The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

The First Seven Blocks

Suppose it’s October, October or November, let’s say, in 1960 or 1961, October, maybe the fourteenth or sixteenth, or the twenty-second or twenty-third maybe — the twenty-third of October in 1961 let’s say — what’s the difference.

Leto—Ángel Leto, no? — Leto, I was saying, has, a few seconds ago, stepped off the bus on the corner of the boulevard, far from the usual stop, compelled by the sudden desire to walk, to traverse San Martín, the central avenue, on foot, and to let himself get lost in the bright morning instead of shutting himself up in the dark mezzanine of one of the businesses where for the last few months he has patiently but impassively kept the books.

He has, then, stepped off, not without bumping into some passengers who were trying to get on and in his haste generating among them a momentary wave of vague protests; he has waited for the bus to pull away and move metallically down the boulevard toward the city center; he has crossed, alert, both sides of the boulevard separated by the center median, which is half planted and half paved, avoiding the cars driving, placid and hot, in both directions; he has reached the opposite sidewalk, has bought a pack of Particulares and a box of matches at the cigarette kiosk that he has put away in the pockets of his short-sleeved shirt, has walked the few meters to the corner, where he has just arrived, turning the corner south on the eastern sidewalk, the shady side at that hour; and he has begun to walk down San Martín, the central avenue — its parallel sidewalks, as they approach the city center, begin to fill with businesses selling records, shoes, groceries, fabric, candy, books, cigarettes, and also with banks, perfume shops, jewelry stores, churches, galleries, and which, at opposite ends, when the cluster of businesses thins out and finally disintegrates, reveal the pretentious and elegant façades, including some — why not — residential buildings, many of which are decorated, beside the front door, with the bronze plaques that publicize their occupants’ profession, doctors, lawyers, notaries, engineers, architects, otorhinolaryngologists, radiologists, dentists, accountants, biochemists, brokers — in a word, essentially, or in two better yet, to be more precise, every thing.

The man who gets up in the morning, who takes a shower, who eats breakfast and goes out, afterward, into the sun of the city center, comes, without a doubt, from beyond his bed, and from a deeper and heavier darkness than his bedroom: nothing and no one in the world could say why Leto, instead of going to work this morning, like every other day, is now walking easy and calm under the trees that amplify the shade from the row of houses, down San Martín to the south. He suffered so much, said his mother Isabel during breakfast before she left for work; alone afterward, Leto poured a second cup of coffee and went to drink it in the rear courtyard. This He suffered so much was stripped of its representations while he walked around the cramped and blooming courtyard where in the shady corners grass and shrubs, flowerpots and planters retained the dampness of the morning dew, but its overall shape and its impalpable reverberations still preserved their fragile and distracted resonance. Maybe the damp and concentrated shade that persisted at the foot of the houses, on the central avenue, or that mix of damp and brilliance the foliage displays in spring, and which stands out in some front yards, is what recalls his mother’s expression to Leto’s mind once again, how it doubles as sincere gesture and set phrase. The morning humidity that persists in the rising but mitigated heat is absorbed, by association, into the persistent and well-framed image, strange but at once familiar, of his mother who, turning from the gas stove, bringing the steaming coffee pot in her hand, uttered, in a low and thoughtful tone, as though to herself, without the slightest connection to what she had been saying just then, that sentence: He suffered so much. In the early penumbra of the kitchen, the little blue flames joined into concentric rings continued burning behind her after she removed the coffee, the milk, the water, the toast, and turned toward the table with the steaming coffee pot. To Leto, the sentence that was just uttered and has dissipated in the kitchen has the characteristic ambiguity of many of his mother’s assertions — he finds it difficult to understand its precise meaning; and when he raises his head, stifling his embarrassment and maybe even his shame, and begins to scrutinize Isabel’s expression, his suspicions that this ambiguity is deliberate only increase, now that, against the backlight of the little blue flames, Isabel’s now slightly thickened figure advances in silence, her eyes lowered, avoiding his gaze, disarming any inquiry. She has let her comment slip unexpectedly, during the routine exchange over breakfast in the kitchen, when phrases, spoken politely, out of courtesy, a dubious motive, have no more significance or extension than the sound of silverware striking plates. And Leto has begun to think, while he takes the first sip of black coffee and watches her sit, abstractedly, on the other side of the table: It must be the hope of erasing her humiliation that makes her pretend he suffered so much—but, and Leto raises his head again and fixes his eyes on the dumpy though still somewhat childlike face, which, with its eyelids lowered, reveals nothing: Can she tell? Does she notice? Is she sounding me out? Is she testing me? The hardest part, regardless, is, at a distance, knowing how to reply. Leto would have been well-disposed and, above all, relieved, to give the response she is waiting for, if, just then, it were possible to know what she is waiting for, but, with a desperate insistence, she seemed to want him to guess it on his own, and does not give him, therefore, any help. Leto searches, hesitates, and then, unsure, though not without a degree of resentment, the way he reacts toward every comment of that kind, does not say anything. A somewhat hard silence follows, uncomfortable for them both, in which there is possibly deception and not even a little relief, and which Isabel breaks by emptying her cup of café con leche in one swallow and chewing, noisily, her last piece of toast, and afterward recur the opaque and customary comments furnished with ambiguity by their intonation alone, though issued from neutral and distracted lips. These comments also come, certainly, from farther away, farther back than the tongue, the vocal chords, the lungs, brain, and breath, from the far side of the depository of named and accumulated experience, from which, blindly groping, though believing to consider carefully, each person withdraws and expels them. In the silence that follows, including when, after brushing his cheek with her lips, closing behind her, softly, two or three doors, she has finally gone, before him, to work, her image, as strange as it is familiar, begins to unglue itself from its representations so as to disseminate itself more easily throughout his body, as though, in its ebb and flow, blood is able to reduce the impalpable to its material tenacity, metabolizing and distributing it to cells, tissue, flesh, bones, muscles. With his second cup of coffee in hand, while he observes the dampness of the morning dew that’s yet to dissolve from the corners of the shade, Leto, though not his body, has now forgotten his mother, and it is this same humid shade persisting now, around ten, on the central avenue, which covers his body like the first invisible layer of the world and is likewise covered by the bright morning, that causes him again to remember her, to project her onto the unstable and inconstant little screen of images where he flashes, momentarily, the tiny spotlight of his attention. Without, as they say, a doubt, the same impulse that moved Isabel to utter her startling and mysterious comment, has caused him, suddenly, to get off the bus, cross the boulevard, buy the cigarettes, and begin walking, for no reason, to the south.

Every fifteen meters, a tipa tree rises at the edge of the sidewalk, and its branches almost touch those that, at the same height, grow from a tree on the opposite sidewalk. In the spaces between the trim branches, patches of blue sky can be made out, and on the street and the opposite sidewalk the bright stretches outnumber those in shadow. Puerile, in every color, at a constant speed, the cars run in both directions: those coming toward Leto on his side, and those that, likewise, follow his direction, alongside the other sidewalk. Flashes and shadows from leaves and branches alternate fleetingly over the chrome of the bodywork, over the painted molding and the glass, as they travel down the tree-lined street. Other pedestrians — not many, because of the distance from the city center as well as the relatively early hour — walk, alone or in groups, lost in thought or conversation, along the sidewalks. Another thirty meters and Leto will reach the corner.

It is, as we know, the morning: though it doesn’t make sense to say so, since it is always the same time — once again the sun, since the earth revolves, apparently, has given the illusion of rising, from the direction they call the east, in the blue expanse we call sky, and, little by little, after the dawn, after daybreak, it has reached a spot high enough, halfway in its ascent let’s say, so that, through the intensity of what we call light, we refer, to the state that results, as the morning — a spring morning when, again, though, as we were saying, it is always the same time, the temperature has been rising, the clouds have been dissipating, and the trees which, for some reason, had been losing their leaves bit by bit, have begun to bloom again, to blossom once more, although, as we were saying, it is always the same, the only Time and, so to speak, from equinox to solstice, it’s the same, no? As I was saying, we call it a because it seems like there have been many, because of the changes, which we name and presume to perceive — a dazzling spring morning, forming for three or four days, since the end of the last rains in September or October that wiped clean the final traces of winter from a sky that grew warmer and clearer each day. Leto feels neither good nor bad: he walks oblivious, in the morning, in the center of a material horizon that sends him, in constant waves, sounds, textures, flashes, odors. He is submerged in this horizon and is, at the same time, its center; if, suddenly, he disappeared, the center would change location.

For this reason, in order to prove that he suffered so much, some three months before she had found a lump in her right breast, like the seed from a paradise tree, and had begun to worry. Charo, the elder cousin who, lacking a boyfriend or husband, had acquired, at forty-five, an approximate understanding of nearly every illness in order to fill the cavity of any other curiosity or sed non satiata, had insisted that she make an appointment with a specialist — an illuminary, his aunt Charo had trilled, dithyrambic, though she was not, in reality, anything more than his second cousin. Leto thinks: It wasn’t wrong to have told Charo either. It’s as if you were to suggest to a madam that you had some spare cash you’d like to spend on an escort. Because of his international conferences, the dinner-conferences at the Rotary, and the rows of the cancerous and its candidates leafing through old magazines in the waiting room of his office, the specialist had only recently seen her, a month after her discovery, and after looking her over, examining her, carefully and skillfully, had told her, with distracted lightheartedness, that, in his modest opinion, there was no reason to worry, and that a more meticulous exam or a biopsy were not justified. The lump, the size of a seed from a paradise tree, according to Isabel, or of an acorn, according to Charo, who, for some obscure and undetermined reason, had also performed an examination, did not reveal itself to the fingers of the specialist, which, though they searched and searched again did not find a single notable hardness in Isabel’s now, on the contrary, somewhat shapeless breasts — not in the right or the left. The specialist sat down at his desk and had begun to fill out a form, and, while she dressed, standing near the bed, Isabel had begun an inquiry full of allusions, to which the specialist would respond with ambiguous monosyllables, whose meaning, like those of the blotches in a psychological test, depended on what pre-existed in the observer. According to Isabel, upon seeing her come in, the specialist had given her significant looks, as she had presented herself with her married name, and her husband’s case, so recent, and so sudden too, as often happens with young people, had probably not been forgotten. Because when she came in they had made her fill out a form where she wrote that she was born in Rosario, and since he would surely have come from Rosario for a consultation, the specialist could not have missed the connection. Of course, because of professional confidentiality—yes, they have that categorical imperative, Charo had confirmed — the specialist could not make it plainly known that he had been to see him during his frequent trips to the city and that, after having examined him, had found that incurable illness, but his responses, deliberately imprecise, were nevertheless significant enough to dismiss any of her leftover doubts. But she’s not too sure she’ll be believed because she insists so much, thinks Leto. That same night she had called Rosario to confirm it with Lopecito who, protective and attentive, had interrupted her revelations with a firm, Don’t waste your money. I’ll call you back, so they hung up and a minute later, when the phone rang from Rosario, she picked up, impatient and satisfied, conveying, in complete detail, the confirmation of her suspicions which, in a discreet but unmistakable way, the specialist had given her. Lopecito, who from the age of twenty-five had begun, in a tacit way, to court her, who had seen her marry his best friend, and who had even been a witness in the civil ceremony, who had seen her have two miscarriages in the second or third month before finally getting pregnant with Leto and bringing him into the light of the world, who had been the impassive confidant for the matrimonial lurch of both man and wife and who, the year before, had finally seen her widowed, being left in the awkward position of eternal pretender and of her husband’s childhood friend whose world was coming up roses — Lopecito, no? — who between his distribution of two or three television brands and his duties as a member of the Rosario Central Festival planning committee, had found enough time to make their leaving Rosario possible without agreeing with the decision, the move, the costs, he had recommended her as a saleswoman in an appliance store and Leto as bookkeeper for two businesses in the city center, he had administered, through his relationships downtown, as he liked to say, her late husband’s pension, and would come to visit them from Rosario every fifteen days, sleeping in a hotel so it would be clear to everyone that they wouldn’t soil the memory of a loved one, likewise feeling enough devotion to Isabel to accept, despite representing in the eyes of the world the voice of moderation, each of her points of view, her discrete extravagance, her constant struggle to deny the obvious, her repeated interpretations among which the theory of an incurable illness isn’t even, Leto thinks as he reaches the corner, the least bit preposterous.

The corner, where the two lines of cars driving on San Martín in both directions slow down, is particular in this way: because the cross street runs east to west, the shade of the row of houses disappears, and as there is nothing to intercept the rays of the sun shining above the street, the street and sidewalk are now filled with light, so as to make Leto’s shadow, which has appeared in a sudden way, only slightly shorter than his body, project itself onto the gray pavement and fall to the west. When Leto is about to step off the gray sidewalk into the cobbled street, his shadow is broken by the cable guardrail and continues to be projected onto the even cobblestones of the street. The shadow moves forward, slightly oblique to the body, breaks again at the cable guardrail on the opposite sidewalk and when Leto’s shoes touch the opposite pavement, continues to slide across the sidewalk until Leto enters the shade of the row of houses and his own shadow disappears. The square is deserted — not abandoned, but deserted — empty, without the presence of people (apart from Leto) who, like him, are also the center of a horizon that, as they move, moves with them. After walking a few meters under the trees, he sees appear, suddenly, on the next corner, a boy on a bicycle who has turned the corner of the cross street, advancing toward him on the sidewalk. It proceeds with that kind of undulation bicycles have when they are not moving very quickly, and whose equilibrium, which the cyclist recovers with every pedal stroke, is not the principal consequence but the transient and fragile phase of a more ample and more complete movement. The cyclist, no more than nine or ten years old, his legs barely able to reach the pedals when they are at the lowest point of their circular path, moves, in spite of his slowness, much more quickly than Leto, whose pace, neither slow nor fast, has not varied since he crossed the boulevard and began walking down San Martín. As he approaches — his velocity, while constant, is increased by Leto’s opposite movement — Leto can hear, each time more clearly, the complex sounds issuing from the bicycle, metallic squeaking, the hum of rubber against the pavement, the stretching and creaking of leather, pedals, spokes, cables in an invariable sequence that repeats periodically because of the regularity of the movement. The bicycle passes between Leto and the row of houses, and the series of sounds, which had reached, arriving next to Leto, its maximum intensity, begins to diminish behind him until finally it is no longer heard. Leto does not even turn and, strictly speaking — as they say, no? — they have barely seen each other, moving in opposite directions and each taking his own horizon with him.

