The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

The Next Seven Blocks

We were with Leto and the Mathematician who, one morning, the twenty-third of October in 1961, we had said, just after 10:00, had met on the central avenue, had started walking together to the south, and the Mathematician, who had heard about it from Botón on the upper deck of the ferry to Paraná, the previous Saturday, had started telling Leto about the birthday party for Jorge Washington Noriega, near the end of August, at Basso’s ranch in Colastiné, and after walking a few blocks together, they crossed the street with an identical, regular pace and simultaneously bent their left leg, lifting it over the cable with the intention, more unconscious than calculated, of planting the bottom of their foot on the sidewalk, no? Alright then: they plant their feet. And the Mathematician thinks: If time were like this street, it would be easy to go back and retrace it in every sense, stop where you wanted, like this straight street with a beginning and an end, and where things would give the impression of being aligned, of being rough and clean like those well-furnished weekend houses in residential neighborhoods. But he says:

— Shht! Il terso conchertino dilestro armónico.

The unexpected cocoliche phrase disorients Leto, especially when the Mathematician stops, grabs him by the arm, and assumes a theatrical pose, which consists of turning his head slightly toward Leto, without making eye contact, while his eyes, gazing in the opposite direction and ceasing to see what’s around them, take on an intense expectancy and tender concentration on the index finger of his left hand, which, at the end of his elevated and slightly bent arm, points to a hypothetical point in the space ahead of them where the finger, like the needle on a metal detector, tries to locate the exact source of the music. Almost simultaneously, Leto hears it too, and his several seconds delay in hearing the music seems to be caused less by sensory constituents, specialized or acoustic, than by his submerged distraction in his thoughts. In spite of his delay, both locate the source at the same time: a record store that’s advertising itself by hurling music into the street, its doors open to the sidewalk out front. The morning sounds on the central avenue, vehicles, footsteps, voices, seem like cheap resonance, undisciplined and savage, on which the music is neatly mounted, but to the Mathematician’s subtle and speculative ear, also seem like both a deliberate and inadvertent contrast, where the juxtaposition of the brute noise and the structured sound creates a richer and more complex sonorous space, a space, I was saying, no? where pure noise, betraying the real nature of the music by contrast, assumes a moral role, like in those engravings where the mere presence of a skull reveals the maiden’s true face. After locating the music’s source, the Mathematician’s finger clenches, and his hand begins to make rhythmic undulations in the air, which his head, bobbing, accompanies, followed by, the first half-closed, the second stretching into a mesmerized smile, his eyes and mouth. And when they continue walking, the Mathematician’s body seems pulled, discreetly of course, by a magnetic attraction to the music, to Leto’s surprise, as he can’t distinguish, in the sort of moderate bacchant the Mathematician has become, the affect of sincere enthusiasm. The Mathematician’s raptures pass, almost as they happen, like a slightly histrionic moment of insanity, and when they approach the source of the music, and therefore hear it with greater clarity, the Mathematician recovers his serene, indolent attitude and once again becomes the measured athlete, blonde, tall, dressed completely in white, including his moccasins, with an unlit pipe in his hand, acting out precise, strict, and elegant gestures, uncalculated by that point in his life, ultimately, the Mathematician, no? who, completely forgetting the noise and the music, tells him:

— Botón says that Washington presented the mosquito this way: eight millimeters of pulsing life.

Leto imagines it: Botón, Washington, the mosquito. According to the Mathematician, Washington, one night the previous summer, had a casual encounter with three mosquitos, whose behavior, according the Mathematician, and always according to Botón, yielded a series of unexpected results, of a similar order, it seemed (to Washington, no?), to those that the distinguished gathering just now derived in regards to Noca’s horse. The previous summer, Washington was working on his four lectures — Location, Lineage, Language, Logic — about the Colastiné Indians, which are only known, for the time being, in their titles: immersed in historical and anthropological treatises, he was forced to work at night because of the heat — unbearable in January and February. Leto, who has gone a couple of times with Tomatis to Washington’s place in Rincón Norte, has no difficulty imagining him at his work table, in front of the window that faces the side patio where, protected by shade from eucalyptus and paradise trees, rows of snapdragons, carnations, daisies, and geraniums extend between paths of sandy earth. Leto remembers two or three rose laurels, a wisteria, a lapacho, a timbo and, at the very back of the garden, like a leftover from the pre-farmed land, five or six yellow mimosa. In the back patio he saw a large, well-tended garden, fruit trees, a corral, and even a rabbit hutch. During the siege of Athens, he once heard Washington say, Epicurus and his friends survived thanks to a self-sufficient economy. I defend myself from the Liberal-Catholic conspiracy by any means necessary. So, the summer night, no? in the middle of the countryside, after a dry and dusty day and the fever of the twilight, the silent but much cooler dawn, and the man on the threshold of old age who, protected from the outside world by the white walls and metal screens, reads, taking quick, abbreviated notes in a journal from time to time. He has spent the day coming and going around the house, avoiding the bright places in the orchard and the garden, alone after his daughter married a doctor and moved to Córdoba — he had separated with his second wife in 1950—accustomed now in his sixty-fourth year to life and death, having left behind periods of impotence, of torpor, and of insanity, but still possessing enough strength to observe, serenely, the summer afternoon from the shade of the paradise trees and wait for nightfall in order to begin to work, which he will do until the next morning. And his story, according to what’s left of Botón’s story in the Mathematician’s, is more or less this: a calm night the previous summer, after midnight. After a light dinner, Washington, with a pitcher of cold water and a dish of plums, has taken up to his study to read, taking notes from time to time, a facsimile edition of Father Quesada’s An account of the adventures of a child lost to the world, which Marcos Rosemberg had brought back from Madrid for him. Little by little the day’s heat diminished, and the internal humming that spans the illuminated section of his mind, monotonously, with its train of apparitions, has been sectioned off by the clear point of his attention that, like the edge of a diamond, has been opening a path that relegates, with successive adjustments, the layers of darkness. Eventually, after several forceful efforts, the layers retract and the faces of the diamond, emerging from the darkness, concentrate on the transparent point that stabilizes and fixes itself, in order to later be perfected at its disappearance, disseminated in its own transparency, so that not only the humming, which is time, flesh, and savagery, but also the book and the reader disappear with it, clearing a place where the eternal and the intangible, no less real than putrefaction and the hours, unfold victoriously. Every so often, his left hand, independent from the rest of the body, slides toward the dish of plums, picks one up and carries it, without possible error, to the half-open mouth that’s ready to receive, masticate, and spit out, after a few moments, into his hand, which has come up again, the pit, without a trace of pulp, which his tongue and teeth, on their own accord, have separated with precision and ease, in order to return it to the outside world. The book, resting on others that had been stacked horizontally, oblique, like a bible on a lectern, does not make a sound — except the one from the reader’s fingers as they seize, with an index finger previously moistened on the tip of his tongue, the lower right corner of the page in order to turn it — but nevertheless a silent turmoil fills Washington’s head. Space and time, swirling around the motionless reader, are powerless to either dissolve or circulate the turmoil and slide around the intangible borders of his body, unable to penetrate the intangible nucleus that is its corollary.

— Washington’s legendary four lectures on the Indians in Colastiné, says the Mathematician.

Leto has heard about them — in a fragmentary way, of course, like, in a similar way, everything relating to Washington. He has been working on them — Location, Lineage, Language, Logic — for four or five years, in a fragmentary way, no? for example, that Washington, who Leto, before moving from Rosario, had never heard of, in fact, that Washington, for example, has been in prison several times, mostly in the twenties and thirties, and that, at the end of the forties, spent time in an asylum, that he was married twice and both times separated, that his daughter married a doctor and has lived in Córdoba for a few years, that the house in Rincón Norte, the land at least, was inherited from his father, a pharmacist in Emilia, with whom he had not spoken from 1912 until his death (his father’s, no?), that Washington lives on a disability pension they gave him when he left the asylum and on translations, etc., etc. — and a mess of other things he has happened to fish out of conversations, things he has heard him tell to Tomatis, to Barco, to César Rey, to the twins, et cetera.

Assenting without turning to look at the Mathematician, Leto nods his head. They are now even with the record store, on the opposite sidewalk, and when they pass in front they can hear with greater clarity the music that, like them, has been advancing up the straight street, via the melody’s more intricate path, to the momentary encounter. But the Mathematician’s outward indifference toward it is so complete that Leto feels a rapid irritation, a kind of rebellion, as if, with that subtle indifference, the Mathematician defrauds him — which in a sense is true, because when he saw him absorbed in the music, Leto felt a confused and somewhat problematic admiration for him. Unaware of any external error, the Mathematician continues:

— But that’s another story, he says.

The lectures, no? In the calm night in Rincón Norte, in the illuminated, silent study where the smoke of the forgotten cigarette in the notch on the ashtray rises, quiet and regular, toward the lamp, Washington reads, calmly, the book open over the table. And this is when the three mosquitos make their appearance.

Here the Mathematician affects an ostentatious and satisfied pause, jerking his head toward Leto who, to punish him for his flippancy a second ago, decides to not register the effect, abstaining from turning his gaze from the fixed point that he is staring at many meters ahead on the straight sidewalk, and the slightly theatrical smile that had started to stretch across the Mathematician’s face is erased, and an indescribable, paled expression, of panic and sadness, appears instead. But just as the decision is made, for lack of resolve or because he disapproved fundamentally of the pettiness in his attitude, Leto gives up and turns his head, assuming an intrigued expression no less theatrical than the Mathematician’s satisfied pause. The Mathematician revives. Once more the fog of The Incident, in brief, faint, and successive waves, had overcome him, a fog that the pale expression of panic and sadness, which has just passed, unnoticed by Leto, has been only the most external manifestation, like the lamps in Entre Ríos that, they say, seemed to vibrate the night of the San Juan earthquake. The waves retreat, and in the Mathematician’s imagination, Washington, absorbed in his reading, hears the triplicate buzzing much later than when the mosquitos started flying around the room, over his head, somewhere between the table and the ceiling — and this, of course, according to Botón, and according to Botón according to Washington.

Now, almost every door on the street, generally sitting open between two windows, belongs to a business. On the opposite sidewalk, for example, after the record store they’ve just passed, diminishing the music’s intensity, there’s a fabric store, a furniture store, a place selling Lux electrical appliances, the women’s shoe store Chez Juanita. On the sidewalk where they walk, Leto and the Mathematician successively pass an American diner, dark and dingy in spite of its plastic stools and its multicolor formica counter; a flower shop; one selling fancy pastries; a cigarette store where an older man behind the window is putting on his glasses to study, with painstaking sincerity, his lottery ticket. At every business, from the upper part of the façade, between the first and second floors, the neon signs extend over the street, vertically or horizontally, in different directions and, though they are turned off, form, to put a word to it, a sort of canopy that covers, as far as you can see from a certain height, the central avenue, or like a multitude of rigid standards, in a tight formation that, if they belonged to an army, would intimidate the enemy with their immobility, their quantity, and their variety — each one, like the music from the record store, advertising itself tautologically, repeating, a little higher, emblematically, the message already expressed in a direct and precise form on the windows, in the same way that some religions, as if the presence of a creator were not evident in the creation itself, need to make use, to demonstrate his existence, of some sign of his existence that’s separate from the objects he created.

For statistical reasons, more so than actual popularity, the Mathematician is every so often obliged to greet, whether with a quick gesture, a nod of his head, or in some terse, conventional way, the acquaintances he passes — statistics that on the one hand are disadvantageous to Leto since he has only lived in the city a short while and knows considerably fewer people than the Mathematician, a constituent ab origine, and that on the other hand, for the last few blocks, considering the gradual and systematic inflation to the number of pedestrians as they approach the city center, increase in the Mathematician’s favor the chances of bumping into an acquaintance. In fact, in only purely quantifiable terms is he favored, because in aesthetic, political, emotional, or psychological terms, so to speak, no? and on moral — as they say, and if you like, and speaking ill and in haste — and existential levels, as I was saying earlier, the Mathematician loathes a good portion of his fellow citizens, especially those of his own class—the bloodlust bourgeoisie—for whom he has cultivated, from the age of eight or nine, a concentrated contempt and inexplicable hatred. In spite of their liberal beliefs, his parents are friendly with political bosses and landowners who, likewise, in deference to their aristocratic name and, more than anything, to the expanse of land surrounding Tostado, tolerate their liberal humanism, the way they would the epileptics or pederasts in their class. His brother, Leandro (because. . no?), several years older than him, for whom, according to the Mathematician, moral reflexes seem nonexistent and money and social status are the a priori principles of his ontology, has been grooming himself as a landowner since childhood, so much so that even his own parents, despite the genuine affection they feel for him, show a certain prudence when he is around. Leandro, for his part, treats his parents like communists and bohemians. And between the Mathematician and his brother, after several grim altercations, relations are limited, when they’re with the family, to an exchange of cold monosyllables thick with innuendo. In spite of this — what a gentleman! — Leandro doesn’t miss a single important family event; he never forgets to call his mother every other day, according to custom; and you had to see him on the tennis court, well-groomed and tanned, fairly conceding each of his opponent’s points only to steamroll him in the second set. And, using him as an example, you could never derive a single generalization about human nature, because it’s difficult to determine if, apart from his real estate and holdings and evenings at the Jockey Club and the Rotary, he possesses a single genuine human trait suitable to motivating a generalization—he said once to Tomatis, with the characteristic humor that likes to feign surprise and false neutrality.

Why did he hate them so much? A psychoanalytic manifestation, Tomatis diagnosed with flippant disinterest. When your parents are perfect, you are compelled to project the hatred you should feel for them to every member of their class. Unlike Washington who, it seems, hated his father so much that the quota of love he should have felt for him he transferred to the rest of humanity.

