The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

The Last Seven Blocks

To be clear: the soul, as they call it, is not translucent, it seems, but murky. The motives compelling it to be carried away, on this block, by what they call play and elation, just as arbitrarily, and in a no less unforeseen way, submerge it — to use the expression once more — in an intense melancholy on the following block. Or so it seems, in any case, no?

In fact, Leto and the Mathematician, after walking backward through the intersection, have slowed down suddenly, and instead of continuing down the middle of the street have returned to the sidewalk and to a regular walk, not slow or fast or somber or blissful, just slightly below the midway point between pain and pleasure maybe, on the same side of the street where the shade line, because the sun is now closer to 11:00 than 10:00, approaches the wall. The Mathematician, for example, after his exultant equation — or so he thinks to himself — is absorbed, for a few seconds, by the ancient murmur, so ingrained in the species that even when it is ignored completely, no one, no matter how shallow, when their mind clears, or even on the dark reverse side of their other thoughts, ever stops mulling over: Where did the world come from? Is there a single object or many? What is. .? no? etc., etc. — and after a few seconds of wandering and brooding, noticing that Leto, while he walks, is gazing distractedly at the illuminated signs extending above them down the street, decides to refute Tomatis’s assertions point by point in order to put things back where they belong. He also suspects that Leto, without daring to acknowledge it, agrees with most if not all of those assertions. His withdrawn attitude could be a form of mistrust, a reticence that, out of discretion or maybe even out of hypocrisy, is not manifested. He is about to open his mouth when Leto beats him to it.

— Tomatis’s dementia is out of control, he says. That kind of sequential slander doesn’t do him credit. It was coming out his ass. Why does he have to attack Rosemberg? And what did the twins do to him? Not even Washington got off.

— I know. Not even Washington.

And, you have to admit, in a completely underhanded way, adds the Mathematician. But Carlitos is like that. There’s nothing you can do about it. Capable of the monstrous and the sublime. How a guy like him can slump so low is beyond me. Some days you can’t control him. And I think stress affects him too much, and instead of trying to resolve a problem like every other mother’s son, he can’t think of anything better than to take a shit on the people around him, the Mathematician explains insistently, stimulated by Leto’s unforeseen confederacy, having thought him on Tomatis’s side, and the discovery of their relative correspondence in certain moral assessments seems to allow him to objectify, you might say, his own critique. He, the Mathematician, no? he, for example, knows the story about Washington in ’49, when the government locked him in an asylum because he wanted, as he said, to dissolve the Duma and the party and organize the country into soviets. He knows what happened because it’s well established among the left-wing groups he has belonged to for a long time. Washington came from the anarchist, socialist, and communist sets, and in 1946, a break with his group lead him to a passing, reactionary association with the Peronists. The left wing had filled the city with leaflets with his mug shot, his full name, and the words FASCIST TRAITOR in large red letters. The Mathematician had the chance to see one of those leaflets — an old Trotskyite militant, who had been collecting documents for a history of the working class in the province, showed it to him. According to the old man, at that time Washington thought that the working class would be represented by the Peronists and that the men on the left should move toward them and not farther off, and that Peronism, as it was a new movement, could be open to any change. The Peronists gave him a provincial seat. Just a few months into the new government, Washington represented the leftist opposition in the party. And knowing him, you can imagine what this meant: two-thirds of the parliamentary sessions ended in fistfights. Ultimately, Washington, who was receiving death threats every day, carried a gun to the capitol. The left wing treated him like a fascist and the Peronists were saying that he was on Moscow’s payroll—him, who since 1915 at least had more than once exchanged gunfire with the nationalist groups and who had declared war on revisionism ever since Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union. The fact is that between ’47 and ’49—on this he, the Mathematician, has a first-hand account — things deteriorated so much that Washington, fearing an assassination, didn’t sleep two consecutive nights in the same house, and every time he went to the capitol he was surrounded by a group of armed men, all members of his faction, whom he trusted completely. One night they put a bomb in his house; later, when he was coming out of a pizzeria, they machine-gunned him from a car — he came out unharmed, but one of his bodyguards died in the shooting and another took a bullet in his spine and ended up paralyzed. The more others tried to silence him, the more enraged he became. And according to two or three people who were close to him at the time, the Mathematician says, Washington, as stubborn as he was, ended up coming slightly unhinged. He must have known that what he was trying was impossible, and if he didn’t realize that it wasn’t possible, so much the worse. The fact is he was constantly agitated — he barely slept and was always on street corners gesticulating with two or three of his comrades, interrupting official meetings with savage outbursts, distributing leaflets on the streets and to unions, organizing demonstrations with small groups of dissident factions from the worker class. If they tried to arrest him, he used his legislative immunity. The truth is, most of the workers in the party looked at him like a strange bird when he told them they needed to take power, and once he was even shitcanned from a union hall because they thought he was a communist. Maybe his desperation had made him lose his sense of reality, and the proof that he had hit bottom this time was that shortly thereafter, after a period of depression when he was released from the asylum, he, who had been in the fray every day for thirty-five years, abandoned politics forever. Finally, in ’49, even the people in his own faction distanced themselves from him — some abandoned the party, others, their principles; he was the only one, out of pride or blindness maybe, who still wanted to make the two coincide. He didn’t carry a weapon to the capitol anymore, and he slept in the same place every night. Meanwhile, the others, the ones who had bombed his house and machine-gunned him outside the pizzeria, were in no hurry to subdue him; it was such an easy job that, letting themselves get carried away by an artistic impulse, and to show off and prove themselves professionals, they were looking for an opportunity that would present a real challenge. And just then, enter Cuello the Centaur.

No, according to the Mathematician, Tomatis does not have the right to suggest that Cuello plotted against Washington in ’49—in fact it was just the opposite. Cuello comes from the same town as Washington, and even though Washington is twenty years older, they’ve known each other for decades. Since, meanwhile, a general consensus credits Cuello with only moderate intelligence, the Mathematician thinks that you have to look for the source of their friendship on a different plane. And, according to the Mathematician, that level would be the gratitude Washington feels toward Cuello, owing, precisely, to Cuello’s actions in ’49, which were, the Mathematician says, more or less the following: Cuello, who belonged to the party youth, did not completely disapprove of Washington’s positions, and agreed with him in a vague and confused way, as his political consciousness was decidedly precarious — nonexistent, actually — apart from a generalized sympathy for populism based on his affection for folklore. If his consciousness improved somewhat in the fifties it was no doubt through the influence of Washington who, for reasons that were difficult to untangle, he admired to the point of idolatry. Washington has been a guru to many variously loyal and renegade people, but none of his disciples (naturally, he did not consider them disciples, and they would not have dared to proclaim themselves as such) had been more devoted. Ever since Washington joined the party, Cuello had gotten close to him and never left his side again. Whenever you bumped into Cuello, wherever you were, you knew that Washington was somewhere nearby. And, inversely, you could be sure that anywhere Washington was the center of attention, Cuello would be hanging around, attentive and silent, on the periphery. No one noticed him, but everyone took his presence for granted. It was mystifying, if you considered everything that separated them — what was holy to Cuello was hateful to Washington, though of course he never pointed this out. It was hard to tell if Cuello ignored people’s bewilderment at his intimacy with Washington or if, perfectly aware, and stoically intensifying his devotion for that reason, he withstood it. Of course, if anyone might tactlessly call him the Centaur to his face, no one would have dared to use the name in front of Washington. It was normal to get to Washington’s place in the afternoon and find them both under a tree, sitting in low chairs drinking mate and sporadically exchanging laconic phrases so full of allusion that it was hard to tell what they were talking about. Maybe, since they came from the same town, mutual and purely material experiences — things, people, places — facilitated their conversation, but, according to the Mathematician, there must have been something else, since more often than not the opposite happens with people who come from the same place — they actually avoid one another when they meet outside of their place of origin, as though the fact of knowing each other before made them lose some of their consistency. No, according to the Mathematician, that loyalty comes from the end of the forties, when Washington was locked in the asylum. And it was based, reveals the Mathematician, raising his voice to a lightly conceited and defiant pitch, incited by Tomatis’s unjustified innuendo, that loyalty was based (he knows from a reliable source) in the fact that Cuello, leader of the youth movement at the time, arranged for Washington to get locked in the asylum and receive a disability pension, in this way averting his assassination. According to the Mathematician’s sources, Washington’s disappearance was imminent, and Cuello’s people, citing his overly erratic recent behavior and a few of his peculiarities, had convinced the parties to Washington’s forthcoming execution that he was insane and that they would take responsibility for removing him from circulation. Naturally, a few of Washington’s old friends accused Cuello of hatching a conspiracy, as they say, and two or three times covered him with red paint and tar outside his house, threatening to kill him, but when Washington began receiving visitors to the asylum — at first they had him in a straitjacket and everything — the only person in the party who he allowed to visit was Cuello. In any case, Cuello visited every week, bringing him food, clothes, books — he even, the Mathematician insists, had tact enough to stop the party from publicly accusing the left wing of having pushed Washington to insanity. According to the Mathematician, Tomatis’s insinuations signified a lack of respect not only for Cuello but, above all, for Washington, who in those hard times probably relied on Cuello not just as political or emotional support, but as a measure of reality when not only the others but also his own reason seemed to be deserting him. Cuello became his last reference point, his last bridge to the outside world, and a year later, when he left the asylum and fell into a depression that lasted until the end of ’51, Cuello was the only person who was willing to see him. Cuello would spend whole days in Rincón Norte sitting with Washington, who didn’t say a word and would shake his head every so often, releasing a long sigh. Several months passed before the terrible, stupefying silence, little by little, was replaced with the laconic, allusive, and sporadic exchanges that made up their conversation, exchanges whose meaning was for the most part difficult to guess because, when a third person arrived, without masquerade or haste, but rather in a plain and natural way, they stopped. Around other people, Cuello ceased to exist and Washington himself only spoke to him every so often, as though taking note of his presence or giving him life for a few moments with his words — interrogative, respectful, and not without a remote and ironic complicity: Would you agree, Cuello? — Washington never used the familiar form with anyone and no one with him, except his daughter—There you are, Cuello, just like I said, isn’t it? to which Cuello would not even respond, restricting himself to existing, to gathering density and volume from the external world, the same way a sorcerer conjures, in empty space, to the senses of the audience, a being that until that moment had been invisible, and whose presence lasts only as long as the incantation. Since he worked as a secretary in the Butcher’s Co-op — his wife was a music teacher at the normal school — he never showed up at Rincón Norte without a strip steak, which Washington would cook after they had talked a while, and which they ate standing next to the grill, without plates or anything, cutting bites from the same steak on a little board. According to the Mathematician, Washington had stashed Cuello at his house for a while because the Comandos Civiles were looking for him, until the hardest months passed and he was able to come out of hiding. It was strange to see them, so different and so close at once. Every so often Cuello would publish a collection of folk stories in papers and magazines that Washington considered the height of absurdity and even of shame, but it was normal to see one of Cuello’s books on his desk, with its corresponding dedication and a bookmark sticking out among the pages, proving that Washington read them. Sometimes the Mathematician thought that, when lots of people were around, Washington’s expression sharpened if he sensed any irony toward Cuello among the company — so much so that even the slightest irony was immediately repressed because of the tension that began to settle on the group — and only when that shadow disappeared completely would Washington’s expression soften again. It had been said that, more conscious of the other’s weaknesses than of their own, steadfast and alert to those only, they watched over one another tacitly. If anything refuted Tomatis’s insinuations, according to the Mathematician, it was Washington’s consideration for Cuello — according to the Mathematician, no? who, in addition to dismantling Tomatis’s assertions in regards to Cuello, took advantage of the opportunity to refute the ones that, in his opinion, Tomatis was gallant enough to smear on La Chichito: He would prefer it if she were a virgin. That would ease the rejection. The only girls he wouldn’t take to his room are either hysterical or bourgeois.

But the Mathematician shuts up, and for two reasons: the first is that he considers himself, and without a doubt is, what they call a gentleman, or rather, considering that, according to the exact phrase that crosses his mind, he couldn’t give two shits about La Chichito’s virginity or virginity in general, he doesn’t want the attentively listening Leto to think that he is suggesting that La Chichito isn’t a virgin, and the second — actually more important than the first — is that if he goes on too long with the problem, Leto could assume that virginity in general, that non-issue par excellence, might occupy a space in his thoughts, no matter how small. But a third reason contributes to his silence: they have reached the corner, and because at this intersection the road opens to traffic again, the same bottleneck as several blocks back, when they started walking down the middle of the street with Tomatis, is repeated in the opposite direction. Crossing is going to be, the Mathematician’s face seems to say when they stop at the cable and take in the so-called panorama, a problem, but in any case we will try to solve it, Leto reads in the expression of the Mathematician, whose concentration on the task at hand is so intense that, shaking his head thoughtfully and rubbing his chin in a mechanical way, softly and distractedly — and to Leto’s unmistakable disbelief — he starts singing to himself.