When he hears the second whistle, Leto realizes that, despite his distraction, he had also heard the first, and turns around. The thick arms, slightly elevated from the body, are buoyed in the air, and the head, which thinks itself elegant, and which certainly is, bobs a little, now that the Mathematician, in the stooped shoulders moving several meters ahead of him, has recognized Leto and begun to whistle so he’ll stop and wait for him. At the moment he recognizes him, Leto thinks: If he has just turned the corner, which is probably the case, since he lives on that street, he should have just passed the bicycle since, because it’s out of sight, the cyclist must also have turned the corner. The Mathematician, a head taller than him, arrives and holds out his hand. What’s up? he says. Without looking him in the eye, Leto responds vaguely. Well, he says, we’re walking along.

The Mathematician lets a hesitant smile linger. To Leto, his white moccasins, like his tan, seem premature, but the Mathematician knows that he just returned from Europe, where he spent three months touring factories, beaches, museums, and monuments with the annual Chemical Engineering alumni group. They’re out of control since they saw La Dolce Vita, he heard Tomatis say, with distracted disdain, the week before. And it was Tomatis, meanwhile, or so Leto heard him tell someone, who began calling him the Mathematician. He’s really not a bad guy, he often says, kind of a snob at worst, but, frankly, I don’t know what kind of sick satisfaction he gets from the physical sciences. Haven’t you noticed his tone when he talks to you about relativity theory? Because of his height he already has a tendency to look down on the world, but I’m just saying maybe it’s not our fault that multiplying the mass of a body with the speed of light squared equals the energy needed for the complete disintegration of that body? For a few seconds, the two young men, one tanned, blonde, tall, muscular, and handsome, dressed completely in white, including the moccasins he is wearing, sock-less, the other thinner, wearing glasses, with thick brown, well-combed hair, whose clothes are from first glance cheaper than the other’s, fifty centimeters apart, they remain silent, without animosity but without much to say either, each of them lost in his own thoughts, an internal swamp that stands in sharp contrast to the bright exterior, from which it was costing them an indescribable effort to emerge and where, because of the tendency to perceive the foreign with a rose tint, as they say, they simultaneously think that other would never be trapped. Without noticing, Leto, who, not knowing what to do, reaches his hand into his shirt pocket to remove the cigarettes, thinks that, for some reason, he is excluded from many of the worlds the Mathematician frequents, that the Mathematician is a species of astral being who belongs to a galaxy where everything is precise and luminous and that he, on the other hand, slogs through a viscous and darkened zone, which he is seldom able to leave, while the Mathematician, in spite of his elegant head, which is full of recent and colorful memories of Vienna, Amsterdam, Cannes, Málaga, and Spoleto, feels like he has been floating in the stratosphere for three months and that Leto, Tomatis, Barco, the Garay twins, and everyone else has taken advantage of his absence to live it up in the city. Finally, and concentrating on the act of opening his pack of cigarettes, in order not to be obligated to raise his head, Leo murmurs: And Europe, how was it?

— I hate resorting to a platitude, says the Mathematician offhandedly, but she’s a decadent old madam.

Leto does not suspect that, beneath the apparent disinterest and the generous estimation of those who have not traveled, the Mathematician fears that an over-admiring appreciation will disqualify him. And he hears him add: Just now, I’m off to distribute the press release from the Association to the papers. Goes without saying that whorehouses don’t figure in the expense report. Without realizing that the Mathematician is holding his unlit pipe by the stem, in his right hand, which is hanging against the seam of his pants, and that because of this, with a wave of his free hand, he rejects his offer, Leto, after tapping the bottom of the cigarette pack to remove three or four from the opening he has made in the top edge, holds out the pack toward the Mathematician, offering him one. So that the reason for his rejection is clear, the Mathematician brings the pipe to his mouth and holds it pressed between his ultra-white and even teeth. To stay so tan and so healthy, thinks Leto, he probably went rowing the day after he got back. While Leto lights the cigarette, the Mathematician, taking advantage of his distraction, induces him, by taking a few steps himself, to keep walking. They continue — or they pass — thanks to the faculty they possess, who knows why, from one point to another in space, gaining ground, so to speak, although the points between those they cross are all, with the two of them between, in each of the points, and in all of them at once, in the same place. No, seriously though, says the Mathematician, it’s an experience one should have—and what he calls experience are those memories that, although fresh and colorful, are no more accessible to himself than a packet of postcards of Amsterdam, of Vienna, of Capri, of Cadaqués, of San Gimignano. Siena is a rosy mirage, floating in the warm fog of the afternoon; Paris, an unexpected rainstorm; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum. While he listens, Leto puts images to the names that echo in the warm morning, and these images, which he forms with assorted memories that have been rescued from disparate experiences and have no real connection to the names he hears, are neither more nor less pertinent or relevant than the Mathematician’s memories, which are unable to render the thing more accessible even when they come from what the Mathematician could call his experience. The names of cities pass as though fixed to an endless mountain range or to a carousel, in the same way that, periodically, in spite of the variations and supplements, sooner or later the same names reappear in the memory of the Mathematician, who makes them sound to Leto’s ears as though they came from an instrument: La Baule, even though it was the middle of summer the sea was frigid; Prague, a great portion of Kafka’s work makes sense when you get there; Bruges, they painted what they saw; Paris, an unexpected rainstorm. Suddenly the Mathematician, who is walking closest to the wall, jumps sideways, pushing aside Leto who, staggering, stumbles a little but keeps walking: as they arrived at the corner, the Mathematician, concentrating on his story, was startled to see appear, abruptly, although always maintaining his placid and undulating pedaling, the kid on the bicycle who, in the time it took them to walk to the corner, has gone around the block. A furious, somewhat ostentatious silence interrupts, after the scare, the chain of recollections from the Mathematician, who stops and turns and sees move away, on the gray sidewalk, under the trees, the slow bicycle with its metallic, discrete, and complicated sounds. Leto, who has kept walking, gains a few steps on him and stops to wait, just beyond the oblique border of the shade of the houses. The Mathematician reaches him, smiling and shaking his head. If he’d run you over, says Leto, he’d have stained your pants.

— I’d kick him to pieces, says the Mathematician, showing with his playful tone that there’s no way he would. He seems less like a flesh and bone person than one of those archetypes you see on billboards, those for whom every contingency inherent to humanity has disappeared. His physical appearance, perfected by his European tan and the whiteness of his clothing, is nothing but the consequence of his biographical perfections: in spite of having been a star on the university’s rugby club, he has, as Tomatis puts it, something slightly more dense filling his head than usually fills up a rugby ball. Though more than a few hectares in the north of the province, near Tostado, belong to him, the Mathematician’s father, a scrupulous yrigoyenista, abhors oligarchs and soldiers and is one of the old liberal lawyers whose name appears at the bottom of the habeas corpus appeals of almost all of the political prisoners in the city, and the Mathematician, unlike his older brother, who is also a lawyer but who has accepted official posts in almost every government — the Mathematician, I was saying, no? — has not only followed the liberal tradition of his father and his maternal grandfather but also, at some point, four or five years back, was a founding member of one of the Trotskyite or socialist reform groups that, after 1955, began to proliferate. But the Mathematician is a thinker and not an activist, a scrutinizer, not an organizer, and not a practician but a theoretician. He likes treatises more than gatherings and prefers futurist manifestos to the builders of the future. His engineering studies are, no doubt, the result of some familial strategy aimed at confronting, with the corresponding diploma, the national development that will one day obligate the heirs to move from passive ownership of the land to industrial investment. They can be as liberal as you want, Tomatis likes to say, malevolently, but they don’t do anything without a motive. The Mathematician, who possibly intuits skepticism or mistrust in Tomatis’s wit, continues impassively in the role he’s assigned himself: the supplier — without, in reality, it ever having been lost since no one noted its absence — of a logical rigor and an exactitude in information that, because of his insistence, makes him annoying to argue with. Actually what Tomatis faults the Mathematician for is his literalness. If, for example, in the middle of a discussion Tomatis cites a German philosopher, by the following week the Mathematician has read all of his work, and he comes back with the intention of returning to the point where the discussion left off the week before. Tomatis has cited this philosopher offhandedly, not because he considers wasting your youth and frying your eyelashes reading his treatises essential, but he is too vain to sidestep the argument. Because of his credulity, the Mathematician is more informed than the rest of them, since all it takes is hearing someone mention an author for him to read their complete works and reappear fifteen days later, refreshed and calm, to have a conversation about them. To be fair, there isn’t much to fault him for, thinks Leto. Because he isn’t even someone who wants to win an argument at any cost; he is kind, modest, and generous. Except, thinks Leto, except when he resorts, without being aware of it, I’m sure, to his magnificent axioms, postulates, and definitions. Then he starts acting like the Werewolf during a full moon, or Jack the Ripper in the company of hookers.

While they cross, the Mathematician condescends to re-list, without much conviction, the names that come with fixed and simplified expressions and memories glued to the back: Rome, he imagined it differently; Vienna, all the locals seem to believe in terminal analysis; Florence, they also painted what they saw; Avignon, a murderous heat; Geneva, the paved barnyard; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum. They leave behind the intersection, the cable guardrail, the angled sun, and enter the cool shade of the next block. An old man is opening the shutters of a window on the ground floor. The Mathematician who, in an abrupt way, cut off his story a few seconds before, greets him with a tilt of the head and continues walking, pensively. In spite of the difference in height, Leto and the Mathematician walk at the same pace, neither slow nor fast, so well coordinated that it is impossible to tell if the Mathematician is reducing the length of his strides to match them with Leto’s steps or if, on the contrary, Leto’s skinnier and shorter legs are accommodating, without visible effort, the step of the rugby-man who’s so adept at the scientia recte judicandi. For a few meters, they don’t seem to know what to talk about. We know what was said above, no? — that the Mathematician, fearing that excessive enthusiasm for his European tour will disqualify him somewhat among those who stayed behind, shares his memories reticently. And yet, in the anxiety of those who have been away and fear that reality has been more intense in their absence, he has been holding, since he met up with Leto, the question he does not dare to formulate, so as not to reveal an excessive interest, just like a jealous person who looks for the opportune moment to begin his interrogation by dissembling with a series of disinterested and banal questions. Meanwhile, Leto is thinking: I’ll need to ask Lopecito if he believed it. Still, he’s too meticulous to reject the idea flat out. He has been, for twenty-five years, the ham in the sandwich. And, ever since he died, things have only gotten worse. He could favor mother’s argument, though even then she wouldn’t be sure to get what she expected without overcommitting herself since they played house, but if she accepts it deep down, the way she does publicly, she risks the supposedly incurable patient laughing at her from the other side.

Observing him, discreetly and somewhat shyly, the Mathematician detects Leto’s withdrawn expression and takes the opportunity to say: And around here, how was it all this time? biting the unlit pipe so hard that, instead of speaking, he sputters the question through his clenched teeth and tongue which, inhibited, wraps around the pipe stem and makes it vibrate against the row of teeth. The Mathematician ignores the fact that Leto has more than enough reasons, though he has been around, to feel much more excluded from the bursts of passion that reality might arbitrarily dispense among the circles he frequents: he, to begin with, has only lived in the city a few months and is, therefore, a mere neophyte, a newcomer, and, because he is only twenty-one, is much younger than several of the youngest; he almost never joins a discussion, and if he is invited anywhere it’s only as an appendix to Tomatis; he’s the only other source of income for a widowed mother, and has to work several account books to support her, and something inside him, surely, like a woodworm in furniture, pre-emptively hollows out any possible passion he may have, which somewhat explains his absences and silences — though he would like it, true enough, if once in a while, something were possible. Leto, allowing a quantity of smoke to spill out through his half-opened lips, from which he has just withdrawn, with careful fingers, the cigarette, responds: he has hardly seen anyone; he rarely goes out; he has almost nothing to report from these past three months.

Imagine a gambler who, for some time, has held the card that will let him win the game but which he cannot play for many rounds because none of the other players have given him an opportunity to do so. Round after round the gambler throws down useless, inconsequential cards that have no influence on the course of the game until, suddenly, the combination he needs appears on the table, allowing him to throw down, euphorically and decisively, the winning card. Leto’s timid confession has put the Mathematician in this dominant position.

— What? he says. Weren’t you at Washington’s birthday party?

Leto shakes his head no, while he thinks: And even today, this morning, when she says that he suffered so much it’s less to remind me of that suffering than to control whether I believe her or not. And the Mathematician, observing him without looking, instead looking straight ahead at the sidewalk, but observing him nonetheless with the right side of his body, which is to say, the side that is almost grazing, during the walk, the left side of Leto’s body, the Mathematician, I was saying, no? at the same time, although it is always, as I was saying just now, the same, thinks: He wasn’t invited.

Leto surfaces as though from under water. He has been thinking, remembering his mother, the death of his father, and Lopecito, submerging himself for a few seconds in those thoughts and memories as though into a subterranean canal parallel to the spring air, and in emerging, in surfacing, he finds himself with this good-looking blonde guy, some twenty-seven years old, dressed completely in white, who Tomatis calls the Mathematician, who is just back from Europe and is out to distribute the press release for the Chemical Engineering Students Association to the papers, who has just, also, a few seconds ago, asked him if he was at Washington’s birthday party, and as he, with a shake of his head, has responded no, he now fears that the other, who seems to be observing him, is observing him not with contempt, but with disbelief and something like pity. In the first place, they wouldn’t need to invite me. I could have gone if I had wanted, without needing an invitation. But in any case, I wouldn’t have wanted an invitation because it would have meant that they don’t consider me close enough that it would be a given that I would have to go. But, given that, I have to submit to the facts: I wasn’t invited.

— I couldn’t make it either. That day we were visiting factories in Frankfurt. I couldn’t hop a jet from Frankfurt because they don’t have direct flights to Rincón, says the Mathematician. But I got the full version, a fresh, subtitled, technicolor copy.

Maintaining his lighthearted façade, he squeezes the pipe a bit more with this teeth, compelled by a memory that returns, suddenly, and which still stings him, one of those memories or emotions about which he likes to say, with an ironic wrinkling of his nose, if they aren’t measurable, at least with our current understanding, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why they couldn’t enter into some general theory or some structure that’s subject to mathematical formulae one of these days.

— You don’t say, he hears Leto say.

— Yes, yes, I heard all about it, he hears himself say in turn.