The Mathematician was shaking his head: Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. . no. Accepting that interpretation would oversimplify things. Casually submitting to the subjective hypothesis means ignoring the valid objective reasons for hating them: for example their enthusiasm and acumen for accumulating wealth and the cruelty they demonstrate in defending it; the egocentric ignorance and compulsive narcissism that isolates them from the rest of the world; and the creepy mimesis they have employed in copying foreign style, first the English and French, later the Americans — one of his uncles, the Mathematician’s, no? had proposed in the thirties that the country transfer power to the English crown; they were poor losers, vindictive, they carried genocide in their blood, bigotry in their souls, and vanity in their hearts, and they were prepared at any moment to annihilate everything they considered heterogeneous to their nature and anything that didn’t reflect, in its features and gestures, the supposed image of what they pretend to be. In a word, the Mathematician always ended up saying after those rhetorical flare-ups, trying to re-establish a balanced and affable tone, in a word, they are uninteresting.

The Mathematician’s bitter, almost rancid hatred for his own class, excepting its expression in the occasional confidence, was almost never displayed in his words or actions, not because he meant to conceal them, but rather from a kind of fatalism — it wasn’t worth wasting time on them, they were not interesting, so why bother spitting in their face when you could spend a lifetime studying Spinoza’s Ethics or the EPR paradox. Nevertheless, some of that hatred occasionally came to the surface, because the Mathematician, who was attentive, polite, respectful, in some cases to the point of affectation, according to Tomatis, when faced with a patrician, with any sort of tycoon, with the nephew of a bishop, or a minister, or a general’s son, could not suppress an ironic genuflection toward what he considered, preemptively and without appeal, the other’s ineptitude. If the encounter took place in the presence of a witness, or someone he respected or admired, that irony was not without cruelty, as though by using it he was trying to differentiate himself from his interlocutor as much as possible. The Mathematician, no? How he’d been marked by the very objects of his distaste! Just look at him, on the central avenue, dressed completely in white, including the moccasins he bought in Florence, with an even tan, tall, blonde, insulated from the imperfection and eventuality of those, like Leto, who observe him from the outside, so much so that his mere presence, his exacting and measured expressions, the apparent culmination of his positive traits, further reinforce Leto’s feeling of exclusion, of awkwardness, of being, not the whim, but the hopeless mistake of Everything.

But they’ve reached the corner, that right angle which, in Hippodamus’s summary calculations, suddenly interrupting the sidewalk and introducing an evident pause for drivers and pedestrians and facilitating orientation, movement, and visibility — describing, as they say, a space that, in fact, has no shape or name — set a conventional order to the mornings in Peiraeus. Shade, gray pavement, the angled sun, cable, cobblestones, cable, gray pavement, angled sun, shade: there they go, without incident or much modification of rhythm or speed, or trajectory moreover, walking down the next sidewalk. The Mathematician says that Washington lifts his head when he hears the triplicate buzzing, somewhat bewildered, and sees the three mosquitos swirling not far from the lamp. Bewildered because the previous summer it had been too dry for the larvae, and later the nymphs, as they call them, of the so-called diptera, to have increased their offspring, or rather, as they say, proliferate. Mosquitos are in fact not uncommon in the area, and if in winter they hit the proverbial road and disappear, later, in the first weeks of November when the heat gets oppressive, if it has rained enough for the larvae and later the nymphs to flourish, the air turns black in the evening and the warm-blooded animals are forced to go around swatting themselves in the head through tenacious, rapacious, and buzzing clouds. People — man, no? human beings, who altogether compose what they call humanity, or rather the sum of individuals since the appearance of the species, as they call it, in, it would seem, east Africa, through a qualitative jump across adjoining evolutionary branches, and the specific attributes they attribute to themselves — man, we were saying, or rather yours truly, the author, was saying, has given it that diminutive or pejorative name for mosca, or fly in Spanish, no doubt following an anatomic classification by size, imprecise enough in any case, but ultimately, in any case, imprecise or not, there’s nothing for it, the naming has to happen. All of this, of course, according to the Mathematician, more or less and always according to Botón, and, according to Botón, I was saying, according to Washington. Thinking about it, no one says this mosquito, everyone says the mosquito, as if it were always the same one and as if, with that synecdoche, as it’s called, we were trying to conceal or, maybe, on the contrary, to suggest, the fundamental problem: one or many? Is it always the same mosquito that attacks every summer night, reincarnated over and over after getting smashed against a white wall, or do new hordes of individuals, pristine and just as transient, avidly sprout up every day, in the swamps, in search of the blood they need, only to, after having been a larva, nymph, an airborne buzzing speck, if they’ve managed to escape the assassin’s hand, propagate, decline, and perish? Is it included among the ones who, definitively, are born and die, or do interchangeable and biodegradable mechanisms successively occupy an eight millimeter entity that bites and buzzes, an invariable essence without contingency or destiny, outside the spatiotemporal melodrama, lacking individual differentiation? Is its function to be someone in life or some anonymous palpitation, absorbed as quickly as it appears by a brilliant, immutable, everlasting, and — even when there are no more little gray bodies to devour — insatiable reality? And prior to that, some say, extrafactually, postemprically, ultramaterially, etc., etc. — ultimately, more or less, according to the Mathematician, definitely not according to Botón, but for sure, he thinks, by way of Botón, according to Washington.

Leto follows the Mathematician’s story, told without pedagogical concessions and without preciousness, with some difficulty, as it seems to only gather order and sense as the clear and well-constructed sentences accumulate, not only for the listener but also, and to an even greater extent, for the speaker, more attentive to the story’s coherence than the listener, insofar as, concentrating on the formation of his sentences, of his concepts, structuring his memories, his interpretations, his fragments of memories and interpretations, the Mathematician is less vulnerable to sensory interference than Leto, for whom the story the Mathematician seems so submerged in and satisfied with is a heterogeneous composition of vague and opaque words he barely pays attention to, and of transparent passages that allow his imagination, turning on and off intermittently, to construct expressive and fleeting images: there was a feast at the house of someone named Basso, in Colastiné, at the end of August, to celebrate Washington’s birthday, and they had started discussing a horse that had stumbled; the Mathematician — it was Tomatis who gave him the nickname — heard about it from Botón the Saturday before on the Paraná ferry, Botón, a guy he has heard about several times but whom he has not had the pleasure of meeting, and then Washington had said that the horse was not an acceptable example for the problem they were discussing — Leto asks himself darkly, without daring to make the case to the Mathematician out of fear that the Mathematician will look down on him a little, what the hell the so-called problem could be — that the mosquito, if Leto understood correctly, would be a more appropriate creature, by reason of its lack of anthropocentric finality, to use as the object of discussion and in fact he, Washington, no? the summer before, after midnight, while he worked on his four lectures — Location, Lineage, Language, Logic — on the Colastiné Indians, had the opportunity to observe three mosquitos that through their singular behavior acquired paradigmatic value and sufficed, better than the horse, burdened as it is with projections, to clarify the debate, all of this, in Leto’s imagination, illustrated with sporadic and fleeting pictures, Basso and Botón picking vegetables at the back of a vague patio on a calm winter afternoon, Beatriz rolling a cigarette, Marcos Rosemberg’s sky-blue car, arriving, undulating and quiet, in front of the house Leto has never seen, the perch and catfish wrapped up in day-old pages from La Región, dipped in oil, Tomatis and the Garay twins, Barco, someone named Dib, who has a mechanics shop, Silvia Cohen, Cohen, someone named Cuello who they call the Centaur because he is half animal, the slow night under the pavilion, behind the house, the winter night that cools, under the mandarins — they stayed, it seems, until the morning, until dawn even, the last of them, and then they went back, excited and drowsy, to the city, in the first light of the sun and the frozen dew, and he, Leto, no? could have gone if he wanted, and moreover, if he had known, he was too close to Tomatis to need an invitation, it was strange that Tomatis hadn’t said anything, maybe because he considered it impossible that he wouldn’t know and that they were so close that it wasn’t worth making the invitation explicit, but ultimately, he had to submit to the evidence: they didn’t invite him.

Leto raises his arm and points to the next sidewalk, some twenty meters ahead.

— Tomatis, he says.

The Mathematician interrupts himself and looks in the direction Leto just finished pointing, somewhat disoriented at first, as if coming out of a daydream, and when he understands, nods, and a smile starts to appear on his face.

— Indeed. Pane lucrando, he says.

Indeed; and, as the Mathematician would say, pane lucrando. In shirtsleeves, his head turned to the south, on the upper step of the reconstituted granite stairs that lead to the main entrance of La Región, intersecting the door, between the windows that display the two black plush boards where movable white brass letters are arranged into the headlines of the day. Tomatis is lighting a cigarette, with the match cupped between his hands — even though there isn’t the slightest breeze and he could just as easily have exposed the flame to the morning air without any danger of it going out. A tall, well-dressed man carrying a portfolio under his arm, and who Tomatis, occupied with lighting his cigarette, is blocking from leaving the newspaper, gives him a little nudge on the shoulder, so that Tomatis, surprised and serious, turns and at the same time moves a few centimeters away, to let him pass, with considerable ill will, stepping down without dignifying the other man’s passing, purely cordial, thank you, with a response. From the lower step, while he pockets the matches, without taking the cigarette from his lips, he continues to gaze toward the south, indifferent to the turmoil on the street. The cars pass, very slowly, in both directions, intercepting, intermittently, the sidewalk in front of the newspaper, so that Tomatis, standing on the first step of the main entrance, vanishes and reappears, discontinuous and fragmentary, to Leto and the Mathematician. Seems like he’s in a bad mood, says the Mathematician, less as a result of a genuine observation than as a display, for Leto’s benefit, of intimacy with Tomatis; and Leto, for very similar reasons: Seems like it.

But it’s not exactly that, no — not a bad mood. No. Tomatis, who is facing south, as I was saying, directly toward the city center in fact, and in spite of the passing cars, of the people coming and going, of the morning sun — because it is, as I was saying just now, the morning — of the uneven and shifting excess of the observable, to use just one of its possible names, has been, since he awoke in bed, in a troubled and painful state, externally manifested by a wrinkled shirt, stained pants, and a three-day-old beard, along with an absent and preoccupied expression. Since he woke up, reality has threatened him — reality, no? another name, and one of the most unfortunate possible for it, and which could imply, because of its obstinate opacity, menace and danger. Once in a while that buildup of danger visits him and covers, darkening without exception, everything. The day before he was fine, in line with himself and the world, and though the day passed without particular incident, he, Tomatis, no? also spent it without divergence, well-formed to its mold, strictly at pace with his actions and indistinguishable from each of them, waking up, going to work, eating, neutral memories and calm plans, conversations, a walk on the waterfront in the afternoon, taking advantage of the weather, and after dinner some reading by lamplight, on the terrace — a full, consistent spring day, without accident, with its mild tint of permanence, of continuity, of unequivocal and complete existence, one of those days that, with its smooth and monotonous regularity, must have given birth to the idea of eternity. Around midnight, without variation, he had gone to bed, and he, Tomatis, who from time to time, and for weeks, had suffered insomnia, manifested with increasingly desperate tossing in bed until he was, as they say, surprised by the dawn, had, the night before, fallen asleep immediately, without dreaming, sleeping so peacefully that when he woke up the next morning the first thing he noticed was that the bed, with him well-encased between the two sheets, was almost perfectly made, as if he had just gone to bed. Nevertheless, at the same moment, unexpectedly, the menace, indefinite and darkening, like in the past, had already installed itself. Right away, things shipwreck against it — or rather, the Thing, the universe, no? and if you like, another way of referring to it, what there is or what is happening or where it is or where it’s happening, or both at once, as if he were passing through zones, through regions, helpless and blind, just a creature, not an individual or a character or a person, troublesome, as they say, and mortal more than anything, wallowing in the empirical until the unimaginable shock of the blackout. And Tomatis, uncertain, indecisive, waits, through the day laced with danger, to receive a blow from he’s not sure where, nor of course why, his mind somewhat dirty, like a half-buried glass, covered, you could say, in dried ash and, if you like, full of constituent bubbles and knots that deform what you see. There he is now, sucking the cigarette anxiously, too quickly, absently biting his upper lip, lost to the bright turmoil thickening to the south on the central avenue. From the opposite sidewalk, as they approach, Leto and the Mathematician experience the same tenuous euphoria produced at any unexpected encounter with someone whose company is pleasurable, observing Tomatis’s morose posture, his shoulders slumped, his contracted stillness disturbed every so often by awkward and uncoordinated, as they say, movements of his arm or head. When they are even with Tomatis, they stop at the edge of the sidewalk, calling him between the cars, and they have to whistle, click, and shout two or three times before pulling him from his distraction, but when he finally hears them, and sees them shouting and gesturing on the opposite sidewalk after searching various points on the street with a murky and uncertain gaze, a wide smile, without any artificial doubt, where traces of anxiety still persist, spreads across his unhappy face. Tomatis approaches the cable guardrail as well and, laughing and shaking his head, shouts something incomprehensible in the Mathematician’s direction.

— Eh? says the Mathematician, leaning a little toward the opposite sidewalk in order to hear him better, and when Tomatis speaks again, raising his voice some, the sound of a scooter accelerating between the two rows of cars drowns out his words again. The Mathematician makes exaggerated faces, trying to hear, shakes his head several times without stopping his laughter, to demonstrate his annoyance, and then, repeating a gesture to Tomatis that indicates he should wait, steps into the street and, quickly moving around the slowly passing cars, starts to cross. More carefully, Leto, whom the Mathematician seems to have forgotten completely, resigns himself to following, lagging a few meters behind and thinking, as he approaches Tomatis and the Mathematician on the opposite sidewalk, amazed at the contrast their external features present: With the way they dress each makes a fiction out of his body.