The situation really is complicated: the cars coming from the west down the cross street, since to the north the central avenue is set aside for pedestrians, are forced to continue east, or turn south on the central avenue, while the ones traveling south to north on the central avenue are forced, for the same reason, to turn east on the cross street — or they will be, rather, because for the time being the rows of cars meeting at the intersection are jammed up and not moving, no exaggeration, even a millimeter, motionless and scattered chaotically on the street despite the theoretical efforts and arm waving of the traffic agent, who has abandoned his platform and who, added through historical experience to the mechanism of Hippodamus’s excessively abstract project, justifies a posteriori, with his impotence, the invention of the traffic light — in truth no less abstract in its mechanical periodicity, inadequate for the non-periodicity of phenomena, than Hippodamus’s invention, whose imperfections it pretends to correct. Leto, meanwhile, sustains his disbelief and — why not — his vague disillusion: first off, the Mathematician’s singing, his preoccupied automatism, do not coincide with the ferrous self-control he attributes to him, maybe because of his scientific grooming and social origin, and second because the tango lyric, on the Mathematician’s tongue, sounds anachronistic, giving him an impression similar to what he might feel hearing a soprano voice coming from the mouth of a boxer. Furthermore, the Mathematician’s reaction seems disproportionate relative to the obstacle they have to overcome, as they say — there is, now, something monstrous in his expression, not unlike panic, which the even European tan, functioning, unintentionally of course, as a mask, allows through. And to this is added the singing, which instead of developing the melody in a way that will impel the song’s lyric, continuously repeats the same phrase over the same melodic fragment, but with a constantly accelerating tempo, in an increasingly softer voice and more and more slurred diction, making the words incomprehensible as his panicked look ricochets around the motionless cars, whose bumpers, which almost touch, demand extreme skill from the person who wishes to cross. The Mathematician’s gaze pauses anxiously on the thin spaces between the bumpers and then turns toward his own pants. His pants, Leto thinks, following each phase of the Mathematician’s desolation, The risk of staining his pants. The soul, as they call it, which just now yours truly said was not translucent but murky, the Mathematician’s soul, Leto thinks, without using, naturally, the word soul, nor without, for the most part, anything resembling words, the Mathematician’s soul, which with ease distinguishes the real from the counterfeit, the right from the wrong, and which possesses enough integrity to return things to their right place when Tomatis unleashes his slander up and down the street, disintegrates and falls apart at the possibility of staining his pants.

Taking control of the situation, and pretending not to have noticed any change in the Mathematician, who, although his attitude is no less anxious, has finally stopped singing, something he notices with relief, Leto starts looking, among the bumpers that are too close together, for some that will allow them to pass to the opposite sidewalk. There are at least three rows jammed up at the intersection, although in fact the actual idea of a row is less than adequate, owing to the irregular positions of the cars, boxed in to the spaces left open as though they had appeared simply in order to be filled — but now, down the entire cross street, there are no spaces open and you would have to stand on your toes and look west at least a block and a half to see the last of the cars still moving, prudently supplementing themselves, if the expression fits, to the ones that can’t move any more. Resolved, Leto inspects the bumpers in complete detail, then looks up and sees five or six people on the opposite sidewalk looking for a way through in the opposite direction, but when he finds a space a few centimeters wide, he turns to the Mathematician — paralyzed by the ineluctability of the stain, concentrating on his dazzling white pants — and making an almost imperceptible gesture, prompts him to follow. An internal battle manifests on the Mathematician’s face, a battle whose outcome, uncertain at first, ends up confirming, in a provisional way of course, the thesis, to pick an expression, humanistic they call it, and as they have it, that in the creature called man, the so-called rational faculties — currently God, country, home, technology, class consciousness — always end up overcoming the irrational — excrement, suction or mastication, sperm, blood, self-destruction — in a constant way along an indefinite, rising curve, so that after a quick and ill-disguised hesitation, imitating Leto, in whose hands he has blindly and helplessly deposited all of the decision-making power, the Mathematician leaves the sidewalk and ventures, slowly, into the street.

Leto makes a nervous, superfluous gesture, removing and then immediately replacing his glasses, and, turned slightly at an angle, after gauging his chances of success in one glance, begins to cross, slowly, between two bumpers, followed, at a half meter’s distance, more or less — always more or less, no? — by the Mathematician, whose proportioned and muscular figure, so necessary for carrying, while evading his opponents, the prolate spheroid ball from one end of the pitch to the other isn’t, in the present circumstance, of any use whatsoever — just the opposite, in fact. The wide, loose cut of his white pants, in deliberate opposition to the arbitrary tightness currently in fashion, also contributes to making his progress more difficult, unlike Leto, whose relative slightness and lack of fetishistic interest in his cheap pants facilitate, as they say, the task. But out of discretion, in order not to humiliate the Mathematician too much, Leto magnifies his own difficulties: he only had to glimpse the fissures in what they call his soul, and, conscious of the ineluctability of our disillusions, accepts, shrouding himself a little from the inside, that myths always give way to the so-called reality principle. Nevertheless, trying not to get caught, he keeps an eye on the white pants while they cross, turning his head discreetly, likewise not wanting the stain to happen, not out of sympathy, but rather out of fear that the stain would cinch his misery, complete it, and in front of him the Mathematician, who in spite of Tomatis’s insinuations seems to be someone who deserves love and a certain admiration, would shipwreck on the dark and indistinct shore to which the clear morning air is the fragile, momentary counterpart. But with patience, luck, and skill, they manage to cross. One stage, at least, has been left behind, to put it one way, but actually, if before stepping into the street they were obstructed but able to retrace their steps, as they say, now retreating is impossible, and the passage between the bumpers confronts them, not with another passage, but with the red chassis of a car blocking the way. Leto investigates, over the red car, the possibilities of continuing forward offered by the disposition of the cars stopped on the street and notices that, from the opposite sidewalk, the group has likewise been examining a possible itinerary and has also ventured into the street, diverging a few meters to the east, and is now crossing, single file, between two cars, impelling him to likewise turn east. Sidestepping the red car and making sure to check that the submissive Mathematician is following, he confirms, dejectedly, that the red car’s front bumper is almost touching the rear bumper of the next car, and when he lifts his head to check on the progress of the group from the opposite sidewalk, he notices that after turning east to cross the first open space between the bumpers they have now reversed course in search of a second passage through the next line of cars. Swiftly — the word seems appropriate here — Leto sizes up — that’s how it’s said — the two possibilities, west or east, aware of the need to make a decision in the forthcoming fraction of a second, facing the dilemma of either throwing himself, blindly, into unexplored territory, or trusting the accumulated experience of the others who are coming in the opposite direction, confirming — only in a certain sense, no? — and to put it one way, the reversible nature of space and, choosing the second option, turns suddenly, bumping into the Mathematician who has been obediently following right behind him, anxiously studying — the Mathematician, no? — over his head, the chances of success offered by the territory. Confused, they try to step aside for each other several times, blocking the other’s path each time, now that, clearly, the Mathematician resists leading the way but refuses to step aside, afraid that if he leans against a car, the pants, whose hems and legs he is trying to preserve, will suffer the much-feared stain on the backside. Leto recognizes this and, leaning back against the red car, lets the Mathematician past and slides against the chassis, cleaning it off with his own pants and, brushing them inconspicuously in order to not make the Mathematician feel guilty, or maybe fearing that even if the Mathematician notices his sacrifice, inhibited in his moral reactions by the excessive attachment to his own pants, he won’t feel any guilt, begins to retrace his path and move west. One last twitch — you might say — of responsibility makes him glance back quickly to make sure that the Mathematician is following.

Now then: the moment they stepped into the street, as though the contact between the soles of their shoes and the asphalt had triggered a complex mechanism of sonorant activation, the numerous motionless cars, relatively silent up until then, in protest of some signal from the attendant, or in gregarious imitation, or for the plain voluptuousness of existing in a slightly more intense manner through the repetitive, musical declaration of the so-called self, have begun, almost in unison, to fill the innocent, bright morning with the sound of their horns. The surrounding space breaks down into sonorant planes whose different tones and intensities mark the limits, perimeter, distance, and location relative to Leto and the Mathematician who, at the center of the horizon of artificial sounds seem to move in a medium more resistant than the air, judging by the undertones, you might say, of effort and displeasure that accompany them, like the same sauce on different dishes at a banquet or a passing contingency as subspecies of eternity, the sequence of emotions that the crossing’s misadventures cause them. At last they find a space between two bumpers wide enough to cross, but they are forced to stop and wait because the group from the opposite sidewalk — led by a grey-haired man in shirt-sleeves carrying a briefcase, almost certainly a lawyer coming from Tribunales or a high-ranking government official on his way to do business at a bank downtown — found the path before them and has started crossing it single file. The grey-haired man passes between the bumpers with his head down, lost in thought, with a solid lead on the procession, but the woman behind him, a housekeeper who has gone out to run errands and holds the family wallet, with a piece of currency sticking out, to her chest, gives them a look that Leto, unlike the Mathematician, cut off from any social commerce, takes up with a knowing gesture, to calm her, because he thinks he has noticed in the look from the woman, fifty-something and plump, of very modest origin, as they say, a kind of excessive culpability for the fact that she, a simple señora de barrio, was presumptuous enough to cross before two educated-looking, well-bred young men. Leto’s look attempts to express, to no effect because the woman would never admit it, the common origin of humanity, starting from the so-called collateral branch of certain primates, as they call them, in west Africa, some seventy million years ago, give or take, on top of the idea espoused by more than a few religions, according to which all people are equal before God, added to his personal conviction that the best form of social organization would be an egalitarian order, with a rotation of roles, minimal government, and a socialization of the means of production, but only a fraction of a second after their eyes meet, the requisite lapse to express her culpability to the two young scholars, the woman lowers her eyes, somewhat ashamed for having dared to look, confused by the knowing look returned by one of them, full of intimations that she cannot nor does she care to unravel. The third in line the Mathematician cannot ignore: it’s someone he knows, the engineer Gamarra, an Organic Chemistry adjunct, who he liked to play ping-pong with at the student center. Sixty-something and well-dressed, he passes while stroking the end of his tie, which is striped with oblique, wide, yellow and green lines, and greets him with an inclination of the head and a short monosyllable that Leto, observing impartially nearby, attributes to the embarrassment of the situation. And finally a young woman, dressed in a little flowery outfit, whose crocodile skin wallet hangs from her arm and rubs against the hood of a car as she passes without even looking at them. The passage itself, more narrow than the first, and which forced the people crossing in the opposite direction to turn their body slightly and continue sideways, presents a greater obstacle, as having to cross sideways puts both pant legs in danger at the same time, and when they set off, the car horns whose sound you could say they’ve been swimming through, go silent all at once. Only one protests, one more time, somewhere along the central avenue, but doesn’t start up again. After they cross the bumpers, Leto, without stopping, turns east and without much trouble locates the passage found by the people coming in the opposite direction — wide, flat, open, with the cable guardrail at the other end, so easy to cross that, without turning, Leto knows that the Mathematician, behind him, is already recovering his personality, and that when they step onto the next sidewalk and start walking side-by-side, he will once again be the tall, elegant, tanned young man, dressed completely in white, including his moccasins, worn without socks and which unbeknownst to him were bought the month before in Florence — the Mathematician, a perfect, poster boy specimen who speaks slowly and clearly and who has gone out this morning to distribute the press release from the Chemical Engineering Students Association, about the trip to Europe recently taken by its recent and imminent graduates, to the newspapers.

But he’s wrong. When they reach the sidewalk the Mathematician is still struggling with himself — or so it seems to Leto who, when he comes up alongside him, on the side closest to the wall, continues to notice his dumb bewilderment while he processes the humiliation of having been, for several moments, hostage to his own pants, and Leto, relieved, senses the surfacing, in the Mathematician’s silence, of a sincere remorse, a resolve to be better in the future, a sense of certainty that he won’t ever again be swallowed up by the penumbra he just now escaped, and the conviction that those weaknesses are just momentary, knee-jerk reactions that a sensible person discards with the help of a liberating intellect, or so Leto assumes the Mathematician is thinking, in his ascendant evolution. They reach the corner. They turn. And when they have resumed their path on the central avenue, to the south — as I was saying just now, no? — the Mathematician, having reconstructed himself after his compulsive eclipse, clearing his throat two or three times, reemerges into the morning sun. But Leto is thinking: They would give humanity everything, just not their pants. They can accept anything but a stain on their pants. They’re gentle as lambs except when their pants are in danger. They are not to be trusted, even when they’ve given up everything and claim that they’ve kept only their pants. Using the plural he assigns the Mathematician to a vast, enemy horde, to the legion that, entrenched in a blind, vain defense of its own pants, constitutes a perpetual threat to the rest of the world. But the Mathematician’s voice, slightly pitched at first because of his contrite throat clearing, recovers its impartial tone, its calculated preciousness and — Leto has to admit — its pleasant sound.

— On several points, Botón is more credible than Tomatis, he says, resuming the conversation as though nothing had happened. Maybe, Leto thinks malevolently, inclined to listen but also to controlling, severely, at every step, to put it one way, and in a literal sense as well in the present case, his credibility. But like every other time his rigorist projects give away almost simultaneously to their formation, plowed under by what you might call an organic relativism that comes from his insecurity maybe, or from a negatively charged rigorism that he directs against himself — to tell the truth, he wouldn’t mind being like the Mathematician, to be able to separate the authentic or at least the probable from the problematic, and at the same time be so enmeshed in historicity to know that he should avoid, at whatever cost, a stain on his pants. On the other hand, their coincidental, negative judgment of Tomatis equalizes them not only through their similar vision of things, but also through their intimacy with Tomatis himself, an intimacy that, paradoxically, the negative judgment intensifies rather than diminishes. And finally, Washington’s notorious mosquitos have intrigued him: in the coming and going of thoughts, memories, associations, of false images that from this moment, and for the rest of his life, he will retain as though they were real memories, the mosquitos swirl, gray and clear, pass over and over across the visible part of his mind where, like in a variety show, a parade of images are called up, as they say, by the Mathematician’s detailed commentary. The Mathematician, passing egocentrically from a pathological preservation of his pants to an impartial and effortless refutation of the Tomatian maledictions, continues thus: Does Rita Fonesca, when she’s got some drinks in her, try to show everyone her tits? He, the Mathematician, doesn’t deny this. It’s likely. But does she not in fact have a right to? And making a wide and theatrical gesture after stopping abruptly, like the magician who suddenly manifests his beautiful assistant in a sequin leotard at a spot on stage that had been completely empty up until that moment, he stretches his arm toward a shop window, pointing it out with an open hand and a broad, satisfied smile.

