Amalfitano hangs the geometry book on the clothesline as an unhappy readymade

Amalfitano’s hanging of Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geometrico is both an improvised homage to Marcel Duchamp and a response to a book he cannot remember acquiring. Found in a box shipped from Barcelona to Santa Teresa, the geometry treatise becomes an Unhappy Readymade: clamped to a backyard clothesline with clothespins and exposed to the desert air. The gesture gives an ordinary object a precarious public life, while its unexplained presence turns the act into a test of memory, ownership, and the possibility of finding order in a place Amalfitano regards as a kind of hell.

Discovery and the mystery of the book

The episode begins when Amalfitano opens boxes of books with a kitchen knife and finds Dieste’s volume, which he does not remember buying or receiving. Published in 1975 by Ediciones del Castro, the book is divided into three parts: an introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky, and Riemann; a section on the geometry of motion; and three proofs of the V Postulate. Geometry means little to Amalfitano, and the book’s final section is especially opaque to him. Even so, he notices the volume’s elaborate tribute to Dieste: the names of the supporters printed in capital letters, while the honored author’s name appears in small letters.

The book also prompts Amalfitano to imagine the life behind its publication. He recalls that Dieste was a Galician poet and speculates about the friends and patrons who supported the edition, before wondering how the volume entered his own collection. When he asks Rosa whether it belongs to her, she first says no, briefly wonders whether it might be hers, and then insists that she has never seen it. Amalfitano is troubled not simply because the book is unfamiliar, but because he cannot explain how it came to be packed with the books he deliberately selected before leaving Barcelona.

A stamp on the first page points to a bookshop in Santiago de Compostela, but that clue does not solve the puzzle. Amalfitano considers whether a Barcelona bookseller might have mistakenly put the volume in his bag, and imagines a forgotten shock on the way home that could have erased the book from his memory. He then follows the mystery across the journey to Mexico: perhaps he packed the book without noticing, perhaps he forgot it during the flight, or perhaps its disappearance from memory occurred while he waited for his boxes in Santa Teresa. The sequence of possibilities gives the arrival of the book the shape of an investigation, but no explanation is established.

The clothesline as an unhappy readymade

After Rosa leaves to go to the movies with a friend, Amalfitano goes into the yard still holding the book. He looks for his shadow and cannot see it, although it is still daytime. His attention falls on the clothesline: four rows of cord attached to a frame of posts, with Rosa’s embroidered shirt, underpants, and two towels hanging there. He takes three clothespins from a supermarket bag, clamps the book to one of the cords, and goes back inside feeling calmer.

The gesture is explicitly connected to Duchamp. Amalfitano recalls the instructions Duchamp sent in 1919 to his sister Suzanne and her husband, Jean Crotti: hang a geometry book from strings on a balcony and let wind move through it, select its problems, and tear out its pages. Duchamp called the work the Unhappy Readymade. The book was photographed but did not survive exposure to the elements; Suzanne later painted the scene. Amalfitano’s version transfers that artistic precedent to his own yard and to a book whose ownership and history remain uncertain. Rather than reading the treatise, he places it where weather can act upon it.

When Rosa returns, Amalfitano explains that he has hung the book not because it was wet or damaged, but to see how it withstands nature and the desert climate. He asks her not to take it down and to pretend it does not exist. Rosa worries that he may be going crazy and later argues that he is destroying the book; Amalfitano answers that nature, not he, is responsible. He also says he does not feel that the volume belongs to him, despite its having arrived among his possessions. Their exchange leaves the act suspended between experiment and neglect, artistic idea and inexplicable impulse.

Watching and interpreting the object

The book remains on the line among the laundry. At night, after listening to the final broadcast on Voice of the Border, Amalfitano goes into the yard and watches it swing in the irregular breeze. The clothes seem motionless, while the book moves as if the wind were trying to free it from its clothespins. The next morning he searches for information about Dieste in the university library, learning that Dieste was a Galician writer, playwright, essayist, and poet, an anti-Fascist who went into exile in Buenos Aires after the defeat of his side in the Spanish Civil War, and that he later returned to Galicia. The research supplies a history for the author, but it does not tell Amalfitano how the book came to be in his box.

In the mornings, Amalfitano checks the volume while drinking coffee before leaving for the university. He observes that its good paper and binding are holding up against the elements. That durability leads him to think about the friends who supported its publication and the book as a tribute to one learned man from other learned men. Yet the yard’s barrenness makes the experiment feel less like exposure to a rich natural world than an encounter with scarcity. Amalfitano briefly imagines planting grass, a tree, and flowers, then doubts the point of improving a yard in a city where he does not expect to stay.

The book thus becomes an object he watches but will not rescue. Ocher dust begins to cling to it, and he feels the urge to take it down and wipe it clean, yet does not dare. The repeated morning observation turns the hanging volume into a quiet measure of time and change: its condition can be checked, but the question of why it is there remains unanswered. Its apparent endurance offers no decisive reassurance, just as Amalfitano’s careful attention cannot recover the missing memory.

Memory, exile, and the limits of order

The placement of Dieste’s book gives material form to Amalfitano’s uncertainty. He cannot establish where he acquired it, why he packed it, or when he forgot doing so; even his explanations multiply rather than settle the matter. The clothesline does not resolve the mystery but transforms it into something he can observe. In that sense, the readymade is an answer to a failure of explanation that refuses to become a solution.

The episode also links the book to Amalfitano’s unsettled relation to Santa Teresa. At the clothesline he asks himself why he came to the city and why he brought his daughter to what he calls a cursed place, while looking at the volume hanging by two clothespins. His thoughts move between leaving and staying, making plans to tend the yard and deciding such work would be pointless. The book’s exposure to the desert runs alongside this ambivalence: it is neither safely stored nor definitively discarded, and Amalfitano cannot bring himself to remove it.

Duchamp’s precedent makes the act a challenge to the authority of the book as a container of principles. A geometry treatise, associated with formal systems and proof, is handed over to wind, weather, and the contingent conditions of a yard. Yet Amalfitano’s stated hope of seeing how it survives does not amount to mastery over the result. The book’s endurance, the dust settling on it, and his hesitation to intervene all keep the experiment open. What hangs there is at once a borrowed artistic idea, a strange possession, and a visible trace of Amalfitano’s effort to make an order out of memory’s gaps without pretending that the gaps have closed.