There they are, in fact, hugging, on the sidewalk, patting each other on the shoulders, on their backs, their arms: the Mathematician, dressed completely in white, including the, etc., etc., no? as I was saying, and Tomatis, his dark messy hair, his three-day-old beard, the shirt and pants he would have changed this morning, after having shaved and taken a warm shower, if the menace, occupying Everything — which could go by another name, no? — had not been ravaging every one of his movements, even the most mundane, needs, tastes, and senses: If no matter what I’m going to. . and sooner or later the whole universe is going to. . what goddamned reason is there to shower and change your pants, he thinks, with tiny depressed shivers more so than with clear images or words, abandoning himself, with black fingernails and dirty feet, to a foreseen decomposition. Separating himself from the Mathematician, Tomatis aims a severe and at the same time jesting look at Leto.

— You’re everywhere these days, he says. And then, to the Mathematician, alluding to the shouts a few moments before, No, I was asking if that tan came from the Costa Azul.

— Partly, responds the Mathematician modestly.

— And so? Tomatis asks. Where do the European girls grow it?

— Some in each armpit, says the Mathematician.

— No way!

— I swear, says the Mathematician. May you drop dead right here.

— Wow, Mathematician! Tomatis says with distracted admiration. Some strange thought crosses his mind and he is silent for a few seconds, looking bleakly at the ember on his cigarette, then turns toward Leto. How’s things?

— Things are good. I’m only so-so, Leto says.

Tomatis laughs.

— What subtle humor, he says. And to the Mathematician, Is there such subtle humor in Europe?

— There is, there is, the Mathematician answers, confirming his assertion with a solemn movement of his head.

— A sigh of relief, says Tomatis.

And so on, ultimately, more or less. Leto and the Mathematician have registered, as they say, his abrupt change in attitude, each in his own way and both convinced fundamentally of being the only one to notice, as opposed to Tomatis, who apparently does not seem to have caught on and continues to act in a way that reveals, under his witty euphoria, the depression and murky confusion pasted to the back of his easy laughter and clever turns of phrase. The contrast between the absent and anxious expression they came upon on the opposite sidewalk and his current lightheartedness, so sudden and mechanical, produces a certain discomfort in Leto and the Mathematician, as though there were something obscene and shameful in Tomatis’s sudden masquerade, while Tomatis, unaware of those impressions and persisting with his mundane rhetoric, raises his face, darkened by his beard, toward the Mathematician: No, jokes aside, how did it go in Europe? The Mathematician hesitates. A feeling of shame and irritation holds him back a few seconds in the face of Tomatis’s compulsive lightheartedness — he would prefer, it’s true, for Tomatis, having been surprised in the middle of an internal disturbance, to show less duplicity or more transparency, conforming his behavior to his real state of mind, but at the same time he tells himself — the Mathematician, no? — that maybe there’s some pride at work similar to what makes him hide, with meticulous precaution, the evidence of The Incident, and Leto who, without the Mathematician suspecting, is feeling the same things, reaches the same conclusion at practically the same moment: So much happiness to see us shows more mistrust than love. All of this of course without words or precise images and, of course, more or less.

After that hesitation which Tomatis, oblivious, does not perceive, and which Leto attributes, with some reason, to the Mathematician’s anticipated exhaustion, having already given many recitations, the Mathematician begins, monotonously, to list the cities: Avignon, a murderous heat; Barcelona, the quintessence of the Rosarian soul; Copenhagen, they seemed more proud of Andersen than of Kierkegaard; Naples, felt just like the Abasto Market; Brussels, for The Census at Bethlehem; Fribourg, the Herr Professor must have been on leave; Rome, he imagined it differently; Nantes, a half-meteorological term. Because Tomatis does not seem to be listening, is occupied, severely, in taking the last drag from his cigarette then throwing it to the sidewalk, the Mathematician interrupts himself, but an irritated and somewhat surprised look from Tomatis impels him to continue: Rennes, the streets emptied at seven; Athens, Pergamino plus the Parthenon; Lisbon, you could almost see Entre Ríos from the Plaza of Commerce; Warsaw, there was nothing left; Oxford, a bunch of snobs. Brief, successive, polished and simplified by a fickle memory, the images the Mathematician’s words bring out, to the bright morning air, seem to ricochet against Tomatis’s disheveled and beard-darkened countenance — Tomatis, no? pale and unshaven, his hair a mess, his shirt wrinkled and his pants full of stains, who, between Leto and the Mathematician, not only because of his position on the sidewalk but also his height and even his age, has assumed, without looking anywhere in particular but with his head slightly raised toward the Mathematician, such a still posture that the quick and somewhat nervous shudder of his eyelids, to shield them from the sun, looks like an autonomous faculty, a little strange and disconnected from the rest of his body — Tomatis, I was saying, no? — seized, to put it one way, since he woke up, by a menace, the nameless, that will grip him all day, maybe all week, in a darkened zone; and while he listens to the Mathematician talk he thinks: if I’m going to. . and the whole universe is going to. . sooner or later is going. . is going. . while the Mathematician, without breaking his surveillance of Tomatis’s ragged expression or the persistent recitation of his thoughts on Europe, thinks: At least now he’s not pretending to listen. And Leto: From this version, longer and more ironic, you can tell he admires him more.

Ultimately, every thing, more or less, no? — and after all, what’s the difference. They visited, the Mathematician concludes, several important scientific centers. Scientific? Tomatis interrupts, bitterly shaking his head and fixing his stare on the Mathematician’s clear and now contented eyes, where Tomatis’s subtle rage, more genuine than his lighthearted chattiness, seems to produce considerable satisfaction. Scientific? Tomatis repeats, practically shouting. And then, in the same voice, Pushers on the police payroll more like it, pretending to understand what they call reality because they are so sure that what they’ve decided, without consulting anyone, are plants need to process something they’ve arbitrarily called photosynthesis in order to do that thing they call growing.

— In a certain sense, I don’t disagree, says the Mathematician, unfazed, not ignoring that, in some sense, his engineering studies and maybe his whole person are included in Tomatis’s description. And pulling from his pocket a paper folded in fourths, he adds, While we’re at it, would it be awkward for you to get the Association’s press release into the hands of your colleague correspondent? Thanks.

With the same conviction and goodwill he might demonstrate in receiving a rattlesnake, Tomatis grabs the folded sheet the Mathematician holds out. With pleasure, he says, looking away. If an engineer wrote this, the structure will need to be checked.

He starts laughing. Leto and the Mathematician laugh. This time, Tomatis’s laughter seems sincere, spontaneous, as though, overpowering the depression, not being a coarse engineer who lacks elegance of expression were enough, in the curious machinations taking place inside him, to force the menace, for some unknown reason, to withdraw temporarily. His entire self is clarified by the laughter — the laughter, no? — that sudden euphoria that comes to the face, accompanied by bodily shivers and internal flashes, abstract and present, it’s impossible to tell why some images and not others release that instantaneous and brilliant cascade that’s let loose for a few moments by the coincidence of things. Letting himself be carried along by the good mood, Tomatis pulls from his own pocket a sheet folded in fourths, almost identical to the one the Mathematician just gave him.

— This morning I wrote a press release too, he says, and, without further clarification, starts reading what is written on the page: In another man devoured / my own death I don’t see / but plagued by geometric flowers / I waste away the hours / and now they keep vigil for me. The Mathematician, who had half closed his eyes and assumed an expression of pleasure in anticipation of the reading, no doubt to demonstrate — and no doubt because of Leto’s presence — that he has already enjoyed the privilege of a private reading of Tomatis’s poems many times before, the Mathematician, when Tomatis finishes his slow and slightly pitched but altogether monotone reading, turns toward Leto, interrogating him with ecstatic eyes. And Tomatis, falling, as they say, silent, turns to look, with deliberate indifference, at the bright sidewalk, the blue sky, the cars, the people passing on the street. Brilliant, the Mathematician hastens to say. And then Leto, after hesitating, Could you read it again? I missed part of it.

A faint shadow passes, quickly, over Tomatis’s face. Without ever having thought about it, he knows that a request for a rereading is a veiled way of indicating that the effect the reader aimed for has not reached the listener, and that the listener, Leto, that is, no? to avoid praising what hasn’t affected him, uses the request for a rereading as a way to put off commenting, in order to prepare, during the rereading, a formulaic response that will satisfy Tomatis. But in truth Leto was not listening: during the reading, loose, disordered memories, practically without images or content, had plucked him from the October morning, pulling him back several months, to the time when, owing to Lopecito’s diligence and as a result of Isabel’s compulsion to escape, they had moved to the city. Leto senses, when Tomatis starts reading the poem a second time, his slight humiliation at the unjust judgment, and he senses, above all, while he puts on a much more attentive expression than his natural attention would call for, the gaze fixed on his face, from just above his head, by the Mathematician, who seems to have assumed, in solidarity with Tomatis, severe authority over the aesthetic effect that, peremptorily, the reading should have on him, authority that of course produces the opposite effect, as his excessive pressure on Leto becomes an element of distraction. Tomatis’s slow, pitched, monotone voice, slightly different from his natural voice, lays out the syllables, the words, the verses of the poem, constructing, with his artificial intonation, a sonorous fragment of paradoxical quality, as they say, no? belonging and at the same time not belonging to the physical universe — that’s it, physical, no? — which is, also, another name for that thing, the undulating material magma, so outwardly expansive, less apt to ritual than to drift, though the dreamy animal passing briefly through, suspect of his existence, insists on shipwrecking himself against it with blind, classificatory assaults. Austere or lapidary, Tomatis’s voice declaims: In another man devoured / my own death I don’t see / but plagued by geometric flowers / I waste away the hours / and now they keep vigil for me.

— Well-turned, Leto finally remarks.

— Do you have a copy? the Mathematician asks.

Tomatis hesitates a second, and then, aloof and ostentatious, gives the Mathematician the paper.

— Official exchange of press releases between the Chemical Engineering Students Association and Carlos Tomatis, he announces.

— A few more years and this is worth millions, says the Mathematician, dropping a reverent gaze at the typed out verses in the middle of the page, then putting it away after giving it a flamboyant kiss and carefully and easily folding it in fourths, following the folds Tomatis had made. And then he says, Should we walk a little?

— A few blocks, Tomatis agrees, reticently.

They start to walk, following the sun, and take up so much of the sidewalk that Leto, who is on the outside, is practically walking over the cable guardrail and every so often is forced to look over his shoulder to make sure that he isn’t about to be grazed by the slowly passing cars. Because Tomatis stayed between them, they form a declining group, from the Mathematician to Leto, not only in terms of their height and weight, but also their age, as Tomatis is a couple of years younger than the Mathematician and three or four older than Leto. But the pressure of the menace, which has surfaced again, distinguishes Tomatis from the other two, in his extremely pale color, his three-day-old beard, his stained and wrinkled clothes, but most of all with his shifty gaze, his ragged expression, the weak shivers of his body, the sudden, rough, and unpredictable movements of his head. Though they pretend not to, Leto and the Mathematician continue to notice it. And after walking a few meters in silence, the Mathematician, in a neutral and indirect way, asks what version he, Tomatis, who was present, can give of Washington’s birthday. Because they, Leto and the Mathematician, no? have Botón’s version, plagued with unverifiable interpretations, subjective assertions, and, he suspects, of anachronisms. He met Botón on the ferry the Saturday before and was just now telling Leto what Botón told him. Only when Tomatis doesn’t respond, merely shaking his head with restrained scorn, does the Mathematician ask, Is there a problem?

The words, Better that I keep my mouth shut, spill over the abject rim of Tomatis’s nervous lips and, proving the inconstancy of the signifying plane triumphant, continue without transition (and more or less): only more or less, Washington’s birthday was a convention of winos, thugs, and showgirls. For example, without going into it too much, Sadi and Miguel Ángel Podio, who present themselves as the vanguard of the working class, eject — at gunpoint — the members of the winning side the moment they lose a syndical election; he, Tomatis, can’t understand how they showed up that night without their bodyguards. And Botón, don’t start: he tried to rape Chichito at the back of the patio; she escaped thanks to her bourgeois reflexes and the fact that Botón was so drunk that not only could he not get it up but his legs barely kept him upright. And the proof that he was drunk is supplied by the fact of having picked Chichito, who is beyond the reach of anyone who hasn’t passed through the National Guard, when there were two or three women present who would gladly have taken a turn around the patio and were frivolous enough that even Botón would have seemed interesting company — they say that Nidia Basso, for example, is a nymphomaniac, and he has heard that Rosario, Pirulo’s wife, who works as a nurse in a clinic, likes to bleed herself with a syringe every once in a while. Hadn’t they seen how pale she was?

Over Tomatis’s head, thrown forward by the force of his disquisitions, Leto and the Mathematician exchange a quick and puzzled look that they use to seal, in that emergency situation, a pact in which their momentary exchange assumes the following precepts as given: 1) this morning, Tomatis seems to be in a special state of mind, 2) their efforts to bring him back to a relatively normalized relational system have up to this point failed, 3) the special state of mind this morning is making Tomatis describe the events surrounding Washington’s birthday in a distorted way, flagrantly resorting to caricature and even to slander in his references to the events, and 4) the parties are mutually impelled, via the present pact, to take Tomatis’s version with a grain of salt. Yes, thinks Leto, who still has some pangs of loyalty to Tomatis, and turns his head: But where there’s smoke there’s fire. The Mathematician, meanwhile: It’s impossible for him not to react. And Tomatis, under the cascade of malevolent words he would like to stop but which the pressure of the menace forces out:. . the universe is going to. . is going to. . and I’m going to. . Ultimately, in short, and once again, though it’s always the Same, as I was saying just now, every thing.

Oblivious to the pact just made over his head and unable to perceive any show of reproach or skepticism or discomfort in the discreet and somewhat embarrassed silence that meets his words, Tomatis continues: to top it off, after dinner, sometime around midnight, Héctor and Elisa, who are constantly brawling, passed out, as did Rita Fonesca, the painter who Botón, among others, makes time with, and who tries to show everyone her tits when she’s drunk. And finally, at four in the morning, Gabriel Giménez had come, not having slept for three nights and trying at all cost to get Washington to snort a little packet of coke. The taxi waiting for him at the entrance, according to Tomatis, had been hired the morning before.