The memory is like a photograph or a shadowy image stamped into the inside of his head, and the emotions and feelings of humiliation and rage form several black-bordered, jagged holes, as if the image had been punctured at many points of its surface with the ember of a cigarette. Three or four years earlier, a poet from Buenos Aires came to the city to give a conference. The Mathematician, who had been corresponding with him for six or seven months regarding a problem of versification, waited anxiously for his arrival, and had annotated a list of discussion points which, after the conference, he hoped to address in order over dinner with the poet. Shortly before the end of the debate that followed the conference, the Mathematician had left to get the car from his father; he hadn’t been able to loan it to the Mathematician earlier because he didn’t get back from Tostado until 9:00. His father was a little late, and when the Mathematician returned with the car to the lecture hall, it was closed. A guard told him that the lecturer had left with four or five of the organizers to a party, or to eat something — basically he wasn’t sure where. The Mathematician felt the first bolt of rage in that moment because, before leaving to get the car, he had taken the precaution of letting several of the organizers know about his momentary absence, asking them to wait for him, but not feeling very secure because he knew that the organizers belonged to the class of people who kidnap celebrities who come from the capital, and since he didn’t spend much time with them, because he didn’t like to move in semiofficial circles, they wouldn’t go out of their way to consider his requests. The Mathematician, when he learned of the poet’s visit, had begun working hard, for at least a month and a half, on problems of versification. His thesis was that each meter corresponded to a specific emotion and that you could devise a notational system, if you sufficiently diversified the meters whose combinations were not already too subtle, which only applied to the metric use of pure sounds, for the poem to transmit the desired emotions. The Mathematician was probably only twenty-three at the time; he considered himself a simple theoretician and would have liked the poet, who was twenty years older and had acquired a great reputation, to apply his theories, like the geologist who forms a hypothesis about the composition of the lunar surface and sends an astronaut to the moon to verify it. The Mathematician left the conference hall, already partially blinded by rage, and began looking for the poet. He started crisscrossing the city in his father’s car, from one end to the other: he would leave the engine running in front of a restaurant, in front of a bar, would get out to look for them, the poet and the group of organizers, and when he didn’t find them would move on to the next bar and repeat the same routine; he tried to disguise his rage behind a calm and mundane façade, passing his indifferent gaze over the lively tables as if he was looking for an empty one or was simply curious. That he was able to maintain his elegance and indifferent façade is admirable because with every passing minute his fury and indignation multiplied. He started to feel like the inside of his head was boiling. After having fruitlessly visited every open restaurant, he went into a bar, asked for a beer, the phone book, and a fistful of coins and began calling the homes of the organizers, hoping that they were at one of their houses or that someone in their family knew where the hell they had gone. But no one knew anything or, if they did know, did not seem inclined to tell him. The Mathematician sensed the unmistakable echoes of some sort of instruction or collusion in their casual responses. Everyone knew, the whole city knew, and, intentionally, concealed it. After all those useless rounds, he started driving the streets at random, hoping to come across the poet and his retinue, and more than once, because of false alarms, he found himself chasing some car that seemed to belong to one of the organizers at full speed or accosting a startled group of people on a dark street. The Fourteen Points Toward All Future Meter, which he had taken the trouble to elaborate and type out over the preceding weeks, were just then nothing more than a sheet folded in fourths, lost in one of the compartments of his wallet at the bottom of the interior pocket of his coat. He had lost all subjectivity and had become a purely external being who, no longer reasoning or applying any agency to reality, was instead the passive object of a fixed system that diverted him from his self in the same way that the wind diverts the ping pong ball from its trajectory despite the force and accuracy of the player’s shot. Finally, in one of his comings and goings down the dark streets, down the illuminated avenues, after passing the same places for the hundredth time, he remembered that, before the conference, one of the organizers, speaking to another, had mentioned a tennis club where his — the Mathematician’s — brother the lawyer was a member, but that he, from disdain for the bloodlust bourgeoisie, as he liked, not without reason, to call them, had not joined. A guard stopped him at the entrance and forced him to wait. The Mathematician stood at the gate to the darkened and deserted tennis courts, beyond which he could see, behind a stand of pines, the illuminated windows of the buildings. A yellow rectangle, taller and wider than the windows, formed in the darkness, behind the pines, when the poet, followed by the guard, opened the door to the facilities and approached the entrance gate, crossing the darkness in the pines and the reddish half-light reflected off the clay-covered surface of the tennis courts. He was eating a chicken thigh as he came, and his free hand must have been covered in grease, judging by the way he kept it stiff and far from his body, the fingers straight and separated, so as to not stain his pants. The Mathematician thought he was coming to meet him and bring him to the dinner where, for a while, they could discuss the Fourteen Points, and so he waited with an understanding and relieved smile, but in reality the poet was coming to explain that it had been impossible to wait for him, that the dinner was very boring though there was nothing for it but to stay to the end and that maybe later, in some bar, when he had unburdened himself of the group, they might be able to have a drink and, in his words, bring into the world, together, the highly anticipated definitive text on the theory of versification. Before the Mathematician could offer an objection, the poet had already disappeared, after offering the name of a bar through a mouth full of chicken, skirting the tennis courts with a sure step, erasing himself for a moment under the black mass of the pines, his silhouette reappearing in the yellow rectangle that formed again for a moment between the illuminated windows and which eventually, after a few seconds, disappeared. The Mathematician stood motionless, with his gaze fixed on some dark point of sky between the entrance gate and the multiplied blackness of the pines, sensing on the back of his neck the satisfied look of the guard, whose instinctive act of blocking his entrance had just been validated by the fleeting visit of the honoree. Then he turned around, walked away without a word, and, taking his car key from his pocket, stopped again after a few meters, holding the key in the air, positioned to enter the lock, shaking his head from time to time, as if debating with himself. In reality, the poet’s unexpected attitude had left him incapable of a reaction, as if his internal life ran on electricity and, two or three minutes before, someone had stepped out of the darkness and unplugged him. But really it wasn’t more than an obstruction, or a cooling, the kind that happens to certain motors that, as arbitrarily as they have stopped, start up again: when he resumed walking, his steps were no longer distracted but furious; he slammed the car door shut and, after starting the engine, drove away, but not before swerving around the club’s entrance with a lot of noise from the motor, brakes, and tires. He drove, deafened by his indignant and tumultuous thoughts, which went in and out, colliding in his head as if, as opposed to a few moments before, the motor was now overheating and about to explode. He went straight to his house and, since at that time he still lived with his family, crossed the entryway almost without stopping and shut himself in his room. Now, that is to say in the now following the now when he had turned on the car and the now when he had driven home, no? in that now, I mean to say, he tried to stay calm, to find the details in the situation that would allow him to transform his fury into disdain and his disdain into self-satisfaction. But he couldn’t pull it off — just the opposite, little by little, and only after getting undressed and throwing himself into bed, he began asking himself if he wasn’t misjudging the poet when he’d clearly given him proof of his trust and friendship by coming to the gate to explain the awkward situation he was in and making a date for later, and if he wasn’t making a mistake by standing him up instead of waiting for him at the bar like they agreed. The time they’d planned to meet was approaching and, like someone in love, the Mathematician could not figure out what to do, changing his mind every fifteen or twenty seconds, pulled this way and that like a dry leaf in the afternoon wind by those emotions and feelings that, if they aren’t measurable, at least with our current understanding, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why they couldn’t enter into some general theory or some structure that’s subject to mathematical formulae one of these days. Finally, after having decided with solid arguments that he would not go, he jumped up from the bed, got dressed and left for the meeting at the bar. He arrived fifteen minutes early, glancing quickly and discreetly from the car, before going to park, to see if the poet had already arrived. The Mathematician sat down at the bar to wait. To kill time, he took out the text of the Fourteen Points and started editing it here and there so that, when the time came to discuss it, every possible objection would be foreseen and pre-empted. For some twenty minutes, the Mathematician, thanks to his complete concentration on the text of the Fourteen Points, kept those emotions and feelings which, if they aren’t etc., etc., no? in the darkness outside the crystalline and well-illuminated cube that occupied the complete space of his mind. But as time passed, the polished and transparent surfaces began to fissure, leaking in, little by little, the indistinct and viscous outside world that, for some twenty minutes, he had seemed to overpower. Since it was now past midnight, the bar filled with people who were leaving the theaters and coming in to drink their last coffee before going to bed, commenting on the movie, discussing hopeless snoops, or making plans for the next day, but around one the bar started to empty again, until at one-thirty the only people left were the Mathematician, a couple fighting in whispers in a corner, and a belligerent drunk at the counter. Finally the drunk was gently driven out by the bartender, and the woman, in a burst of rage, stood up and walked out so that the man with her had no choice but to pay quickly at the register and run after her, and the Mathematician, who was on his second cup of coffee, was left alone in the bar where, discreetly but firmly, they had begun to set the chairs, upside down, on the tables, and to mop the floor. After a while, since it was now two in the morning and the poet had said eleven forty-five or twelve, and since the table where he sat was the only narrow islet surrounded by a sea of upside down chairs on tables and the floor where his feet were placed the only fragment, two meters square, where the floor did not shine, ready for the opening the following day, the Mathematician folded the Fourteen Points in fourths, picked up his unlit pipe, paid for his two coffees, and went out into the street. A new feeling was mixing with his humiliation and rage: the desperation we feel when we realize that the external world’s plans do not bear our desires in mind, no matter their intensity. The moment he left, the lights in the bar went out behind him. If not for the traffic lights and, from time to time, for the fleeting headlights of a passing car, he could have sworn that, in the whole universe, the only illuminated light hung inside his head and that something, in passing, had given it a shake and now lights and shadows shook violently in that too-narrow ring where thoughts, memories, emotions, fast and uncontrollable, exploded and disappeared like flares or grenades. He parked in front of his house. He closed the car door and stood for a moment on the dark sidewalk. For a while now time had been running backward, and just like a traveler, who begins to see an unexpected landscape through the window, in a moment of panic, understands that he’s on the wrong train, the Mathematician began to sense the person he’d thought he was being dismantled piece by piece, and replaced by floating loose fragments and splinters of an unknown self, fragments that have their own familiar quality, but seem in their ideas, emotions, and habitual feelings, archaic and excessive. He tiptoed through the dark house, went into his room, and, without turning on the light, undressed and went to bed. Every so often, sparks of tranquility made him say to himself, Come on, come on, it’s not worth getting bent out of shape over a slight or, even, over a series of unfortunate circumstances that no one’s to blame for, but because they were fleeting, they entered the whirlwind and were transformed into the archaic kind, tormenting him, so that, unable to sleep, as the dawn paled the bedroom through the skylight and the blinds, he lost his sense of reality, and the few ties binding him to the known world were loosed. Laying in the dark bed, he understood for the first time in his life, and at his own expense, that with enough pressure, like physical suffering, the spirit can also start to fissure at some unnamable and empty point, practically abstract, and what you could at one time call shame, guilt, humiliation, transforms, multiplied and approaching bottomless, into pins and needles, thumping, agitation, stabbing pain, shudders. For hours he tossed in bed, his eyes wide open, run through by sparking, incessant fragments that burned him from the inside and caused him so much suffering that, much later, when in spite of every effort to suppress them, he recalled them, a singular and recurrent image appeared to him: a human face that someone was slicing to pieces, slowly and deliberately, with glass from a broken bottle. Finally, around 11:00 in the morning, he fell asleep. As he had the habit of spending whole nights studying in his room, no one bothered him during the day, so that around 6:00, little by little, he woke up, thinking that he was surfacing on a different world or that he, in any case, wasn’t the same, and for a long time, whenever he ran into one of the conference organizers he tried to hide or, if he couldn’t, assumed an attitude of exaggerated jauntiness, without allowing the least bit of reproach to show in his face, to the point that, for some months, his greatest preoccupation was not to fundamentally interrogate himself about what had happened, but to avoid at all cost anyone noticing. And it worked. That burning, which for weeks had transformed his insides into an open wound and that, until it scarred, had been the complete opposite of the clean, tranquil, and well-proportioned external self that proffered smiling, precise statements — that kind of burn, I was saying, no? — which, bearing in mind the insignificance of the spark that started it, seemed to have been generated spontaneously, had gone unnoticed, just like the pain of the memory, to the rest of the world. And he, secretly, to himself, when he measured it from a distance, referred to those days, ironically, and particularly, as The Incident.

— Oh yeah? says Leto. Who did you hear it from?

— Botón, says the Mathematician.

Leto nods. That name, or nickname rather, Button, appears every so often in conversation, but to Leto it doesn’t evoke any precise image because he’s never seen its owner. He seems to be from Entre Ríos, to study law, to have been a reformist leader, to be seen a lot at vernissages and conferences, and to be a guitar player. Three or four times he’s heard Tomatis say, speaking to a third person, things like, Last night we ran into Botón falling down at a bar at the arcade, or once, referring to a painter, Botón cleans her pipes. But Leto has never seen him. In fact, when he hears the nickname, the first thing he imagines is an actual button, black with four holes in the center, and only after a quick correction begins to see the image of a person, a guy with straight hair and dark, pockmarked skin, which doesn’t correspond to any experience but which makes up, as a stand in, for the absence of experience. There always has to be something, thinks Leto. If there’s nothing, you think that there’s nothing and that thought is something.

Yes, Botón indeed, the Mathematician has just repeated. Botón who, as it happened, ran into El Gato Garay at the School of Fine Arts and promised to bring his guitar but, since he hadn’t gone back home after the meeting, hadn’t actually brought the guitar and, after running some errands downtown, was the first to arrive in Colastiné, where the party was. He had bought three bottles of white wine. In case they ran out, says the Mathematician. He’s always afraid they’ll run out. According to Botón — and, afterward, according to the Mathematician, no? — since it couldn’t have been later than 5:00 and the sun was still high, and Basso, the owner of the ranch, had just gotten up from his siesta, they had gone behind the house to pick vegetables. According to the Mathematician, Basso has a vegetable garden, raises chickens, and, with some money his maternal grandmother left him, can get by without working. Leto, who doesn’t know either Basso or Botón, nor has he ever been to that house, sees two guys picking at black earth, backlit by the falling sun at the end of a mild winter, in the back of a patio whose image comes, without his realizing, from two or three different ranches he’s visited, in Colastiné and Rincón, since he moved from Rosario. And the spot where that ranch sits, as the name Colastiné includes a physical area that extends beyond his experience, is an approximate point, more or less imagined, which Leto places, without knowing or even asking himself why, in a border region between his experience and the many purely imaginary fragments associated with the word Colastiné, and which he has never seen.