Tamely, stopping likewise, Leto looks toward the window indicated by the Mathematician’s open hand. Behind it, the building, still closed, is in semidarkness despite the white walls that emit, in that darkness, a kind of glow. At the back, the only furniture, a desk and a couple of armchairs, are somewhat obscured by the semidarkness that dissipates near the windows flanking the door to the street, screened behind a sheet metal curtain. Hung from the white walls are several unframed paintings of a distinct form, generally very large and on which they can see, from the street, various abstract lines. But, well-exposed to the window indicated by the Mathematician, also without a frame and leaning against a white, wooden easel, one of the paintings is displayed in order to be seen from outside the building, through the window. Next to the painting is a white card that reads: GALERÍA DE ARTE — RITA FONESCA — DRIPPINGS — 1959/1960.

— She has a right to, no? insists the Mathematician proudly and enthusiastically, pointing to the canvas displayed in the window, which Leto has begun to look at. And since, bothered by his insistence, Leto doesn’t respond, the Mathematician falls silent, as they say, without being able to stop himself from observing, as he did during Tomatis’s reading, Leto’s aesthetic reaction. But this time Leto forgets his presence and penetrates, to put it one way, the surface covered to the edges with paint, withdrawing so much and so suddenly, from the outside world, that he doesn’t even hear the car horns starting, for a few seconds, to honk again and then stopping because the lines of cars that were stuck at the intersection have started, at a walking pace, to move again. Leto has never seen a painting like this: it’s a rectangle about a meter tall and some eighty centimeters wide, without representation of any kind, no figure or silhouette, not even a vague or distorted shape, but rather an accumulation of drops, smears, splashes, and splatters of fluid paint in various colors that superimpose, contrast, are neutralized, blend, and combine, and, together, harmonize miraculously despite the irregular, frenzied, and dizzying randomness with which the paint was dripped onto the canvas. She can show the whole world her tits if she paints this well, he thinks, mesmerized, tempering with this crude parody — coincidentally allowing him to express his admiration — the unmistakably violent emotion produced by the painting. No color dominates, notwithstanding the flashes — not periodic because their combined distribution doesn’t conform to any regularity — with which they stand out every so often, and always in close relation, as they say, to the others, at different points on the surface. The splatters, thin for the most part, sometimes thicken into whirlpools, into smears superimposed several times, into variously sized drops, which, upon hitting the canvas, falling from different heights, thrown with varied force, or consisting of mixed quantities of more or less diluted paints, therefore color in a distinct way each time, not only because of their size, but more so because of their perfectly individuated scattering across the canvas. Meanwhile, the smears and tortuous splatters extend to the edges, the four corners nailed to the frame, in a way that makes the area behind the frame into a continuation of the visible surface; the viewer can easily intuit that the visible area is just a fragment, and the eye, reaching the edges where the surface folds, senses the indefinite extension of the intricate apparition continuing, with its unexpected combination of colors, of densities, of speeds, of jumps and accumulations, of abrupt turns and temperatures, beyond the tormented canvas. They’re not forms but formations — temporarily fixed traces of a ceaseless flux, no? — a sensible cluster, you might say, at a precise, tense point in time, tenuously juxtaposing, without annihilating, intent and accident, and adding, to the present, unbinding thrill and radiance. Leto shakes his head several times while tucking his upper inside his lower lip to express his admiring perplexity. The Mathematician, who has been looking at the painting and at him simultaneously, constantly examining his reactions, follows willingly and gratefully when he turns and continues walking.

A sort of manifold pride fills the Mathematician, first for having introduced Leto to a talented artist, since it’s always pleasant and calming to have been first in anything, second because he interprets Leto’s admiration to be sincere, which in a certain sense confirms his own artistic taste, no? and finally with the refutation, without wasted words but instead a simple presentation of proof, of another of Tomatis’s slanders, or in any case of his slanted view, as they say, of the facts. Because in fact, the Mathematician says with an easy smile that’s aimed at demonstrating his complete lack of interest in moralizing about the issue, it’s a patent fallacy to claim that when Rita’s drunk she tries to show everyone her tits because she’s actually always drunk and most of the time her torso is completely covered. No, if she does that every so often, according to the Mathematician, it’s not from alcoholism or exhibitionism, but out of shyness: what to do, what to say, how to act in society? Should you fake interest in mundane conversations and behave pretentiously, attempt refutations of impervious yet completely false arguments, rationalize a preference for quince over yam candies or Miró over Dalí? Ugh, no! Better to sit quietly in a corner drinking gin after gin after gin and smoking cigarettes without saying a word until suddenly, at a given point in the evening, in order to finally take action after an intolerable paralysis, not knowing the right way to behave or the right thing to say, just to discharge her anguish, pow, tits unleashed. This of course without any forethought, in a more or less compulsive way, when, not only everyone else, but she herself least expects it. He, the Mathematician, has several times had the fortune of seeing her at work in her studio: she paints without an easel, puts a rectangle of canvas straight on the floor and all around the canvas arranges cans of paint in which she dips sticks of different widths — pieces of broom handles, rods, tree or shrub branches she peels with a knife, brush handles — and then drips over the canvas; other times she pours paint into a colander and lets it drip over the canvas, or she pierces holes directly into the paint cans and runs them over the canvas. Nearby, on a little table, she has a bottle of gin, glasses, a dented aluminum bowl filled with ice, and a bunch of packs of Colmenas and Gaviláns. Sometimes, if the canvas is too wide, she moves around the corners with her sticks and paint cans and colanders, but if the width permits she stands over it, her legs spread wide apart so as not to step on the canvas, bent over toward the floor all day — one of her favorite jokes, she has always the same two or three, which only she laughs at, is that to be a painter you have to have a trucker’s kidneys and that actually the gin isn’t for inspiration but to ease the pain in her hips. Once in a while, says the Mathematician, she stands up, takes a good drink, and then goes back to work with her cigarette hanging miraculously between half-open lips, holding her head rigid to keep the ash from falling onto the canvas; every so often she stands up to tap out the ash and consider her progress. It seems strange to him, the Mathematician, no? that she’s such good friends with Héctor, the other painter, because it’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar modes of practicing or understanding the work — this on top of having such different personalities. Héctor takes weeks, months, to finish a painting; she, on occasion, paints three or four a day. When he has an idea, Héctor puts it into practice exactingly, patiently, making calculations, theories, and all his paintings, even all his sketches, have a theoretical foundation, not counting the fact that his paintings are sometimes monochrome, or they have one or two colors, or different tones of the same color, and are almost always geometrical. Héctor finds what he’s looking for before starting to paint; she paints constantly and stops when she finds something. He, the Mathematician, once heard her say that being a good painter consists of knowing when the painting’s done, when to stop; and in fact, the paintings that don’t come out, because she’s actually gone too far — which happens most of the time — she crumples and throws in the garbage. Several times a day she has to throw out the results of hours of work — several times a day — because her hand, which had been passing ceaselessly over the canvas, dripping highly diluted paint, has not performed the exact movement needed to impress the final colors in a way that makes their combination — incidental and chaotic up till that moment — begin to radiate an exalting inevitability and grace, says the Mathematician, more or less. But, bent over the canvas, swaying a little because of the gin, absently tapping out her cigarette, she must be the first to notice, in the apparent disorder, the magical proof. Not just in that way is she different from Héctor — and what’s curious is that they feel a sincere and reciprocal admiration, and two or three times a week they’ll spend all night getting drunk together at a hotel bar. Héctor talks constantly, and she doesn’t speak a word except when she’s had a whole bottle of gin, then she talks nonstop, unless its to unbutton her blouse, and she shouts and laughs at whatever until — no one knows why and least of all her — she ends up insulting whomever she’s talking to. They’re both around thirty, and they studied a while together at the Fine Arts school, but while Héctor spent time in Europe visiting museums and carrying on theoretical discussions with the cream of the European avant-garde, she has never once left the city. Héctor buys his sweaters in Buenos Aires, and sometimes even orders them from Rome or Paris; she’s always walking around in the same skirt and the same blazer, paint-stained just like her hands and sometimes even her hair, with big, worn-out men’s shoes on her feet and no makeup on her face, a Gavilán or a Colmena always hanging from her lips, a mismatched manicure most often trimmed with black grime, constantly looking for someone — a man or woman, it doesn’t matter — to bring home with her for the night because she can’t stand to be alone; it’s rare for her to go to sleep before dawn, she’s endlessly coming and going to fill her glass with gin and get ice from the dented bowl. And in fact Botón, who the wicked tongues don’t know what else to whisper about, because he has an official girlfriend in Diamante, that wasted bullet known as Botón, says the Mathematician (more or less), thick as he is, happens to be — along with Héctor, of course — one of the few people who knows how to handle her. It’s the hidden side of Botón, which he himself is careful to hide, preferring instead, who knows for what obscure reason, to present himself to the world as an alcoholic womanizer. What’s clear is that Botón would abandon anything, at any time of day or night, if she called him. He, the Mathematician, thinks that if some sort of sexual relationship existed between them, it must have been only early on, and if they apparently get drunk together most of the time, it’s only with her that Botón is careful because he knows that in the morning he’ll have to take care of her, and if at the party he got as drunk as Tomatis claims it’s because he couldn’t prevent her coming with Héctor and Elisa in order to stay until the morning — the morning, no? — when after a whole day of disappointment waiting for the night’s deliverance you finally understand, as the vain blackness fades at the first dismal light, that the day, that dreadful and endless film, is starting again.

The Mathematician strikes a balance, as they say, between Botón’s virtues and defects, to the considerable annoyance of Leto, who has to correct the rather summary image he has been putting together. To Leto he was a pimple-faced, dark-skinned kid from Entre Ríos, a law student with more affection for wine and guitars than for the Civil code, a rape enthusiast in his free time, with a more or less conventional taste in books, and a somewhat obtuse intelligence, but now it turns out that he’s an exemplary young man, protector of the avant-garde, a kind of saint who’s capable of the greatest sacrifice (staying sober) if a higher end — this is the expression used in these cases — demands it. A doubt starts to take hold, as they say, of Leto, and he wonders if the Mathematician, in setting himself in radical opposition to Tomatis, has lost his critical faculty and is overstating the case, or worse still, Leto’s sensitive intuition tells him — though with nothing resembling words — or worse still, I was saying, if the Mathematician, having tasted the bitterness of human misery, life reduced to trying to keep a pair of pants from getting stained, only to rediscover, you could say, the ambrosia of life, the good in all things, sees virtues even in Botón. But these thoughts pass quickly, like silent sparks or dark flashes in the back of his mind, which is concentrating instead on the unforeseen lunge his body has to make, alongside the Mathematician’s, to step into the street, and a driver, seeing them, brakes slowly, and leaning toward them slightly to look at them through the windshield, makes a friendly gesture indicating that they can cross, which they do then and there, as they say, hurrying with an ostentation that, actually, doesn’t speed things up but instead lets them respond to the driver’s friendliness with their entire bodies, an ostentatious hurrying that more or less signifies, we’re hurrying as much as we can, so much that we don’t have the luxury of responding to your friendly gesture, but in fact our own friendliness consists in hurrying and which, ultimately, though it doesn’t speed things up very much since what has increased is their ostentation and not their velocity, still transfers them, like it or not, to the opposite sidewalk.

Curiously: Botón had actually, the previous Saturday, on the upper deck of the etc., etc., no? related to the Mathematician the arrival of Rita, Héctor, and Elisa at Washington’s birthday — at around 2:00 in the morning, apparently — Rita and Héctor already tipsy, to use Botón’s eloquent diminutive, and Elisa serious and detached as usual, acting like she was there involuntarily, declining to sit on the pretext that she was only there with Héctor and Rita, who were just stopping by to say hi. Of course they would be the last to leave — Rita because she can’t go to sleep before sunrise; Héctor because of the never-ending conversations he gets tangled up in with this or that person, about anything whatsoever; and Elisa standing near the grill at first then later near the door when the morning cold forced them inside, her purse pressed to her stomach, not drinking anything or talking to anyone, just to make it clear that she was being held there involuntarily by Héctor and Rita. He, the Mathematician, knows all of these details through Botón. Leto nods again, to show that he has understood, encouraging the Mathematician to continue: at that hour, 2:00 in the morning, things were going well — a short laugh escapes from the Mathematician, which Leto interprets as amusement at the recognition of the typical behavior of the group, most of whom the Mathematician knows well, and the recognition of the typical in each of them and the typical in the whole group produces a pleasant sense of familiarity with the world, and something like nostalgia, too — in Leto’s interpretation, at least — for the irrevocability of not having been there, of having been, on that same day and at that same hour, visiting factories in Frankfurt, victimized by humanity’s maladjustment — if the expression fits — to time and to space, as they call them, a two- or three-second laugh that, translated into words, might more or less say: How easily I can imagine them! How easily I can picture them now! How easily my senses can reconstruct that night without having captured it before! What sad luck to be in Frankfurt! What sad luck that the trip to Europe overlapped with Washington’s birthday! What sad luck that human beings, all living beings in general, prisoners of sequence, are forced to exist at a single physical point in space at a time, and that it’s impossible to abstract the successive transitions required to move from one point in space to another! the same way that Leto, who wasn’t there either, as we were saying, or rather yours truly, etc., etc., doesn’t stop thinking something or feeling something somewhere inside him, and not with anything resembling, etc., etc., which, converted into a verbal approximation, could more or less be the following: Two or three allusions from Tomatis imply that not inviting me was a premeditated decision, but they could also imply the opposite, if in fact they didn’t invite me because of some involuntary lapse, although on second thought the allusions were probably just a probe to find out why, given that they thought it unnecessary to invite me, I didn’t go, which would imply that they themselves were offended, but even allowing this possibility, that they consider me so close to Barco, the twins, and Tomatis that they didn’t need to invite me, any way you look at the thing, the facts force a submission to the evidence, they didn’t invite me.

