Now that I’m standing at the estuary in my room I remember, through a straightforward association, Delia’s own inverted estuary. It opened like a fan from her anus, ascending her groin and spreading beyond its borders. A dizzying territory. It advanced upward, laying claim to the surface of her skin until it reached its unexpected and, I suppose, astonishing end when, overcome by a sudden weakness, it became a simple and sparse trail of down that slid into her bellybutton, almost entirely spent. Now the wardrobe, the bed, and the chair are there, as is the window that lets in a light as solid and as dense as a block. At nightfall or, rather, sometime after that, in the middle of the night, after taking even more steps across this river of wood, a light will come on in the window where, a few days ago, someone struggled to survive. It has often seemed to me that much of a person’s life is filled with thoughts that have no future. Observing a flickering flame, counting the days left in the week, readying oneself for the shock of cold metal. And this is only the beginning, by which I mean that one could also start from the premise that all thoughts are without a future because they are made to hold up a dead moment; some more obviously than others, though they all end up muddled together in their futility. I can sit on the edge of my bed and wait for night to come while staring at the walls, trying to make out what the voices that can be heard on the other side are saying. On days like this, I’m surprised by the direction my thoughts take, how they shift from one thing to another and, without warning, lead me to wonder about Delia’s fate. The word “fate” has rarely seemed more appropriate to me. I could have written Delia’s “future,” but that future would now be, in the strictest sense, the past. Fate, on the other hand, whether it has been fulfilled or not, always asserts itself as an unknown. I should say that when I left her, Delia’s reaction was so wise that, though it provoked no feeling in me then, it gradually filled me with shame. More and more, in fact; even years later, when it could be said that time should have helped the work of forgetting along, her memory moved me, and then filled me with a burning shame. Still, I had no regrets, nor did I pity Delia. Tenderness, as is well known, does not last long. It’s hard for something like tenderness to endure under any circumstances, even when the tenderest of moments is repeated. But not shame. A well-deserved feeling of shame can stay with us our whole lives, and it’s not uncommon to find shame that has been passed intact from generation to generation. As the verse goes, “The girl held, in the gleam of her dark hair, the trembling gaze that shamed the lad.” Delia took to waiting for me in the most improbable places, though not exactly in order to surprise me. I said a while ago that she was a simple creature, but I also said she was wise. With her silence and her patience she was trying to tell me that she didn’t need to speak, that the place she chose to wait and the openness of her gaze were signs enough. No matter how often this scene was repeated, how many encounters there were just like it, silent and cut short by my flight, the frankness of her gaze was unfailing. She watched for a reaction from me like someone searching for a sign of life. I evaded her, at first with my eyes and then with my body, by changing course. She never spoke; she only followed me with her gaze. She had the deranged air of a victim about her. To a stranger, she probably looked like a lost soul.
Her growing belly did not stop her. To me she seemed sweeter, rounder, and — as often happens with pregnant women — lovelier, holding up her pregnancy on legs as straight as sticks, always waiting, always with the same wistful expression. There was bewilderment in her gaze, that much was easy to see, but it was also free of demands. It was simply a gaze that wanted to be told that it was all just a bad dream, a storm that was slow to pass. Her wisdom consisted of this, and it was this that ended up making me feel ashamed. Because she made no demands of me, it was as though she were turning the other cheek while her swelling stomach offered growing proof of her dignity. She would show up alongside the thistle barrens, across from the bus stop on the corner of Los Huérfanos, just a few feet from the gully where we had seen F’s boys, on the corner (if it could be called that) of her friend’s house, and so on. As though Delia, in her need to get my attention back, understood that she needed to bring geography up to date: these were no longer the places we visited together, but rather where she had ended up waiting for me, day after day. I should also say that her strength and determination flustered me, and I responded viscerally, abruptly; I wanted the earth to swallow me whole and I fled without knowing where I was headed, only that I needed to get out of there, to get far away.
This might sound a little inappropriate, but I don’t think I’m far from the truth when I say that if Delia acted this way, it was because of her proletarian nature. As I said, few human tasks have turned resignation or waiting into an essential trait, a virtue, even. Yet this is the first thing one notices in the worker, and it is what endures in them. People often talk about the patience of farmers, the endless periods of waiting that the land endures, of the seasons weaving themselves together into a single era in which we are no more than a grain of sand in the universe, and so on, but they rarely mention the infinite patience of the worker and the intractable presence of the machines. This is because of their operational cycles, which are always visible and always repeated, and because of the transmission of energy, which, by translating itself into force, imposes the idea of a process that is unstoppable, endless, and above all, unfathomable. The legends that depict the fragility of machines, like the one in which they are destroyed by nothing more than the carelessness of those operating them, actually draw attention to the opposite, to the continuity of the machinery, which is its greatest strength, in the face of which all else recedes. The land is always telling us that it could disappear at any time, that the ground is no more solid than our perception of it. Industry, on the other hand, promises to operate forever, imposing itself on everything associated with it. Anyway, whether it is a force the worker assigns to the machines or a force that flows in the opposite direction, from the machine to the mind of the worker, what is certain is that, while the strength Delia showed by waiting any and everywhere, regardless of the weather, could be attributed to the surprise she carried in her heart — to put it one way — but it was also nourished by that intractable strength that came from her proletarian condition. Because she had a talent for showing up right in front of me, and because I obviously had to see her before I could avert my eyes, I was able to see how evenly her belly was growing. She was so young that the pregnancy paradoxically emphasized her innocence, making her seem like a girl who had discovered the secret of the game, or like prey that was not granted the hunter’s mercy. And so Delia’s belly grew and grew. Toward the end, I’d see her waiting for me, leaning up against whatever was at hand — a post, a tree, a fence, or a wall — until one day, feeling my shame ebb away, I noticed that she wasn’t there. She and the child had stepped into the dark.