factory as a whole, and his mind could not take it; in the same way, the workers found that part of their immediate world had turned itself inside out like a glove, bringing into view that which the choreography of the factory, the activity of the machines, the skilled movements of their hands, and the contortions of their bodies had always tried to keep from sight. As Delia would explain, one morning G did not show up at his former machine, or rather, at the new ones that were unable to hide the marks of the old. Though he had always been the first to arrive, during the crisis he showed up even earlier, only to leave long before his shift was over. It was strange to see how life outside the factory went on as usual while this tragedy unfolded inside. I say strange in order to be able to say something; in fact, it was devastating. The truth is that everything was the same inside the factory, too, aside from the moral threat posed by G and suffered by his fellow workers. But if many of the causes and effects of this anomaly were unknown on the inside, where it was produced, they were monumentally ignored on the outside. And this sparked a certain bitterness, because the world went on turning, unaware of G’s terrible experience — either its beginning or its end. How many anonymous victims like him does the world produce every day? This is the true factory of man, though saying it in these words might seem inappropriate.
Delia and G. I’ve often thought that the connection between them — that concrete and enduring bond so pronounced that at first glance they seemed to be brother and sister — remained vital despite G’s dismissal and the different paths their lives took. The boy ended up being abandoned by the factory just like Delia was abandoned by me. The factory dismissed him for the distress he showed when faced with the new machines, filling him with even more suspicion and mistrust; in that same way, I turned my back on Delia and left her in the most painful state of abandonment. I recently mentioned the interior of the factory and the outside world, how one was unaware of what was going on in the other; now I want to describe how something similar occurred between the world in general and Delia’s interior. However barbaric and cruel, my abandoning Delia did not disrupt the course of the world, which went on in spite of her suffering. The world also turned its back on something else that Delia and I knew: the cell of life that had recently settled inside her. This is how both of them ended up as victims, though of different things and under different circumstances. I remember Delia’s expression: she couldn’t believe it. To put it simply, she took it like a swift and fatal blow. Her eyes revealed her shock, opening wide with fearful uncertainty; she couldn’t react, which was a form of reaction in and of itself. I also remember what she said, which was, as always, appropriate. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. Now, writing these words, I remember the other two I wrote above, also in reference to Delia: the victim’s “Please, no.” I am unable now, as I was then, to make it better. It was not only Delia’s eyes, but also her voice that had changed. It seemed to come from somewhere behind her throat, and sounded as though it belonged to someone else, a cracked and pitiful murmur. And I remember that, in spite of this, she struggled to preserve its inflection: it was she who spoke, though she seemed to be on the verge of becoming someone else. She took my hand. “Don’t leave me,” she repeated. Perhaps, without realizing it, she meant to underscore her feelings, which were already eloquent in themselves. Like G, Delia reacted spontaneously. This was surely due to their youth; they were both practically children. The problem with reactions is that they are never clear in the real world: contrary to what happens in novels, where the most unexpected or complex action provokes, in the other characters, a reading or reaction that corresponds to its supposed obscurity. That’s not what happened in my case. Delia and I once went for a walk. I’ve already said that there were uninhabited and diffuse territories that nonetheless had some form of community life. Then there was the opposite case, hybrid spaces that were less a neighborhood than an area that seemed to be made up of one multi-family dwelling: the streets were hallways that could only be traveled on foot, the plazas were no larger than patios. Similarly, there were also shared dining areas, often exposed to the elements, and a few sheet metal doors distributed around the perimeter of the neighborhood were the only way in. As was the case in Pedrera, once inside, things turned out not to be as they appeared from the outside…
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.