And so on. In actuality — actually an expression, no? — Botón, on the deck of the ferry, almost from the moment he began, had started talking about that, about the arrival of Rita, Elisa, and Héctor, referencing the painters’ advanced stage of intoxication, as they say, because, having failed to catch the ten o’clock ferry due, it was obvious, to the all-night session he’d just ended, he was making what they call a subconscious effort to downplay his own behavior by exaggerating the others’. And, according to the Mathematician and always, and until further notice, according to Botón, the moment Héctor got wind of the earlier conversation — about Noca and Noca’s horse and Washington’s mosquitos — he started asking everyone there how it had been; what Noca had said about the horse and why; how credible his assertions were; how Cohen, Barco, and Beatriz had interpreted them and how they responded; and above all — and during this section of the interrogation Washington remained impassive and smiling as though he weren’t listening — and more than anything, the Mathematician said that Botón said, how exactly had Washington’s interjection happened and in what way was it connected to Noca’s horse, if it connected at all, and also wanting them — Héctor, no? — to tell it step by step, in complete detail, since he was starting to make sense of what had happened and could possibly clarify the murkier points of the problem somewhat, something which, given his state of tipsiness, as Botón would say, naturally inspired an intense skepticism among the gathering. To all of this Washington offered no response. Here the Mathematician felt obligated to clarify this impassivity for Leto, saying it’s a classic joke of Washington’s, consisting, when an explanation is demanded, of pretending not to have heard anything, a joke he only plays on those who are already familiar with it, in any case, since the opposite could come off as pride or hostility, two attitudes completely foreign to Washington, an innocent joke, besides, since those who are already familiar with it know well enough that he enjoys staying silent and smiling for a long time and that, moreover, the joke always precedes one of his interjections. Another of Washington’s classic jokes, the Mathematician annotates, satisfied that the joke conforms to his inclinations, consists of describing Omar Khayyam as the author of a treatise on cubic equations, pretending to not know that he also wrote the Rubaiyat. What’s clear is that Washington’s silence goes almost unnoticed amid the uproar and laughter that Héctor’s insistence generates. Let’s put you to bed, my love! Dib was shouting from the other end of the table while inserting a cigarette into the gold-plated mouthpiece that matched his gold-plated cigarette case, gold ring, and gold wristwatch, all glowing against his matte complexion, his rail-thin body topped off by a somewhat equine face divided into two mismatched halves — the top longer than the bottom — behind a large nose that supported gold-rimmed glasses above a black, well-trimmed beard.

But Héctor isn’t easily intimidated: smart, occasionally pedantic, with prize-winning paintings in San Pablo and Venice and five or six hanging in the international avant-garde sections of European museums, always with the vague suspicion, most often suppressed around other people, that everything occurring in his absence forms or could form part of a vast conspiracy against his person. According to El Gato, the possibility of a dialectical contest with Washington is particularly exciting to him, a mania that, out of delicacy, Washington pretends not to notice, which, since it provokes Héctor even more, actually generates the opposite of the desired effect. Cohen describes him as ambivalent and, in reference to him, once employed the following jest: He’d like them to like him and no one else like him, but not like liking anyone but him; he likes those who like him to not like each other; it’s not unlike him to not like it when those he likes like him, and to not like that he likes them; he’d like to stop liking people’s liking and make people not like him. But he, the Mathematician, in spite of everything, recognizes Héctor’s genuine interest not only for the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) but for the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), with which he means, Leto assumes, that Héctor, aside from his talent for painting, is not undeserving of invitation to any circle that’s discussing certain universal questions, however small.

Leto nods, his expression more or less abstracted, to show that he has understood not only that Héctor is well-versed in certain questions but also — and especially — what those questions are. But the Mathematician doesn’t even see him, occupied as he is in specifying and organizing the details of the memories he obtained, through Botón, the previous Saturday, on the bench at the stern, on the upper deck of the ferry, and which will accompany him the rest of his life. You could say the memories parasitize other experiences, but they don’t, for this reason, lose force, sense, or cohesion. In fact most of the details are familiar and, because of this, it’s not difficult for him to piece them together, in contrast to Leto who, new to the city, or relatively new at least, has to patch them up — with assorted memories that are unconnected to the objects being evoked or with vague images that aren’t traceable to any experience related to the events — alongside the fragmentary, scattered, and sometimes confused image the story produces in him and which, paradoxically, because of its fragmentation and hypothetical nature, just like a fairy tale, leaves profound and vivid traces in his memory: Basso’s ranch, Silvia Cohen, smarter than her husband, the table under the pavilion, the conversation, Beatriz rolling a cigarette, the ferry to Paraná, Washington’s ironic silences, Pirulo’s wife bleeding herself with the syringe, Washington’s three mosquitos, tiny and gray, swirling around the summer night, buzzing clearly, in the illuminated studio in Rincón Norte, Noca’s horse stumbling in a field along a coastline partly made up of coastlines previously visited and transferred to the above — all of that, no? — also mixed, but not carefully measured, with the contradictory assertions made by Tomatis and the Mathematician, who continues, clear and distilled, as they say: Until Washington gives in and says—Washington, no? — no, I was saying that last summer, etc., etc., to Héctor, whose attentive but somewhat severe, hostile silence and pre-emptive expression more or less signify: Yes, yes, I’m listening, but in any case, say what you will, I already have a refutation prepared. Washington’s expression, meanwhile — a singular masterpiece of highly controlled art that in no way betrays an awareness of Héctor’s threatening severity — Washington’s expression, I was saying, along with his words and the intonation used to pronounce them, compose something that, in what they call an organized or discursive form could be formulated more or less like this: I don’t know what the others have led you to believe, but if I were you I’d ignore them. Don’t waste time on my meandering trivia, there’s nothing to refute. Everyone here is a little overexcited by the alcohol and the party. No one can hold them back. I’m an old man — sixty-five Aprils today exactly — living in Rincón Norte, retired, occupied exclusively with his little cottage. Watching that my chicory doesn’t go to seed and watering a lot during the hot months doesn’t leave me time for much else. Our friends here exaggerate, don’t believe them. As you seem even at a distance to be an intelligent man, you can’t help but see how scatterbrained they are. But since you are so kind as to let me take up your time and insist on the pleasure of hearing me prattle, I’ll tell you that last summer, after dinner, I sat down to read something, I don’t remember what, Mitre’s Rimas, maybe, or a novel by Cambaceres, when out of the silence appeared three mosquitos that started buzzing and swirling around me, until eventually they distracted me from my reading. And that’s it. As you can see, our friends here get worked up when they drink. Héctor, according to the Mathematician, and always according to Botón, aware of having been stalled by Washington’s rhetorical tricks, which, fundamentally, he is forced to recognize as effective, because by avoiding any affirmative discourse, as it has been called, Washington has compelled him to renew his request for information, disarming his killer refutation — Héctor, we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, feigning a disinterested curiosity over certain fragmentary reports he would prefer not to amplify, specifically because of the limited faith owed to their friends in their current state, to which Washington does not seem to have succumbed, he starts over: But hadn’t they said something about Noca, the fisherman? Had he misheard or had they mentioned Noca’s horse? Hadn’t there been some talk during dinner over whether horses can or cannot stumble, and hadn’t this been the actual reason why Washington had brought up the mosquitos? Washington spends a considerable length of time trying to remove a tobacco strand from his lower lip, with particularly inept fingers, after having listened to Héctor’s questions with complete attention while — according to the Mathematician, and according to the Mathematician always according to Botón — looking fleetingly into Héctor’s eyes and then fixing his gaze on the dark patio beyond the pavilion, the dark patio now beginning to chill in the morning air, then responding slowly, and if his words can be summarized, and because in any event a summary is always required, they might be summarized like this: That’s right, that’s right, I don’t deny it: our friend Noca said something about his horse. He said that if he was late with the fish it was because his horse had stumbled that afternoon along the coast, as per my eminently unverifiable assertion. Noca, who is of my same generation, like me isn’t a top seed. And when our friends Cohen and Barco started discussing whether or not a horse could stumble I offered my modest reticence — it’s not that I wanted to deny the stumbling of horses, it wasn’t anything like that. Noca just happens to be a walking threat to the principle of sufficient reason, and if you want to discuss something it’s better to ignore his assertions. That’s why, with utmost caution and not intending to draw any conclusion, I told the story of the three mosquitos. Basso, you’ve got the bottle handy; be a gentleman and pour me a finger of whiskey? Thank you. And according to the Mathematician, without saying another word Washington started sipping his drink and, fixing an extremely deferential look on Beatriz, who was watching him with a furrowed brow and a kind of malevolent smile, said: Did you know, Beatriz, that velvet dress looks very pretty on you? Thank you, Washington, says the Mathematician that Botón said that Beatriz responded, suggesting that she followed his meaning, but with a somewhat exaggerated intonation meant to show that she was aware of his evasive maneuvers.

And so on. According to Botón — according to the Mathematician, no? — Héctor, hearing the response from Beatriz, hesitated a moment (though it continues to be always the same), panicking briefly, possibly thinking, and with some reason this time, that the vast conspiracy, implicating even his most precious possessions, so to speak, even Paolo Ucello and the cosmos, was just then reaching a decisive juncture, and if he hoped to dismantle the organization that had finished off his master Malevich and whose cloaked schemes had succeeded in keeping several women from falling in love with him and sometimes wore holes in the elbows of his Pierre Cardin sweaters, he needed to put all his faculties to use, including his intelligence which, and why not admit it, says the Mathematician, is of superior quality, capable of swimming effortlessly in the waters of the trivium as well as the quadrivium. The best thing would be to demonstrate that in spite of the conspiracy he had understood everything, and since the active members of the organization refused to confess, he would explain things to them step by step and in complete detail. Like so: Noca had nothing to do with it. You had to consider the assertion and forget about the subject. If Washington had brought up the mosquitos it was because he wanted to improve the proposition included in Noca’s assertion, and the fact of bringing up the mosquitos seemed to grant Noca some credibility, assuming he had correctly interpreted the evidence gathered from this or that person, although, frankly, the present company wasn’t at its most loquacious. One of the mosquitos never approached Washington, another approached repeatedly and when Washington tried to swat it, it took off and flew away, and the third one had let itself get swatted immediately. That was it, right? He wasn’t mistaken? In his opinion, given that Washington had made the comparison, to Washington the mosquito that lets itself get swatted is in the same situation as the riderless horse that stumbles. Washington was the one who suggested this. All he was doing was clarifying what Washington had said. He wasn’t for or against either Washington’s assertion or Washington himself. If there were objections they should be directed to Washington. And if he had stated things poorly he hoped Washington would offer some corresponding clarification.

According to Botón, Washington rearranged the blanket, which was already sitting well on his shoulders, and directing himself to Héctor’s somewhat anxious expectation, which stood out among the general expectation, shook his head, saying, no, Héctor hadn’t stated things poorly, but rather just the opposite, almost perfectly, that no one, least of all him, Washington, could have done better, and for that reason, naturally, not the slightest clarification was necessary. Some might consider the horse/mosquito identification excessive, somewhat abbreviated maybe, and he ran the risk of the yellow press publishing essays to that effect, but he, Washington, wasn’t going to split hairs, realizing that, out of necessity to the exposition, and given the lack of useful information in such a thorny subject, simplifications were inevitable, and it was up to the insightful listener to introduce the necessary qualifications.

— I understand, I do, Leto says. But watch the guardrail.

The Mathematician, wrapped up in the Héctor-Washington controversy, does not seem to realize that they have reached the bright corner, and that two steps from now they will reach the edge of the sidewalk, so wrapped up in fact, even now, and twice over, so to speak, that Leto, who has assumed a protective attitude toward the Mathematician after the incident with the pants, is afraid that in his abstracted walk with his gaze fixed on the future, that is, on the end of the street, the Mathematician will fail to perceive the drop-off of several centimeters between the sidewalk and the street and will fall to the ground. He fears this for several reasons, among which the Mathematician’s so-called physical integrity enjoys a significant place — if the expression fits — but not, though not far behind, the primary, belonging to his apprehension that an error in translation, just a common motional accident, a false step, might completely demolish the harmonious im age of the Mathematician which, after forty-five minutes of walking, give or take, he has begun to appreciate, and whose recent fissures, occasioned by the incident with the pants, are at the point of healing. An accident after such an event could dramatically transform a situation which, in general, falls into the category of comedy — comedy, no? — which is, if you think about it, just a delaying of the inevitable, a merciful silence toward the brutal progression of the neutral and its nauseating confusion, the passing, gentle delusion of celebrating the error rather than wasting one’s voice and impotent fury cursing it.