The Mathematician has already heard this story from Botón, the previous Saturday, on the bench at the stern, and even from such a dubious source that version had seemed more plausible, or in any case more elegant, than Tomatis’s: according to Botón, as we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, just now, according to Botón, I was saying, no? Gabriel Giménez had in fact arrived in a taxi at four in the morning, animated no doubt by the little packets of coke, and according to Botón, according to Giménez himself, after three consecutive nights without sleep — a frequent thing in the case of Giménez, of Botón, and above all, in the case of Tomatis and, in Tomatis’s case, oftentimes in the company of Giménez himself, who never leaves his side — which means, the Mathematician thinks, that Tomatis should observe some basic rules, for example abstaining from scorning others for something that he treats so indulgently in himself. And, according to Botón, Giménez not only hadn’t disturbed the party with his condition, but rather had added, with his innate delicacy and sincere love for Washington, that in normal circumstances Tomatis would be the first to acknowledge, a pinch of salt to the event: to stay with Botón, Gabriel approached Washington and, undertaking a series of slow and genteel genuflections, in which all present could recognize a superior manner, and employing a gesture resembling the offering of the Eucharist, presented Washington with the little packet of coke, a kind of oblong, precious host that Washington, flattered by the distinction that the offer implied, declined with a polite smile and a quick pat on Giménez’s cheek, contending to not hold communion with that sect but at the same time declaring himself a supporter of religious tolerance.

— Right, says the Mathematician. Botón told me about it.

Tomatis doesn’t seem to hear him. They have reached the corner: a backup of cars and buses cutting each other off fills the intersection, caused by the street becoming pedestrian-only, so that the cars coming from the north are forced to turn at the cross street, and the ones coming up the cross street can only continue straight or turn to the north. Every so often a car horn connotes, through the artificial production of what they call conventional sound waves, someone’s impatience and, you could say, the nervous excitement of the drivers, which, added to the authoritarian but inconsequential whistles and arm gestures of a traffic agent standing on a platform, and the general sound of the city, where the nearest and most differentiated noises stand out, add several unforeseen variables to the ideal scheme of periodic intersections as conceived by Hippodamus. Leto, Tomatis, and the Mathematician disperse, adopting independent strategies for crossing, by sizing up, detouring, advancing, and retreating around the motionless cars, and when they reach the other side, almost at the same moment, they resume the initial order, highest to lowest, and continue walking together, this time in the middle of the street, cleared, for several blocks and several hours, of every kind of vehicle — Tomatis in the middle, immune to the circumspect silence of his company, to the somewhat desolate reticence his startling and unpleasant story is generating, and, blinded by the menace’s bitter compulsion, continues: No, the truth is it was not a good idea to invite all those people, and many of them, meanwhile, had no right to be there; they should have done something more intimate, with his real friends, the ones who, when Washington turns around, aren’t in the habit of punching him in the back of the head: Pirulo, for example, who thinks he has the right to look down on Washington because he’s not a member of the superstitious cult of quantitative sociological criteria, or Cuello the Centaur, who now pretends to be one of his closest friends, but in ’49 when the Peronists, in order to politically neutralize Washington for demanding that all the power should belong to the people, had him locked up in an asylum, Cuello, who was one of the youth leaders then, had washed his hands of it; and still, he, Tomatis, no? isn’t sure that Cuello wasn’t up to his teeth in the machinations. You could say the same of Dib, who, when he was director of the Center for Philosophy Students in Rosario, invented a political pretext for boycotting a conference that the Cohens had organized for Washington that was intended to mitigate his poverty because his pension hadn’t been paid for a year — and Dib’s true vocation and philosophical rigor can be understood, Tomatis says, when you stop to consider that he, Dib, in whose mouth the word idealist is the worst possible insult, the moment he finished spending the money his father left him, dropped out and went back to the city in order to open a mechanics shop, calculating — while calling himself a Marxist — that the main advantage of a mechanics shop is that it can operate, like the oligarchy’s plantations, with very little personnel. In any case, Tomatis says, having been the director of the Center for Philosophy Students is already proof enough of his vocation as a slave trader, because among the habits of those gentlemen is sending the troops to the front during a demonstration while reserving their spots in the hierarchy. No, frankly, there were several too many that night. And several who weren’t there who should have been.

Leto gives him a discreet, sidelong, glance, to see whether that last sentence had been intended to make up for not having invited him, but Tomatis’s pale profile does not alter when his gaze grazes it. From the other side, the Mathematician, whose attention was also caught by the sentence, concludes fundamentally that, almost certainly, the sentence is directed to his listeners, not because the absence of his listeners at the birthday party seemed a major injustice, but because, in order to mitigate the malevolence of his discourse somewhat, Tomatis strokes — without deliberately meaning to — the vanity of his listeners in order to compensate for the blackness of his descriptions. Tomatis’s pause seems to confirm this, and in a discreet but no less peremptory way, exploiting the caesura, the Mathematician ventures to suggest: Aren’t you exaggerating a little? Certainly Botón’s version isn’t altogether trustworthy, especially when he tries, instead of sticking circumspectly to the facts, to season it with his own interpretations, but from what he — the Mathematician, no? — knows about the people present, it seems that, ultimately, Botón’s version, leaving aside a few fantasies, probably doesn’t stray too far from the truth. And lastly, Tomatis’s psychological characterizations — here the Mathematician tries in vain to share a quick look of complicity with Leto over Tomatis’s head — if not unjust or incorrect in certain cases, seem to him secondary at best: You say that Botón is a lush? A gold star for that news! That Pirulo’s conceptions are among the most limited and that Cohen is always clouding his with rudimentary psychology? They’ve already agreed on that twenty times. No; from what Botón told him, the draw of the party wasn’t in those banalities, but in the discussion over Noca’s horse and Washington’s three mosquitos. Ending his circuit, the Mathematician, without even looking at Tomatis, puts his empty pipe in his mouth and, not inclined to making any more concessions, waits for a response.

— Noca’s horse, Noca’s horse, the three mosquitos. . Oh right! Now I remember, Tomatis concedes little by little, pretending to have to rummage deep in his memory in order to manifest those insignificant details. And he adds, exaggerating his skepticism, Yes, yes. Possibly.

Although, in his opinion, you have to be careful. If they were to try, for once, to be rigorous, there would be objections to spare: first off, whether or not Noca’s horse stumbled is something ultimately unverifiable, given that Noca’s fabulations are well-known up and down the coast, from the city all the way to San Javier and even farther north, and his reasons for constructing them — pragmatic or artistic as were the case — but always inspired by wine, are infinite in variety, resulting in a high probability of discussing something that never happened. Furthermore, if he remembers correctly, Noca had offered this explanation to Basso, the owner of the house, to account for his delay with the fish, an explanation that was rooted, as is well-known and beyond discussion, in his total inability to deal with any sort of real criticism, something supposedly caused by his Orientalism — a subject which he barely understands and has hardly read about; and finally, if his memory serves, Cohen was the one who started the argument, while he prepared the fire, and everyone knows that Cohen has a particular tendency to propose problems that appear fundamental only in order to adopt subtle-seeming formulations and supposedly knowing expressions for explaining them; and all of this because Silvia, his wife, is smarter than him, something he endures with considerable pains. Furthermore, Tomatis adds before becoming thoughtful for a few seconds, you would have to decide if instinct, as he assumes, really is pure necessity.

— Set in motion by, says the Mathematician, taking the pipe from his mouth, waving it in the air, and repositioning it between his teeth. As I was telling Leto just now.

Tomatis doesn’t seem to hear him. You’d have to decide, he repeats. Furthermore, he continues forcefully, any interjection from Barco, who was very involved in the first part of the discussion, is seriously dubious because he spent it coming and going from the pavilion, where Cohen was preparing the fire, to the keg he had installed at the entrance to the kitchen, and you had to repeat half of what was said while he disappeared to empty foam because he wouldn’t let anyone touch the tap, worried that the extremely precarious installation he had fashioned for the hose would fall apart. On the other hand, he asks himself, who among them could have been interested in that kind of discussion? Not counting Cohen who, as I just said, likes to present himself publicly as a dialectician while consumed by the complex his wife’s superior intellect caused him; disregarding Basso and his three-by-five irrationality; eliminating El Gato, who during that kind of polemic limits himself to watching the different participants with a sardonic air; Pichón, who isn’t someone who likes a lot of saliva in his conversations; Silvia and Beatriz, who were in the kitchen when the thing started, Washington, who didn’t say anything until after dinner; Marcos Rosemberg, who doesn’t open his mouth since his wife left him for César Rey; and Barco who, as I just said, spent it coming and going from the keg to the pavilion and back. Who else among them could have the slightest idea what they were talking about?

And Tomatis shakes his head, depressed by the number of people at Washington’s birthday who couldn’t keep up with the discussion. But the alert Mathematician is not convinced: among those who, according to Tomatis, would be capable of sustaining a quality dispute he easily recognizes Tomatis’s own best friends, who without the slightest hesitation have been relegated to the mass of humanity in the darkness beyond. And Tomatis? As if guessing the Mathematician’s mental interrogation, Tomatis continues, referring to himself: He didn’t intervene at all — that useless display of supposed dialectics was liable to give him tremendous gas, so he restricted himself to staying silent at the end of the table, calmly eating his perch and enjoying his white wine — which, if the Mathematician believes Botón’s version, is more or less false, given that, according to Botón, Tomatis, whose arteries had already circulated three or four whiskies before he had arrived at the party with Barco and the girls, if in fact he didn’t intervene directly in the discussion, then he spent it tormenting this or that person, ridiculing their comments with third-rate word games and reducing to absurdity, out of sheer volubility, the better part of the arguments. Silent at the end of the table, calmly eating his perch and enjoying his white wine, Tomatis insists again, like the second hammer given for good measure so that the nail sinks totally and completely, vaguely suspecting that his credibility with the Mathematician, and even with Leto, who follows the conversation silently, is not far from dropping to zero. But the menace is stronger than his self-respect: With Washington, he insists, it’s hard to tell when he’s speaking in jest and when he’s serious, and the fact that he stayed silent for so long before intervening makes him suspicious. Maybe his delayed interjection was a snide way of saying he was fed up too. That story about the three mosquitos, one that doesn’t approach, one that approaches and takes off every time he raises his hand to smash it, and one that on the first try lets itself get smashed on his cheek seems, to him, Tomatis, who is close with Washington, no? highly unlikely. Even if the thing had really happened and, beyond any doubt, the three mosquitos had existed, appearing in the aforementioned circumstances and behaving the way Washington described, even then you have to ask whether bringing them up could be anything but an indirect way for Washington to tell Cohen, Barco, and company that if they were deliberating over a horse, why not deliberate over three mosquitos while they were at it, so that, since they were already deliberating, they might deliberate in earnest, not at the expense of a poor horse burdened from the word go with the foolish delirium of the human race, but rather, if they could, and since they liked to deliberate so much, over three mosquitos, gray, minute, and neutral — an elegant way of suggesting that the more ridiculous the object the clearer the dimensions of the delirium. And second, if you accept the possibility that Washington was speaking seriously, you have to bear in mind that he isn’t infallible. Why don’t they analyze a little and see? At this point he, Tomatis, remembers — curiously, it had been almost completely erased: He doesn’t know Botón’s version, but since he knows Botón, that’s more than enough. He therefore discards it. Furthermore he, Tomatis, was present, and though he had not been interested in participating, or maybe for that very reason, he also doesn’t consider himself, ultimately, disqualified to reproduce it. Looked at another way, if there’s anyone who can boast to knowing Washington well and being able to seize on the multiple intentions that can sometimes be discerned in what he says, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest that he, Tomatis, would be that person. Alright then, in his point of view — in his, in Tomatis’s, no? — if it turned out to not be a huge practical joke — Washington’s taste for farce is not as well-known as he is — then Washington’s intrusion would have been a meditation, indirect of course, on the concept of destiny, and not an accelerated course on the obscure features of a marginal entomological branch. To him, Tomatis, Washington, who was divorced twice and therefore does not feel obligated, every time he’s in public, to demonstrate that he’s more intelligent than his wife, is also not so naïve as to believe that when he waxes philosophical about the behavior of three mosquitos, that he is just talking about those three mosquitos and not something else. Because someone who says, about the mosquito, that it’s this or that thing, Tomatis says, doesn’t in fact say, about the mosquito, anything. It’s what he says about himself, Tomatis says, and he repeats this so severely in the bright morning on the central avenue that a woman passing just then raises her head and looks at him in surprise. About himself! About himself!, in the tone, not without passion, of someone who, disclosing a conspiracy piece by piece, finally volunteers the fundamental revelation that will end the masquerade, as they say, definitively.

Even Leto looks at him, astonished, rocking his head back slightly to acknowledge the intensity; Leto who, since the Mathematician saw Tomatis standing at the entrance to the newspaper and started gesticulating in his direction from the opposite sidewalk, feels like he has become invisible because of the excessive attention Tomatis and the Mathematician are lavishing on each other, forming a kind of mutual aura, impalpable and bright, that he feels excluded from. And still, on the previous block, the Mathematician looked at him over Tomatis’s head to form a sort of complicity aimed at neutralizing the arbitrary and compulsive tirades from Tomatis, who cannot stop himself from speaking, without their knowing it, as a result of the tenacious titillations of the menace. The painful exclusion that makes him invisible incites Leto, paradoxically, to smile constantly, maybe to hide his true feelings, but the muscles in his face, which should obey his intentions and form a smile, resist instead, as though his skin were taut and hard, so much so that, from forcing himself to smile or as a result of his overwhelming sense of transparency, he feels a sharp, sporadic pain in his jaw.

