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Now we return to the present. Many years after this “not working,” as he sits in his pensioner’s armchair he inadvertently overhears one of his sons allude to Einstein’s train. He could understand the idea — the logic was fairly simple — and it seemed to be the best explanation for the anxiety he would feel when he thought the contents of the wheelbarrow might spill on him. At that moment he came to suspect that the fields, the house, his family, his chores, and even he himself were inside the rail car that the genius had used to explain his theory. The example had an immediate retroactive effect: entire blocks of memory were dislodged in the way that, when you forget one language, your former life is translated into a new tongue. Just as when he was a boy, he liked nothing more than to eavesdrop; not because he was drawn to the shameful or the improper, but because something within his bleak interior needed that complement to life found only in secrets. As he listened to his son, the man came to understand that it was not simply one of those ingenious paradoxes of the mundane; more than that, it was the explanation that allowed him to understand his origins and his new life, as he called it, in contrast the one he had led in the village where he was born. And so his memories, which could be transported back and forth from oblivion, did not belong entirely to him; they were part of the multi-purpose car that contained his family and the land. At some point he had gotten off the train, and since then had occupied his own, autonomous time. The multi-purpose car: it was an idea particularly well suited to what it was meant to communicate, a collective journey. The man was surprised to have reached old age and to have retained of his past only a simple token, devoid of value, and proof only of itself. One question had always unsettled him: What could have made him casually blot out entire parts of his life? Now he understood that the mistake lay in trying to find causes or reasons. Trains serve many purposes; the answer could be found right there in the son’s example. It was a simple comparison, an established metaphor — somewhat worn, but for this very reason, effective…
The problem was that, though the argument allowed him to understand and justify his new begi
Delia did not work for long after she got pregnant. The stony-faced workers, as I’ve described them before, would collect money in order to help the child along. A nebulous emotion filled the hearts of many of them, something between compassion and solidarity. On one hand, the group was making the necessary preparations so that its newest member — one of their own, most likely a future worker — would face the fewest possible challenges. On the other, there were plenty of occasions to curse the world and pity the child who would be born into it so insignificant a thing, a solitary castaway. From one moment to the next, the orphan would enter into a reality that was not only hard or merciless but was, above all, incomprehensible. Delia’s fellow workers could not understand it. “Another one,” they would say, “another mouth to feed.” And, a few years later, there would be two more hands that would have to add themselves to the collective labor. Thinking of it that way, as if it lasted only the flutter of an eyelid, time seemed to pass more slowly in the abstract than in practice. And yet it was shocking to see it all laid out in advance, as though life were just a day in the factory, waiting for the years to pass the way one waits between one blink of the eye and the next. Anyway, while the workers muttered about the child’s arrival and secretly organized donations to help Delia out with a few things, I spent most of my time shut away in Pedrera. Like everything else around there, like everything everywhere, the buildings were laid out in a way that was not only imprecise and arbitrary, but also inconsistent and extremely dense. This became even more obvious when you had to cross through one house to get to another, when you wanted to leave Pedrera, or when you ended up in a space that, though it was private, belonged to several houses at once. For example, my bed was next to a hallway that joined two rooms to a bathroom, which, for its part, had to be passed through to reach a cluster of houses that had been built on the far side. Sometimes I’d think about the geography of the place and find no words for the binding and eccentric routes it imposed on those who lived there, as though the simple act of walking through it were a ritual of submission to its authority. From my bed, I would watch people pass with astronomical regularity, day after day, as persistent as ants. I thought: I, who have always so admired the working class, was heartlessly abandoning the weakest representative of the species as though I were intent on its extinction. It was an idea that did not lead to any other; it lingered only as long as it took to smoke a cigarette or hung there for a moment as the voices of passersby distracted me. It was an inert phrase that did not lend itself to replies or associations, nor did it translate into words, and even less so into actions.
The morning I heard, in passing, the words “There goes Delia, the girl from the factory that got knocked up,” the certainty that something had changed shook me like a bolt of lightning. I was walking along Los Huérfanos; it was afternoon, and people were lingering in the vacillations of the siesta. At some point, from among a group of men leaning against a wall emerged the voice that said, “There goes Delia…” I looked up and down the street but didn’t see her; not then, nor when I ran to the corner. I didn’t know what to think, but I remember what I felt: instead of doubting the comment, I felt that not finding Delia right then confirmed it was true. She was hiding from me. The afternoon came to a stop; time was an ellipse in the middle of a void. It seemed as though the world were falling apart and that Delia had gone over to the side of evil. To this day I have no memory of the route I took on my way back. Who knows where I ended up wandering, I must have gotten lost looking for impossible shortcuts. If anyone had seen me arrive at Pedrera, they would have said that I wasn’t so much walking as dragging myself along. Not long after, I would be subjected to another blow, which, by the cruel mechanisms of pain, modified the first: I found the neighborhood, and especially the area around my house, steeped in humiliating normalcy. There was no sign of my tragedy there — life was content to go on in its distracted way. It was at that moment, just as I was about to reach my front door, when I felt that hand from another planet touch my body. Delia belonged to the past. The vision I described earlier, the worker who watched years unfold in the blink of an eye, was the same vision that told me that Delia belonged to a past that was at once recent and unfathomable. I said just now that she had gone over to the side of evil. This belief has stayed with me, though now, due to the obvious workings of time and memory, that evil might seem less evil and more i