Leto’s fear also has an external justification: the corner is practically deserted and they have now left behind what is referred to — certainly out of convenience — as the city center, where the somewhat more crowded cluster of shops, vehicles, unlit billboards, and people produced a particular turmoil which they crossed with certain indifference, owing to the internal effort required by their verbal exchanges and the subversion of moral energy, you might say, that it cost them to oppose Tomatis’s insistent and blind maledictions. And because, paradoxical as it may seem, the decrease in danger in a certain sense increases the risks as their vigilance relaxes — or so it seems to Leto, in any case — he has the impression that the Mathematician, impassioned again after the bad moments they went through a couple of blocks ago, having forgotten them, is now more vulnerable. But he is wrong: in full control of his so-called physical and intellectual faculties, the Mathematician adapts to the transition across the cable and crosses over without losing the thread of the story — so to speak — which, because of his unnecessary circumspection, Leto himself forgets. Leto’s distraction has other causes: as they cross the street, now that most of the shops have disappeared, you could say, they give way once again, if you like, to the suites, waiting rooms, and offices of various professionals, the old, single-story houses with ornate façades and iron balconies that evoke the persistent comparison with a mausoleum whose tombstones would one day be decorated with the bronze plaques announcing the name of the owner and the nature of his trade. At the same time, that accumulation of professions, by class, whose so-called economic and social logic he is not ignorant of, makes him conceive of the city not as though it were divided into neighborhoods or sections, but rather into territories in the animal sense, an archaic and violent demarcation of ritual, bloody defense. And he is so absorbed in this depressive sensation that, without realizing that they have reached the opposite sidewalk, he is the one who trips over the guardrail. And to think I worried for him because of the excessive love he has for his pants, he thinks with a certain childishness, while everything spins around inside his head as he stumbles onto the sidewalk. And as he thinks this, practically falling, a pleasant and unexpected sensation surprises him: the Mathematician’s strong arms, which have made his tackles feared and admired in every university campus along the coast, and including in Buenos Aires, in Córdoba, in La Plata, and even in Montevideo, prevent his fall and support him fraternally thanks to his quick, precise reflexes and the unique opportunity that destiny presents him to demonstrate to the world, and above all himself, that he is capable of an awareness of external objects and phenomena besides his pants. For a few seconds Leto finds himself tilting forward, his feet barely touching the ground, wrapped in the Mathematician’s thick arms, feeling the contact of the white, immaculate shirt against his cheek, his half-displaced glasses pressed against his ear by the Mathematician’s chest to keep them from falling, the cigarettes and matches, which he carried in his shirt pocket, scattered on the sidewalk because of the violence of the jolt that projected them forward.

— Saved, he hears from the calm and somewhat ironic voice of the Mathematician somewhere above his head, which is pitched toward the sidewalk pavement.

— Thanks, Leto says, straightening up and releasing himself a little from the arms that have not decided to let go. He adjusts his glasses after checking to see that they haven’t been damaged and goes to gather his cigarettes and matches, but the Mathematician, pre-empting him, already has them in hand, and having finished reinserting — with some difficulty — the cigarettes that had come out of the packet, hands them to him.

— Thanks, Leto repeats, somewhat humiliated by all of that solicitude because, overwhelmed by the speed of the accident, he is unable to discern the discrete way in which the Mathematician conceals his authentic concern.

— Alright then, where were we? Leto asks, removing a bent cigarette from the packet and returning the packet to his shirt pocket. Hurrying somewhat, to overcome the situation, as they say, but with his hands still trembling, he lights the cigarette and puts away the matches. His shadow, slightly shorter, projects over the gray pavement next to the Mathematician’s.

They continue. While they try to appear indifferent and outwardly calm, in the depths of their so-called souls — apparently not translucent but murky, as we were saying, or rather yours truly, the author, was saying just now — they struggle with emotions that anger them and that they would rather not see expressed inside themselves, humiliated by the thought that the other, because of his apparent indifference, is too noble to feel them. In Leto’s case it’s a belief — tenuous, it’s true, but very present — that what just took place has ruined any pretense of superiority toward the Mathematician, accompanied by the shameful suspicion of being excluded from any other sphere in which he might feel equal or superior to him, while the Mathematician, beginning to sense that the happiness he feels at having saved Leto from falling is growing into a kind of euphoria in which he senses certain non-altruistic elements, is filled with guilt. But let’s be clear: assuming that we agree that — as we have been saying from the start — all of this is just more or less, that what seems clear and precise belongs to the order of conjecture, practically of invention, that most of the time the evidence is only briefly ignited then extinguished beyond, or behind (if you prefer), what they call words, assuming that from the start we have agreed about everything, to be clear let’s say it for the last time, though it’s always the same: all of this is just more or less and as they say — and after all, what’s the difference!

Saved, the Mathematician could have said again. The character — it’s the exact word that corresponds to him in the present circumstances — walking a few meters ahead of them turns at hearing their voices and stops to wait. At an age when most others are sure to feel lost in a dark jungle, he possesses an overabundant self-satisfaction, and his pale brown checked suit, lightweight and tailor-made, the perfectly adjusted knot in his tie, the imperceptible rose-colored dots on his suit, his long, waxed hair, the matching colors of his suit and his tan — slightly clearer than the Mathematician’s, which inspires, as they say, his admiration — testify to his self-satisfaction — they proclaim it even. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, he waits for them with a wide smile directed exclusively toward the Mathematician, who, Leto senses, reticently returns it. But when they reach him, the Mathematician softly extends an indifferent hand that the other grabs and shakes tenaciously, even going so far as to cover it with his left while doing so. And Leto is on the verge of feeling invisible again, as he was in Tomatis’s presence when, in an unexpected and peremptory way, the Mathematician introduces them: Do you know each other? My friend Leto. The doctor Méndez Mantaras. And then, as though to apologize to Leto, he adds: He’s a distant relative. The distant relative extends the tips of his fingers, barely allowing Leto’s hand to graze them, and then fixes a disapproving look on the Mathematician, which more or less signifies: As though the family didn’t have it bad enough with your parents’ eccentricities and your quirks, you had to come along and introduce me to one of your communist friends in the middle of San Martín just to burn me. But the Mathematician, without hesitating, responds with a severe and penetrating look: Is something wrong? If so then get going right now and if not then drop it—more or less like that, no? — his eyelashes slightly pinched, as they say, looking down at him so much that Leto wonders if the Mathematician, magically, like the superheroes in comics, has grown subtly taller. The distant relative, apparently no less muscular than the Mathematician, or only slightly less so, as though the difference in size were of a category distinct from the physical, notices the peremptory warning immediately and, to Leto’s surprise — expecting a reaction proportional to the unequivocal severity of the Mathematician’s look — puts on an elusive and conventional smile and starts throwing out pleasantries: How’s the family? Beautiful day, no? Let’s walk together to the corner since we’re going in the same direction, etc., etc., to which the Mathematician, as they begin to walk, starts responding in a condescending and even disdainful way that the other, unfazed, pretends not to notice, or that maybe he only half-listens to, occupied as he is in digging through his cache of pleasantries in order to toss them one by one — with his fake cheerful and fake familiar tone — into the morning air. How’s Tostado? Did you go to the Saturday rugby match in Paraná? And come to think of it, how was Europe? To this last question, after a contrary hesitation, as though he couldn’t decide how to take it, the Mathematician starts to deliver — this is the word that sounds best here — a mechanical, fast summary, and likewise abundant response in which the string of cities and accompanying images — evoked for those he admires at the even and gentle rhythm of a carousel — have, in the present case, the same force, frequency, and effect on the other as a series of hammerings: Warsaw, there was nothing left; La Rochelle, sparkling white; Paris, an unexpected rainstorm; Brussels, for The Census at Bethlehem; Bruges, they painted what they saw; Vienna, all the locals seem to believe in terminal analysis; Biarritz, our oligarchs would have loved it; Palermo, the gods passed through before disappearing; Venice, the real gateway to the East, not Istanbul; Segovia, arduous in the yellow wheat, etc., etc., in a rapid, precise way, pretending to believe that the distant relative understands what his allusions denote, but formulating them, Leto thinks, in the most condensed and cryptic way possible, so that the relative, who seems to be attempting an intense concentration of effort so as not to miss anything, won’t understand them. Moreover, Leto senses that the Mathematician, although simulating a conversation with his distant relative, is actually talking to him — to Leto, no? — as though he were performing a practical demonstration of the other’s absolute ineptitude, insofar as every one of his words and gestures seems not to say what it normally would, but instead rehearses a categorical formula corroborated over and over by the accumulating evidence: See? See? Don’t bother wasting time on him, he’s not interesting. Even the memories of Europe, fleeting, fragmentary, radically condensed and simplified now that they are somewhat distant, he presents with an exaggerated vividness and a false spontaneity, intending to amplify their familiarity, which in a way diminishes the complicity because Leto, as much or possibly more than the distant relative, believes in the authentic possession of those memories and in the aura they confer on their possessor. Further, no doubt: what to Leto represents a place to project his imaginary energy — so to speak, and if the expression fits — to the distant relative is nothing more than another quirk of a member of the most extravagant branch of the family. Then again, the Mathematician’s phrases don’t seem to have any effect on him, since in the seconds of silence that follow them, the distant relative has time to find a new topic of conversation, or of monologue rather, and obliterating any response in advance, begins to speak: The night before he had gone to the city center with his wife — who in fact is second cousins with the Mathematician — to see the premier of The Wind in Florida, and the movie seems to have made what they call an indelible impression on him, and strenuously recommending it, as they say — to the Mathematician, no? given that Leto’s presence continues to be problematic to him — and inspired by the renewed empathy remembering it produces, he begins to tell him the plot. According to him, it’s the story of a family of pioneers on the Florida panhandle — apparently that’s how it’s referred to there — who, after fighting for years against the Indians, build a ranch that little by little is transformed into a huge plantation. The movie tracks three generations, the pioneer grandfather, the landowner father, and his two sons, one good and one bad, who fall in love with the same woman — the widow of a neighboring farmer who was killed in a brawl with the landowner over an argument about property rights. The widow first falls in love with the bad one, but when she realizes her mistake, she falls in love with the good one, and at the climax a hurricane engulfs them and the plantation house is destroyed in a blaze. Instead of yielding to his distant relative’s hope — after being shaken by pathos — of sympathy from the others, the Mathematician, having received the story with deliberately ostentatious skepticism and insulting silence, forces him instead to hear a counter explication of the same in the following terms, more or less: As far as he can tell it’s a piece of garbage intended to justify the slaughter of the Indians, the brutal seizure of Mexican territory (though it takes place in Florida the story is clearly a metaphor for all of Latin America), and the absorption of small business by big monopolies, with the president of the Lions Club dressed up as a landowner, a showgirl passed off as a Methodist widow, and two stock actors playing the roles of the brothers, the good blonde one, neat and clean-shaven, and the black-haired bad one, with a curly beard, to implicitly suggest that Anglo-Saxons are the morally and physically superior race. And at the climax — what a coincidence, no? — the hurricane and the fire happen. All this had to happen at once and he — the Mathematician, no? — wonders if the fire starts at the same time as the hurricane just so that the rain can put out the flames and, after an inconsequential scare in which all the evil darkies are exterminated, the blonde gallant and the showgirl can rebuild the mansion as though nothing happened and continue exploiting their neighbors like before so that their grandchildren can drop their atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a clean conscience. And the Mathematician finishes his interpretation with a short, satisfied, and somewhat exaggerated laugh that serves, though Leto is unaware of this, as supplementary evidence to a kind of indictment concentrated in the counter-explication: They are not interesting. They are ignorant and ambitious and their worldview is rooted in a murderous solipsism. They hate what they don’t understand and despise what doesn’t resemble them. Although through mysterious aspects of my temperament and my own personal efforts I’ve managed to differentiate myself as much as possible, the tragedy of my life until the day I die will consist of having been born among them. To maintain or expand their privilege they are capable of humiliating their parents, of sending their own brother to prison if they detect even the shadow of opposition in him. To perpetuate their caste they would lay waste to the universe. To treat them differently from the way I do would be a dangerous mistake. Anything you can do to dismay or neutralize them is useful as a form of self-preservation, but apart from that, for the things that really matter, it’s not worth wasting time on them, they are not interesting.

And so on. That tenuous and somewhat feverish, passing cruelty, a kind of violent courtesy directed toward Leto and intended to demonstrate his absolute difference from the character — the word could not be more apt — walking with them, does not attain its objective, strictly speaking, as they say, or at least does not attain it completely, because although Leto does not fail to notice, in the Mathematician’s contemptuous hostility, an instinctive response to the other’s pretensions, the response seems disproportionate, and the distant relative’s efforts to simulate that they are walking along in a normal conversation produces less malevolent pleasure than it does a certain compassion. To the Mathematician’s short and poorly concealed laugh, the distant relative responds with another, of similar style but less effective because of its defensiveness, intended to more or less signify: To us normal people that kind of twisted interpretation of a beautiful movie goes in one ear and out the other, but his avoidance of the Mathematician’s eyes prove that he is not what they call a well-matched adversary, and the renewed pleasantries he starts sputtering confirm this: He could swear that the Mathematician’s white moccasins are Italian. Is it true? Has he heard that his boy was champion in the youth division of the interclub tennis league? The strawberries from Coronda this year were tasteless, but the asparagus came out first rate, etc., etc. His sentences, spoken carefully and with a certain insistence on an obligatory response — like a letter certified with return receipt, you could say — seem to dissolve in the air before reaching the Mathematician, who not only doesn’t register them but, with his head turned toward Leto, actually ignores even the physical presence that speaks them. Moreover, while the other talks the Mathematician busies himself in formulating more completely, and in more explicit terms not worth squandering on his distant relative, the narrative mechanics of The Wind in Florida—thinking that there always needs to be a climax at the end, he says, more or less, is equivalent to ignoring that objectivity is incomprehensible enough for its catastrophes to occur unnoticed and end up being nothing but statistics, anonymous blips in some distribution index; besides, the coincidence between the climax and the fire belongs, it seems to him, the Mathematician, to the category of comparisons so obvious that they border on tautologies. The monologues interlace and Leto, who out of courtesy and curiosity tries to listen to both at once, does not manage to concentrate on either until, aware of the competitive nature, as they say, of the situation — who will demonstrate most definitively the ineptitude of the other — grows disinterested in both. Moreover — and Leto asks himself if the distraction isn’t deliberate — the hulk of the Mathematician absorbed in his explications keeps the distant relative so far away as he walks that he, the distant relative, is only left with a thin strip of sidewalk to use, forcing him to execute a continuous slalom around the cable guardrail. And when they reach the beveled corner — or so it’s called — that widens the sidewalk, the distant relative stops talking, and taking advantage of the space, slides behind Leto and the Mathematician and, hurrying a little, beats them, as they say, to the bright section of the sidewalk, waiting for them, three meters ahead, with a triumphant expression that, far from affecting the Mathematician, on the contrary, becomes the definitive substantiation, as they say, of his proof: because just as Leto, owing to an instinctive politeness that nevertheless does not suppress the vaguely demented and, you could say, exclusively intrafamilial nature of the tacit altercation in which he doesn’t feel implicated whatsoever — like the foreign tourists indifferent to the so-called domestic struggles of the countries they visit — just as Leto, owing to an instinctive politeness, as we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, is about to move toward the distant relative who’s waiting for them with a satisfied look in the middle of the sidewalk, the Mathematician, grabbing him by the arm with a hand whose years of rugby and crew have endowed it with what they call above average strength, detains and forces him to continue straight while the right hand lifts and drops quickly for a brief goodbye accompanied by an inaudible grunt that — Leto guesses without seeing, or just barely seeing — rearranges the distant relative’s triumphant smile into a stupefied, outraged grimace as they step over the guardrail into the street and begin to cross the bright and all but empty intersection.