According to Tomatis, therefore, the notorious mosquitos had been, for Washington, a pretext — and Tomatis remembers that Washington nodded when Cohen, as Washington finished his story, offered the following suggestion: If Washington had killed one of the mosquitos, the one among the three that had actually let itself be trapped by the first slap, they shouldn’t look for the reason in the mosquito but in Washington. At that suggestion from Cohen, Washington nodded, Tomatis says. And also when someone objected that if one of the mosquitos had landed on his cheek to bite him and let itself be slapped to death, it was for the simple reason that it’s the females and not the males that bite and you could deduce that the one that had tried to bite him was a female and the two that had kept a distance were male; Washington refuted this saying that first off one of the other two mosquitos had tried to land on his cheek or around there several times, and second, and this was, judging from the emphatic tone he used, his primary argument, that on the level he was referring to, gender was not a principal determinant.

Motherfuckers!, Leto thinks. They can’t shut up about their so-called levels. Whatever. Basically, I don’t give a shit. But this isn’t true. In fact, sixteen, seventeen years later he will still remember Washington’s three mosquitos.

So will the Mathematician who, one morning in 1979, aboard an airplane coming from Paris and beginning its descent into Stockholm, while he waits patiently for the landing, takes his wallet out and, from among the bills, the credit cards, the identification, withdraws the sheet folded in fourths that Tomatis gave him at the entrance to the newspaper, the sheet whose folds are now more brown than yellow and so worn that, when opening it over the tray table where the remains of his breakfast have just been cleared by the stewardess, the Mathematician is extremely cautious, fearing that the folds, splitting at points, will separate completely. But the Mathematician doesn’t even read the five typed verses — only glancing at them, now that the sheet, after so many years and so many transfers out of pure habit from one wallet to another, from one jacket to another, from one continent to another, imperfectly sheltered from the years in the Mathematician’s warm pockets, has finally lost its communicative quality and become an object, and, ultimately, a relic, halfway between its material presence and what they call the deep well of memory that sooner or later will notice it; or a fragment, not of Tomatis, actually, who he was discussing just the day before with Pichón Garay as they walked through Saint-Germain-des-Prés, coming from the Assemblée Nationale toward the Place Maubert, no, not of Tomatis, but of the morning when, having just returned from his first trip to Europe, he ran into Leto on the central avenue and they walked south together. The Mathematician looks at the sheet, shakes his head, then carefully folds it again, and after returning it to his wallet and putting the wallet back into the inside pocket of his sport coat, he puts his empty pipe in his mouth and, folding his hands over the tray table, sits in thought. In fact, he first put it in his wallet when he was changing his pants, the evening of the same day Tomatis gave it to him, and was taking everything from his pockets, his handkerchief, his keys, his empty pipe — he packed and smoked it only every so often — a copy of the press release from the Students Association, and because the sheet folded in fourths was among these things, and he was late to a meeting with the Association, he quickly tucked it into his wallet, and for months it sat forgotten in a little compartment until one day, when the wallet was worn out, even, like the sheet, at the folds, and his mother gave him a new one for his twenty-eighth birthday, in switching the papers from one to the other he found it again. He was about to leave it on his desk, to later file it in a drawer with some other papers, but a superstitious hesitation stopped him, and he felt a premonition, certainly unpleasant since it forced him into a kind of servitude, that if he discarded that sheet of paper something awful would happen. With a shake of the head and a brief and skeptical laugh, characteristic of someone allowing themselves a passing weakness that does not correspond with their personality and which they plan to correct as soon as they have time to get to the bottom of the problem, he tucked the sheet into the new wallet and forgot it again for several months. One day when he was reading in his room, he remembered having it and the hesitation that struck him when he tried to let it go, and because he was in a very good mood and felt inwardly clean, organized, and stable, he decided to take it from his wallet in order to jettison, with a decisive act, the unease that his superstitious reaction had left him with, at which point he opened the wardrobe where his jacket hung, took the wallet from his pocket, the sheet from the wallet, returned the wallet to the jacket pocket, closed the wardrobe door, and, opening a desk drawer, prepared himself to drop the sheet folded in fourths onto some papers that lived, as they say, at the bottom, but at the last second he told himself that doing it that way would be compulsive, and it would be more convenient, instead of hiding it in the desk drawer, to leave it a while, in an ordinary way, on the table, the way he would have done with any other thing. So he left it on the table and sat down to read. Night came. He had been concentrating on his reading a while, stopping only to turn on the lamp, when he realized that it was getting dark, and suddenly he raised his head and saw the rectangle of white paper on the table, shining in the intense lamplight, directed strategically to project a luminous circle over the portion of the table where his hands, the book, and the paper sat, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. But only the paper seemed to be present; seized by another feeling that, as he liked to say, if they aren’t measurable, at least with our current understanding, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why they would resist, etc., etc., no? seized again by one of those feelings, I was saying, that revealed his frailty, the Mathematician recognized, with the same clarity that he could recognize the energy radiated when combustible material burned, that this paper laying on the table radiated danger, that the sheet folded in fourths had a secret relationship to disparate fragments of the universe, and that if he wanted to protect them from destruction, he should not let go of it for any reason — the Mathematician, no? who after thinking over the above in a calm and clear way, shook his head like the first time and issued the same short, incredulous laugh. He decided to go out, to stop by the bar at the arcade, eat a sandwich or a pizza near the bus terminal, and come back to work until midnight. But after combing his hair a little, adjusting his tie, putting on his jacket, and preparing to leave his room, an impenetrable obstacle, which in spite of having risen, invisible but corporeal, from inside him, seemed to block the doorway and stopped him suddenly at the entrance. It was the danger that, shining from the table, seemed to radiate from the sheet folded in fourths. The intense hesitation made him turn sideways in the doorway, and he was left standing with half his body in the hallway and the other half in the room, his head turned toward the table where the white rectangle reverberated in the harsh light — the white rectangle holding together fragments of the external world, defenseless and anonymous, but already joined to him by secret connections, people maybe, systems, things, he didn’t know, something that he, with such a mundane-seeming decision, might take part in exterminating. He thought that he could not give in and, turning off the light and closing the door behind him, resolved not to give in. He went out into the street resolute, and while he took his first steps on the street — it took him only a few seconds to get there, on account of his speed — he forgot about the paper, but almost immediately he began to slow down until, shaking his head, upset, as they say, more than afraid, he stopped completely. And when he went back for the paper, to neutralize it, and tucked it into his wallet, he told himself he was doing it less out of fear that those fearful connections really existed than because he didn’t want his thoughts to ruin the walk. With the world safe in a compartment of his wallet, he was able to think better, and with a cool head it wasn’t difficult to realize that neither Tomatis nor his verses had anything to do with that species of nefarious energy that had built up in the sheet, but instead, through some coincidence, an encounter had occurred between the paper, up to that point neutral and inscribed on a different network of relationships, and a moment of personal weakness, owing maybe to exhaustion, to a momentary transformation that, in reorganizing the constituent elements of his personality, brought them all to the surface without exception, including the most ancillary and most archaic, in order to form a new synthesis that would definitively relegate the useless parts, the same way that, when he was cleaning his desk, he would withdraw and read all the papers stored in the drawers, the ones he would keep and the ones he had decided to throw out. It was a good explanation, and the Mathematician did not place that passing anomaly in the same hierarchy as The Incident but, although he only thought about it from time to time, and always with the same skeptical and brief internal smile, eighteen years later he still carried the sheet folded in fourths in a compartment of his wallet, and though he had memorized the lines, every once in a while he would take it out and look it over, in a mechanical, unpremeditated way, with the gray and somewhat worn gestures of the customary, like that morning on the tray table which the stewardess had just cleaned of his breakfast when the airplane which, as we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, just now, had left Paris a few hours before and was beginning to descend into Stockholm.

Though it was still February, in Paris, strangely, the weather had been good, a humid and still cold sun, and they had flown at three thousand feet, allowing, every so often, pale sunlight to stream through the windows. Distracted, the Mathematician glanced out, knowing that now, for a few months, until May at least, he would be away in Uppsala, and just as he was looking toward the windows — he was sitting in the opposite aisle, in a middle seat — the airplane flew into a thick, grayish fog, which was the clouds, which seemed, suddenly, to swallow the monotonous and consequently inconspicuous sound of the engines. If Limbo were somewhere among the clouds, certainly at that instant the airplane was starting to cross it. For the moment, before the final landing maneuvers, it seemed motionless more than anything, but because that motionlessness followed the sudden change of dipping into the thick mass of clouds, the impression was of a motionlessness frozen mid-movement, as though time itself and not just the moving machine had stopped. Equally motionless, resting against the back of his chair, his hands deserted on the tray table, the Mathematician, his eyes fixed on a vague spot somewhere in the enormous empty cabin, was so absent from the airplane that, no doubt as a consequence of the illusory and indistinct stillness of the machine, he seemed like a character from one of those fantastical stories, instantly spirited away to a magical world while the real world he comes from remains stopped and as though frozen through the entire duration of his adventures.

He is on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with Pichón Garay; they have been walking from the Assemblée Nationale toward the Place Maubert. Just then they have reached the Rue du Bac; at the entrance to the Assemblée they had split from the delegation — a group of exiles who have just been received by representatives of the socialist bloc, and who promised them, the bloc, no? to look into the issue, the massacres, the disappearances, the tortures, the assassinations in the middle of the day in the middle of the street, etc., etc., ultimately, as we were saying, from the start, or rather yours truly has been saying — and more or less, no? — every thing. The two forty-somethings, dressed in youthful clothing, have separated from their so-called compatriots and have started walking slowly under the unexpected, cold, and above all humid February sun, as others have written, it’s true, many times, although it’s always the same — as yours truly has been saying from the start — always, like in the beginning all the way to the end, if there were, as they, the knowing, say, a beginning, and if there will be, as they imagine, an end — I was saying, no? the same Time, in the same, no? as I already said several times, in the Same, no matter the city, in Buenos Aires, in Paris, in Uppsala, in Stockholm, and farther away still, still, as I was saying, Place. In a word, essentially, or in two better yet, to be more precise, every thing.

The year before, in May, Washington died of prostate cancer; in June, El Gato and Elisa, who had been living together in Rincón since she and Héctor separated, were kidnapped by the government and had not been heard from since. And around that same time, though it only came out later, Leto, Ángel Leto, no? who for years had been living in hiding, found himself obligated, because of an ambush set up by the police, to finally bite the suicide pill that, for security reasons, the leaders of his movement distribute to the soldiers so that, if they are surprised, as they say, by the enemy, they will not compromise, during their torture, the entire organization. And Leto had bitten the pill. The Mathematician, for his part, is well-informed of these things, given that, though he was often at odds with her opinion, he and his wife had shared, for several years, until they killed her, in 1974, that singular existence. The marriage of the Mathematician! Tomatis, for whom every example of the female sex whose measurements in the chest, waist, and thighs did not correspond to those of Miss Universe is an indistinct and transparent creature, one night in 1970, sitting with Barco on a bench at the waterfront after a long walk, remarked on the marriage in more or less these terms: The Mathematician was one of the most handsome, intelligent, elegant, rich men he had known; more than once he had seen him remain impervious to the advances of the most beautiful girls in the city. Every time that a woman entered a party where the Mathematician was present you could instantly tell that the eyes of said woman were turning, inevitably, in the Mathematician’s direction. Tomatis was sure that, for a couple of years, Beatriz, who he had tried and failed to seduce, was secretly in love with the Leibnizian rugby-man. And after years of unflustered, mysterious bachelorhood, the Mathematician had taken up conjugals with Edith. Incendiary news! Tomatis says. And just a year later they’re married. Tomatis knows Edith: she is fourteen years older than the Mathematician; she’s short, fat, ugly, Jewish, a feminist, a Trotskyite and widow of a Trotskyite who, clandestinely militant since 1967, died in a brawl with government thugs, at a bar in the great Buenos Aires. His parents (the Mathematician’s, no?) I don’t think objected at all, but Leandro, his brother, and the rest of the family, I can see their faces. He crossed the line. Traitor, said Tomatis, his head shaking with laughter. But he was wrong; consciously at least, as Tomatis himself might say, there had been no premeditation or intention to provoke. The Mathematician felt sincere respect and an egalitarian affection for Edith, and a few years before, when they had been active together in a Trotskyite group, he had been a little in love with her. In any case, they didn’t see each other much, and although the Mathematician did not completely approve of an armed rebellion, and they calmly and often discussed these things, they blindly trusted each other and, every once in a while, felt an intense desire to meet again, him to be with someone who deserved the quota of admiration and respect he could not live without and which, as he got older, very few people inspired in him, her because she trusted his intelligence and his loyalty and because he provided her, through his uncompromising critiques, a criteria for reality that action obscured. As soon as they met, despite his being twenty and she a little over thirty, they were like an old couple, connected by a kind of desperate tenacity that made them, because of their differences, marvel at having met, both convinced, for distinct reasons of course, that nothing was possible, but constantly acting as though anything were. They hadn’t seen each other for years, the intractable activist and the good son, condemned to join their lives with the common component that luck had granted them, their moral conscience, which, after so much error, insanity, and violence that certainly neither was entirely innocent of, made them react with the same intransigence. They had a shared, official apartment in Buenos Aires and a little house in the Córdoba mountains no one knew about, which they called the phalanstère for security reasons, and where in difficult moments they met in secret. She would be at the typewriter constantly and would give him what she called the material, reports, political analyses, statements, that the Mathematician read carefully, shaking his head, negatively most of the time, marking the individual themes with different colored pens — he had gone to work in the chemical industry in Buenos Aires and then had become a professor at the university, and he always retained the habit of marking industrial reports, notes, and his students’ homework with colored pens or pencils. Finally, in 1974, they killed her. Everything happened quickly, and the Mathematician’s initial fear that, because they saw each other sporadically, and she would disappear again and again in an unsystematic way, she would be killed and he would never know it was ultimately unwarranted, because one evening in July an anonymous telephone call informed him that they had killed her that morning and he should disappear because any second the police would be raiding his apartment. Calmly but quickly he packed a suitcase with clothes, books, and papers and caught the bus to Córdoba, hoping that the news was false and that she would be waiting for him at the phalanstère, but despite traces of a recent occupation in the house, she never came. He didn’t fool himself: the telephone call could have come from one of Edith’s fellow soldiers, to whom she had expressed at some point her desire to have her death communicated to him, but it — the call, no? — could have come from the same people who had killed her, given that, although his brother wasn’t yet in the government, where he would be in ’76, he nevertheless had sufficient influence and intimacy among the security forces to protect him. If the latter was what had really occurred, he still didn’t fool himself much: with Leandro more than ten years had passed, since their father’s funeral, without their meeting or speaking, and if they passed on the street they ignored each other, so if Leandro had protected him it was to protect the family name, as he might say, and, above all, his own political career — with excellent results, actually, having emerged unscathed from massacres, combat, assassinations, shootings, tortures, concentration camps, bombings, and overthrown governments, he had become a minister in the provincial government in ’76, without once losing his tanned, healthy, calm, and elegant appearance, and without having missed a single eleven o’clock Sunday mass or a call to his mother at 8:00 sharp every other day for twenty years. The day after he left for Córdoba, a group of armed men raided his apartment in Buenos Aires and, not before removing every valuable object, tore it to pieces. He had no illusions about this either: if Leandro had been the one to inform him about the raid on his apartment, he must also have been the one responsible for its destruction, in order to teach him a lesson about deviating from the norms that governed the life of his tribe—the bloodlust bourgeoisie—like the time when he was undersecretary in another de facto government and had ordered him taken prisoner for several days. He was safe in Córdoba for a few months — only he and Edith knew about the house — but because his sudden appearance in the town, his isolation, and his excessively long stay might awaken the neighbors’ suspicions, he returned to Buenos Aires. A Swedish friend put him up in his apartment and found him work at the University of Uppsala. Early in November he landed in Stockholm for the first time. The black and terrible winter waiting ahead disoriented him a little, but in the spring he started walking around, warmly dressed and with his unlit pipe in his mouth, among the houses and gardens of the university, and on Sunday afternoons he would watch televised sports programs. The rest of the time he read his timeless philosophers and the newspaper clippings he received, prepared his courses, and, when the holidays came, traveled south, to Paris, where Pichón Garay lived, to Madrid or Rome, and every once in a while he would stop off in Copenhagen, which he continued to like despite, as he liked to say, its smooth and well-swept streets which seemed to be more influenced by Andersen than Kierkegaard or the Interpretation.

