hinting at all it conceals. The hidden part is a secret, or a threat that hangs over mariners. The same is true of names. Ships sail blindly through a night rife with danger, never knowing the risks hidden beneath the surface. I remember reading, once, about a crossing during which no one slept for a week. In the same way, I say “Delia” now and am overcome; I cannot speak her name, yet little happens when I write it. Writing is one thing, speaking, another. I remember the murmur, impossible to capture with words: “Delia, my Delia, it’s me.” The strokes required to trace out those five letters don’t compare with the fleeting whisper, the fraction of a breath it took to say her name. Writing just one name or word involves a tremendous balancing act in which complex mental, motor, and visual operations come into play: an effort far greater than is required to pronounce them. In part because the written word is meant to endure. And yet we are weakest when faced with the temporary, with something whispered, spoken. Now, for example, when I say “Delia” under my breath, I tremble at the invocation because when I hear my own voice I feel as though I were calling her, or talking with her as I did years ago, as though she were just about to turn her attention to me. I am left defenseless. What I mean to say is that there is more to Delia than just the woman, the worker, the person without whom I was unable to wake or to function; there are also the symbols and the forces hidden within her name. It may sound a bit esoteric, but that’s how it is.
Heading north, the corner after Los Huérfanos was Pedrera. Delia and I rarely went that way, even though, as everyone who hung around Los Huérfanos knew, that was precisely where I came from; not exactly from that corner, but from that general direction. It’s strange how ambiguous places and bearings can be. Pedrera wasn’t the border of anything, and yet it was the start of something that actually began several blocks later, a fanning out of streets with no other name than just “past Pedrera,” as it was called. To the inconclusiveness of place, then, was added the ambiguity of names: why should it be called “past Pedrera” if there were other streets with names of their own closer to—and therefore better suited to describing—what was “past” them? As I said, Delia and I almost never went in that direction, even though that was where I came from every afternoon and where I returned in the dark, in the small hours of the morning, her touch still fresh in my mind. The pressure Delia applied with her hands was something inhuman, even supernatural. It was the right and proper amount of pressure, at once premeditated and innocent, and I’m not just talking about her caresses. Delia’s touch left a memory on the skin that would last for hours, and even then would only appear to fade: it might return as its reflection, an imagined graze of the fingertips that would leave one disoriented and defenseless because, in spite of its concrete origin, Delia, it could travel block after block through the darkness. These reflected touches manifested as a slight burn, like the sensation caused by contact with a thistle, and were concentrated around things that were, at that moment, intangible—the tautness of Delia’s skin, the heat emanating from her body, the agitation caused by having her near—as though they were part of some gravitational field intent on testing its strength. And so, what I had felt as a pressure that, let’s say, began with or was born of her hands, became, in her absence, the pressure exuded by the memory of her touch. Perhaps because of her age, Delia’s pores breathed more than average. Her skin was dewy; it consoled and protected, but there was also something disconcerting about it. This is why I wrote earlier that I thought she was supernatural, because it felt as though I were touching an inscrutable surface that was neither smooth nor
Gene Wentz, B. Abell Jurus