— He’s a venomous snake, the Mathematician whispers as they cross, without letting go of his arm. He’s a regular at the intelligence services and the eleven o’clock mass.

Leto discharges a thick mouthful of smoke and starts to laugh, thankful. He, until the year before, went to mass every so often and more and more infrequently, and though he has stopped going without much reservation, for someone to place the eleven o’clock mass among the fundamental credentials of human iniquity serves to confirm, a posteriori, the just nature of his defection. But also, and above all, he feels thankful because he has sensed, in the Mathematician’s somewhat brutal contempt for his distant relative, a gesture of seduction toward himself, which, being unexpected and fleeting, is therefore all the more intense. The dispersed and scattered elements suddenly come together as they cross, through the unmistakable gesture of affection, and the inconstant, fragmentary flickers emerging from the dark depths inside him, where their flashes almost immediately extinguish the tenuous and phosphorescent glow of consciousness, the frayed, mercurial recollections that assault him whenever they like, the tide of regrets, the turns of phrase, the nonsense, the doubts and ghosts, the lonely flux produced by the unaccomplished all come together, as we were saying, or rather yours truly, just now, was saying, and become a solid burst, a translucent, stable whole, almost a real but fragile object, like a smoke ring or a soap bubble, that occupies every corner of his body and radiates a euphoric sense of himself, him—Ángel Leto, no? — clearly defined and distilled among the things that, dispersed across the benign transparency, fill the morning. The force of that feeling is so strong that it suppresses its sporadic or transitory character, and when they reach the opposite sidewalk, as they step over the cable, the somewhat pedantic tone with which the Mathematician, recovering from his intrafamilial vexations, resumes his story, begins to gnaw at the edges of its short-lived stability: As I was saying, with that response he assumed the conversation was finished, says the Mathematician.

— Of course, Leto says. Obviously.

— Washington’s reason for bringing up the mosquitos is explained in his response to Héctor, don’t you think? says the Mathematician, letting go of his arm after seeing the empty pipe in his hand and putting it into his pants pocket, then taking the folded up sheets of the Student Association’s press release from his other pocket to verify that they are still there and putting them away again.

Leto takes advantage of the Mathematician’s distraction to offer, without much enthusiasm, an affirmative response. What makes the whole thing troublesome, as they say, is that he can’t remember just what the pivotal response from Washington had been that, according to the Mathematician, clarified the notorious subject which a while ago, despite their contradicting moods and versions, Tomatis and the Mathematician, without even suspecting his somewhat obfuscated confusion, seemed so in agreement on. However much he tries, Washington’s response does not make what you might call an appearance in his memory — his memory, no? — or rather that maybe slightly concave mirror (or flat, what’s the difference) where certain familiar images, through which the whole universe takes on continuity, are reflected, sometimes clearly and sometimes darkly, in an uncontrollable, fugitive rhythm all their own. And Leto realizes after a moment of frustrated effort, so to speak, that the famous response, the final explication of that string of allusions which from that night toward the end of winter would travel by means of increasingly variable and dubious recollections, that Washington’s circuitous, vernacular sentence, apparently the solution to the riddle, must have been pronounced by the Mathematician, whose source was Botón, when he wasn’t listening, most likely when they were crossing the last street, just before he — Leto, no? — absorbed in his thoughts, stumbled over the cable.

— Washington likes to draw out what he’s thinking little by little, says the Mathematician. But everything is clarified when he reaches his conclusion.

— And that was where he wanted to end up? Leto says, trying out that vague question in order to obtain a better indicator.

— Right there, says the Mathematician.

— Set in motion by, Leto says slowly, in a thoughtful tone that simulates an implicit series of rationalizations.

— No. No. Not at all. Just the opposite, says the Mathematician with a kind of energy that could be of a pedagogical order.

— Right, yes, Leto says. Just another way to put it. More elegant.

— Why say it another way when Washington said it as clearly as possible? says the Mathematician.

— That’s true, Leto says. And, disappointed, he takes a last drag from his cigarette and flicks it to the sidewalk.

Considering the issue resolved, the Mathematician says that, according to Botón, right after dinner they had given Washington his gifts: Basso, Nidia, and Barco had put them all in a big cardboard box, and Basso’s girls, before going to bed, had taken out and given them one by one to Washington, who unwrapped them slowly to everyone’s anticipation: Beatriz, a belt; the Bassos, a box of darjeeling tea; Marcos Rosemberg, a mechanical sprinkler for the garden; Cuello, a mate gourd with a silver top and base; Silvia Cohen, a book by Paul Radin; Tomatis, an album of erotic Japanese etchings from the eighteenth century; Dib had a case of wine from Salta in his car; and later on Héctor, Elisa, and Rita Fonesca brought him a super-expensive illustrated history of modern art. The rest the Mathematician doesn’t remember — ah, yes, Barco, a checked shirt of the kind Washington likes, and the twins a ham.

— A ham? Leto asks, less out of genuine surprise than out of a faked curiosity, which is aimed at distracting the Mathematician while he tries to remember, or in any case decipher from the Mathematician’s words, the clarification of the story of the mosquitos that the whole world, except him in particular, seems to understand through lateral allusions and fragmentary, cursory precisions as conclusive and decisive evidence. But the Mathematician only responds with a quick, distracted nod, concentrating on what he means to say and not disposed to letting a secondary problem, the ham the twins gave Washington, disturb his mnemonic and rhetorical efforts. The sincerity with which the Mathematician seems to consider his full comprehension of the real meaning of Washington’s words, as a result admitting him into an exclusive circle, produces ambiguous feelings in Leto, a mix of pride and guilt, as though he were slightly fraudulent, but the Mathematician, unaware of his contradictory states of mind, takes for granted his admission to a circle of people who are intelligent and well-intentioned, as they say, correctly situated in their politics and so, offering the first results of his internal elaboration, goes on: All the gifts, according to Botón, Marcos Rosemberg planned to take to Rincón Norte the next day. Washington was very happy with them. In fact, as they say, despite how mild the winter had been, as the night wore on it got increasingly colder and those who stayed outside, under the pavilion or simply out on the patio, had to cover themselves as much as possible in order to bear it, and on top of sweaters, overcoats, hats, scarves, gloves, and cloaks, the Bassos started bringing out ponchos and blankets to distribute among the guests who, sitting around the table, or coming and going from the pavilion to the house, or walking in clusters through the trees at the back, started wrapping themselves up and releasing streams of air that turned to vapor each time they opened their mouth to say something or just to breathe. According to Botón, says the Mathematician, at some point they went looking for mandarins at the back, the last of the year, from the trees where even in the morning darkness they could sense the appearance of the first shoots that signaled the end of winter, and the mandarins were so cold that biting them would hurt their teeth, until Sadi, the unionist, suggested heating them up around the last coals and ashes that were still warm, the way he did when he was a kid with oranges in a barbecue. And so they had put them in the ashes and embers for a while and had eaten them warm — and the Mathematician can’t imagine how good those mandarins must have been. I can’t imagine what that’s like. Ever since Botón told me about it Saturday on the ferry I’ve been tempted to recreate the experience. Which is satisfying to Leto because he, on the contrary, as far back as his memory goes, can remember the warm mandarins and oranges they would take from the grill on winter nights, when he spent July vacations in his grandparents’ town, and this is the first time since the Mathematician started relating the circumstances of the party that he feels ownership of one of the details of the events of that night last winter at Basso’s ranch in Colastiné, which he’s never been to and has had to piece together, as they say, from assorted images of various ranches, half real and half imagined. Like two towns on the river coast, the warm mandarin juice connects, one might say, his own life to the images evoked (if the expression fits) by the Mathematician’s words: Ah, the warm mandarins. Because they’re always last, at the end of winter they’re the sweetest. They’re so full of juice that when you warm them in the ashes they taste like honey.

The Mathematician looks at him. Like any good rationalist, he distrusts lyrical exaggerations — especially unfamiliar ones — and his look, blatantly scrutinizing, searches Leto’s face for the gravity that’s necessary to lend credibility to the description and for the indifference and absence of hesitation that would certify his rationalist certitude, which, in light of his somewhat indiscreet comparison, and conscious of having hyperbolized his description in order to amplify the importance of his experience, Leto struggles to maintain at all costs. Turning his eyes back to the street, the Mathematician seems to have concluded his inspection, with satisfactory results apparently, if Leto judges by the carefree bonhomie with which he resumes his stream of compact, well-turned phrases, at times elegant and not exempt from a kind of arch excess of precision, a certain refrigerant preciousness in the expression of emotions, and mostly ironic shades in the disdain of his assumptions. Sometimes a general dispersal, sometimes a reunion under the pavilion. They walked through the darkness covered with ponchos and blankets, holding a glass in one hand and a cigarette between the index and middle fingers of the same hand, the glow of red ends of their cigarettes growing slightly in the darkness, among the mandarins, if they took a puff. When they crossed the bands of light projecting from the ranch into the patio and between the trees, you could see the streams of whitish breath they expelled through their half-open lips. Sometimes, from somewhere in the darkness, they could hear a couple whispering, and in some cases, and despite the cold, the whispers sounded more like conclusive shudders than preliminary murmurs—all this, the Mathematician clarifies, according to Botón: branches shaking, voices, laughter and shouts that dispersed and faded in the dark, frozen air under the stars resembling pieces of ice formed yellow, or blue, or red, or green, that in the Mathematician’s imagination are sidereal chemical memories in which each color is just evidence of this or that substance or of thermal relationships where the different colors are just the consequence of varying temperatures. As he speaks, the Mathematician imagines them, lighthearted and happy while he marched around Frankfurt, sees them coming and going across the dark patio under the sky loaded, one might say, with active substance. But these are private images belonging to what is intransmissible in his representations — those apparently arbitrary and senseless images that, nevertheless, were they diagramed, would reveal more of his identity than his fingerprints or the features of his face. According to Botón, says the Mathematician, a few people sat around the table wearing blankets, scarves, hats, gloves — they smoked with the gloves on. Until at some point the cold was so unbearable that the ones who were left, because most people had already gone, were forced to move inside. The cold chased them from the patio to the house, says the Mathematician that Botón had said happened. According to Botón, they had sat around drinking mate and at some point Washington had said that certain ritual positions in tantric yoga were revolutionary. If Botón didn’t hear wrong, which is highly likely, says the Mathematician.

— This Botón’s credibility seems to fluctuate considerably, says Leto, somewhat irritated by the continuous corrections he has to make to his general idea of Botón, and by the nagging feeling of having missed the crux of the Mathematician’s story.

— His heart is big like a house. Unfortunately, its size sometimes seems inversely proportional to his intellectual faculties, says the Mathematician, simultaneously severe and tender.

— Isn’t he also kind of a. .? says Leto.

The Mathematician discharges a short, resigned laugh to show that even on the defensive he is willing to get to the bottom of things.

— A liar? he says.

Making a vague gesture with his lips and his shoulders, half-closing his eyes and adopting an enigmatic, ambiguous expression, Leto declines to respond, so the Mathematician presents his opinion: If the descriptor includes even the slightest hint of moral judgment, he rejects it emphatically and pre-emptively. Otherwise — and here the Mathematician’s timbre turns slightly pitched, a kind tone and singsong rhythm, as they also say — if it implies his inclination toward fantasy, his oversensitivity to bearing the steady bitterness of reality, his well-intentioned descriptions of things from an angle that will be most pleasant, calming, and enlightening to his interlocutor, his lack of, um, education and somewhat, um, limited culture, his malnourished capacity for rational thought, not to mention his intemperate consumption of gin, which don’t exactly contribute to a clarification of his ideas and more than anything don’t allow any certainty as regards the events to which he is an eyewitness or even a protagonist — if you bear all of these criteria in mind, the Mathematician continues, you could say that any statement from Botón, whatever its contents, presents itself a priori as slightly problematic. This said, he — the Mathematician, no? — isn’t the only one who thinks that, among all his traits, his ingenuousness and simplicity are what make Botón so lovable. Consider instead — or along the same lines maybe — the example of Noca, who might be regarded as a virtuoso of every variety or genre, and straightening the fingers on his left hand one by one, to mark his enumeration, the Mathematician intones: exaggeration, omission, perjury, fabulation, contradictory statements — and having used all of his fingers, he folds them back against his palm, except the index, which ticks the sixth variant — slander — of approaches that are contrary to the truth, and then he resumes straightening his fingers one by one: chimeras, systemic distortions for obscure mercantile reasons, flagrant misinterpretations, pseudologia fantastica morbosa, etc., etc., says the Mathematician, circling both hands in the air to indicate the infinite varieties of falsification at Noca’s disposal.