The Mathematician put on his glasses. In the half-empty cabin his sudden and at the same time slow gesture contrasted with the illusory stillness of the airplane, which floated in a bank of the gray clouds like a fragile object wrapped in cotton packaging. To the external equilibrium corresponded, just then, a kind of internal stillness, lacking any moral or emotive primacy and resulting from a chain of events too long, too complex, and too buried to inspire any analytical interest, but paradoxical enough that, with all the bad news, returning to the dark north and his almost complete isolation for three or four months, that unquestionable internal stillness, in the motionless and illuminated limbo of the airplane among the clouds or their coincidence with it, was not much different from well-being. And all because of the walk with Pichón Garay the day before, leaving the Assemblée Nationale and walking down the Boulevard Saint-Germain toward the Place Maubert! After the meeting with the representatives, the other members of the delegation decided to have lunch together, but without having agreed to beforehand, Pichón and the Mathematician declined the invitation. Apart from ideology they had, to tell the truth, nothing in common with the other members of the delegation, who were certainly very earnest, but who lacked the force of experience or memory. And saying goodbye to the others, they had started to walk.

Without knowing how, they began talking about Washington’s birthday, maybe because that night had inspired the phrase, it’s like Washington’s mosquitos, meaning something was of dubious reality, which Pichón had employed just then in reference to the promises of possible help for the refugees on the part of the French government. The Mathematician knew the expression well, but the accumulated experiences of the last few years had stifled its memory somewhat, and hearing it again, after a period of forgetting, revived, like the periodic cosmos, and re-substantiated, so to speak, clear and intact, large fragments of his former life, and the Mathematician began to recall, without meaning to, memories of experiences that had never happened. No one knew who had first used the expression, or when, but at the time, after the famous night, it began appearing in conversations, and even once, astonishingly, the Mathematician had heard it used by someone who not only didn’t know Washington or any of the guests, but also couldn’t have known the story or even imagined it, and if he had heard it, could not have understood it or been interested at all. Pichón had begun to discourse on the expression after having used it, recalling the party without noticing that the Mathematician, who had been visiting factories in Frankfurt when it took place, was nodding along, still, eighteen years later, feeling a sense of shame and humiliation at not having been there, and only through an exercise of will was he able to transform the nod into a negative shake before declaring, and causing a passing confusion in Pichón’s memories: I, unfortunately, was not there. Pichón couldn’t remember well: It was a story with three mosquitos. . three mosquitos that. . how did it go? He really wasn’t there? Strange, because he clearly remembers seeing him next to the keg, discussing something with Horacio Barco. Wasn’t he, the Mathematician, the one who, in the morning, when Pirulo, slightly tipsy, tried to fight with Miguel Ángel Podio over some political story, had tried to separate them? The Mathematician shook his head as Pichón continued assigning him actions that had never taken place, without realizing that Pichón’s confusion overwhelmed any disadvantage to the absent and that, after so many years, the events were as distant and inaccessible to those who had participated in them as to those who only knew them as hearsay. And Pichón, who resisted evicting him from his memories, and in truth never would, scratching his chin perplexedly, continued: Really? Wasn’t he, the Mathematician, the one who had driven Washington there? Hadn’t it been with him that he, Pichón, had gone to pick frozen mandarins to bring to the table and seeing that one of the trees was shaking violently in the darkness had approached, thinking it was an owl when actually it was Barco and La Chichito whispering and laughing quietly, intertwined and hidden in the leaves? And he could have sworn that the Mathematician was among the group who, early in the morning, when almost everyone had gone to sleep or returned home and only six or seven people were left, huddled together drinking mate around the fireplace in the house — Basso, Barco, Beatriz, Silvia Cohen, him, Pichón, no? — while Washington, refreshed and calm, started comparing, who knows from what tangent off the conversation, the Hatha Yoga mudrā with the Fourierian utopia, arguing that the mudrā, which compel the human body into unnatural positions and psychological states that are, a priori, considered impossible, refute biological fatalism the same way that the society theorized by Fourier, where everything is deliberately constructed in rational opposition to spontaneous liberal self-regulation, once and for all demolishes the social fatalism that supposedly underlies all oppressive human nature. Pichón barely remembered the mosquitos or Noca’s horse, but that conversation, around the fireplace, in the frozen morning, was still with him. And, more than anything, the return to the city. Washington had to do some things before going back to Rincón Norte, cash his pension check or something, Pichón didn’t remember anymore, but what he felt sure of was that they returned in two cars, La Chichito’s and the Mathematician’s, no? And the Mathematician shook his head: Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. . impossible; he, just then, was in Frankfurt, he remembers very well. And Pichón was forced, temporarily, with considerable effort and certainly unconvinced, to remove him from his memory, so fresh, clear, and orderly, as if from the previous day; true or false, it was more or less this: excited by the night’s drinking, by having stayed awake, by the conversations, they went out into the cold morning to discover that, since the temperature had been falling near sunrise, which had made them at some point move from the pavilion to the house, at many points around the yellowish fields, the dew had been settling in frozen white patches that the already rising sun, shining in a pale sky, had not yet been able to thaw. Pichón remembers the clean, icy air, and that, walking out of the house, Silvia Cohen had gone to inspect the first buds of a tree, asking out loud if the frost would kill them. Everyone had started looking at the sky, the air, the trees, the sandy path, trying to guess, with looks that became suddenly uncertain and solemn, the real severity of the frost, determined to pronounce on the possible survival of the buds, until finally, after a decidedly measured deliberation, they agreed, just as they were getting into the cars, that it was a relatively mild frost and the buds, certainly, would resist it. Pichón had begun to laugh so intensely that the Mathematician, infected, laughed too, and for no other reason, since Pichón’s laughter was caused by a memory he had yet to express and would only describe a few seconds later, realizing that if, after inspecting the severity of the frost with their eyes, skin, and lungs, they had agreed on its innocuousness, it wasn’t that they had the least capacity for an objective analysis of the weather conditions, but that after the night they had been through, the drinking and the dawn, the momentary carnal exchanges in the darkened margins of the gathering, the excitement of the conversations, they had come out into the icy morning happy and reconciled, and they wanted — because forgetting this realized their desire — for those benevolent waves rocking them to be verified, incontrovertible, in the external.

Like that. Or, if you like, more or less — more or less like that, no? Through his glasses the Mathematician passed his gaze over the illuminated cabin, without paying, as they say, too much attention to the motionless heads protruding over the seats, or to the windows covered by that cottony substance that intercepts the external light and paradoxically emphasizes the artificial clarity in the cabin. Over the years he had gained some weight, but not much, because his conviction that sports was the best way to counterbalance his sedentariness had preserved him — through a methodical but less obsessive practice than the worship of the body that emerged in the West after the death of the gods — from the ravages time inflicts on the body of a forty-year-old, but his blonde hair had dulled and turned somewhat ashen, and extremely fine wrinkles, closer to those of an infant than an old man, creased his face in clusters of more or less parallel lines whose orientation reproduced on his skin the hidden location of his facial muscles. The sudden burst of laughter on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the day before, resonated inside him with the singular quality of sonorous recollections that, while they return silently to memory, do not lose their timbre, color, or intensity. The well-being came less from the implicit but ultimately restrained joy of the conversation itself and the context that produced it, than from the effect of certain words, of certain associations that, in an unexpected way, allowed him to unbind, or unglue rather, sections of his life that had become superimposed and stuck together, the way those posters on city walls, under successive layers of paste and printed paper, form a kind of crust whose tattered and distressed edges can barely be made out, though you know that on each covered page persists, invisible, an image. Since the day before, many of those covered images had reappeared thanks, not to his own memories, but to Pichón’s — Pichón, no? — who despite the privilege of experience was just as lost in a deceptive uncertainty, while at the time he, the Mathematician, had criticized himself for having been in Frankfurt, depriving himself of the means of capturing, at a fixed point in reality, the approximate sequence of events with the network of his five senses.

Suddenly the Mathematician remembered a dream, or rather, a nightmare. He had been passing a somewhat vacuous gaze over the cabin, produced by the emotional neutrality transformed, as the laughter dissipated in his memory, from the well-being of a few moments earlier — and if, as they say, pleasure is nothing but the absence of pain, his internal vacuousness, without a doubt painless, could be considered a consequence of that well-being. The airplane’s illusory, slightly oblique detention in the cottony Limbo persisted, blocking the windows, and the Mathematician, sitting at the outside end of a row of seats halfway to the back, could see the cabin floor declining almost imperceptibly down, toward the front of the plane, and he thought again, somewhat amazed, of that elemental mechanical paradox that demonstrates that motionlessness is what creates motion, that motion is simply a reference to motionlessness, and just then the machine, which had swallowed him in Paris and would spit him out in Stockholm a few minutes from now, as if it had been aware of his thoughts, correcting its position, its speed maybe, or its direction, he couldn’t tell, produced, benevolently, a series of vibrations that caused it to tremble a little, along with everything it carried inside, as though it had wanted to confirm for the Mathematician that the Limbo was transitory, a variant lull, and that each of those vibrations was reactivating time, space, matter, thought, until, after those two or three shivers that reintroduced the swarm of distinction into the heart of the singular, it returned to complete stillness. The Mathematician’s nightmare was as follows: Walking through an indistinct and deserted city, he found a piece of paper lying on the sidewalk, a kind of rigid strip four or five centimeters long and one centimeter wide; for several moments he stood observing it, without mistrust but without hurry, trying to understand its significance, its use, the likely circumstances that had brought it there — almost, almost its mystery. Bent toward it, but without deciding to pick it up, intrigued, he observed it, until finally he took it up into the palm of his hand to study it closer, realizing that it actually wasn’t a rigid strip but a sheet folded like an accordion, whose external band, seen from above, had looked like a flat strip. Now that he had it close, he noticed that he had missed the primary feature: what he had thought was a stain in the middle of the strip was actually his own portrait, printed vertically, his head and shoulders, not clearly either a drawing or a photograph, his own portrait, no? with an expression that seemed naïve, youthful, somewhat tender. Fascinated by his discovery, his fingers shaking a little, he turned the strip to the opposite face, in the literal sense of the word, and another portrait was printed in the middle of the strip, at the same height as on the obverse side; only the expression had changed, so much so that, for an instant, he thought it was someone else — but it wasn’t, it was him, himself. On the reverse side, the expression was furrowed, solemn, and seemed to be trying to display a strength of character that because of its ostentation was ultimately unconvincing. All of this inspired a certain levity and heightened his curiosity, and taking the ends of the object between the tips of his index finger and thumb, he began to unfold the accordion very slowly, confirming what he had predicted, that on each face of the folds on the paper, at the same height as the previous, there was his portrait, not clearly either a drawing or a photograph; on each of the portraits the expression was so different that, although he knew it was the same person, for an instant he suffered the brief delusion, passing a moment later, that it wasn’t him. Separating his symmetrically facing thumbs and index fingers toward the edges of the paper, he unfolded the accordion a little more, knowing that he would be increasing the variety of miniature portraits, printed vertically at the same height, beginning now to form a small multitude of, to him, amusingly conventional expressions. A second-rate actor in the broadest downmarket television series wouldn’t have employed more vulgar gestures to effect innocence, pain, guilelessness, intelligence, avarice, resolution, disdain, cunning, desire, emotions, and traces of a personality which appeared so domesticated, so pliant to conventions, that they stank of servitude but nevertheless revealed, through hidden details, a compassionate attitude toward the spectator. Of course, he thought. This is a dream. It signifies that we don’t have one personality but many. In addition, all the expressions we assume are insincere, incomplete, and conventional. My dreams are so transparent, and he continued unfolding the strip. By now he had unfolded it so much that he stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his arms stretched apart, and the sheet, which started off straight and rigid, seemed to have softened somewhat, because of the increasing width, and curved down. His first moment of unease, abruptly effacing his amusement, was a physical one, because he realized that, no matter how far he stretched his arms, he wouldn’t be able to unfold the accordion completely, but at the same time he figured out that he could let go of the ends, grab the sheet with both hands and open it from the middle in order to complete the operation without needing to stretch his arms and instead sliding the paper strip apart with his hands, letting the already unfolded ends accumulate on the ground. He did this. But as he slid it open, it continued unfolding. At his feet, on the indistinct and blurry sidewalk, the accordion folded strip accumulated in two symmetrical piles, without his being able to reach the center. He quickened the sliding but the only thing he accomplished was to instill them, on account of the diversity of effigies printed on the folds, with caricaturish life as the stereotypical expressions were juxtaposed and, through a phenomenon similar to retinal persistence, created a contradictory and unknown face: then the expression was distorted and lost its conventional aspect, taking on vertiginous and demented features, so that, sensing that his unease was becoming anguish, he decided to slow down. Now, as they passed slowly, the effigies were increasingly decayed and indistinct and the whiteness of the page darkened, taking on an exhausted and yellowed tint. His anguish grew when he sensed that the texture, consistency, and temperature of the paper had changed, resembling a material that was familiar but which he resisted examining directly; he continued slowly unfolding the infinite strip with this head turned away and his eyes closed tight. Shaking his hands he tried to release the strip, but it was useless. He turned his head and opened his eyes. He was naked on the sidewalk, and the strip he was sliding open between his fingers was the skin coming off his own body in a continuous and even ribbon, like a bandage being unwound. It was a single, infinite length of skin unwinding. And when he screamed, sitting up in the hotel bed, in the dark, without realizing at first that it was a nightmare, it was because he had started to realize before waking up that when the strip finished unfolding, where he was, where he had been, nothing would be left, not a speck, not a sign, not anything that his purely external body was carrying inside it — nothing, no? — but a hole, a transparency, the invisible and once again homogenous space, the passive receptor of the light he had considered his kingdom and yet where not one of his false features would be imprinted.

