He had been assigned a couple of weeks to what was the house of the painter José Guerrero in Chite. Dani arrived with her small but practical carry-on suitcase, the kind that allows you not to check in at airports, and a few comfortable clothes that would allow her to work with comfortable mobility in her arms and legs. A cautious artist, for whatever his sensitivity led him to build. In a cargo transport cart he carried the material to make his works, which rang to the rhythm of the bells as he climbed the slopes. With the ringing of the bells, they called the parishioners from the next town (at least that was the feeling), and not because there was tension between townspeople on one side and the other, nor because there were not enough Chitero devotees, rather it was because Those from Chite were always there, either sitting on the benches at the door selecting stories that might be out of the daily routine, or inside chatting with the priest at odd hours, looking for the third time at San Segundo in the altarpiece or proposing improvements for the patron saint festivities. The parish of the Inmaculada was always so crowded that the church bells decided on their own not to address them so much, but rather to take the opportunity to ring louder so that the murcheros would take notice of the mass announcement. Surprising to them, that strategy worked and suddenly one day seventy more people showed up, coming from Murchas, at eleven in the morning. Just the day Dani arrived at the painter's house. At the same time. His car let the entire religious cast of neighbors pass and he walked behind, almost as if in a procession. Carrying the suitcase on his back felt like carrying the cross of penance.

Dani was given the keys to the house where José Guerrero lived at a time when, at around eleven in the morning and listening to the pipes of the church organ playing the Kyrie of Delibes, he couldn't stop thinking about how his own bubble was related to that of that unknown but kind person who gave him the keys. He was thinking about the idea as if he were running his index finger and his pupils over the entire area of ​​his own sphere and seeing the limits of the sphere of the person in front of him when, just as he was releasing the keychain, their surfaces were approaching. until the object crossed the border of one and entered the other. What was it about Sloterdijk that, as he progressed in his reading, colonized more areas of his thinking. What was so special about him? Kyrie of Delibes to better accommodate his round digressions to this composition than to the The Spheres by Gjeilo. Meanwhile, without stopping the circulation of those ideas, he inserted the metal teeth of the key into the keyhole and prepared to carry the suitcase up to his room. The transport cart had earlier provisionally finished its journey near the façade of the house.

As soon as he opened the door, a beam of light greeted him, accompanied by a fresh smell - both welcoming stimuli - committed to offering his company until the end of the stay. Dani, grateful for the hospitality of these two particular beings, did a general sweep of the site. The next thing he noticed was the beautiful floor. A floor of precisely fitted tiles, with joints that made visible an isolation between them as well as a close coexistence (again the bubbles, as if they had adopted a new shape - now square - and were embedded in the plane that was just under your shoes).

Both downstairs and upstairs, despite the change in color of the dark tiles (from brown - downstairs - to green - upstairs -), the floor reminded him of a chess board. Each slab a square. The light tone did not vary from an ivory white, the dark one on the ground floor was a wet earth color (perhaps that was also why it evoked the coolness when entering, which had even rubbed off on his clothes) and on the first floor a green rather caramelized, the kind that certain leaves reach in the first days of spring, soft to the eye, or the flesh of the avocado, comparable even to its flavor, which far from invading space to other flavors, respects them and comes out to meet with the warmth and sweetness of first memories.

With the board set up, but without pieces, the first days passed for Dani in a series of peaceful movements, which if they were inside the painter's house, could well be interpreted by rows or columns, by certain squares and coordinates. He found it more and more fun to associate the ground with the game. He would burst into laughter imagining strategies, possible chess games while walking from the living room to the kitchen or going up to the bedroom.

However, as the days passed he began to notice certain changes in the light. The common reaction would perhaps have been to try to find out why these alterations were occurring; On the other hand, for him - who used to take the common route as the last alternative in decisions of this type and still testing a couple of unusual options to exhaust first - the most logical thing was to think that the light wanted to be an opponent player in his solitary simulated chess games. and, as he found no problem in having her as a rival, he accepted the challenge.

The artist deduced that the light tokens (beams of light of greater to lesser intensity according to the degree of importance of each token in the game, coming from each glazed square of the windows −located on the left and right side walls−) were They would be placed on the tiles where it shined especially and as the flash moved it would imply transfer of the token. He made his own pieces out of some plaster and placed them at their proper opposite end of the room. Both fell silent, the melodies that Dani could have previously heard in her head or outside her were cleanly muted and in the delicate movements of the light you could also feel its impenetrable silence. Likewise, only two movements a day were allowed for each one. However, at night it was forbidden to move around the board, because the light would then suffer a disadvantage compared to its opponent. In reality the action took only a few seconds; During the rest of the day each player had to take care of his chores, even if a part of the brain couldn't stop thinking about the next gesture when passing through the hall. Thus, in a continuous zig-zag of two weeks, similar to a luminous dance in which each step, each gesture, is long premeditated and becomes a kind of preparation for a timelapse, the penultimate sunset arrived.

Dani had devised his last move, one that would make him end his stay with the taste of victory, the smell still fresh clinging to his shirt and the light shaking his hand like a great rival. All night his mind was scheming possible counterattacks that he should defend against, exhausting what his opponent could do next and how to respond to the blow. He would lie awake sweating and grab a cotton cloth to wipe his forehead. Bishops, pawns and horses attacked with hunger for glory each nook already expropriated from their hours of rest. He turned around in bed in vain attempts to find a more comfortable position that would make him fall into a deeper sleep.

The next morning, having already packed his suitcase and hoping to display on display the works he had been working on during his stay in Chite - apart from chess - he decided to make what he considered the last move. What a surprise you wouldn't be to see that most of the squares on the board were ivory white. The wet earth-colored tiles were so burned by the light that not a trace of the dark color remained. Impossible to understand that board and how the light pieces were arranged now. The opponent, in her inability to speak, would not have been able to communicate coordinates to where to distribute her pieces. The skylight - responsible for intensifying the projection of light from each square of the window in the corresponding turn - which from the ceiling of the first floor crossed a gap from the floor of the first floor to the ceiling of the ground floor, had been focusing on the tiles according to the direction in which his chips were heading, reaching the point where he had eaten almost all the dark tones. Dani had grasped it unconsciously from the beginning, but until facing the last move he had not realized that the more rounds, the less the board and that at some point, it would become absolutely incomprehensible.

Almost out of his mind, trying to think of a way to solve the disaster - never conventional or common - to achieve his victory, Dani looked back at the ground. He gathered up all his pieces, moved them off the board, and took a second look at the now-clear tiles. The parish bells were ringing again, this time seeming to beg for a viable outcome, a chance to break the tie.

Suddenly, a kind of revelation took over everything he could perceive and the clearest answer assailed him without circumlocutions: ¡Un crucigrama! The grid, with white squares divided into horizontal and vertical ones and a few brown tiles - those resistant to scorching light - seemingly disordered - but which well hid the separation of letters and words - made it evident how the light preferred to propose other games to Dani. than let him win. In fact, games in which she, again due to her chronic hoarseness and supposed illiteracy, could not even participate. And he preferred it not for not accepting defeat, but for not accepting farewell; something well known to be inevitable.

The last day then, was spent between concepts and definitions, of which the visitors to Dani's exhibition, after having enjoyed the installation proposal that the artist offered as a result of his exhaustive research and his curious and unique look at the world, They were able to solve the last word - we assume that it was a shared triumph -, of three letters (each one assigned to its own bubble, but forming a single meaning as they are contiguous) and ending in N, extracted from: m. Termination, finishing, end or consummation of a thing.