How I missed having Miguel’s ample mass spread out next to me! It is strange how I missed having sex with Hipolito but longed for Miguel’s physical embrace. Miguel had a huge embrace that could surround me completely. Miguel was also easy to undress, since he was always missing a few buttons lost long ago in some flurry and never replaced. More than once he had taught an entire hour of class at the university with his fly half-open, all the while facing the understanding smiles of his students.

Miguel was the epitome of the absent-minded professor. Time after time I played the same game with him, burrowing my hands “under his huge sweater, finding his shirt, buttonless as usual, and easily reaching his warm belly — which was just abundant enough to be soft and comfortable but not flabby.

“Life certainly is precarious.”

“Precarious? What do you mean?”

“Just that,” I explained. “How our feelings, our actions are so precarious. There are moments in which we feel we are very intimate with someone, truly united with another person, and then the next moment we realize it was only an illusion, that we are completely alone. At times we think we are able to communicate with others, but a minute later we’re certain that communication is impossible. Doesn’t it happen to you? It does to me. There are times when I believe I care for someone, love them intensely, and then, an hour later, I realize I don’t really feel anything for them at all. And at times I am happy, at times I feel so alive, so happy, so content with my space in the world. But.those moments are very short, so short, and right away I find myself hanging in the void again. Do you understand? As if everything were absurd, unreal; as if the world were absolutely irrational and I were paralyzed and inept.”

The truth is, I told him all this not as a reflection that was strictly my own, but because I was eager to warn him that his lack of love for me at that time — if my intuition was correct — was quite normal and he shouldn’t give up but strengthen his will to con- tinue loving me. But my words seemed to have shaken him out of his lethargic state. He smiled with that pleased, candid expression I liked so much, leaned forward — resting inadvertently on the leftover lamb — and almost shouted with enthusiasm.

“Of course! That’s the delta function.”

“The what?”

“The delta function. You don’t know what it is? It’s a mathemati- cal function, from quantitative mechanics, a priceless function, one of the most beautiful ones there is . . .” (I have always been surprised by the concept of beauty scientists have, their aesthetic rapture in the face of complicated formulas.) “It is a function that describes discontinuous phenomena of great intensity but of very brief duration,” he continued. “That is, phenomena whose inten- sity extends toward infinity but whose duration is practically zero. If one could visualize it, it would look like a broken line of very sharp angles,” and as he said this, he sketched the outline of a saw with his hand in the thick, damp air. “Do you get it?” He leaned back again and sighed with contentment, brushing his curly bangs out of his eyes with the same hand he had used to draw invisible saws. “It was invented by an English mathematician named Dirac, who is very old now . . . It’s a lovely function, one of my favor- ites...”

The house I was born in and which now survives only in my memories disappears. And in a few years, when Ricardo and Rosa and the others die, no one will know of my existence. It will be as though I was never even born. The stupid injustice of life. I have to finish writing my memoirs, I have to do it. So that some- thing of me is left to save part of me from the nothingness. To engrave in time those days during which I existed intensely, those acute moments of my Delta Function. I must finish my memoirs, I must outlive myself. Although, in reality, why does it matter? It is useless to write pages that won’t exist for me when I no longer exist.