— On top of that, Tomatis says, do not forget that by then the beer and the white wine were beginning to take effect.

Not in Washington, of course, he clarifies, but Beatriz and Silvia are not ones to shy from the bottle. And Cuello, forget it — unfortunately his congenital populism blooms once he’s put back a few glasses, and it ends up being impossible to dissuade him from his fixed idea that the best way to fill the silence at a party is with folklore. Pirulo, on the other hand, is an evil drunk and likes to get in fights — he, Tomatis, can understand the resentment of someone who has nothing but American sociology to help him deal with reality. Early in the morning, he doesn’t remember why anymore, Pirulo had started exchanging blows with Dib, and he and Pichón had to go and separate them — Dib and Pirulo, who had been such good friends in school and claimed to have mobilized between them the entire Rosarian student body in ’59. You can see, Tomatis suggests, why living with Pirulo makes Rosario look for comfort at the end of a needle. What happened was they found them punching each other at the back of the patio — Dib had blood running from nose and bloody stains on his sweater. As soon as he, Tomatis, no? and Pichón looked away, they had started again: Dib had Pirulo by the hair and was dragging him across the patio, between the mandarins. Finally Barco, who’s like two meters tall, had to separate them. Between the three of them they pushed Dib and Pirulo to the bathroom and made them wash their faces, all of this in low voices, whispering so that the people under the pavilion wouldn’t notice. Which failed, of course, and two minutes later he, Tomatis, no? Pichón, Pirulo, Dib, Barco, Basso, Nidia Basso, Rosario, and Botón were all in the bathroom, yelling at each other in what they imagined were low voices. Basso wanted to kick them out, but Nidia intervened on their behalf; Rosario was shaking her head and not saying anything, staring at Pirulo with a look that more or less said, You had to make a scene again; and Botón, who only an hour before had tried to rape La Chichito, was acting like Dib and Pirulo’s behavior was a personal insult to Washington. Don’t let Washington find out, please, he was saying melodramatically, when a minute earlier La Chichito, all disheveled, had come crying under the pavilion, holding up her skirt because Botón had broken its zipper. He had gotten the idea, Tomatis recalls, that Dib and Pirulo had to give each other a conciliatory hug, an idea thoroughly in Botón’s style, and if you needed further proof that Botón and reality were entities of a contradictory nature, he insisted on volunteering this genteel exhortation while everyone else, divided into two groups, was making a superhuman effort to hold back Dib and Pirulo, who had been glaring at each other during the reconciliation and at the slightest distraction started hitting each other again. Finally the whole thing ended when. .

Abruptly, Tomatis cuts off his story and stops so unexpectedly that Leto and the Mathematician take two or three more steps before stopping too, noticing when they turn around that Tomatis, in the middle of the street, is surveying, with a worried look, the trajectory they have just traveled together, as though he were measuring the distance. In fact, since they left the entrance to the newspaper, they have covered three blocks, and after crossing, with some difficulty, the cause of the bottleneck at the first intersection and continuing easily in the middle of the street thanks to the absence of cars, they’ve crossed two more intersections without paying any attention at all, Tomatis concentrating on his story, and the Mathematician and Leto on the somewhat awkward reproach the story causes them to feel. Guessing the distance, a more and more scornful expression takes over Tomatis, whose gaze, which has become sullen and evasive, deliberately avoids meeting Leto’s and the Mathematician’s. A bitter, humiliating thought, unexpected and scattered, overwhelms him when he realizes that, absorbed in the details of his story, he has let himself be dragged three blocks, something along the lines of, as if they didn’t know that everything is going to, that I’m going to, that sooner or later the whole universe is going—no? — as if they didn’t know, and worse still if they don’t know it, coming along and asking me to sign up for this senseless adventure, walking three blocks with them and telling them about Washington’s birthday, a thought painted so clearly on his face that the Mathematician who, out of respect for what you might call Tomatis’s hypothetical strength of character, has been trying to intercept his gaze, gives up and, just the opposite, admitting defeat, tries to give him an opportunity to excuse himself.

— Maybe we’re taking you too far from the paper, he offers.

Not taking part, somewhat indifferently, in such a delicate situation, Leto has started thinking, It could be that he had an incurable illness, like she insists, but the most important symptom isn’t the cellular degeneration but the act of lifting the revolver in his hand and pressing the barrel to his temple.

— Everyone at the paper, says Tomatis, from the editor down to the very last sports reporter, and most of all the editor, and most of all the very last sports reporter, can suck my ass — which translates, the Mathematician imagines, if he has understood correctly, into more or less the following: the paper doesn’t have anything to do with this, and it’s out of delicacy and so I don’t get twisted up in neutered discussions that I don’t point out the ones actually responsible. And all because of the scattered and nameless pressure of the menace, of the turbulences in the neutral, which in a single stroke, through unexpected coincidences of flesh and scent, unhinges and tears apart! For a few seconds they remain motionless — motionless, why not, no? — if you leave aside, and it’s worth asking why, the cohesion, to put a word to it, of what are apparently called atoms, the, if there are no objections, cellular activity or the so-called circulation of blood, the supposed muscular effort, the magnetic disturbances surrounding them, the continuous flow of light, the imperceptible drift of the continents, the so-called terrestrial revolution and rotation, the general gravitational force, as the papers have it, and including, if you bear in mind the latest issues of the specialized journals, the expansion or, depending on how you look at it, collapse of what they call the universe, motionless, ultimately, if we accept, having come this far, the word, unsatisfactory of course the more you keep at it, when, on second thought, the motionless would be, rather, a whirlwind or a stationary stampede — motionless, then, as yours truly, no? or better yet — in a word, or in two better yet, to be more precise: every thing.

And like that they separate. Shaking his head a little next to two bent fingers along his temple as though he were taking a mental note, with a look that said, if I don’t make you pay for this it’s because I’m not begrudging, Tomatis, without conceding any other sign of farewell, turns around and starts walking toward the newspaper. Corpulent and dark, somewhat strange in the morning sun, he seems to be reconstructing, while he moves away with an uneven keel, a kind of imaginary dignity that the encounter with Leto and the Mathematician had displaced. Leto observes him, more distracted than relieved, asking himself, without realizing it, now that Tomatis has shaken them loose, how he, Leto, can likewise shake off the Mathematician. His indifference toward Tomatis’s abrupt and humiliating departure is nothing but a modest revenge for the fleeting complicity between Tomatis and the Mathematician who, a few moments earlier, had kept him on the periphery of the aura they radiated. The Mathematician, after shaking his head lightly for a few seconds, turning resolutely toward him, seems to consider the incident finished.

— They can cut one of my nuts off if I know what’s bugging him, he says, exaggerating his annoyance.

And both of mine if I have to keep at it with these clowns, Leto thinks, but while he resumes his walk next to the Mathematician, who with a single stride has reached him and continues without stopping, instead of showing his irritation, he assumes an impartial attitude and says:

— You can tell a mile off that he’s not well.

The Mathematician does not answer, wrestling, somewhat exultant, his head held upright, with the quick bind of his own disquisitions, and Leto abandons him to his silence. In any case, for several minutes, he has been withdrawing from the bright street, from the October morning, immersed, as they say, in a single object, the damned revolver that the man — his father, that is — insolently according to Rey, and no doubt resolute, had raised to his temple the year before, taking care not to fail as regards the results — a discreet but familiar object that he, even as a child, would from time to time withdraw from the wardrobe, where it was stored in a wooden box with other knickknacks, so he could play gunslinger. Once, in the middle of a fight, Isabel ran to the bedroom melodramatically and took from the wardrobe, and from the box, the revolver that he, Leto, no? knew wasn’t loaded, while his aunt Charo, who had arrived in the middle of the fight, struggled to pry it from her hands. They cried and argued while the man, without saying a word, had locked himself in the garage to clean up the tools that Isabel, a few minutes before, in the fury of the argument, had thrown to the ground, cables, screws, parts, radio bulbs smashed to pieces, against the man’s unfazed silence, his father, no? who didn’t even assume a stoic or resigned expression — nothing like that, no, nothing, not a single theatrical gesture, no intemperance, a creature made from material that, in contrast to the appliances he assembled and dismantled, built of countless small parts and interdependent fragments to make them work, seemed solid, without internal turmoil, lacking external signals to betray any contradiction, absorbed in preparation for the single act he would carry out years later, intending to obliterate, the way someone might flick a fuzzball from their shoulder, the vulgar error that the indistinct shades clattering around him called the outside world. He must have been eight or nine at the time — Leto and the Mathematician cross, oblivious, just like many other pedestrians, who move around them in every direction, down the street and the sidewalk, from south to north, from north to south, from east to west, from west to east, tracing straight, oblique, parallel or diagonal trajectories, the intersection where a row of cars waits, you could say, patiently and resigned. Eight or nine, only, because, and this he remembers well, the garage was the one in Arroyito. It must have been three or four in the afternoon on a summer day, a silent siesta whose brightness was dimmed by the dark screens on the doors and windows, protecting the house, clean and cool thanks to Isabel’s persistent work, which in spite of the nightly weeping she cleaned, swept, and polished, without missing a single corner, humming, no? every morning. The man was in the workshop, in the garage; Isabel, dressed to go out, was waiting for Charo somewhere in the house; he, Leto, stretched out face up across his bed, his head hanging a little over the edge, held his arm up and, with the back of his hand fifty centimeters from his head, was wiggling his fingers without stopping, not closing them and keeping them well-separated, fascinated by their shape and by the movement they were capable of, personifying each of them a little, while at the same time, his mouth open, he amused himself by making his vocal chords vibrate, emitting a string of guttural and somewhat fractured sounds, changing the sound every so often, going from an a to an e, to an i, going back to the first one, or vocalizing all of the vowels one after the other and modulating, like a virtuoso, the intensity of the vibrations. With a strange curiosity, he seemed to touch certain regions of his own body the same way that, he might say, now that he’s older, he would have tried out a new suit the night before a wedding. His fascination was so intense that, when the shouting started, a long moment elapsed before he heard it, and when he got up and walked slowly toward the workshop, where the shouts seemed to be coming from, his alarm did not efface the curiosity, but rather made it change direction. Both of them were in the workshop; Isabel, crying and gesticulating, was hitting the man on the chest and face, not with her hands or her fists, but with her forearms, while the man, rigid and leaning back somewhat, received this without moving or reacting, his eyes wide open, more questioning and patient than surprised, so unfazed that Isabel, humiliated and enraged by this new disillusion being inflicted on her, after looking around a moment, distractedly, for something to discharge herself against, found the long, pine work table and, again with her forearms, keeping her fists shut tight like two stumps, started sweeping the surface of the table, throwing everything on it to the floor. She only opened her fists when some object resisted and she was forced to grab it in order to smash it against the concrete floor. Calm, unfazed, not even pale or with his lips pressed together, the man followed her, gathering up the falling objects and calculating with a professional objectivity, before returning it to its place, the damage it might have suffered. The scene lasted a few minutes until Isabel, realizing that everything in existence, independent, outside herself, was intractable and would not bend, took on an extremely intense expression — of resolve, possibly — and started running toward the bedroom. He followed her, knowing that the man, behind him, as though he were alone in the house, would continue piecing together, slowly and meticulously, his working materials. Leto saw his aunt Charo, who has coming in from the street just then, look once at Isabel and take off running after her toward the bedroom. He saw them struggle, fighting for the unloaded revolver, and when Isabel finally gave up, Charo took hold of the revolver, put it in the box, and replaced the box in the wardrobe, and when she closed the wardrobe door Leto could see, reflected in the mirror, an image of Isabel, standing near the wardrobe, the image of Isabel perfectly reversed, the image that, when the door closed completely, disappeared from sight. Finally, Isabel let herself fall, sitting on the edge of the bed, and for several minutes aunt Charo, crying a little as well, tried to console her. He, Leto, no? observed this from the doorway, expecting, hoping almost, maybe without realizing it, that they would not notice his presence but, as though she had read his thoughts, maybe because she had read them, Isabel, who had now calmed down somewhat, locked eyes with him, and assuming a fatigued and commiserative expression, made a gesture that, as he was perceiving it, he tried to exorcize with all his strength so that it wouldn’t be produced, knowing that she would hold out her hands in his direction, encouraging him to curl up with them, and when he saw the soft and round arms calling him, he took off running and shut himself in his room. He stayed there until dark, not thinking that he was shutting himself in, unworried and without remorse — no, he stayed there playing and hearing, every so often, the sounds of the house, the man from time to time leaving the workshop to go to the bathroom or the kitchen, the return of Isabel, humming, seeming contented again and a little self-absorbed, and starting to make dinner. When he realized it was time to eat, he went out to the kitchen and helped set the table. She seemed refreshed and calm, careful and nimble in her domestic chores, satisfied almost, and at eight or nine years old, those inexplicable but seemingly authentic changes in mood mesmerized him. When everything was ready, she told him to go call the man to the table, so Leto, unhurried, crossed the house and, through the half-open door, peeked in to the workshop installed in the garage.

