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Th e poor woman had fallen into the trap of a melodrama where she was just another character, and barely that — Delia Siffoni, the woman who was always talking about disasters. Her fatalist palinodes wouldn’t have helped her now, because fate did not depend on her. She was in an ensemble, but she was all alone. Th ere was no third person. Th ere was no story.
    How could this happen to me? she said to herself. How could I have come to land, without realizing it, in this stony, godforsaken desert? She meant: to me, why did it have to happen to me and not to someone else? She belonged to a common type: without ever really thinking it over in detail, she had considered herself a woman like the rest, with no reason for anything to happen to her that didn’t also happen to all other women. It was as if this sort of thing happened to someone else, to an absolute someone else, which is to say, as if it didn’t happen to anyone. And yet . . . Her brain, somewhat feverish at that moment, was unexpectedly reviewing all kinds of exceptions. She knew so many women who were victims of lamentable fates, some of them almost unbelievable in their bitterness. So many women who could have asked themselves “Why me?” . . . and the question was left unanswered . . . So many, that suddenly it seemed as if it were all of them. In that sense then, she, to whom nothing ever happened, was part of a small minority of typical women, so small she was almost alone in it. Inconceivable women who were free to narrate it all, to fill themselves with all destinies. And if she was the exception, the only one, if the world was turned around in that sense, then it was logical that the exceptional and unique would happen to her. Just to her. Maybe it seemed like there were so many victims because she had always devoted herself to their disasters, to juicy remarks, one after another, squeezing the last drops out of them. She was grandly unoccupied, she was the gossip woman. For example, something was coming back to her, who knows why, with almost excessive microscopic clarity — the case of a young woman who in the recent past had been one of her favorite topics until it was displaced by the electrifying Balero affair: the girl was named Cati Prieto, she had been married for a couple of years and was the mother of a baby; the husband, with the excuse (justified or not, that was unknown) of a job in Suárez, had literally abandoned her; he came Sunday mornings, he left at night, he didn’t even stay to sleep. He had another woman in Suárez, that was obvious. And when he presented himself, the bastard, hardly noticing the presence of his son, she spent the hours pointing out the child’s progress to him, the smile, the little hand, the gurgling; look, did you see, did you hear . . . and him smoking through it all, behind his mask of ice, his indifference. And she would insist, the poor unhappy girl . . . papá, pa . . . pá . . . For the commentators on the case, like Delia, it was relatively simple, because in the end it all came down to an unknown quantity, like when people say, “Every family is a world,” and no one can pretend to know an entire world. But maybe . . . this occurred to Delia now, with the crystalline clarity of her vision . . . maybe the pathetic young girl didn’t know either. She didn’t know either, to start with, if her husband had abandoned her or not, if she was stupid, if she was hanging on to her hopes, if he did or did not have another woman in Suárez, et cetera. Maybe she didn’t know anything, and maybe she had no way of knowing it; she was the one who knew the least, like when they say, “She’s always the last to know,” and that’s where the gossips made their mistake: believing that the sea of ignorance they operated over was a mirage, until their wings were broken and they found themselves thrashing in waters that were real and turbulent and salty. Cursed water, that does not satisfy thirst.
    Cursed