But soon enough, the Mathematician says, the others began to arrive: the Garay twins, who had wanted to use their house in Rincón but weren’t able to at the last minute because their mother had decided to fumigate that week, and Cuello, the writer. Cuello, like a neck? says Leto. Cuello, neck, that’s right. The Centaur, Cuello the Centaur, says the Mathematician. The Centaur? repeats Leto, intrigued. The Mathematician starts laughing. Yeah. The Centaur. Because he’s half man, half beast. Leto laughs too, shaking his head. The laughter, expelled by human throats and which, at the same time, sparks in human eyes, spreads to the morning air outside. A pedestrian, passing them, a man in shirtsleeves carrying a portfolio under his arm, a chubby and all but bald forty-something, laughs too, without their noticing, infected by the burst of sudden laughter he has just heard. And the Mathematician continues: Cuello had come early, according to Botón (who had heard it from El Gato at Fine Arts) in case Noca, a fisherman, who was supposed to bring a load of catfish and perch, failed at the last minute, in which case, since he worked at the Butcher’s Co-op, he — Cuello, no? — would be able to get some leftover steaks in a pinch. But Noca did not fail; almost at the same moment as Cuello, but coming from the coast and not the city, he’d arrived with two baskets full of perch and catfish which, after having caught, he’d taken the trouble to clean and gut in the river water. Judging by how the Mathematician tells it, Botón reported Noca’s arrival in a manner resembling a Greek chorus. But as he relays it, the Mathematician, applying a rigorous protocol, dismantles his informant’s version: Botón, a gringo, assumes a country style whenever he feels like it; he has an excessive taste for the barbarous; the real litmus test is his patent inability to dance a single step of the local folk dances, neither the rasguido doble nor the chamarrita. He knows Noca: instead of going to fish himself, he spends the day at the disco; he buys his catch from the real fishermen and resells them to the locals. He’s going to end up a fruit wholesaler. Still, Botón’s version, despite the Mathematician’s categorical yet disinterested sociological objections, is the one Leto adopts and retains: the mythic Noca, hunting in the savage river, with timeless skill, for the last perch, prevails despite the collective displacement caused by the social mobility that produces incremental urbanization in the coastal region. But for the Mathematician, were he to notice, Leto’s reticence would be neither here nor there: in reality, just as no art critic would think to disparage a portrait by asserting that the pictured model is ugly, or old, or a man or woman, and instead would attack the painter’s technique, the Mathematician couldn’t give two shits about the object Noca in its objective objectivity, he says, speaking poorly and in haste, but not so the description made by Botón, composed, according to the Mathematician, of stereotypical apriorisms and not of real empirical data. Pure radiotelephonic material, says the Mathematician.

Leto doesn’t laugh now. The word radiotelephonic carries, as though pasted to its reverse side, the image of his father: but sadness isn’t what has erased the smile from his face, but rather that somewhat mechanical gravity we assume when, with its insistent call, a thought or memory lures us toward the internal. For a few seconds, the Mathematician’s narration, intense and highly detailed, becomes, little by little, loose words, sound without meaning, a distant murmur, as if, despite the identical rhythm of their walk and of their almost grazing arms, they are walking in dissociate spaces, proving how much a memory can separate two people until, finally, the call dissipates, not without leaving a vague pit inside him, like a stain on a white wall whose source you ignore, and eventually Leto smiles and becomes attentive again, and the words of the Mathematician who, as I was saying, no? is telling Leto about Washington Noriega’s birthday, emerge from the horizon of sound and continue filling his head with not always adequate images. And the twins. . says the Mathematician. They leave the sidewalk; a car stops at the corner, waiting to turn off San Martín; they hesitate, move around it, cross the intersection, which unlike the previous ones is paved and not cobblestone, and reach the opposite corner. They leave behind the sunlit street and continue under the shade of the trees. Since stepping into the street the Mathematician has been quiet, postponing what he was about to say and assuming a vigilant expression at seeing the car approach, an air of ostentatious hesitance when the car, stopping at the corner, blocks their path, and when they leave the car behind his hesitant air gives way to a distracted and reproachful shake of the head, which stops when they reach the opposite sidewalk. The Garay twins, Leto goes on thinking. The twins, continues the Mathematician when they enter the shade, had gotten a hose to install a keg of import. In the hypothetical courtyard, situated in a fantastical place, the human figures, simplified by Leto’s imagination, disperse and scatter, active, outlined against the twilight: the Centaur, Basso’s wife and their girls, Botón and Basso picking vegetables at the back, the twins installing, at the door to the kitchen, the keg, covering the hose with ice, and Noca’s carriage leaving for the coast by a sandy road that Leto and Barco once walked, three months before, on a Sunday morning, to fish. And while the Mathematician dispenses new names, the image, more or less stable, made of assorted memories, is populated by new figures who come to occupy a place and function: Cohen and Silvia, his wife, Tomatis and Beatriz, Barco and La Chichito — the Cohens have come on their own — and Beatriz, Barco, and La Chichito, who had gone to pick up Tomatis at the paper, where he came out with a stack of day-old newspapers, for wrapping up the fish on the grill. According to Basso or Botón, says the Mathematician, Marcos Rosemberg had brought wine the night before, twenty-four bottles, and was in charge of going to find Washington and taking him to Basso’s. Finally they arrive, just before nightfall; Marcos Rosemberg’s sky-blue car parks in front of the ranch. To be exact, the Mathematician only says, in Marcos Rosemberg’s car, but since Leto knows it, having gotten in three or four times, he imagines it the proper color, so that he sees, in the twilight, the sky-blue car arrive, undulating and quiet, shimmering slightly in the falling light, in front of the imaginary ranch. They gave him a prodigious welcome, says the Mathematician ironically, quoting Botón verbatim. Evidently, the tap to the keg was poorly installed — it came out all foam — so Barco, who is a genius with his hands, dismantled and reinstalled the tap. Is it working? Is it? inquired a circle of anxious faces. Finally it started to draw. Because it would cool off that night, they’d prepared a large table, which hadn’t been set, under the pavilion, near the grill. Overcoming a moment of confusion, Leto is forced to install the unforeseen pavilion among the trees at the back. Nidia Basso and Tomatis were making a bitter salad in the kitchen. Cohen, the psychologist, who was going to be the cook, was lighting a fire in the grill. Barco was filling glasses with beer, and Basso cut slices of strong cheese and mortadella on a board and passed it around. Beatriz was rolling a cigarette. Washington, who had just relieved himself of his old Aerolinas Argentinas bag, which was full of books and papers, held a glass of beer in his hand, without deciding to take the first drink. And Botón? Botón, for hours, seemed to have removed himself from his story, as if the role of observer precluded his intervention in the action. Introducing a subtle variation, the Mathematician comments that, in fact, Botón’s version of events demands, with Botón’s personality in mind, a continuous revision, aimed at translating the scene from the province of mythology to that of history, but Leto, right then, from beneath the persistent image of a courtyard on the coast, on a winter evening, full of familiar and unfamiliar faces that combine vaguely, Leto, I was saying, no? almost without realizing it, and even though it’s always the same, is thinking about another time, about Isabel, the incurable illness, about Lopecito saying next to the closed casket, his eyes full of tears: Your old man was a television pioneer. He had the inventor’s gift. I owe him everything.

— The idea to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday was the twins’, says the Mathematician. And you have to tip your hat to them for bringing together such a diverse crowd. But as the saying goes: not everyone there was someone nor was everyone who’s someone there.

Leto looks at him: Is this a courtesy? But his look bounces off the perfect profile of the Mathematician who, with his gaze fixed on a point of air between the sidewalk and the treetops, somewhat absently, remembers: one night the previous summer when they were talking to Washington, Tomatis, and Silvia Cohen on the Cohen’s terrace, and Tomatis, who had been filling his glass of gin on the rocks nonstop, had begun to curse the fate of humanity, purely in jest, raising a threatening fist to the starlit sky, and he, the Mathematician, had started pulling his leg, but Washington, without distracting himself very much from his conversation with Silvia Cohen, had told Tomatis, pretending to answer an honest theoretical question, to let it go, that from a logical point of view the person who purely and simply whimpers under the stars, frightened by the absurdity of the situation, is closer to the truth than someone who, trying to be a hero or a believer in historicity, attempts, in spite of everything, to raise a family or win a book award from the SADE. A quick, distracted and discreet smile flashes in the Mathematician’s eyes. But, for some obscure reason, which even he is not conscious of, instead of telling that anecdote about Washington, he tells another, which he hasn’t thought about in a long time and which, as he started telling it aloud, was free of its representations.

— I heard that once a fantasy story writer, who was visiting him from Buenos Aires, asked Washington if he ever thought of writing a novel. And Washington puts on a scared face, as if the writer were threatening him. After a moment he answers: I, like Heraclitus of Ephesus and general Mitre in Paraguay, shall leave but fragments.

They laugh, continue on. The Mathematician thinks: Noca said that, if he came late, it was because one of his horses had stumbled. And Leto: He stole the love of his life, turned him into a bachelor, left him in charge of his family, and he says that he owes him everything.

— Supposedly, says the Mathematician, Noca told Basso that he’d be late because one of his horses had stumbled and broken a leg. They stood, Botón had said, five or six around Cohen, chewing cubes of mortadella and drinking beer as an appetizer, and observing Cohen, who was arranging coals and firewood, not without making every kind of grimace and weeping from the heat and smoke from which the spectators remained at a comfortable distance. And when, according to Botón, Basso had related Noca’s excuse, Cohen had abruptly interrupted his work and, without stopping from weeping and making painful grimaces, had planted himself, insistently, in front of Basso: Since when do horses stumble? he’d said.

— What? They don’t stumble? Leto says.

— They stumble, they do, says the Mathematician placatingly. And after a doubtful pause: Actually, it depends.

— Depends on what? Leto says.

— Depends on what you mean by stumble.

According to the Mathematician, and always according to Botón, no? Cohen’s argument had been the following: if stumbling is an er ror, and horses, like every other animal, act purely on instinct, isn’t it contradictory to attribute an error to instinct? An instinct would be something that, by definition, does not make mistakes. Instinct, Cohen said before returning triumphant to the flames, is pure necessity. When he turned his back on the spectators to work the fire with exaggerated attention, you could sense, to his satisfaction, a general silence. But a moment later Basso interjected again: He was only relating what Noca had told him, to let everyone know that, if he was late, it was because one of his horses had stumbled and. . Yeah, yeah, we get it, interrupted, with lighthearted impatience, Barco, who had left his post at the keg and reached the pavilion just in time to hear Basso’s story and Cohen’s objection. What, in his opinion, you had to ask yourself instead, were two things: the first, if it’s true that instinct doesn’t make mistakes; the second, if stumbling is a mistake. A pensive silence fell over the gathering. Basso interjected again: The problem with Noca was you could never tell when he was mythologizing and when he was telling the truth. And because he didn’t provide many details, they were forced to guess whether the horse had stumbled alone or when someone was riding it: Leto evokes, easily, the image of a man on a horse. The Mathematician thinks: The problem only arises for a horse with a rider. In that case, the error is the rider’s and not the horse’s. Just then, though, and always according to Botón, there was a commotion: Tomatis was carrying the fish, which he had just rewashed at the kitchen sink, in an enormous plastic tub (yellow, Leto thinks). You have to wash them again because there’s always some sand left behind, the Mathematician says that Botón told him that Tomatis said. And he adds: For Tomatis to have washed the greens and rewashed the fish shows how much he admires Washington. He and El Gato are his favorites. Washington, though he isn’t one or the other, has a soft spot for cynics and the arrogant.

But Tomatis isn’t cynical and El Gato isn’t arrogant, Leto thinks. Or is it the opposite? At that point, according to the Mathematician, it’s easy to imagine what followed: The fat catfish who offer the fruit of their body year round and the metallic perch who, prudently, only appear in winter, were submitted to the proper treatment for highlighting, perfecting even, their qualities; after filling them with a generous portion of onion and some parsley and bay leaf, they dipped the newspapers in oil and, with a dusting of salt and pepper, wrapped the fish up and arranged them neatly in rows on the grill, where the carefully distributed coals beneath would prevent any of the fragile meat from being lost. And to think he calls Botón a folklorist, Leto thinks with a touch of bad faith now that he can detect, in the Mathematician’s description, a touch of irony. Because, additionally, the Mathematician insists that whosoever looks to swim unaided in the colorless river of postulates, syllogistic modes, categories, and definitions should accompany his studies with a strict dietary regimen: fed on yogurts and blanched vegetables, the abstract order of everything, in its utmost simplicity, will be revealed, ecstatic and radiant, to the relentless, recently bathed ascetic.

