The significance of Iron on Agua Viva: The Alfredo Gonzalez Sculpture is that the Iron was the main character’s only reality, and our only clue about his way of living, at least initially. The following excerpts shows how the iron shapes the way we imagine Alfredo:
“His greasy hands, hair follicles and pores super-saturated with oils, grime and ferrous particles caught and caked in them, no longer felt the long,sharp, and shallow cuts, or the multiple punctures that scalpel-ed edges on cams and cogs of highly polished steel and burrs on poorly finished cast iron inflict on human skin”
“(...)In fact, before this moment he had never reacted at all, not for five and maybe seven years.To anything.Except iron and steel.”
“His house had become the lair of the iron woodchuck, the hive of the iron bee, the storeroom of the iron squirrel, the complex of chambers of the iron ant”.
<em> "From wall to wall, from floor to ceiling the mountain of metal was broken only by a thin corridor that was wide enough for the passage of one man at a time and which changed direction as often as a young river in the mountain"</em>
All around Alfredo, was only iron, metal and artifacts made of it, such as parts of his current working piece “Agua Viva” . All of the character’s action is centered on iron: Constructing with it, collecting it, cataloging, measuring and writing about it. The relationship Alfredo has with iron is so close that he has iron dust all over his body, piles of iron blocking the passageways of his house, and he isn’t aware of the world outside his “studio" .
Everything changed when the boys throw the clod of soil at him, that act in the story as an awakening point, where Alfredo finally realizes the situation he is for so many years, without baths, hygiene, not taking care of himself, and sees that there is a whole world around him. Before that we discover that the character probably lost his son, and has no family, suffering from mind conditions that put him in an institution where, after a year he was released; then we know that beyond this point he was immersed in the only thing that could interest him: working with metal.
At the end, Alfredo accepts help from the neighbor and it seems like he will merge into the community again.
