Another thing that house had was flies, which were more of a presence there than in most other places I’ve been. Delia’s friend lifted a large pot to show it to me, and as I made out the dents on the bottom of it, the marks left by children tirelessly banging spoons against it, a fly emerged, startled, from the shadows. A common occurrence in people’s lives, this took on a particular meaning there. It may seem a bit naïve, but I saw it as another indication of the boundless hospitality of the poor. I’m not ashamed to put it like that, leaving a number of other things out. They were fat, black flies that had been part of the household for a long time. Every so often one would waver and seem to be on the verge of falling mid-flight as though, suddenly and without any external or internal force having alerted it to the fact, the animal had just become aware of its own mass, and was shocked by it. As a result, it would fly quickly upwards. Delia’s friend leaned over in the dark, looking for some other object to show me — a little later, she would find a tin with combs in it between two mattresses — when I suddenly wondered whether we might not all be flies as well. We submit ourselves to life just as they do, floating over the earth until we are startled by our own weight. It would have been hard to convey this to the lady of the house, I could imagine the uncomfortable silence she would offer in response, so it hardly seemed worth it, though it’s not as though there were much to explain. While Delia was changing, I kept getting the impression that her friend was about to say something. Showing me things was her way of communicating; this became especially clear when it would take her a moment to find something new and she’d open her mouth as though she were about to speak, only to immediately change her mind.
Later, as we left the house, I got the impression that I was stepping into a world that was different somehow, enclosed. It should have been the other way around: one goes into a house to escape one’s surroundings, but as I passed through the doorway I thought that the outside was actually the real inside, the true interior. Delia was beside me, quiet, exposed to the elements. The inside of the house felt like the outside, and the outside like the house, or rather, it felt like the house was an infinite expanse and its surroundings were only a part of the whole. We paused on the other side of the door where the ground dipped a bit, worn down from having been trod on so often. On either side, two flowerbeds sprouting different types of weeds indicated that someone, at some point, had wanted to plant a garden there, though they had almost certainly forgotten about it since. The immensity of the territory stretched out before us, an apparently limitless expanse flecked with clusters of shrubs, scattered houses, and gentle slopes. It wasn’t just the size of the surface that gave this sensation: one saw it this way because of its homogeneity, the vertigo of simple things. This simplicity ennobled the landscape, but it also silenced it, deprived it of a voice. It was the house that spoke for it, the house that endowed it with meaning, an existence. The house behind us, the broad territory ahead. Something small that justified something large; it occurred to me that expansiveness is incidental when there is a center to it, and that center was behind us just then. The light was fading; soon it would be night.
As we made our way back, Delia told me a few things about her friend, specifically the details of what had happened on that legendary train ride. She described the monotony of its route; it had seemed like a journey into the depths that, as such, would never end. Delia told stories as though nothing in the world could distract her. She said that the man, seeing the girl’s confusion, took a second portrait from his pocket, showed her that they were identical, and gave it to her. Before he left, he tousled her hair paternally. Delia’s friend would spend the years that followed contemplating her double. The longer she spent with the image tucked among her clothes, the more at one with it she felt. Talisman, key, salvation. She set the portrait in the upper corner of her mirror and would draw near; wide-eyed, she searched for differences, eager to discover something that had gone unnoticed until that moment. The sessions were exhausting: the friend derived a deferred, circumspect pleasure from studying one face and then the other. Time passed, and she had little to show for it. She began asking herself, more and more frequently: How can one find something intangible? Accustomed to the workings of the mirror, reflection and portrait seemed the same to her, to the extent that, had her features not been identical to the model’s, the habit of looking at them would have eventually made them seem so anyway. That is, the prevalence of ambiguity made difference and novelty impossible. Days passed, then months. In her cryptic manner, after a taxing but revelatory session, one day Delia’s friend had a premonition: “From now on, finding something will never mean finding something new.” It would be the other way around, she thought: discovering something old, something that had always been there, but had never been seen. This feeling of connection and frustration was the bond that joined her to the image. As Delia spoke, the path disappeared beneath our feet. Although we couldn’t see it, the ground made itself known through its unevenness, catching us by surprise and making us stumble. The pitch-black night grew denser toward the edges of the street, where clumps of bushes, abandoned objects, and motionless animals attracted us with the pulse of their presence the way the current draws a swimmer off course. This blackness, which seemed strange and probably hostile, was precisely the opposite to us: it reminded us of the blackness of the Barrens. The dark, a stimulus that promised something intimate, untamed. Every now and then we’d see a flicker in the distance: someone carrying a light. Other times, a solitary streetlamp would illuminate the air, which was absolutely still except for the insects or birds that would pass through its cone of light. A common expression might give a sense of these little wells of darkness: a black hole. There were many of these black holes or, rather, the landscape itself was a vast, insatiable one. There, in the realm of the concealed, everything seemed lost and nameless. I’ve read many novels in which the dark is an inverted reflection of light. This was not the case here. If there is beauty in the world, Delia and I thought, if something moves us to the point we are unable to breathe; if something presses our recollections to the very limits of memory, so they can never be as they were, that something lives in darkness and only rarely makes itself known.
As I said, when Delia told a story she grew even more distant from her surroundings; she’d get so immersed in what she was saying that she couldn’t be torn from her thoughts. Something might interrupt her, anything, but Delia would immediately pick up where she left off, more insistent and engrossed than before the distraction. This was not stubbornness, but rather a unique form of persistence; one more trait I have since been unable to find in anyone other than her. As soon as she left it in the hands of her friend, Delia forgot about the skirt. An article of clothing traveled from person to person, place to place, sometimes worn — in Delia’s case, in the ideal way — other times inside packages or bags, wrapped in paper, folded or rolled up in purses or backpacks. An untethered object exposed to the elements that, contrary to what might be expected, was not reduced by its circulation, but rather acquired greater meaning and renown because of it. No one cared who owned the skirt; this followed from a certain truth, which is that no one did. Its mandate was simply that it be returned. This may seem emblematic or symbolic of something else and, basically, it is; but it’s also true that this was how it happened in real life.