— I’ll be right back, the Mathematician says unexpectedly, and taking from his pants pocket several pages folded in quarters, he enters the La Mañana building. Leto sees the tall, tanned body, dressed in all white, cross, with elegant strides, the threshold of the morning paper. After tomorrow, the press release, soaked in oil, will be used to wrap up perch and catfish, he thinks bitterly. And then: He left suddenly to force me to stay. Accepting, passively, the inexplicable need for his company that the Mathematician seems to feel, Leto leans against the trunk of the last tree on the sidewalk. Beyond the bright cross street, at the opposite corner, the street widens abruptly, and trees no longer line the sidewalks. As they have approached the city center, more people have appeared on the streets, and because the commercial district proper starts to concentrate after the next block, the passing cars, slow and humming, are mixed with bicycles, tricycles, and light delivery trucks painted with the names and addresses of businesses. Despite the conversation and the Mathematician’s story, Leto is submerged in his own memory, where Lopecito’s voice, with his Rosario accent, murmurs, melancholic and stunned. We built radios in a little workshop on Calle Rueda. And when people started talking about television, during the second World War, your old man started studying English and ordered technical magazines from North America. You were two or three. Don’t you remember how, on his own dime, he started putting together a television in the garage you had in Arroyito? You should remember because you were older then. You remember? He remembers: he slept in the room next door. Every night, Isabel, in a nightgown, would get up three or four times and bang on the locked door to the garage. Can’t you answer? Can’t you answer? she would yell. He listened to the same insistent lament every night. Later, when the house was dark and silent, he would hear the garage door open and close, and breathing and footsteps moving, in the darkness, toward the bedroom. Isabel’s whiny, sleepy voice could be heard again, and Leto, holding his breath to hear better, waited for the response that never came: What can you do, it was a sexual thing, he thinks, his eyes fixed on the bright intersection. Or something even worse. Lopecito, meanwhile, his eyes full of tears, muting his intensity with that whispered register that’s reserved for wakes: Don’t you remember before the television came to Rosario we did a demonstration at the Sociedad Rural with a machine he’d built in the garage and there were write ups in La Capital? He’d order parts from Buenos Aires, from the U.S., and what he couldn’t find he made himself. Isabel would come in from time to time and hug them, crying. You’ll have to be very good to your mother now, Lopecito said, and, so that Isabel wouldn’t hear, he added in Leto’s ear: While I’m alive and can use my hands you won’t want for anything, I give you my word. And he was making good. But he, Leto, no? felt like he was on stage, and not that he didn’t have anything to say, or that Isabel and Lopecito and everyone else hadn’t learned their roles, but they were all acting, on the same stage but in different plays. Once in a while, something they said was so surprising that Leto could only stare, waiting for them to bust out laughing, because he thought they were joking. But the laughter never came. The familiar faces became impenetrable, remote masks, and no matter how much he examined them he got nothing, nothing whatsoever, no? from anyone. They were like another species, like those invaders in science fiction movies who come from another planet and take on a human form to better facilitate their takeover. His father, for example, whom they had put in a casket, was he really dead, or pretending? And what Isabel and Lopecito said about his person — his father’s, I mean, no? — coincided so little with Leto’s empirical reality that he heard them as formulaic expressions memorized to further some conspiracy. For that good man, for that inventor who had ended up dedicating himself to the sale of electrical goods, Leto felt neither love nor hate, but rather a neutral anticipation, similar to what we feel when, after smashing a housefly with a shoe, we wonder whether it still has the reflexes to keep twitching a little more over its ruined self. There was something in the man’s habits that no one seemed to perceive but which to Leto was the essential and all but singular characteristic that emanated from his person — a kind of sardonic expression that signified something like: just wait and see, just wait for when I decide to, or when that, rather, that which he was on the verge of, and which others seemed to ignore, would be decided. That inner half-smile that, on the contrary, never once escaped Leto, announced to the world an approaching catastrophe whose unmistakable signs its bearer had seen from the beginning. It couldn’t have been only sexual, Leto thinks, feeling the tree trunk, hard and rough, on his back, through the thin fabric of his shirt. Even though César Rey argues that, looked at a certain way, even Billiken is a pornographic magazine. No, it was something separate and distinct from the sexual, he thinks, a constituent part of himself that stained everything and that poisoned him. All the afternoons, the mornings, the evenings that made up his life had been corroded by that toxic substance he secreted, and which, whatever he did, whether he was still or tried to stifle it, never stopped pouring out and leaving a pestilent smear on everything. And, Lopecito was saying, your old man was. . he was a genius with. . I owe him. . etc. Leto remembers that in the garage where his father shut himself up there was a kind of large table, made of pine, bolted to the wall, and a giant heap of casings to radios, full, empty, or with the insides half out and spilling from the back, bulbs, tubes, pins, knobs, loose plugs, colored cables, copper wire, technical books and magazines, pliers, screwdrivers, and even when he didn’t take part in the permanent squabble that pitted Isabel against his father, that his father, although somewhat distant, was more or less friendly or indifferent, and that all of those mysterious and colorful things intertwined on the table in the garage never lost their appeal, though he never touched them, not out of fear of his father, who would have no doubt been pleased by his son’s interest, but fear of that fluid that, possibly without realizing, his father secreted, and whose signs Leto could detect on everything, the way the earth shows, through indistinct but definitive markers, the clear trail of a snake or scorpion. Leto imagined him bent over the table, under lamp light, working a tiny screwdriver and, for some unknown reason, not responding when Isabel banged on the door each night. Open the door. I said open it, Isabel would say, her tone desperate, until, surrendering, she’d finally go to bed, not without whimpering a while before falling asleep, and, still, the next morning she would wake up radiant, and sing while she made breakfast, straightened up the house, or walked to the market. That sudden change intrigued Leto: Was it faked, or was it the nightly desperation and the whimpering in bed that she faked, or was it all faked, or none of it? And this morning when, turning from the glowing blue rings on the stove, she said that unexpected, He suffered so much, Leto thinks, And I started pointlessly scrutinizing her face, its impenetrability came, precisely, from the absence of artifice. She‘s not faking when she sings or when she talks or when she shuts up or even when she insists that she’s doing one thing when in fact she’s doing the opposite. She lives a plain life, in a single dimension—the dimension of her desire, the desire for nothing, or rather for the contradiction to not exist. And Lopecito, no? the night of the wake, as soon as they were alone: Everything came out right for him. When he started in sales he had so much work he called me to offer the whole north part of the province if I wanted it. Nothing would have stopped us from expanding, but he preferred freedom and, more than anything else, shutting himself up in the garage every night to work. He was in love with technology. He was so enthusiastic. Leto listened, silently, telling himself over and over that even poor Lopecito had been sucked into that masquerade, and with a conviction that exceeded every expectation. That plain universe which, for mysterious reasons, and without their suspecting it, Leto had been excluded from, in a way that made the generalized vacuousness of their actions immediately recognizable, seemed impregnable less because of its solidity than because of its inconsistency — diffuse, irregular, and ubiquitous.

Absorbed, as we’re in the habit of saying, by his thoughts or, if you prefer, as always, by his memories, Leto steps away from the tree, walking slowly toward the intersection. He has just forgotten about the Mathematician. Like the stage actor who does a pirouette and then disappears into the darkness off stage or, better yet, like those sea creatures who, ignorant of the sun that makes them flash, reveal, periodically, a glistening spine that sinks and reappears at regular intervals, a few images, sharp and well-formed, approach and move off. Distracted, he crosses the street and arrives at the opposite sidewalk — and his distraction is also what makes him go through with the paradoxical act of stopping on the bright sidewalk and turning back toward the corner he has just left, knowing unconsciously that he is waiting for someone or something, but not knowing exactly who or what, or better yet, and strictly speaking, his body is what turns and stops to wait — Leto’s body, no? — that unique and completely external thing that, independent from what, inside, yields control and continuity, now casts, over the gray pavement, a shadow slightly shorter than him — his body, I mean — plump and young, standing in the morning, on the central avenue, giving the world the illusion, or the abusive proof, maybe, of his existence.

In a hurry, the Mathematician walks out of the newspaper office. Seeing him, Leto, for a fraction of a second, thinks, What a coincidence, the Mathematician, until he remembers that they have been walking together for several blocks and that he’s been waiting for him on the sidewalk for a few minutes now. The Mathematician walks straight to the middle of the sidewalk and, noticing Leto’s absence, stops suddenly, disconcerted, but, turning his head, spots him across the street and, resuming a normal stride and smiling apologetically, starts walking toward Leto, who also smiles. And the Mathematician thinks: Did he decide to leave? Maybe he crossed the street to put some distance between us and now he’s smiling back guiltily. The editor had sat reading the press release on his desk without touching it, as though it were a venomous snake. They probably have me blacklisted, the Mathematician thinks. But, like a magician who makes several plates at once dance at the edge of a table, his thoughts are occupied at the same time with Leto, and the Mathematician, to show his good will and that the delay wasn’t his fault, hurries a little without managing to get very far, as the traffic on the two-lane cross street is stopped on the corner because of the movement on the central avenue, forcing him to wait a moment at the cable guardrail, smiling at Leto over the cars that are slowly advancing.

From the opposite sidewalk Leto returns his smile with a vague gesture: on the one hand he wants to show that he accepts the Mathematician’s forgiving smile, which discharges his responsibility and in any case is already disappearing from the Mathematician’s face, but also he doesn’t want to exaggerate the display, in order to highlight that, after all, the Mathematician was the one who whistled on the street and who insists on following him on his walk. But the signals his expression sends in the Mathematician’s direction are neutralized and his expression is incomprehensible, or at least it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the Mathematician’s. Leto looks at him: the Mathematician has finally managed to step over the cable into the street, but a car, brushing past, stops him, and when he moves around it the car stops at the corner, but when he gets to the middle of the street another car coming from the opposite direction forces him, again, to stop; the car that paused on the corner starts up again and, just then, the Mathematician’s entire body, dressed completely in white, including his moccasins, emerges, as if through the opening made by the panels of an accordion door, from between the trunks of the two cars, the same model but different colors, which are separating in opposite directions. He is present, clearly visible. For some reason he ignores, and that he, of course, is not conscious of, Leto’s thoughts and memories are interrupted, and he sees the street, the trees, the newspaper building, the cars, the Mathematician, the sky, the air, and the morning as a clear and animate unity from which he is slightly separated but completely present to, in any case at a fixed and necessary point in space, or in time, or matter, a fluid or nameless, but no doubt optimal, location, where all contradictions, without his having asked or even wanted it, are, benevolently, erased. It’s a novel and pleasant state, but its novelty doesn’t reside in the appearance of something that didn’t exist previously but in a build-up of evidence in the preexistent, and the pleasure, likewise, doesn’t reside in a gratified desire but in some unknown source. It’s hard to say whether the clarity comes from Leto or from the objects, but suddenly, seeing the Mathematician advance upright and white from between the trunks of two cars that are moving in opposite directions, Leto begins to see the group, the Mathematician included, not as cars or trees or houses or sky or human beings, but as a system of relations whose function is no doubt connected to the combination of disparate movements, the Mathematician forward, the cars each a different way, the motionless things changing aspect and location in relation to the moving things, everything no doubt in perfect and causal proportion so that living it or feeling it or however you’d call his state, but without thinking it, Leto experiences a sudden, blunt joy, in which he can’t distinguish the joy from what follows, which sharpens his perception. The car driving away behind the Mathematician is white and the one in front of him, driving in the opposite direction, a pale green — a rare pale green, with shades of gray, as though some white and black had combined in its composition, no? — and the Mathematician, who is emerging from between them, contrasts against the background of trees forming a luminous half-light, over the sidewalk, on the block they just left. What is happening is at the same time fast and very slow. Independent of his physical features, of his dress, even of his social origin or the posture he assumes, nor owing to some affective projection of Leto’s, who shares Tomatis’s objections and knows him less, the Mathematician, as he crosses the street, is transformed into a beautiful object, with an abstract and absolute beauty that has nothing to do with his preexisting attributes but rather with some cosmic coincidence that joins, for a few seconds, many different elements into an unstable composition which, mysteriously, when the Mathematician reaches the sidewalk and the two cars separate in opposite directions, dissolves, having existed only for Leto.

— They wanted to cut it, says, to apologize for the delay, the Mathematician.

Again he’s the Mathematician, a friend of Tomatis, tall, blonde, tan, rich, progressive, dressed completely in white, including his moccasins, carrying a pipe in his hand, just back from a tour of Europe. Leto looks at him quizzically.

— The press release, says the Mathematician.

— Oh, I see. That’s a relief, says Leto, laughing, but the distracted seriousness of the Mathematician, who doesn’t seem to have heard him, causes him to put on a grave expression. They start walking. Out of the corner of his eye, somewhat awkwardly, Leto observes the Mathematician, who has retaken the inside track. For several meters they walk without speaking. Leto thinks that the Mathematician, offended at having seen that he’d crossed the street and was ready to leave if he took any longer at the newspaper, has shut himself off deliberately to show his disapproval; but what is really happening, what gives him that serious, almost irritated air, is that, burrowing into his information, into his suspicions, into his capacity for psychological projection and the political classification of his associates, putting the pieces together, the Mathematician is all but convinced that the newspaper employee, having catalogued him politically as well, has tried to set up obstacles to the publication of the press release and has even suggested that they might end up cutting it. And Leto thinks, or rather sees, no? Lopecito’s face the night of the wake: He never complained. Nothing ever bothered him. He slept three or four hours a night. He never got tired. He never got sick. He always had great ideas. I never saw him depressed. He always had friends. Not once did he doubt his ability. He always had his sights on the future, always wanted to learn new things. Lopecito’s image is erased. Leto turns slightly toward the Mathematician and is about to tell him something but, shaking his head, as though recovering from a faint, the Mathematician speaks first: No, he says, smiling. I was thinking about those cheap sluts the masses refer to as journalists.

— Tomatis being a typical example, says Leto.

— Exactly, says the Mathematician. They laugh. According to Botón, Tomatis, when the discussion over the stumbled horse had picked up, had said about Noca: If a horse walks into a bar and stumbles, it’s the horse’s fault; if it’s walking out, it’s Noca’s fault. Everyone laughed, according to Botón, but in reality they didn’t know. In reality, says the Mathematician, Noca’s horse, and even Noca’s story, are irrelevant to the argument. You only need to generalize the problem: Do horses stumble or not? And then, as Barco says, what do you mean by stumble?

Just back from Europe, the previous Saturday, the Mathematician had boarded the ferry to see a rugby match in Paraná. Leaning on the railing of the upper deck, with his lit pipe clenched tightly between his teeth, watching the big tractor trailers lining up in rows on the lower deck, he sees Botón board at a run, holding a bag in one hand and his guitar case in the other and, judging by the speed and precision with which he climbs the stairs and walks up next to him, without lifting his eyes once, thinks Botón must have seen him from the dock, before getting on the ferry — Botón who, as the Mathematician guessed at seeing him sidestep, clean and freshly combed and shaved, the trucks maneuvering, noisily and almost at a crawl, to board and line up on the ferry — Botón, who the Mathematician, I was saying, no? has guessed his plans to spend the weekend with his family in Entre Ríos, and who, as soon as they sat down on a wooden bench on the upper deck, at the stern, began telling him, in complete detail, about the birthday party. They’ve taken the midday ferry for different reasons, the Mathematician because he figures that since the trip takes two hours and the match starts at 3:30, he will have time to walk to the field, and Botón because, as he put it, he should have taken the ten o’clock, since the bus to Diamante leaves at 2:30, but he overslept and now he’ll barely have time to get from the docks to the station and jump on the bus. It’s cloudy but not cold: both reasons they can stay on deck at midday. Blinded by repetition, they don’t see the gradual withdrawal, as the ferry moves away, of the suspension bridge on the southern side, the regatta club, the harbor, Alto Verde on the opposite shore, the inlets, the islands, the canoes and motorboats that, in the opposite direction, are navigating toward the city. The overcast sky is unique: the clouds are small, almost square, stuck to together at the ends, which are a darker gray than at the slightly protuberant centers of each; motionless, they cover the whole sky, to the horizon, almost all the same size, so that the firmament, whose name was never better suited, though the name applies to the starlit sky and not, specifically, to the clouds, gives the impression of being a concave, stone-walled vault. That rocky, stable sky would last all day, until at nightfall, without a sound, it would begin to dissolve, not before passing through a much darker gray, a smooth phase, with an ever-increasing rainfall that would last until the evening the following day. But at midday on Saturday, above the ferry, the river, and the islands, it still conserved that hardness of pavement. Botón, who has left the bag and the guitar on the bench they’re sitting on, takes a bar of chocolate from his pocket and undressing it — why not — halfway down its two layers of printed and silvery paper, extends it to the Mathematician who, with distant and pensive courtesy, refuses it. Without formalities, Botón asks, point blank, the inevitable question: How was your trip? And the Mathematician, a few seconds later, with his gaze fixed on the point where the ferry’s wake begins to disappear on the surface of the river, hears himself repeat for Botón, not without a certain distaste, the list of cities that bring with them the supposedly empirical images that, ever since his travels, accompany their names: Venice, the real gateway to the East and not Istanbul; Warsaw, there was nothing left; Bruges, they painted what they saw; Madrid, the thing you feel you’ve lost abroad you rediscover there. Botón observes him a few seconds, without blinking, his head slightly tilted, already thinking about something else, eating his chocolate, and when the Mathematician finishes, without offering any comment, he starts telling his own story, as if their stories, which have nothing to do with each other, were complementary — Botón I was saying, no? that blonde, curly-haired boy, with a blonde goatee and almost transparent blue eyes, who when he sings along to his guitar does it so softly that you have to lean in with your hand to your ear and turn toward him to hear anything — according to Tomatis, Botón’s only deviance from a rigorous nationalist observance is the excessive consumption of cognac and Paraguayan caña that, while both are national brands, are in fact manufactured beyond our borders. Botón says that, early in September or late August maybe, he doesn’t quite remember, there was a big party at Basso’s ranch, in Colastiné Norte, to celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Jorge Washington Noriega (the sixty-five years of Washington, in Botón’s words), that he had run into El Gato at Fine Arts and that El Gato had invited him and told him to bring his guitar too, that the guests had arrived slowly — the first of them had gone to the back of the patio to pick vegetables with Basso, who had just gotten up from his siesta. That the thing had lasted til dawn.

