Testamento geometrico
2666Testamento geometrico, a geometry treatise by the Galician writer Rafael Dieste, becomes a central object in Oscar Amalfitano’s life in Santa Teresa. He cannot remember acquiring it or packing it among the books sent from Barcelona; rather than resolve that mystery, he hangs the volume from a clothesline in his yard and leaves it exposed to the elements. The book’s uncertain history, stubborn physical presence, and eventual role in an encounter with Oscar Fate make it at once an intellectual reference, an improvised artwork, and a measure of how tenuous control can be in the desert city.
Identity and Unexpected Arrival
Amalfitano finds the book while opening boxes in his study with a kitchen knife. Published by Ediciones del Castro in La Coruña in 1975, it is divided into three parts: an introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky, and Riemann; a section on the geometry of motion; and a discussion of three proofs of the V Postulate. The subject is unfamiliar to Amalfitano, who does not know what the V Postulate is and does not intend to investigate it. The book’s jacket describes the three parts as independent but functionally connected, a whole devoted to the foundations of geometry and the notion of space.
Its arrival is troubling precisely because it is ordinary enough to invite explanation but remains unexplained. Amalfitano asks his daughter, Rosa, whether the book belongs to her; she first wonders whether it might, then says she has never seen it. He knows he sent it from Barcelona with more familiar and cherished volumes, but cannot say where it entered the collection. A stamp from Libreria Follas Novas in Santiago de Compostela points toward Galicia, not the Santiago de Chile where he imagines himself capable of wandering in a state of catatonia. He considers several mundane routes by which the book could have reached him—including a bookseller’s mistake in Barcelona—but none becomes a memory he can trust.
The volume also carries traces of a history distinct from Amalfitano’s. A tribute page names Dieste’s friends and supporters, whose names appear in capital letters while the honored author’s is printed in lower case. Amalfitano puzzles over that discrepancy and over the author’s identity, remembering that Dieste was a Galician poet and learning that the geometry book emerged from a life that joined literature, teaching, and exile. The book’s physical arrival is unexplained, but its author’s history gives it a real intellectual and political context.
The Clothesline and the Unhappy Readymade
Amalfitano takes the book into the yard and, using three clothespins from a supermarket bag, fixes it to one of the clothesline’s cords. He calls the clothespins perritos, the Chilean term he grew up using. The gesture follows Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade: Duchamp had instructed his sister and her husband to hang a geometry book by strings from their balcony so that wind could pass through it, choose problems, and turn or tear out pages. In Amalfitano’s version, an unidentified book is submitted to the weather of Santa Teresa, and the act of hanging it turns a volume that had been inert among packed belongings into an object to be watched.
The book does not immediately disintegrate. Its paper is good, its binding holds, and it sways in the slight breeze while the washed clothes sometimes remain motionless. At night, the book moves in fitful gusts; later, a strong western wind sweeps the yard, shifting Rosa’s clothes and turning the volume’s exposure into part of a larger disturbance. The book is not merely a symbol applied from outside: its paper, binding, clothespins, and motion give Amalfitano something concrete to observe, even as he cannot decide what the experiment means or what the book is teaching.
Amalfitano explains to Rosa that he has left it out to see how it survives nature and the desert climate, not because it was wet or damaged. He insists that nature, rather than he, will do any harm. Rosa worries that the book will be destroyed and that the neighbors will think her father is behaving strangely. Amalfitano replies that the neighbors’ walls are topped with broken glass and that much worse things are happening in the city. Their disagreement makes the object a small domestic conflict: to Rosa, it is a book that should be protected; to Amalfitano, it is an experiment whose meaning depends on leaving it alone. She tells him to pretend it does not exist, while he asks her not to take it down.
Watching, Memory, and Unsettled Meaning
The clothesline gives the book a recurring place in Amalfitano’s daily life. Before going to the University of Santa Teresa, he watches it while finishing his coffee. He considers improving the barren yard by planting grass, a tree, and flowers, then doubts the point of such work because he does not expect to stay long in the city. In those moments, his questions about where he should go, why he came, and whether he wants to die gather around the book hanging from two clothespins. He feels an urge to take it down and wipe away the ocher dust settling on it, but does not dare.
The book’s exposure also enters the novel’s imagery of a landscape that resists explanation. After a night of poor sleep, Amalfitano sees the volume’s coffinlike shadow from his window. Later, as the wind moves through the backyard, the narration imagines it trying on his clothes and reading a few pages of Dieste in search of something that might explain the streets and houses—or explain the wind to itself. The book is thus placed between the human wish for an account and the impersonal movement of the environment. It offers no answer to Santa Teresa’s disorder; its presence instead makes the attempt to find one visible.
Amalfitano’s intellectual response does not settle into a single interpretation. At the university he finds additional information about Dieste: the author was born in Rianxo, wrote in Galician and Castilian, worked in theater and poetry, opposed Fascism during the Spanish Civil War, went into exile in Buenos Aires after his side’s defeat, and later returned to Galicia. Amalfitano’s research confirms some of what he had guessed, but does not explain how the book came to be among his possessions. The distinction matters: biographical knowledge can restore a history to the author, while the object’s own passage into Amalfitano’s life remains obscure.
Visitors and Narrative Significance
When Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza visit Amalfitano’s house after going to the circus, Espinoza notices the book in the backyard and asks about it. Amalfitano identifies it as Dieste’s geometry treatise and explains that its author was a poet who had arrived at these ideas while teaching high school. Pelletier goes outside to examine the volume. Seeing its pages stir almost imperceptibly in the afternoon breeze, he recognizes that it has not simply been left out to dry: it has been there a long time. Espinoza agrees that they should leave it alone and go home. From the window, Amalfitano watches them with deep sadness, then retreats to the kitchen and pretends to be absorbed in preparing lunch. The book has made his private gesture visible, but the visitors do not convert it into a shared explanation.
The volume later becomes a quiet point of contact in Oscar Fate’s visit to Rosa and Amalfitano’s house. After crossing into the backyard with Rosa, Fate touches the hanging book and asks what its title means. Rosa translates it for him and explains that the arrangement was her father’s idea. Fate remarks on the oddity of a book hung out like a shirt; the explanation establishes that the object belongs to Amalfitano’s continuing practice, not to an accidental household chore. In a scene shaped by uncertainty about what has happened that night, the book supplies a familiar feature of the home without resolving the danger outside it.
Across these appearances, Testamento geometrico links a forgotten acquisition, a literary and philosophical history, an allusion to Duchamp, and the daily material conditions of Amalfitano’s yard. Its role is deliberately unresolved: it may be read as an experiment, an artwork, a stubborn book surviving exposure, or an object around which Amalfitano’s anxieties about memory, departure, and the city briefly become legible. The text supports those connections without making the book a solution. It hangs in place, enduring weather and acquiring new meanings through the people who notice it.