And then he falls, as they say, silent, and lets his arms drop to his sides. Two boys sitting in a doorway, seven or eight years old, gaze at a spot somewhere on the opposite sidewalk so intently that Leto looks toward it, not seeing anything, as does the Mathematician, who has not seen the boys yet but, intrigued by Leto’s curious look, passes his over the same spot without seeing anything but the one- or two-story houses and the gray pavement covered with bright morning light. They are so abstracted, Leto observes, that they don’t even see them approach or notice when anyone else walking down the sidewalk passes them, though the proximity to the government district generates a slight increase in movement along the streets. Just then the Mathematician recognizes — and is recognized by — two young men coming toward them on the opposite sidewalk, and they exchange, across the street where just then two cars are crossing, a quick greeting that consists in raising a hand, shaking their head a little, and smiling vaguely, a passing acknowledgment that dissolves in the bright air as quickly as it forms, so fast that Leto, because no verbal exchange follows, doesn’t even notice it, intrigued as he is by the boys’ indistinct but nevertheless attentive gaze. But as they pass alongside them and leave them behind, and he hears their conversation—I spy, I spy. What. A thing. What. Shiny. What color. — he suddenly understands the boys’ extreme attention. He would have liked to hear the thing’s color too, in order to find, somewhere in the spot, what they were talking about, but they’ve gone too far from the boys, and the one who was supposed to give the color stalls, possibly on purpose, in order to conceal the direction, disorienting the one who has to find the object and drawing out the game a little more. I spy, I spy. What. A thing. What. Shiny. What color, Leto thinks and, with somewhat childish disenchantment, can’t stop himself from looking again toward the opposite sidewalk, motivating another pointless look from the Mathematician who, because he was distracted by his greeting didn’t pay attention to the conversation, ends up slightly annoyed. Deliberately, Leto doesn’t provide an explanation. Washington’s notorious sentence, which the Mathematician must have referred to just before he stumbled over the guardrail, supposing that the allusions shared by the Mathematician and Tomatis were engineered to exclude him from the sphere where they moved effortlessly between the trivium and the quadrivium, as the Mathematician would say, the famous sentence that Leto continues to suspect was never spoken by Washington, sanctions his lack of explanation for his insistent interest in looking at the vague spot somewhere on the opposite sidewalk, prompted, so to speak, by a childish whim born, it’s not clear why, in the fissures of his soul — a problematic object if there ever was one, as they say, and which yours truly — just now, no? — was saying seems not translucent but murky. And in that climate of what you might call tenuous opposition, they reach the corner.

The landscape, to put a word to it, has changed completely. The small, private houses with their bronze nameplates and balconies over the sidewalk give way, as they say, to the Plaza de Mayo, bordered, on its four sides, by the cathedral, the courts, the Jesuit college, the capitol. From the long, three- or four-story buildings surrounding the plaza, suppliers of law, power, justice, and religion enter and exit with folders, briefcases, papers, alone or in small groups, men and women, the litigators, the faithful, and the public servants. Several pass, most likely on an errand from the curia to the courts, from the courts to the seat of government. Many cross, in different directions, the red brick paths of the plaza between the green flowerbeds bordered by bitter orange trees, rubber trees, or palms. The sky, bright blue, without a single cloud, spreads, you could say, over the plaza. The Mathematician slows down.

— This is my stop, he says.

Surprised, Leto looks at him, searching his expression for any resentment of his recent behavior. But the Mathematician’s wide smile, and the sincere look that meets his, calm him.

— I have to drop the press release off over there, he says, vaguely pointing somewhere in the city beyond the plaza, the capitol, and the courts. And then, satirizing himself and the Students Association: It’s not enough to travel through Europe. You’ve got to publish it too.

— I’m going straight, says Leto.

— Shame we missed the party, no? says the Mathematician.

— They didn’t invite me, says Leto.

— It must have slipped their minds. Or probably they thought they didn’t have to, says the Mathematician.

— So strange, giving him a ham, says Leto.

— It’s Washington’s favorite, says the Mathematician. But not to worry. In a couple of visits Tomatis will leave him with just the bone.

Okay. Time to say goodbye and finish it, Leto thinks, but as if he had guessed his thoughts, the Mathematician is already extending his hand. Leto holds out his. The look they exchange when they say goodbye, brief and polite, expresses many things that both perceive and register carefully, discreetly, and intuitively. Leto’s look says more or less the following: Frankly, when you whistled at me back there, I didn’t have a single ounce of interest in having someone pester me for fifteen blocks, especially since I only knew you through Tomatis’s patently unenthusiastic references, and your physical appearance and style of dress don’t favor you much with the poor mortals you happen upon. But after our walk I have to admit that your personality, although not without its pedantries, is more or less pleasant, and things haven’t gone badly. Furthermore, at some point I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart, but don’t worry, to me, it’s like the thing with the pants never happened. And the Mathematician’s — more or less as well, no? — and as we’ve said, without a trace of words: I’m aware of your reticence. I’ll try to understand it. And I’m aware of Tomatis’s too. But that doesn’t matter to me. The two of you, because I was born among uninteresting people, perceive uninteresting things in me, which is the cause, I’m sure, of that reticence. Let’s take the pants, for example. I know I shouldn’t let them be so important. But the feeling is stronger than me. At any point, if my white pants are in danger, my whole being feels in danger, because my whole being — who knows why, probably because of the uninteresting things that persist in me despite my efforts to eradicate them — though it seems strange, is concentrated in my pants. But I could offer some objections too, if I wanted. Tomatis, for example, wasn’t so brilliant. And in your case, I’m not sure you’ve understood everything with so much patience, detail, and scrupulous respect for the truth I’ve been trying to tell you. More than once I caught you thinking of something else, and at one point I wondered if you were taking advantage of the thing with the pants. But why bother with all this — they’re details that belong to the category of the uninteresting. Don’t you think there are more important things for the time we’ve been given? De rerum natura or Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, or the debate over the EPR paradox.

And so on. When they let go their hands, the Mathematician, taking advantage of a favorable stoplight, crosses the street at a diagonal, toward the plaza, while Leto, hesitant, undecided whether to continue, watches with an inexpressive, almost inert gaze. The Mathematician’s tanned, athletic, tall, and blonde-haired body, dressed in a white shirt, the blinding white pants that inspired a momentary enslavement in their owner, the white moccasins which Leto does not know were bought the month before in Florence and are worn sock-less with an excess of affected simplicity, the combination so stereotypical of the decade’s aesthetic ideal that a rational advertiser would have rejected him from a billboard for fear that his exaggerated perfection, producing a refusal effect, would lower sales of the products he was meant to sell, the Mathematician — in a word, no? — or in two, to be more precise, leaves the street behind, and stepping into the plaza, and always at a diagonal, moves away from the corner on the red brick path between the green flowerbeds where, juxtaposed against the cloudless blue sky and a landscape of block-long public buildings three or four stories tall, grow bitter orange trees, rubber trees, palo borrachos, and palms. Leto’s gaze follows him, more indolent than attentive and, unconsciously, at the level of thought that under layers of archaic rumination and delirium is always yoked to the essential, insolubly glued, so to speak, to the profound illusion of the external, watches as he is lost to the unreality of the morning, the translucent stuff of space and time that, with every step, swallows and returns him, over and over, with an impalpable rhythm, an absurd yet stable cluster of gradually diminishing radiation, less distinct as he moves away, a dense flux revealed and immediately erased again by the daylight. But when he reaches the center of the plaza, an acquaintance, coming in the opposite direction, intercepts him and they start to talk. From a distance Leto thinks he can imagine the conversation of which he catches only a few gestures and two or three head movements. He imagines hearing again the list of cities and the images associated with each — Paris, an unexpected rainstorm; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum; Warsaw, there was nothing left; Brussels, for The Census at Bethlehem; La Rochelle, sparkling white; etc., etc. — and, satisfied with the fresh rendering of the white image that had been losing its reality, recovering, through an illusory, conventional conversation, a somewhat more familiar humanity, he starts to cross the intersection.

The same lack of obligation that, some fifty-five minutes before, give or take, had compelled him to get off the bus and, instead of going to work, start walking down San Martín, now induces him to continue, though his decision is supplemented by the fear that, having told the Mathematician about his intention to continue straight, the white figure chatting with an acquaintance in the middle of the plaza might turn around and, seeing him still standing on the corner, killing time or undecided where to go, would suspect that what he had said was just a pretext for unburdening himself from him. But when he reaches the opposite sidewalk this apprehension disappears. Washington’s birthday, the mosquitos, Noca’s horse, the table set under the imaginary pavilion, at once persistent and inconstant, clicking along in a unique, complex order, now make up a carousel of memories more intense, significant, but nevertheless more enigmatic, you could say, than many others which, originating in his own experience, ought to be stronger and more immediately present in his memory. And the passing distractions, the opacity of certain allusions — apparently evident to Tomatis and the Mathematician — instead of diluting those images, clarify them, the way a crevice, by forcing a ray of light to pass through its tiny opening, contributes to a greater display of its richness in the concentrated darkness. Without realizing their fantastical aspect, Leto examines them, holds them — or accepts their persistence, passively — in the white circle of his attention, the way a traveler, projecting the artificial images of his recent trip, trying to gather together everything that escaped his attention just when the picture was taken, lingers a while studying the details of some slides more than others. The complete morning, including his body crossing through it over the gray pavement, and the intangible, ubiquitous “I” he carries inside him, disappear behind the images that, now almost definitive are, though they come from his memory, permanent and more indestructible, you could say, than the breath and flesh that contain them. They are, in any case, interwoven with them in spite of coming from the impalpable, articulate, and reverberant voice which, for several blocks, has been disseminated in the external transparency through the white, even teeth and well-formed, almost mythic superhero lips of the Mathematician. Until his death, certain associations, with greater or lesser force, will recall them, so dependent on each other that at some point he will no longer know which came first, the image or the association, and in some cases, as proof of their insoluble adhesion, so to speak, they will act upon each other without even reaching his consciousness, in the form of short sparks, pulses, and anonymous, shapeless signs that will wrinkle slightly the fissures, to put a word to it, of his being — his being, no? — or rather the incomprehensible formed into a continuous presence, a sensitive lump trapped in a nameless something, a slow whirlwind that it’s simultaneously part of, a spiral of energy and matter that is at once the womb that produces it and the knife — neither friend nor enemy — that slices it open.