— Of course, says Leto. I get it.

— Right, says the Mathematician.

More or less like that, no? What you mean by stumble. Is there just an external hoof and an external hole or a rock in a place of pure externality where, through the intervention of different spacio-temporal factors, an encounter between the end of the hoof and the salient protuberance of a half-buried rock takes place, so that its motive equilibrium is disturbed by the collision, leading to an imbalance of the subject, without notions of error or intention needing to intervene whatsoever in the sequence of events, considering it simply as a physical occurrence in which a specific mass, velocity, force, direction, etc., coincide, or rather, approaching it from an internal or subjective perspective, is this an event whose occurrence is only possible if you admit the existence, among the subject’s attributes, of a tendency contrary to what allows it to move quickly on its limbs and navigate obstacles without accident? Neither Barco under Basso’s pavilion, nor any of the others present, nor the Mathematician or Leto on the straight and bright street they walk down at a regular pace, have framed the dilemma in these terms, this way, but its outline, irrefutable and stripped bare, floats, identically, despite the occasional frills each of them dresses it with, in each of their heads. Right, the Mathematician says again. And Washington, calmly smoking a Gitane Filtre (Caporal) from one of the packs given to him the day before by the director of the Alianza Francesa, wasn’t saying anything. He smiled, pensively, but didn’t say anything. Hushed by Noca’s symposium, by Noca’s horse, by every individual, horse, or human: under Basso’s pavilion, on a mild evening at the end of winter, and on a straight and bright street, the hard residue of the event, the outline, the ossified or petrified limit, remains as an obstruction to the problem. Cohen worked the wood and coals. Barco, in a single swallow, emptied his glass of beer and, leaving the pavilion, took his post next to the keg and the tap. Others dispersed as well. Botón and Basso went to the refrigerator to make sure the white wine was chilling properly; Beatriz, Tomatis, Cuello the Centaur, and La Chichito were walking around and smoking, glass in hand, under the mandarins. Silvia Cohen and Marcos Rosemberg were talking inside the house, near the library. Under the pavilion were Nidia Basso, Cohen, Washington, and the twins. Afterward, necessarily, Botón returns, because how else, no? — Botón who at the stern of the ferry tells the Mathematician: Washington always pensive, the twins there, Nidia Basso, and Cohen, satisfied for having, with his objection, etc., etc. — the others dispersed around the patio and the house, on a mild evening, at the ranch in Colastiné, to which Leto, who is listening now to the Mathematician, has had to add an unforeseen pavilion and a grill he can barely picture, since most of the story takes place under the thatched roof of a generic pavilion, more or less the idea of a pavilion, without an overly defined shape, staked in a patio he can’t picture with absolute clarity, where familiar and unfamiliar people possessing, as the Mathematician mentions them, distinct gradations of reality, drink a kind of beer that Leto has never seen, smelled, touched, or tasted, but which has been stamped unequivocally inside him, golden, with its head of white foam, probably in circular glasses that, without realizing it, Leto makes coincide with, or deduces rather, from his memories.

God damn it! And me in Frankfurt, thinks the Mathematician suddenly. Residue of The Incident. But he forgets it. Owing, apparently, in the era of Temistocles, to a man named Hippodamus, from Miletus they say, tasked with the so-called urbanization of Piraeus, Leto and the Mathematician, ruled by the chess set form of our cities, arrive at the next corner where the intersecting caesura of the cross street interrupts the straight gray line of the sidewalk. They pass from the sun to the shade, from the sidewalk to the street, from the street to the sidewalk, and from the sun to the shade again without changing the rhythm of their pace and without having to stop once, because, as luck would have it, no cars were passing just then on the cross street. The street is so empty that they can keep talking while they cross or, to be more precise, the Mathematician can continue his story — or rather can keep telling Leto the memory he’s been keeping, without having told the outside world a single detail, since the previous Saturday, an opaque and cloudy afternoon on the upper deck of the ferry — the memory, elaborated by Botón’s words and proffered between mouthfuls of chocolate, that he, the Mathematician, no? imagines like this: Barco, the Garay twins, Nidia Basso, and Silvia Cohen start setting the table under the pavilion, the fish continue grilling, the salads sit ready on the stove in the kitchen. There must have been some general commotion before they settled at the table, coming and going from the kitchen, chairs scraping, clinking of plates, of silverware, hesitations — How many are we? The kids already ate, me and Nidia two, Barco, Tomatis, La Chichito, and Beatriz and the twins eight, Botón and Cuello ten, Washington and Marcos Rosemberg twelve (Cohen: I won’t sit, just pick a little from the grill), Silvia thirteen. We’re missing Dib, Pirulo with Rosario, and Sadi and Miguel Ángel — a while must have gone by before they started to eat, thinks the Mathematician.

And he says: It’s the most diverse group you can imagine. In sixty-five years Washington had time to make friends in every sector, and for different reasons: Cuello, for example, who is twenty years younger, was born in the same town and calls him his mentor; Sadi and Miguel Ángel Podio, who are members of the left-wing labor union, admire him because in the twenties Washington published an anarchist newspaper; Pirulo and the Cohens discuss the humanities with him; Basso and his wife, Zen Buddhism; Beatriz (Leto imagines her rolling a cigarette) worked with him on a translation of some nineteenth-century French prose poems. Barco, Tomatis, and the twins are part of this entourage, and Marcos Rosemberg is the only one left in the city from Higinio Gómez’s generation. Botón considers himself a close friend. And me in Frankfurt, thinks the Mathematician. And Leto: I wasn’t invited.

According to Botón, Dib, who after abandoning philosophy opened a mechanics shop, brought three bottles of whiskey, Caballito Blanco, he — Botón, no? — clarified, approvingly, and they started to eat. And Botón says that Barco said (more or less): If we attribute the stumble to chance, it’s obvious a horse can stumble. But if we consider the stumble an accident, that is, deviance from a necessary action, it goes without saying that horses do not stumble. I’m of the chef’s opinion, in that case. And Cohen (also more or less): I don’t have an opinion. I’m only inferring the necessary implications in our notion of instinct. And Beatriz (also more or less and, to Leto, listening to what the Mathematician tells him, constantly rolling a cigarette): If we accept the cook’s notion of instinct, we would come to the conclusion that horses don’t die. Given that instinct is pure necessity, and the first necessity of a living being is its own survival, how can a horse die, given that it’s a living being?

Much more alive than some of us here, says the Mathematician that Botón told him Tomatis said. He can imagine Tomatis saying that from the other end of the table, while he slowly unwraps his fish and scrapes, with his knife blade, the burned skin that may have stuck to the newspaper. Washington, the Mathematician says, wasn’t saying anything. Several in the group must have been waiting for him to open his mouth, but Washington confined himself to eating, bent over his plate with a thoughtful smile, pushing down the mouthfuls from time to time with sips of white wine. Botón, on the upper deck of the ferry, says that Washington didn’t say anything. Botón says, the Mathematician says. Both imagine him: the Mathematician as blonde, curly-haired, with a blonde goatee, eating his chocolate bar to make up for the breakfast he couldn’t eat because he got up too late, the almost transparent clear blue of his eyes, recently showered and combed, getting ready to spend the weekend in Diamante, and Leto as dark-haired, imprecise, his skin dark and covered in acne, his hair straight and unruly, of an almost wiry stiffness, without Leto knowing or ever having asked himself, since he’s never seen him, why the word Botón, which evokes that string of unknown associations, summed up in the characteristics attributed to their name, makes him look like this.

Washington didn’t say anything, no? sitting there with his eyes lowered, leaning over his plate, where his perch sat unwrapped, open, with its filling of parsley and onions, on the charred newspaper page, and in some places fused, or confused rather, with the fish skin. But, according to the Mathematician, his eyes smiled thoughtfully and, two or three times, he was about to say something, lifting his head and looking at the whole gathering who, except for two or three, Beatriz, maybe, or the Centaur, or one of the two twins, El Gato probably, weren’t paying any attention to him. He seemed to be gathering, inside him, the ends of a phrase, of a memory, of something that demands a basic order before it will let itself be spoken — spoken, or rather laid out, articulated, through a sequence of muscular and respiratory combinations, among palpable and impalpable folds of organic material and thought, to the outside world — a familiar music that, even when it comes out in constant and conventional forms, allows itself to be stitched and unstitched in an infinite number of variations.

— Instinct. Set in motion by, the Mathematician says that Beatriz said, and always, and more or less, according to Botón.

— By whom? Or by what? asks Leto.

— What. Probably what. Who, some argue, is already finished, says the Mathematician cryptically.

They’ve left behind the wide, residential section of the street and are now walking down a narrow, treeless sidewalk where more and more frequently the windows and doors of businesses sit open. Bringing the stem of the unlit pipe to his lips, the Mathematician distractedly starts stroking them with the tip, its bowl hidden in his closed hand. He doesn’t say anything now. Above his eyebrows, on his smooth forehead, his skin wrinkles a little, into horizontal furrows, and between the two little blonde brushes appear two oblique fissures, forming a vertex at the bridge of his nose. Leto, meanwhile, remembers: Isabel, the past year, Lopecito, the wake, the closed casket, etc. — and five days before all that, that is, before the wake, Lopecito, etc. no? — as we were, or rather I, yours truly, no? was saying: green wheat, already so tall, from the bus window. He has left Rosario Norte an hour before, with his mother. They’re on their way to Andino, to his maternal grandparents’ house, to spend the weekend. It’s a Friday in late spring. They left Rosario at 1:00. When they leave behind the San Lorenzo industrial complex, the land fills with tall green wheat, fields of flax, and, sometimes, yellow sunflowers right up to the shoulders of the road. Every once in a while they pass a farmhouse, with its windmill and eucalyptus, which interrupts, as they say, the fields, the same way stations divide the scant towns in two like a river or a railroad would in other places in the world. A parallel dirt path separates, in the country, the geometrical grains from the road — and on that path, every once in a while, a solitary carriage travels, hardworking and unreal, which the bus, as slow as it is, leaves behind with ease. He, helpful and enthusiastic, went along to the station. That man who, ever since Leto has had use of his reason, has always been silent, distant, shut away with his unsuspected chimeras in his radio workshop, for the last month or so seems to have broken the bell jar that separated him from the outside world, and has come with them, seeming euphoric, close, warm, and open. Leto observes him at a distance, incredulous. At first the change was so sudden that, in his skepticism, he was sure it was some kind of joke, or a tactical transformation, but his persistence and his conviction to the role were so intense that Leto’s initial incredulity was replaced with doubt — is he? would he? — all that, no? telling himself at the same time, but from then on without concrete ideas or words and almost without realizing it, though not only his mind but also his whole body are for some reason saturated with those senses that more and more resemble the shudder or the silent beating or the contraction of nerves, temples, veins, muscles, telling himself, he would say, but in that way, no? that if it was a comedy the intended audience was Leto himself, because for Isabel, Lopecito, and the rest, who were convinced in advance, no persuasion was necessary — he, Leto no? — the only one who suspected that the man had something up his sleeve, that the man had realized—and decided I was the last obstacle to demolish before his magical circle could finally close, the straggler he had to force in before sealing, hermetically, from the inside, the capsule, and launching it into the interstellar space of his own delirium, Leto thinks, this time with clear and well-formed thoughts, walking, next to the Mathematician, always to the south, on the shady sidewalk, where, more and more frequently, the windows and doors of businesses are open. On a bright, warm, and calm November afternoon, the bus drives past rectangles of blue flax, of yellow sunflowers and green wheat, leaving behind, slow and regular, the repetitive uprights of the telegraph poles, while Leto, sitting next to the window, candidly observes Isabel who, in the seat ahead of him, calmly and serenely flips through the latest issue of Ms & Mrs. The comedy that Leto, after several weeks, has convinced himself is real, produces a tranquilizing and at the same time euphoric effect in Isabel, inasmuch as her old phantasms of marital bliss, upward mobility, sexual satisfaction, economic stability, familial harmony, religious tranquility, and physical well-being have seemed, in recent weeks, to have found their long-awaited substantiation, despite the resistance of a hostile world. Isabel’s attention, detached from the intense perfection of the land, is fixed on the page — a weight-loss plan? the horoscope? an interesting recipe? the opinions of a movie star? sentimental correspondence? Leto doesn’t wonder anymore, feeling nonetheless, indifferently, definitively perhaps, the abyss that separates them. The magazine, elevated almost to her chest, lets him see the belly which, under a modest skirt, ends at the vertex that the crossing muscles form with the pubis — he was in there, for nine months, and then funneled out, fell into the world. What should he feel? First of all, the ubiquitous mother, the amazing plain, fascinates him just then more than his own; the vast world, so indifferent, nevertheless seems more familiar than the one he was raised in at home. His coldness isn’t quite hatred — still, the censure he himself ignores, buried for a long time, feeling now that it’s too late to want them to have been different, makes him see his own feelings as though they were controlled remotely by others, an older and distinct species — not hatred, no, but instead a sort of quiet and curious outrage that makes him observe them constantly to see how far they’ll go, with the wild hope that, after so much time, with laughter and a shift in pose, they will finally say: Okay, that’s enough, show’s over, time to start being our real selves. He, the kind and helpful man, has gone with them to the bus station, in Rosario Norte, has given the impression, for the last month, of being something else, not his real self, but still very different — his concentrated detachment has become lightheartedness; his distracted indifference, friendly attention; his limp and depressive inertia regarding his family and work, enthusiasm and projects. The day before, he came out of the workshop with his eyes tired from connecting so many thin cables and adjusting so many tiny screws, and while he helped Isabel get dinner ready and set the table, he told Leto that next week, when they came back home, they would go fishing together; they would cross the river on a canoe with Lopecito and camp on the island for a couple of days. He even rang up Lopecito who, of course, sounded excited. And in Rosario Norte, just as they were getting on the bus, he, that man, reminded him: on Wednesday, at the latest, because Lopecito was busy Monday and Tuesday, they would row to the island. In fact, Leto has to put effort into showing that he finds the outing as attractive as Lopecito and his father seem to, but the slightly irked, wary curiosity these altered people inspire allows him to give himself over, to persist, with the same affected detachment one would use to observe the behavior of a colony of laboratory mushrooms, in acting out the different scenes of the comedy, hoping to finally unravel the heart of the plot and its characters. Many years later he will understand, from the overwhelming evidence, that the so-called human soul never had, or will ever have, what they call substance or essence, that what they call character, style, personality, are nothing but senseless replications, and that their own subject — the body where they manifest — is the one most starved of their nature, that what others call life is a series of a posteriori recognitions of the places where a blind, incomprehensible, ceaseless drift deposits, in spite of themselves, the eminent individuals who, after having been dragged through it, begin to elaborate systems that pretend to explain it; but for now, having just turned twenty, he still believes that problems have solutions, situations outcomes, individuals personality, and actions logic. Leto observes, with some pleasure, the countryside through the window. Every ten or fifteen kilometers the bus stops at a station for a few minutes to drop off or pick up bags of mail, travelers, the ticket taker, the shopkeepers returning from their restocking trips to Rosario, the packets of newspapers and magazines, the passengers going from one town to another, few compared to those coming from Rosario, as though contact among those towns were prohibited and it was only possible for them to connect by way of the abstract and distant city, those towns on the plains, squared off like the country, regularly and strictly consisting of two rows of houses, most of unplastered brick, four blocks long, one on each side of the highway and separated — each row of houses, no? — from the bus station by a wire fence, a windmill, and a wide dirt street — and on the ends of the four blocks, two lateral streets that close the quadrilateral and rise slightly at the shoulder, towns that are, to put it one way, like a miserly concession from the plains to roughen, at brief and regular intervals, its simplistic, monotonous geometry. To Leto those towns are childhood — that is, in his case, the coming and going by train or by bus, the vacations, in winter or summer, at his grandparents’ house, his grandfather’s general store with its big, dark shelves, the colored fabrics, patterned with flowers, stripes, polka dots, blocks, or with little black and white flowers, stacked on top of each other and lined up diagonally in the cases, the carefully situated yellow bags of sod, the logo and the letters of the brand repeated on several rows, the pyramids of identical cans of preserves, piled up at the back of the store, the bins of caramels, the rows of cigarette packs organized by brand, the ones with blonde tobacco on the left side of the case, with black tobacco in the middle, toscanos, toscanitos, matches, loose tobacco, and rolling paper on the right, the big bins of sugar, of lentils, of garbanzos, of noodles, the rows of dried cod, stiff and covered with rock salt, the harvesting bags smelling of leather and oil, the bottles of wine, by type, by brand, by size, the glass cases with toiletries, the cooler, the scales, the wood countertop, smooth, dark, and weathered, the calendars and the cardboard advertisements with pictures of movie stars, of soccer teams, funny or artistic drawings, the shoeboxes, the kerosene cans and cooking alcohol in the storeroom, next to rows of detergent, flour, salt, oil, and above all, the boxes of Quaker Oats with the drawing of a man holding a smaller box of Quaker Oats with a smaller man holding an even smaller box of Quaker Oats with an even smaller man holding, no? an even smaller, no? to infinity, no? like. . no? childhood, we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, or rather, that is to say, no? childhood: internal construction and external wandering, convalescence of nothing, corporeal truth versus social fiction, hope of pleasure versus generalized deception, just like that thing on Sundays, the pursuit, torture, and murder of grasshoppers and frogs between the trees in the back yard, the terrifying nights under the crucifix hanging on the headboard with dried olive branches from the last Palm Sunday, the white nightgowns of his aunts, cousins, grandmother, his uncles drinking cold beer under the trees, the afternoon, the whistles of the express passing through town and filling it with fear, the childhood Leto is already starting to tell himself, without words or concepts — not even with images or representations, no? — Isn’t what I had expected. It’s still not what I think it should be like. This can’t be all there is.

