The Dark Read Free Page B

rough, nor was it opaque, translucent, or glistening. As with other mysteries from which one can only retreat, it never occurred to me to ask her about the strange quality of her skin. This confirms, I think, her enigmatic nature, though it also speaks to her utter simplicity, which presented itself as categorically as truth.
     
    Delia was someone who never needed to be asked anything because she took it upon herself to respond before anything was said. I’m obviously talking about a certain kind of question, since some can only be asked and answered with words. There are those who think that the essential, precisely because it is so fundamental, can remain unspoken; that words attach themselves to and distort the truth. On the other hand, I’ve read many novels in which words are capable of revealing all, first hiding the truth under different layers of meaning, then revealing it the way the layers of an onion protect its core. And yet, when we get to the center, we find that there’s nothing there, that the work of the onion was to justify itself and, in so doing, create itself. Are human lives just as useless and as self-contained? That’s what novels ask. Delia was both a promise and the fulfillment of that promise. She occupied a neutral territory. The first time she asked me to do something for her, I noticed her tendency to disappear, to dissolve among people and things, leaving apparently incidental traces behind her in what is known as the day-to-day world, the indifferent witness to her movements and actions. I may return to this idea later, this double inclination of Delia’s: to disperse and distribute parts of herself while remaining distant, contracting and expanding at once.
     
    For a long time, as I said, we would take the same route every night through the thistle barrens and the surrounding area. One evening, though, Delia wanted to make a detour and asked me if I wouldn’t mind going a few blocks further with her. Given how I felt at the time—how I still feel—I said of course, anything, whatever she wanted. Delia explained that she had to pick up some clothes. We didn’t head toward Pedrera, or toward her place; we went to a neighborhood full of half-built houses inside which packs of children played. At night it was hard to tell if the structures were ruins, or if something was being built there: a neighborhood, a settlement, a community, individual houses, and so on. That’s what I thought—or what Delia and I thought—at the time; now I don’t think there’s much of a difference. Everything built is the promise of a future ruin, even new constructions. We live surrounded by debris; living in a house means inhabiting a ruin—and I don’t mean this only in a literal sense. The children’s arms and faces could be seen through the holes left for windows; sometimes they would try, unsuccessfully, to hide behind the thin concrete columns that held nothing up. I remember those faces, lit by the moon, furtive like the animals. Never before had a place seemed so entirely left to the mercy of God, though I had seen worse. It was the sense of incompletion, the feeling that nature neither offered resistance—because no one had challenged it—nor made any demands; it wanted only to affirm its presence in the face of the man-made world. We walked in silence for more than an hour; the night passed while the landscape stayed the same. Though impossible, this happened as if it were true. And this was because we belonged to a misleading order of things: it was not that the landscape didn’t change, but rather that it didn’t matter to Delia or to me. My “landscape” was at my side: it was her, a face that presented itself for contemplation freely and without discomfort, partly confident and partly indifferent to those who fixed their attention on it. Just as the wind suggests the activity of the world by stirring the leaves, the breeze that ran through Delia’s hair exhibited her concentration,