The man, maybe because the smell of the food had reached him, or because the usual time for dinner was approaching, or because hearing Isabel humming in the kitchen he understood that the routine of the house was operational again after their fight that afternoon, was standing in front of the table, organizing his tools, the way he would whenever he left the workshop, even if it was only to eat and go right back half an hour later. One glance was enough for Leto to see that everything was in its right place again and that not the slightest trace of what had happened remained. Serious and pleasant, the man, hearing him come in, offered a quick look of consent, but during the momentary distraction that the look caused him, his fingers, searching the surface of the table near where it met the wall, touched something so unexpected, intense, and brutal that the arm drew back and his whole body, contracted and rigid, jumped or was sucked backward, while the man, with a pained look, rubbed the hand and arm that had just retracted. Leto was too familiar with the man’s occupation to not realize that he’d received an electrical jolt, shock therapy, they called it, but the surprise of witnessing the manifestation of something they had terrorized him with ever since he could toddle gave way to astonishment, to panic almost, before the unexpected reaction from the man who, after recovering from the surprise, took on a strange, malevolent smile and, still rubbing his arm, started to speak, to talk to the invisible force that had shaken him, to converse almost, in a tender but at the same time ironic and defiant tone, not without malice, the way he might have talked to a living thing, a puppy or a person whose intimacy was problematic. Ironic, with hate-laced affection, the man chatted, reproachfully, with the unseen. Leto approached the table and leaned toward the wall where, standing on his toes, he was able to see the end of a cable, made of naked threads of twisted copper wire that the man started to push back, to duel almost, like an excited dog, with the end of his index finger, which he drew near and withdrew from carefully but daringly, to test its intensity, the limits of its force, of its territory — invisible and vigilant — you could almost say, and several times he was forced to pull back quickly, but not needing to stop smiling or talking to it, in a constant and playful whisper, intense and familiar, an exclusive and morbidly authentic treatment that — and Leto was sure about this — the man did not provide anyone else in the world.

The Mathematician, meanwhile, seems to have calmed down. As they continued down the middle of the street, incrementally weaker traces of his agitated silence were reaching Leto. Tomatis’s attitude, after generating skepticism and even a kind of confused and agitated brooding in him — in the Mathematician, no? — as they separated, when Tomatis showed what they call an open display of hostility, has instead transformed, in fact, into a somewhat charitable psychological evaluation, a resignation that induces him to minimize the arbitrary in Tomatis’s behavior and attribute it to a passing moral failure of which Tomatis is more victim than perpetrator. In fact, he had to suppress the momentary waves of The Incident which, rising from the darkness, appeared several times during the debate he has been having with himself. He has had to suppress them, it’s true, but they were suppressed. And so, breathing deeply, and noticing that Leto, who is walking next to him in silence, apparently overwhelmed by Tomatis’s insolence, also seems to emerge from his thoughts prepared to continue the conversation, the Mathematician lifts his head, contented, and straightening himself a little, looks with euphoria or resolve at the straight and bright street extending before him. He sees it sharp, clear, living — he wonders if, submerged in psychological trifles, he has been missing the best things. His attenuated enthusiasm, modifying even the rhythm of his stride, reaches as far as Leto who, almost simultaneously, comes out of his self-absorption and senses that the fact of being there, in the present and not in the swamp of memory — though he does not ignore that the extinct endures in the material, in the bones and the blood — of being there, in the morning sun, produces a shiver of pleasure and a startling sense of liberation. Not such clowns ultimately, he thinks and lifts his gaze, meeting, for a prolonged moment, the Mathematician’s eyes, which are open and radiant. The incidental Tomatis, a soft and dark mass that polluted the morning with its sticky splatters, disintegrates into the past — both time and place, matter interlaced with breath or fluid or whatever — which the translucent but harsh succession of experience, unfathomably ineluctable, deals out and discards — discards, no? — or drops, into an abyss, out there, into what is, by definition, inaccessible, and about which Leto and the Mathematician, in unison — if you’ll allow the expression — and without any kind of words, think, it’s not worth worrying, just now at least, when a whim of chance, a setback becoming a boon, a stringing of the disperse globs of the visible and the invisible, of the ambiguous clumps of the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous, of the organic and the inorganic, of waves and particles, have come together to deposit in us, in the translucent center of this morning and no other, a reconciled deliverance.

More or less. The Mathematician brings his arm up, grabbing the horn of the pipe in his hand so that the pipe stem sticks out between his middle and ring fingers, and, tracing a semicircle in the air, designates the present, which is to say the sidewalks, the street, the rows of shops, the illuminated signs, the people standing on the sidewalks or walking in different directions, the various perspective planes that stretch down the straight street, made linear by optical illusion as they extend toward the horizon, the morning light, the sound of voices, footsteps, laughter, motors, horns, the familiar smells of the city, of the heat, of the spring, the clear and incessant multiplicity which could also be, and why not, a new expression for that.

— Occurrence, he says.

Touched by a sudden loquacity, Leto responds, The philosophers’ straight flush. It was this street. This moment. So many burned or made to burn.

— To hell with them, says the Mathematician, afraid that Leto, so circumspect a few moments earlier, would fall, disappointing him, into grandiloquence. But immediately he repents: And what of it, when all’s said and done? The manner in which a truth manifests is secondary. What matters is that the truth is clear, he thinks, more or less. And then, incorrigible: Manner, exactly — it would takes years to come to terms with the terminology.

They cross the street. Without realizing it, they have accelerated a little, and looking at them you would say that they are hurrying somewhere in particular, so as to arrive on time; their rhythm and expressions translate as dexterity, facility, and ease. But they are going nowhere, in fact, and unburdened, you could say, of duties or destination, they walk inside an integral, palpable actuality that spreads through them and that they likewise disperse, a delicate and transient organization of the physical — delimiting and containing, during an unforeseen lapse, the dismaying and destructive blind drift of things. The Mathematician observes that the clarity of things sharpens and persists, not only in the whole but also in the individual details, and that the notorious reality he has heard discussed so often is ultimately nothing but this, the thing just now surrounding them, and which at the same time is, and of which he at the same time is, object and surrounding — always at the same time, as we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, and at the Same, no? which could be called something else — place, I was saying, no? — and the Mathematician, stimulated by the persistence of his vision, thinks that he is beginning to understand everything, from the start, comprehending, in a single look transforming into thought, the shape and form of what moves, vibrates, and congeals in this translucent medium, relating each of his perceptions with such quick and strong nexuses of so much precise and universal evidence that, almost bothered by his simultaneous enjoyment and comprehension, he imparts, austere and decisive, a command: Substitute an equation for the ekstasis.

This could be, according to the Mathematician, no? R = (R, naturally, for reality). Reality equals — and this capital R, the Mathematician reasons, should correspond to an expression describing it so exhaustively and rigorously that whenever the word is used all of the perfectly identified terms of the equation would be automatically implied. The first term is him — the Mathematician, no? — not a given as an individual, but as a constant in the equation, a subject S, a structured and transitory but at the same time invariable moment of possibility for conceiving the equation; and to resist the interpretation of a plurality of equivalent moments to the cognitive act, he decides to add a lowercase s so that the plurality of the subject — which could be the Mathematician or anyone else on the street right then or anywhere else or at any other time — is a constant included in the term. You would have, therefore, the Mathematician tells himself, R = Ss, for starters. But wouldn’t it be too naïve to put Ss before an object O, as though they were antagonistic and the juxtaposition an overly simple operation that destroys the unity that exists between them? Ultimately, yes, bearing in mind that Ss, as a subject of the equation, is already implied in O, the object he intends to formalize. In that case Ss O constitutes an entity. This entity can be referred to as x, which gives R = x (SsO). Elegant, thinks the Mathematician. But his entity immediately falls apart: if there is a distinction in Ss, the lowercase specifying the transindividual order of the S, the capital O on the contrary does not distinguish among its different components, of which S and Ss are not the least important — in O you have to include Ss not as the subject of the equation, but as an objective component of O, where all of the contingent objects that are not O are also included in the universal and all-inclusive objects S, Ss, and O, if a lowercase o designates the multiplicity of contingent objects that compose it. This gives R = x SsO (S Ss O). . On the other hand, the heterogeneous and contingent designation of the lowercase o, that is to say the concrete moments of O, also present several complications, given that its number, function, nature, etc., can be determinant or indeterminate — the Mathematician continues, no? — meaning you would have to designate its determination and indetermination at the same time, since if they are designated by their determinant, an indefinite number of its attributes would not be included in its definition. But since S and Ss, as objects, are not free of indetermination, instead of writing oⁿ it would be more exact, the Mathematician tells himself, to formulate it the following way: R = x SsO (S Ss o)ⁿ—and so on, or rather, to be more precise, more or less.

Leto observes that the Mathematician is walking with his eyes half closed and wearing a pensive smile that he attributes to some kind of rhythmic test he set for himself, or for Leto maybe, as if, concentrating, he was preparing to adapt himself to any change in rhythm, velocity or even trajectory that Leto, unexpectedly, might decide to employ. In any case, this is what Leto interprets in his expression, and accepting the challenge he imagines in the Mathematician’s face, he accelerates a little more, so unexpectedly that that Mathematician, whose modest person is trying to formulate an equation — valid forever, anywhere, in any language — to once and for all substitute the word reality with a more manageable tool for thought, reciprocates the acceleration without turning his head and, changing his stride, as though marching, adapts to Leto’s pace. Unfortunately, the ekstasis, more akin to animal pleasures than complex abstractions, vacates once again from the equation, and his whole body prepares for possible approaching changes, while above, inside his head, the fragile distinctions that as pure diversion he has been trying to sort through, are demolished by the muscular effort and silently fall apart.

Thanks to years of training on rugby fields, the Mathematician could easily, if he wanted, with a few vigorous strides, overtake Leto who, because of his shorter and less prepared legs, would need to supply extra effort to follow him, but, actually, he doesn’t want to, and he allows Leto to lead, forcing him into a contradictory effort intended to mitigate rather than impel the force of his stride, and so each of his steps is measured and careful — fruit, as they say, of a controlled energy that produces more aesthetic and, you could say, moral satisfaction in him than a continuous acceleration, taking him to the limit of his strength, would produce, in a race, for example, and after a few seconds he adapts so well to the effort, matching the imperceptible but constant increase in velocity that Leto adds to the walk, that the idea of an equation to stand, in any language, time, or place, for the word reality appears again obstinately but in the form of euphoric convictions or visions that follow one after another in the lucid part of his mind: It’s the visible plus the invisible. In every state. Me plus everything that’s not me. This street plus everything that’s not this street. Everything in all its states, thinks the Mathematician, somewhat self-exultant, and in order to see the street in a different state from the one he is seeing, he turns his head, without modulating the rhythm of his stride at all, and starts to look, over his left shoulder, at the street they have been leaving behind. Leto, tense and vigilant, observes all of these gestures out of what they call the corner of his eye, puts on a rigid grin when he perceives the head turn and, very slowly, as though it were something millimetric and ritual, copies the movement. The Mathematician, who likewise notices, waits a few seconds while they take two or three steps and, to take Leto by surprise and make him hesitate, continues, with the rest of his body, the turn he had just made with his head only, without interrupting his walk, so that now his whole body is facing the part of the street they have already traveled and the Mathematician continues as before, but walking backward. Leto carries out the same movement with a fraction of a second’s difference, satisfied by his quick adaptation to the Mathematician’s inexplicable whim. Upright and even more tense because of the unnaturalness of their movement, rhythmically and cautiously in reverse, they arrive, without realizing, at the intersection, underestimating the disturbance that their singular attitude is causing in the people passing them. Two or three have to step aside to avoid a collision. From the sidewalks, others look at them with surprise, with indignation, or with an incredulous and condescending smile. An old man stops and looks after them, shaking his head reprovingly. But they ignore them, less so out of insensitivity than because of the extreme concentration their walk demands, and most of all because, whether or not they think it in words, the straight street they are leaving behind is made of themselves, of their lives, is inconceivable without them, without their lives, and as they walk it forms along with the movement — it’s the empirical edge of the occurrence, ubiquitous and mobile, which they take with them wherever they go, the shape the world takes when it gives in to the finite, the street, morning, color, matter, and movement — all of that, let us be clear so it’s well understood, more or less, and if you like, while it’s always the Same, no? and in the Same always, as I was saying, but after all, and above all, what’s the difference!