Ultimately, as they say, and to say it a second time, though it’s always the Same, no? every thing. He even rang up the man he calls his best friend, Lopecito, to suggest going fishing on the island the following week. And Leto, on the bus, is willing to let himself be carried along, with a somewhat uneasy sense of calm, through those warm and beautiful spring days, to the following Wednesday, on the island near Rosario. That anticipation saturates the entire weekend: arriving in the town, crossing the streets and the bus station, passing the windmill, arriving at his grandparents’ house, the dinner, the evening walk through the town, the croaking of the frogs, the intermittent song of the crickets that has always attended, and no doubt preceded, the human night, the intermittent, phosphorescent glow of the fireflies, the smell of the paradise trees, the family gathering on Saturday with the relatives who have been arriving from nearby towns in cars or on the bus, the organized abundance, formed by identical objects repeated over and over in the store, the night spent under the crucifix, the mass, the cookout at noon on Sunday, the women’s flower-patterned dresses, the walk around the station with the cousins, and more than anything else, the perfect hour on the plains, the afternoon, and also, every once in a while, in little outbursts to someone in the family, Isabel’s foolish declarations of her marital bliss, her upward mobility, her sexual satisfaction, her economic stability, her familial harmony, her religious tranquility, her physical well-being, which he lets run on like background noise whose fictitiousness intrigues him less than its obstinate and emphatic repetition. That insistence betrays her uncertainty, the same way that, on Sunday night when the bus arrives at Rosario Norte, the thing she murmurs, slightly distracted, Hopefully he hasn’t made anything for dinner because I could pop after everything we ate in Andino, could be translated, Leto thinks, into a way of saying the opposite, because the fact of him waiting with a warm dinner would help dispel the uncertainty that’s working on her and which is of such a curious nature — when it manifests itself externally, it always appears to be the opposite.

The man is not at the station, It’s good he didn’t come, murmurs Isabel, after scrutinizing the walkway and the entrance. It’s good he didn’t come because anyway we don’t have suitcases and the train leaves us a block away. Leto, who after so many years has become an expert in the art of pretending he hasn’t heard anything, or of responding, almost inaudibly, with vague monosyllables, to every irrational, or, as he refers to them privately, false bottom argument laid out by Isabel, turns the conversation to fresh eggs, their bouquet of flowers, the greasy chorizos just made at the farm stand and plied on them in the town.

Slowly they leave the train, walking away from the palm trees lining the avenue to enter the dark, tree-lined block that separates them from their house. Isabel isn’t, Leto thinks, in any hurry to get there, as if through some physical inertia her body, contrary to her reason, were trying to express things more truthfully. Twice in a single block she stops for several minutes to talk with neighbors who, sitting in folding chairs on the sidewalk near their front doors, or leaning out a window, have come out to enjoy the cool night, while Leto, keeping a polite distance, with the basket of eggs and chorizo in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other hand, asks himself if she isn’t trying to gain time so that he, who she supposes innocent of machinations and exempted from her intuition, will overtake her and get home first — and all of this in spite of the fact that, to the outside world, they are just a mother and son, a silent twenty-year-old young man, coming back, respectable, straightforward, and a little tired, from a weekend in the country, neighborhood people, apparently the husband is an electrician who works on televisions and doesn’t mix much with the neighbors, the boy studies accounting, and she’s still pretty even though she’s around forty, the men more or less silent and withdrawn, while she sometimes maybe has the habit of talking too much, like she can’t stop, or she’s trying to hide, to cover up, with words, deep dark fissures which her words, despite her intentions, open at their multiple, secret edges. But she doesn’t give up. Leto waits, patiently, or a little callously, rather, at every stop, and when they get to the house, which is dark, silent, and lifeless, and he slides the key in the lock, and turns it, he feels again, coming through the door, the trail of the snake, the indefinite but distinct presence of the scorpion, whose signs, weakened in the previous weeks, have returned, unequivocal and palpable. When he turns on the light, this presence draws him, sucks him, slowly, toward the bedroom, and when he sees the man sprawled on the floor, his skull shattered by the gunshot, the revolver still in his hand, the floor, walls, and furniture splattered with blood, with chunks of brain, hair, bone shards, he says to himself, calmly and coldly, So that’s what this was. Specifically, this meaning the days, the nights, the time, the body, the world, the thick beating life, how the man, in his little electrical workshop, had dismantled them, detaching and separating them into separate pieces, colored cables, copper wires, gold screws, spreading them over the table to inspect them one at a time, neutral and merciless, limiting himself to reaching what he no doubt considered objective conclusions, and later, during uniform and meticulous hours, putting everything back together according to the indisputable logic of his delirium. To achieve his goals he had to construct the comedy, setting a stage, the visible universe, and making all of his so-called loved ones take part, modifying the plot sometimes to convince the most reticent, as had been happening for the previous weeks with Leto, whose mistrust had forced him to make appearances outside his “workshop,” transforming his personality slightly and preparing, with Lopecito’s unconditional support, when he swallowed whole the supposed week of fishing on the island, for Leto, his reticence becoming hope, to fall, on his return from the country Sunday night, from an even higher rung. Put briefly, and by the man himself, no doubt to himself, and no doubt without words as well, more or less like this: When I say dance, everyone dances. No excuses.

Two or three days later the autopsy reveals that he shot himself on Friday at around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, meaning that he said goodbye with a grin at the station, reminding him before he left that on Wednesday they would cross to the island with Lopecito, then, still grinning, boarded the train back to their neighborhood, walked the block between the train stop and the house at a calm and regular pace, and no doubt without losing his grin entered the house, crossed the hallway, shut himself in the bedroom, and without hesitating or losing the fixed, vindictive grin, blew his brains out.

— I call that an insolent suicide, said César Rey, a few months later, at the bar Montecarlo, in the city, while they watched the sun, through the window, rising into a cold autumn dawn. And Rey can speak with authority because the day before, in fact, he had gotten a hotel room, intending to slit his wrists, but at the decisive moment he had suddenly changed his mind, and after leaving the hotel, he had run into Leto at the arcade’s bar, where they proceeded to go on a bender.

— The insolent suicide, says Leto, shaking his head. Isabel and Lopecito were left stupefied by the event — in the director’s absence they no longer knew exactly what role they played in the comedy — but Leto himself thinks he has known how to conserve enough cold blood to keep him from the path of the gunshot, though the suspicion of having been the primary target for the last few weeks could be, without his realizing it, proof of the opposite.

The insolent suicide, he thinks, discreetly watching the Mathematician, whose eyebrows indicate a laborious reflection that Leto cannot know, and is not interested in knowing, but which is more or less the following: Where does instinct come from? Does it belong to the individual or the species? Is there continuity between individuals? Does the latter individual take over the instinct from the point where the former left it or does he reconstruct, from zero, the whole process from the start? Is it substance, energy, reflex? What is our idea of instinct? How was it first formed? By whom? Where? As opposed to what? What, in a living thing, isn’t instinct? And then, forgetting Noca, Noca’s horse, instinct, the images he has built up thanks to Botón’s story on the ferry, the previous Saturday, on the upper deck, images of Washington’s birthday at Basso’s ranch, which he didn’t attend but will remember for the rest of his life, the other questions, always stirring, underground, and sometimes rising to the surface, suddenly, that follow us, form us, lead us, allow us to be, the old questions first brought up in the African dawn, heard in Babylon and asked again in Thebes, in Asia Minor, on the banks of the Yellow River, which sparkled in the Scandinavian snows, the soliloquy in Arabia, in New Guinea, in Königsberg, in Mato Grosso, and in Tenochtitlán, questions whose response is exaltation, is death, suffering, insanity, and which stir in every blink, every heartbeat, every premonition — who planted the seed of the world? what are the internal and the external? what are birth and death? is there a single object or many? what is the I? what is the general and the particular? what is repetition? what am I doing here? — that is to say, no? — the Mathematician, or someone else, somewhere else or at some other time, again, though there is only one, only one, which is always the same Place, and always, as we were saying, once and for all, the same Time.

For the twenty-seven seconds, give or take, that it took the Mathematician to refocus, silently, on his thoughts, and for Leto to remember, in quick, fragmented and disordered images what, as I was saying, I was saying just now, their bodies advance, in a regular way, down the narrow sidewalk, to the south. Neither of them notices that, without disruption, and without it being possible, with any clarity, to separate the two dimensions, they are advancing in time while doing so in space, as if every step they take moves them in opposite directions, inasmuch as time and space are inseparable and one is inconceivable without the other, and both inconceivable without each other, Leto and the Mathematician, the pedestrians, the street, and the morning form a thick current flowing calmly from the source of the event. Leto thinks (more or less, no?), For her to come along a year later with the story of an incurable illness just proves her inability to accept the transparency of his message—and you could add a comparison: with excessive, but for him necessary, means, like the physicists who build a tunnel several kilometers long where they shoot an infinitely small particle because the behavior of that particle will explain all matter and therefore the universe. And the Mathematician, walking alongside him, thinks again, Set in motion by, but says:

— Everyone was looking at Washington, who wasn’t saying anything.

Always according to Botón. Anyway, he wasn’t saying anything, but it seemed, from his pensive and half-smiling expression, his white eyes, the smoke of the Gitane Filtre (Caporal) rising to his face from his hand, which he held more or less at the height of his diaphragm, that he was about to say something. And in fact, he was. Leto imagines him at the head of the table, under the illuminated pavilion, close to the grill, the unforeseen pavilion installed hurriedly among the orange, grapefruit, and mandarin trees, in the dark patio, at the end of winter — Washington, the night of his sixty-fifth birthday, dressed warmly in his thermal undershirt and plaid wool shirt, plus a v-neck sweater with the shirt’s collar poking through the top, plus his wool blazer and over his shoulders maybe a poncho or a blanket, his white hair messy and thick, the skin on his face sagging a little but still firm, thick, clean-shaven, and healthy, one of those old men who, maybe because they work a farm, or go fishing, or often ride horses, or sit in the garden to read the paper during the siestas in winter, are tanned year-round, Washington, I was saying, while he forms, with a more and more pronounced smile in his eyes, which he keeps raising to his interlocutors, and a more and more vague smile on his lips, what he is about to say, shaping words, phrases, and gestures, he raises, parsimoniously, his cigarette to his lips and between puffs of smoke exhaled through his nose and mouth, begins to speak.

