Oscar Amalfitano’s decision to hang Rafael Dieste’s geometry book on a clothesline becomes an improvised, uneasy counterpart to Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade. The book has appeared among Amalfitano’s possessions without a clear history; rather than resolve that uncertainty, he suspends the treatise outdoors, where weather and dust can act upon it. The gesture gives physical form to his questions about memory, ownership, nature, and the possibility of leaving Santa Teresa.

The unexplained book

While opening boxes of books in his study, Amalfitano finds Testamento geometrico, a volume he does not remember buying or receiving. Published in 1975 by Ediciones del Castro, it is arranged in three parts: an introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky, and Riemann; a section on the geometry of motion; and a final section on three proofs of the V Postulate. Amalfitano knows little about geometry and has no intention of learning what the V Postulate means. The book is thus present as an object before it is useful to him as a text.

The volume’s publication details deepen that sense of dislocation. Its dedication lists the friends who supported Dieste’s work, with their surnames printed in capitals while the honored author’s name appears in lowercase. The cover describes the three parts as independent yet correlated, and presents the work as the culmination of Dieste’s reflections on space. Amalfitano recalls that Dieste was a poet, but cannot explain how the book reached his boxes in Santa Teresa.

He asks his daughter Rosa whether it is hers. She first denies recognizing it, then briefly entertains the possibility before insisting that she has never seen it. Amalfitano tells her that it must have arrived among the books he sent from Barcelona, but the shipment offers no certain explanation. A stamp on the first page identifies Libreria Follas Novas in Santiago, Galicia. He considers whether he might have bought it in a Barcelona bookstore that had acquired another shop’s stock, perhaps through a clerk’s mistake, but each possible account remains conjecture. His search does not recover a memory; it multiplies possible stories about its absence.

From uncertainty to the clothesline

The scene shifts from the study to Amalfitano’s yard, which he surveys in shirtsleeves as though he were a feudal lord inspecting land. The comparison is deliberately at odds with the setting: the yard is humble, barren, and dusty, in a city standing against the desert on the Sonora–Arizona border. The next-door walls are topped with broken glass, a practical sign of boundaries and protection. Against this landscape, the book’s mysterious arrival remains a small but persistent disturbance.

After Rosa says she is going to the movies with a friend, Amalfitano hears her leave through the gate and head toward the bus stop. He looks out into the street but cannot see her or a car. Still holding the book, he notices the moon despite the daylight, then returns to the backyard. He pauses, looking around for his shadow and failing to see it. The clothesline gives the scene its next point of focus: four rows of cord run from a crossbar supported by posts to hooks on the house. A few of Rosa’s clothes and towels are already hanging there.

Amalfitano goes into the small brick laundry hut and takes three clothespins from a supermarket bag. He calls them perritos, the Chilean word he has persisted in using. With the pins he fastens Dieste’s book to one of the cords and leaves it exposed. The action is modest and deliberate: instead of discovering where the book belongs, he changes the conditions under which it exists, putting it between a household object and the weather.

Duchamp’s model and Rosa’s objection

The narrator identifies the idea as Duchamp’s. In the account of the earlier work, Duchamp instructed his sister Suzanne and her husband, Jean Crotti, to hang a geometry book by strings from their Paris balcony so that the wind could pass through it, select problems, and turn or tear pages. Duchamp called it an Unhappy Readymade. The work did not survive exposure to the elements; its photographic record shows an open hook left hanging, while Suzanne later painted an image of the arrangement. Duchamp’s stated interest in bringing the categories of happiness and unhappiness into readymades, and in subjecting a serious treatise to the facts of life, supplies Amalfitano with a precedent—but not a guarantee that his own gesture has the same meaning.

That night, after Rosa returns from the movies, Amalfitano explains that he hung the book to see how it would withstand nature and the desert climate. He tells her not to take it down and asks her to behave as though it does not exist. Rosa is concerned that he may be losing his mind. In a later conversation, she calls the hanging an experiment; he resists the literal label and describes the idea instead as leaving the geometry book exposed to see whether it can learn something about real life. Rosa replies that nature will destroy it, while Amalfitano distinguishes between harming the volume himself and allowing the elements to act upon it. Her concern is also social: neighbors may see what is happening in the yard. Amalfitano answers that worse things are happening in the city. Their disagreement leaves the gesture unresolved between playful experiment, neglect, and a challenge to the usual respect accorded a book.

Watching, weather, and departure

The clothesline does not remain a one-time spectacle. On mornings before going to the University of Santa Teresa, Amalfitano watches the book while finishing his coffee. He observes that it is printed on good paper and that its binding is holding up. Its sturdy construction recalls the materials chosen for Dieste’s tribute edition, which Amalfitano reads as an early farewell from one circle of learned men to another. The book’s physical endurance becomes something he can check, even when the story of its arrival remains unknowable.

His attention to the volume is set against his thoughts about whether to make the yard livable. He considers planting grass, buying a small tree, and putting flowers along the fence, but then concludes that the work may be pointless because he does not expect to remain long in Santa Teresa. He asks himself why he came to the city and whether he ought to return, without reaching a settled answer. The hanging book remains in view, now held by two clothespins and beginning to collect ocher dust. He feels an urge to remove it and wipe it clean, but does not dare.

The act therefore does not solve the mystery that started it or settle the question of Amalfitano’s future. Instead, it gives those uncertainties a continuing material form: an unfamiliar treatise stays suspended in a yard he may soon leave, surviving for the moment while dust accumulates on it. The experiment’s force lies in that tension. Amalfitano subjects a book of geometric principles to unpredictable conditions, but the gesture also exposes how little control he has over memory, place, or what will happen next.