To Washington, if he has understood correctly, which is somewhat unlikely, as our friend Cohen’s subtlety in weighty questions is well-known, and he doesn’t even possess the rudiments that the university, spontaneously clearing any number of paths, supplies every student, not to mention the timely remunerations that, at the end of every month, help purge the spirit of material preoccupations that often disturb the progress of the syllogism, in short, if he understood correctly, the horse, having been declared an instinctive being, would be prohibited from stumbling, for the very reasons of instinct, which is considered pure necessity, while all of this is assumed only if you take the stumble, as our friend Barco clarified, in the sense of an error or mistake, not merely an accidental or external occurrence, but rather an internal contradiction in the horse, between the objects in question and the unexpected failure of the execution. Is he on track? Does the absence of an objection authorize him to continue? Yes? Alright, he will continue.

And so on. He, Washington, no? thought he understood the issue. Here, ostentatiously, almost paternally, the Mathematician grabs Leto by the left arm, to protect him from the aggression of a car that’s coming down the cross street, driving threateningly from the previous block, where it had accelerated, after crossing the intersection, according to the habitual system of motor vehicle conduction in rectangular cities: brakes and deceleration before the corner, accelerator after the intersection, reduction of speed midway down the block, and so on successively, which gives the system, bearing in mind that the length of the blocks is more or less constant and despite its contradictory principles, a highly regular nature. Over Leto’s head the Mathematician, in one second, analyzes the facts gathered by a glance that scrutinizes the cross street to the west: the cars appear well-adapted to the brakes/accelerator system, and the three approaching at the crossing with San Martín, one behind the other, judging by the unvarying distance that separates them in spite of the decreasing velocity of the first, appeared set, if they maintained the rate of reduction, to stop and allow the cars arriving perpendicularly down San Martín and the pedestrians crossing the intersection to pass, so that the Mathematician, decisive, drags Leto by the arm, making him stumble when they cross the cable guardrail into the street and forcing him to increase the extension and speed of his steps while they cross, and you could say that the Mathematician, who hasn’t for an instant stopped watching, by turns, the cars coming down the cross street, the ones that could turn sharply from San Martín, and the cable guardrail they are walking toward, until he feels released from his responsibility after they cross the guardrail, does not let go of Leto’s arm or continue his story before verifying that they can walk safely down the sidewalk. Then he goes on: as Botón has it, Washington, in the first part of his interjection, does not pose a single objection to Cohen or Barco’s propositions — furthermore, they seem pertinent to him and he appears to understand the point of view they presuppose. The only thing he finds objectionable, for the clarity of problem, is the selection of the horse as the object of analysis. In his modest opinion, one can handily discard the horse for several reasons. First off, the horse is too close to people (to whom he concedes, without major theoretical obstacles, the ability to stumble), which pollutes the rationale with anthropocentric contaminants, not to mention that the proximity between horses and people has caused every class of symbolic projection to be deposited on the poor animal, to such an extent that, under so many symbolic layers, it is difficult to know where to find the real horse. Likewise, we pretend to know so many things about the horse — we think that it’s strong, that it’s loyal, that it’s noble, that it’s tough, that it’s nervous, that it loves the pampa, and that it’s greatest ambition is to win the Carlos Pellegrini prize. We’re convinced that if it got into politics it would be nationalist, and that if it talked, it would sound like old Vizcacha. To top it off, says the Mathematician that Botón said that Washington said, because of its more or less pre-eminent position on the zoological ladder, the horse possesses an excessive biological and ontological density: it has too much flesh, too much blood, too many bones, too many nerves, and in spite of its elusive gaze, less indiscreet than the cow’s, we can conceive of its presence in this world as not exempt from necessity, in such a way that, through metaphysical negligence, to which not a few thinkers have succumbed, one could even allow an existential category that included both horses and people — in short, if he has understood correctly, what you could say in relation to Noca’s horse, which is certainly nothing but a pretext for the discussion, you would have to apply to another being, more differentiated from people than horses, a member of a species of living beings of course, but whose identity, inconsequential but irrefutable, is less disposed to misrepresentation. The mosquito, for example.

Waiting for the effect of his interjection, Washington turns a profile to the gathering and, slowly lifting his head, simulates interest in the crossbeam that supports the pitched roof over the illuminated pavilion. One or two, off guard, also raise their heads and examine the crossbeam, without seeing anything in particular, but the majority of the guests fail to demonstrate, in the seconds following Washington’s lecture, the slightest reaction, insofar as an almost ubiquitous silence, disrupted only by the sounds of utensils and plates, settles on the table. Almost ubiquitous: because just as Washington pronounces the last syllable of his interjection, Nidia Basso starts to laugh. Her laughter, suddenly welling up, you could say, under the pavilion, resonates in the surprised ears of the company, reverberates among the tops of the trees cooling in the darkness of the patio, and is finally lost, dispersing into many of the night’s different and contradictory directions, the starlit sky in particular — the starlit sky, or rather that thing above our heads, somewhat lost among the horizontal plane, that shines a neutral cover, without omnipotent or capricious or judgmental presences, the starlit sky, no? which, though no less mortal and likewise prisoner to the incessant solids and gasses, with its apparent firmness, its dimensions and its mystery, expansive and cold, annihilates us.

On the upper deck of the ferry, on the bench at the stern, the previous Saturday, Botón thought it opportune to introduce a quick digression, drawing a sharp caricature of Nidia Basso: according to Botón, whose tone of voice rises, suffused with rancorous qualifiers, Nidia Basso’s laughter does not on its own prove that the scene or the words that tie it together are comical, because in any situation, in fact, Nidia seems disposed to laugh at whatever is said, funny or not, insofar as, always according to Botón, her laughter has no connection to the outside world, and even less so with the part of the outside world composed of the words that Washington has just spoken. (The mosquito, for example.) What’s more, according to Botón, it would be difficult to tell if, in this specific case, it was Washington’s words or the silence after that caused it. Even though humorous rhetoric makes frequent appearances in Washington’s conversation, Botón argues savagely, the release of tame, easy, high-pitched laughter is a disproportionate response to Washington’s subtle irony, which should probably leave you thoughtful and could, at the most, make you smile, inwardly more than anything, unlike, for example, Tomatis’s vulgar, cheap cracks, or El Gato, whose supposed sense of humor consists in mocking the person who’s speaking. Listening to him, with his gaze constantly fixed on the spot on the river where the ferry’s wake starts to dissipate, the Mathematician suspects that, with the pretext of defining Nidia Basso’s peculiar laughter, Botón is exploiting the opportunity, for some unknown reason, to slander El Gato and Tomatis, but while he recounts Botón’s distinctions to Leto, in his own words, he omits, though he feels them again, his suspicions. If it were the words, the Mathematician says, then according to Botón it would mean a simple lack of subtlety in perceiving, behind the superficial irony, the gravity always apparent in Washington’s words (or vice versa), but if it was caused by the silence, one’s hypothesis would have to incline toward nervous laughter, less a sign of the comedy of the world than of neurasthenia in the issuing subject, Botón qualifies with postmodernist taste. Botón thinks that, in fact, if you were to attempt a general classification of distinct types of laughter relative to the circumstances that provoke it, you would realize that the overwhelming majority have little or nothing to do with humor. This is the case with Nidia Basso’s laughter. Botón says he never saw her laugh about something that was actually comical, or he didn’t notice, or doesn’t remember — in any case, laughter caused by something comical wouldn’t be, in Nidia Basso’s case, anything but a simple exception, a flash of real connection to the world, a fleeting moment of inattention to the incessant and anxious narcissism that suppresses her subjective laughter.

Is Botón capable of this sort of interpretation? The Mathematician asks himself this while he talks, without looking at his companion, and responds without hesitating: In his opinion, no. Among various possibilities for the source of the digression he considers two: either Botón heard a similar explanation from a third party, Tomatis, or Pichón Garay, or Silvia Cohen, or was present for a conversation between them and is appropriating, in a parasitic way, their ideas, or maybe he, the Mathematician, has been framing, to the extent that Botón was relating unadorned scenes in a linear way, the way he presents Leto with Botón’s words as if Botón were recalling a riddle in which the Mathematician heard the solution but not the terms that compose it. But there is a third possibility that the Mathematician, as an impartial rationalist, does not discard: flatly rejecting that Botón could be the author of the interpretation, he could concede that Botón, in good faith, has forgotten that it belongs to Silvia Cohen, or to Beatriz, or Pichón Garay and, thinking it his own, repeats it without realizing this, so that when he, the Mathematician, no? opts for the second possibility, where he claims the interpretation as his own, his situation becomes similar to Botón’s, though more acute, because by attributing to himself the interpretation that Botón ignores having taken from Silvia Cohen, let’s say, the Mathematician in turn repeats Silvia Cohen’s terms, leaving the event in question with so little reality that the value of the interpretation itself is made problematic.

— So, the Mathematician says, to Washington, what is confused in people and horses is clarified by observing the mosquito.

— The mosquito, Leto repeats.

— The mosquito, right, says the Mathematician.

— The mosquito, Leto repeats again, assuming a reflexive intonation.

— The mosquito, the mosquito, the Mathematician says, shaking his head affirmatively.

Their pace, now well-harmonized, is neither slow nor fast, more regular than ever, as if it had taken their legs, their entire bodies, several blocks to find the common rhythm that surrounds them, transforming them into a kind of machine that regulates the differences between their two bodies and calibrates their proportions to obtain a common output. From the outside, the rhythm is so regular it appears deliberate — from the outside, no? And yet you couldn’t find two people who were more different than these two: the athletic and rational rugby-man, picture perfect from a physical standpoint, dressed completely in white, including the moccasins he bought that August in Florence, whose father, a liberal yrigoyenista lawyer is, nevertheless, the owner of a majority of the farms surrounding Tostado, the Mathematician, as I was saying, no? fond, for some reason, of swimming in the colorless river of premises, of propositions, of postulates, and to whom Tomatis — who gave him the nickname — claims those same premises, propositions, and postulates give a sick satisfaction, something that Leto, to tell the truth, has never been able to verify, and which could be more about Tomatis’s intent, using the Mathematician as a pretext, to slander the exact sciences in general. And the other, Leto, Ángel Leto, no? skinny, his legs a little crooked, much smaller and younger, slightly myopic, whose shirt and whose pants, of three or four times poorer quality than the other’s white outfit, combine less elegantly, Leto, who has lived less than a year in the city, which he came to following Isabel, his mother, who fled the evidence of a suicide like it was a worldwide catastrophe, Leto, who keeps, for a living, several accounts, and who that morning, for reasons as inexplicable as those inclining the Mathematician toward syllogisms and theorems, instead of going to work, decided to get off the bus and start walking down San Martín to the south. Impossible to be more different, although something, in spite of it all, equalizes them — and not just them, no? the identity that’s generic to individuals of the same species, individuals who, after all, speak the same language and, though they come from different cities, were born in the same country and even the same province and therefore possess common fragments of experience — no, nothing like that, which of course is their own and shared with their co-provincials, their so-called compatriots, their countrymen — no, nothing like that, but rather something more particular and at the same time less definite, an impression, a feeling they both carry deep down inside themselves — and never suspecting that the other, or others, also feel it gives it a particular tint and above all reinforces it, the feeling, I mean, of not completely belonging to this world, or, as a result, to anyone else, of never being able to perfectly fit the internal to the external or vice versa, and no matter how hard they try they will always find thin gaps between themselves and everything else, something which, for obscure reasons, they blame themselves for, a feeling so confusing and inconsistently applied that it is confused for thought and for flesh, where the self is the stain, the error, the asymmetry that with its solitary, ridiculous presence clouds the radiant body of the universe. Now, as well, since they began walking down the straight street together, along the shady sidewalk, a new, impalpable tie binds them: the false memories of a place neither of them has seen, of events neither witnessed, and people neither have met, of a day at the end of winter that is not inscribed on their experience but which stands out, intensely, in their memory, the illuminated pavilion, the encounter between El Gato and Botón at the School of Fine Arts, Noca coming from the coast with his baskets of fish, the stumbling horse, Cohen turning the coals, Beatriz constantly rolling a cigarette, the golden beer with a white head of foam, Basso and Botón picking vegetables at the back, shadows moving confusingly as darkness falls, and which, without it being clear how, and above all why, are swallowed by the night.

One almost immediately after the other, the Mathematician perceives, as they reach the corner, two familiar faces: the first belongs to the owner of a newsstand on the beveled corner; as the man is sitting on a bench among his merchandise, situated so as to be shielded from the sun that’s striking on the cross street, his head stands out against the low background of weeklies, monthlies, and evening papers, against the color photos of movie stars in bikinis, political and syndical leaders, soccer stars, photos repeated several times, just like the regular, black headlines in the newspapers or the characters in comic strips. From their repetition, the images, which form an oblong background, become almost abstract, transforming into a kind of multicolored guard that seems to decorate the relief portrait of the vendor, whose gaze, lost in the street, the Mathematician does not manage to meet so as to exchange the greeting he has prepared. But, raising his head again, his eyes meet the second familiar face, and this one, passing alongside Leto, smiles back. It’s only a familiar face, not actually someone you could say, to be more precise, he is familiar with. A familiar face — or rather, no? — a face that occupies a place between the familiar and the unfamiliar, which he can’t match with a name, but which, from having passed so many times across his visual field, has ended up imposing its peculiar characteristics on the Mathematician’s memory, just like the Mathematician’s face has ended up imprinting itself in the other’s memory, so that eventually, when they pass on the street, as proof of their recognition, they say hello. It’s true that, in moments of surprise, familiar faces also become suddenly unfamiliar, but there is a gradation that, beginning with these and moving across familiar people first, then across familiar faces, and then across unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar people, the last bulwark of experience, arrives finally at the dark and viscous horizon of the unknown — the unknown, no? or rather the thing that, beyond the fleeting capacity of the empirical, is background, the persistence we try to force back, unsuccessfully, with those vague signs passing, as though lost, in the day.

Maintaining their identical, regular pace, Leto and the Mathematician step off the sidewalk into the street and start to cross. A slow-moving car intercepts them, and when it slows at the intersection, they move ahead of it, both at the same time, without stopping or varying their pace, without even looking at it, like two robots with a preprogrammed electronic mechanism which makes them automatically avoid obstacles, and when they reach the opposite sidewalk both, simultaneously, bend their left leg and lift it over the cable.