Leto looks back at the plaza. The white figure, at least a head taller than its interlocutor, speaks with distant and measured gestures, and as it forms part of a pleasant, blooming multitude, the plaza’s flowerbeds, the spring sun, the trees, and the blue sky, Leto thinks that it would definitely be nice to see the Mathematician again and have a conversation, less because of the Mathematician himself than because of the whole morning he is part of and because he is now a part of his life, but actually, in the coming years, they will only be together two or three times at parties where they exchange a few words and, when they meet on the street, will limit themselves to a greeting, polite of course, but without stopping to talk — and all of these encounters more and more sporadic and further and further apart. Little by little Leto will abandon his work, more and more involved in political militancy, with more and more radicalized groups, until eventually going into hiding, and not a trace will remain of the familiar Leto but for two or three brief reappearances, except with a few close friends like Tomatis, Barco, El Gato Garay, who he will visit every so often, always briefly and unexpectedly, not to discuss politics but to spend some time with people who are connected to him not just by principles, but rather, to say it again, by shared experiences and memories, since it’s possible to fight against the same oppression, with the same principles even, but for different reasons. First he will leave his job — Isabel ends up marrying Lopecito — then his house, then the city, later the country, coming and going from Europe to Cuba, to the Middle East, to Africa, to Vietnam, until he disappears completely into the exacting, silent, clandestine life of the walking dead. For sixteen or seventeen years he will sink into an order governed by such strict, specialized, closed-circuit norms that, although they were created to form an association of people who intended to modify reality, will force him into an unreality so profound that, behind his so-called impenetrable mask, into which his face will be transformed, or inside the various costumes he will dress up in to enter and exit the same comedy like an actor playing several supporting roles at once, in his own life, behind the impenetrable mask — we were saying, or rather yours truly, just now, was saying, no? — nothing will be left after the rage, the faith, the daring, but a sardonic and not even self-pitying intransigence of someone who, chased by a torrential storm, as they say, or by an uninterrupted series of explosions, runs in a straight line, without caring, and maybe without even asking, whether the direction they are running in will lead them to safety or to a precipice. In any case, at some point he will start carrying, wherever he goes, a suicide pill, well-hidden against his body in one of his pockets, and every so often he will look at it to remind himself, not of his mortality, but of his freedom. Guessing the weight of things, he will tell himself with cold satisfaction that, placed on the opposite side of a scale as the little pill encased in plastic, the entire universe would weigh nothing, and that the little pill could dispatch the immeasurable weight of the known world and make it disappear suddenly and silently in spite of its iridescent, soap bubble feel. But all of this will come little by little, after successive stages of uncertainty, violence, and deception. At some point, in the last two or three years, he won’t have anything left but the silence, the sardonic intransigence, and the pill. After confirming that the whole universe is inconsistent and futile, the pill, in its place, will become a singular object. And having realized after fifteen years that blind fighting against oppression can create more oppression rather than eliminating it, the way sometimes fighting a fire can actually increases the force of the flames, and having come too far to turn back, he will begin to trust, not in strategies or organizations or in so-called historical movements, not even in his own weapon, but only in the pill, in his pill, the way someone might refer, as they say, to his sixth sense or his lucky star. The way others think of their bank account as a provision against hardship, he will think of his pill. After a few years his physical appearance will change drastically. The messy hair on his head will thin and gray, making his forehead much larger, exposing the wrinkles. He will start wearing contact lenses in order to get rid of the glasses, and he’ll grow a thin, silky beard, grayish, curly, and straightening out around the corners of his mouth, and in spite of his thin, almost frail shoulders and slightly crooked legs, a kind of taut thickness will build up at his abdomen, maybe because, having decided not to drink anymore so as not to lose his clarity or his reflexes, he will suffer, looking for a substitute, from a weakness, as they say, for soft drinks, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, and caramels. The change will be so drastic that after not having seen him for a few years, Barco, who he will go to early one day for the key to Tomatis’s apartment — he was traveling in Europe at the time — Barco, we were, or rather, I — yours truly — was saying, seeing him appear between sheets of gray morning rain, won’t recognize him for several minutes, until hearing him recall — his voice somewhat cracked by the cigarettes that in those days he lit with the one he’d just finished — their shared experiences. In fact, the sacrosanct pill will be given to him as yet another obligation, wrapped up with indoctrinatory discourse where the words sacrifice, cause, victory, and republic would easily stand out in any lexical frequency analysis, but he, secretly even to himself at first, will receive it as a promise, a privilege, an amulet. Later he will start to roll it over his tongue, not as a test of his invisibility to his enemies, but as a means of ridicule and contempt, behind his impassive face, toward his own allies. If by chance he finds himself yet again at a meeting where he doesn’t agree with a single decision, he will catch himself thinking, slightly annoyed, sardonic: Talk all you want, I have my pill. It will be like his own portable nuclear bomb, his perfect weapon. At several dangerous moments, after realizing that they had been false alarms, he will notice that while his comrades had instinctively drawn their weapons, he had first reached for the pill and then, several seconds later, for his gun. He will learn to keep space, time, history, and matter itself at bay and as though in suspense with the pill. No one likes going from subject to object, he will tell himself more than once, laughing a little deep down because to the outside world he will be always impassive, so much so that his equals — after so many years of risk and violence he will have reached the rank of Comandante — his immediate superiors, mistrusted him, not having learned how to match, every day, his discipline and indifference to danger. No one likes going from subject to object, he will say, we were saying — or rather, no? — yours truly was, as I was saying. No one likes going from subject to object, but with the pill, eh? With the pill what’s lost in the transfer is still up for discussion. He won’t be far from thinking that just like the big bang was the start of existence, the almost inaudible click of his jaw closing and his upper teeth colliding with his lower teeth to crush the pill will end it once and for all. A few months before this click, he will visit Tomatis at his mother’s house, where Tomatis has taken refuge after his third divorce. At the time Tomatis will be suffering from what people called psychiatrists call depression, which he will come out of intact a few months later, but when Leto visits he will be at what those same people call a critical juncture. Tomatis will spend every day being waited on by his sister — thrilled despite everything to have him home — while sitting in a chair in the living room watching television from noon until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, with a demijohn of Caroya wine on the floor next to the chair, and a glass, a plastic ice dish shaped like an apple with white bumps, and a stem-shaped corkscrew on the table. From the bedroom, his mother, blind and slightly senile, because she never gets up from bed, calls out to him every so often to often to give him a kiss, calls him baby, like when he was little, and whimpers a little. It will be midsummer. Since just before Christmas, Tomatis will have installed himself in the house, sleeping, by means of a meticulous ingestion of barbiturates and tranquilizers, in the room on the terrace, which his sister had to clean out because it had been turned into storage. Every morning, when the electric shadows, the garish simulacra, the bimbos, and miniaturized Barbies of cookie-cutter American shows, interrupted every five minutes by the commercials thought up by and for the retarded, the military propaganda inviting the unemployed youth to join gangs of murderers and torturers in order to save the nation from the cancer of deviance — every morning, no? — in the burning darkness filthy with the pestilence, you could say, of unmarked graves and decay, Tomatis will get up, breathless and somewhat brutalized by the Caroya wine, the barbiturates, and the tranquilizers, just to collapse on the same couch where, twenty years earlier, he had spent every night contemplating, joyfully, delighted, the carnal and the divine. Without recovering completely, he will wake up every morning around noon, and after drinking a couple of mates in the shade of the terrace, will sit down again, with a plate of cold cuts and tomatoes, the demijohn, and the ice dish, in front of the television, getting up every once in a while to take a piss or to get an irresolute kiss from his mother, who will call him baby again like when he was little and pat him on the wrinkled cheek that’s covered with a hard, two- or three-day-old gray-streaked beard. The colored shadows will march across his inexpressive eyes, which will sometimes half close trying to understand the insipid jokes of the third-rate comedians, almost inaudible over the canned laughter and applause. Moving the chair between two open doors in order to take advantage of a nonexistent breeze, wearing only underwear and a pair of hemp flip-flops, from noon until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning he will watch the cycle — sometimes losing the story lines and sometimes without even looking at the screen — of infomercials, educational shows, police dramas, or westerns, the kids shows, the soap operas, the folk stories, the shows written for housekeepers, picking his nose every so often, rolling a soft, dark ball with his snot and dropping it next to the chair. Once in a while he will have a jolt of rebellion: What if I shove it in your mouth, he will mutter to the host of a kids show who insists on speaking in the high-pitched, infantile voice people assume you should use with children. If I shove it in your mouth, we’ll see how fast you lose the baby voice. And once in a while, to the government propaganda, out loud, but with a diluted hatred, sitting up a little and grabbing his flaccid bundle of genitals: This, right here. But deflating again, he will look toward the kitchen, afraid that his sister, convinced that he’s having the most relaxing vacation in years, will be offended by the vulgar remark.

Leto will find him like this when, suspecting he might not have another chance, he decides to visit him. Tomatis will greet him with a weak smile, more visible in his squinting eyes than in his mouth, which will spread somewhat blankly, without his lips parting. For the first few minutes he won’t even get up from his chair — his sister will be the one who lets him in — and his conversation will be disjointed because he will be looking anxiously at the television screen so as not to lose the thread of the show he is watching. But later, just when Leto begins to regret coming, with a superhuman effort, as they say, he will introduce him to his sister as an old book editor friend who has come from Buenos Aires, and will invite him up to the terrace to talk in peace. Tomatis will give Leto the plastic apple after filling it with ice, and carrying the demijohn and dragging his flip-flops while trying to hold up his underwear with the same hand that’s pinching the glasses, will ascend the red staircase to the terrace. It will be the afternoon. Tomatis will offer him a glass of wine, which he will decline, but after some hesitation, in which he’s not sure whether Tomatis isn’t scared that his visit will implicate him, he will ask for a caramel, or a Coca-Cola, and Tomatis will stand up, barefoot, clutching the underwear that even his swollen paunch can’t sustain, and, leaning over into the interior patio, ask his sister for a caramel. The sister will bring him a cellophane bag of fruit caramels, orange, yellow, green, red, each individually wrapped in little cellophane papers with twisted ends, which Leto will unwrap once in a while so as to pop the candy in his mouth and then toss in an empty tray next to his folding chair. Once in a while, Tomatis will look with vague curiosity at the canvas bag where he knows Leto has a gun. Night will come. Leto will feel confused, slightly disoriented: He has come to Tomatis to enjoy, maybe for the last time, his lethal jokes, his conversation, his somewhat nasal voice that’s accustomed to discharging torrents of slightly stuttered words that are punctuated here and there with bursts of elegance, but finds instead an overweight, middle-aged man, his eyes teary, bright but bleary and alcoholic at the same time, his days-old beard more gray than black, his face swollen, feet dirty, and underwear dubious, a middle-aged man who mutters this or that irresolute and slightly weird question every five minutes, losing interest in the response almost immediately but repeating the same question a half hour later, as though he had never asked it, losing interest in the response again and drifting away into incomprehensible, labored ruminations. That fear is not what holds Tomatis back is proven by the fact that his questions refer, with the same detachment and the same indifference, to the most compromising and the most banal subjects, which, in normal times, they could have discussed in a lively, exhaustive way, but which on that winter evening Tomatis will mutter without conviction, uncertain and impassive, and to which he — Leto, no? — will most often respond with monosyllables, honest but incomplete. After a while his mistrust will transform into relief, and when he realizes that Tomatis’s rare moments of good mood consist of a sanctimonious, mechanical rehearsal of television commercial slogans, into compassion as well. A couple of times, because the television was left on, Tomatis will get up, interested in the change in programming, in some sensationalist news story, in the plot of a police drama, yelling questions down to his sister through the interior patio, and then sitting down again in his folding chair, thoughtful a few seconds while serving himself another glass of wine on ice. Until, at a certain point, the pivotal question will reach Leto’s ears, so sudden and unexpected that, in a violent rush of emotion, though he has spent years walking through gunfire unfazed and practically indifferent, he will feel faster and more violent beatings of his heart. Is it true about the pill? Tomatis will ask, leaning in, with the same complicit, delicate smile that he might have used to ask him about a pornographic photograph. Leto won’t say yes or no. Looking Tomatis directly in the eyes, he will search for the complicit smile he just had, but to his surprise Tomatis’s eyes, vacant of the least glint of humor, will be fixed on him, for the first time since he arrived, with a vivid, almost imperative stare. His eyes, which will have been moist and weepy during the whole meeting, will now glow so strong that Leto will think, mistakenly, that they are reflecting the lights in the terrace. In the end, Leto will slowly unbutton the safety pouch hidden under his belt and will remove the pill and, suddenly opening his hand, will make it appear in his palm, moving it toward Tomatis, and during that more or less quick movement, the plastic capsule containing it will reflect, in passing, one of the lights. Tomatis will lean forward to observe, with slow shakes of his head, of corroboration, affirmative at first, then negative, and finally affirmative again. Of course, of course, he will say, as though thinking of something else. And then he — Leto, no? — will put it away again.

A few months later he will take it out for the last time, in Rosario, in fact, and, in fact, in Arroyito. He will be alone in a house they’ve told him is secure, where, they’ve told him, not the slightest chance of detection exists. He will be laying on the bed, in the darkness, smoking cigarette after cigarette — lighting them, as he is in the habit of doing, with the one he’d just finished — not thinking of anything, examining the shape of the sparse furniture, the silhouette of the window, and the somewhat clearer darkness filtering in through the blinds of the shades. It will be around 11:00. An electric heater, placed at the foot of the entrance to the room, in the hallway, will give off a reddish glow, which the flame of the cigarette, brightening with every puff, will seem — to put it one way — to echo or metastasize. He will be fully dressed, since he has adopted, for years now, the habit of sleeping that way in difficult times, less to feel secure than to gain time, according to what you might call the principle of objective efficacy, in which his personal interests are not considered whatsoever. On the floor, within arm’s reach, are his weapons. He will be just lighting a new cigarette with the end of the one he has just finished when, for a fraction of a second, he registers a large, very fast shadow momentarily imprinted on the parallel rays of clear darkness filtering gray through the blinds and, sitting up slightly in bed trying to listen for something, will put out the stub in the center of the ashtray and balance the one he has just lit on the notch so that, if it’s a false alarm, the cigarette won’t be wasted unnecessarily. Without making a sound, he will pick up his gun, turn off the electric heater to thicken the darkness, and approach the window. At first he won’t see anything but the empty street, the stoplights, the trees, the sidewalks, the parked cars — everything tempered-looking, sharpened, full of dark reflections caused by the dry, hard-to-breathe air of the winter night. For one minute at least, he will remain motionless, looking through the blinds, and that minute will be so long and monotonous that, when it has passed, he won’t even remember why he came silently to the window, since the street and the hard lines of the clearly outlined things in the frozen air will appear abandoned and even empty. When he is about to turn back and pick up the cigarette from the notch on the ashtray he will see shadows move slightly on the opposite sidewalk, less stable than the ones of the houses and of the naked trees crisscrossing those of streetlights on the sidewalk—like a spider web—he will think, a final literary reflex whose conventional, trite style will cast an ironic tint to his thought. And, the way someone developing a photograph perceives its details little by little, he will recognize little by little the outlines, the unmistakable silhouettes of armed men running hunched over to hide or protect themselves in doorways, behind cars or trees. Like the traveler who, before boarding a train, puts his hand in his pocket to check that he hasn’t lost his ticket, Leto will reach for the thin pocket under his belt, will rub the capsule through the cloth, and, continuing to look through the blinds, will start to unbutton the pocket. Seeing two armed men cross toward the house, bounding silently across the asphalt, he will tell them, without uttering a word, with his thoughts, as he is used to doing: You two, like the ones behind the cars and the trees, like the ones waiting on the corners, like the ones probably already at the front door, on the roof or at the back patio at least, you’re not real, you’re like ghosts or clouds or smoke, because I have my pill, I’ve just touched it with the tips of my fingers, the pill that with a single click will annihilate the big bang, the blind, senseless proliferation of its heavy metals and its ridiculous pseudoeternity. And, groping toward the night stand and lifting the cigarette from the notch in the ashtray to take two or three more puffs before putting it out, he will bring the pill to his mouth in a motion so fast that, before biting it, holding it a moment between his teeth without pressing down, he will need to wait to exhale the last puff of smoke.

Reaching the corner, Leto turns his head back toward the plaza. The Mathematician’s white figure, now separated from its interlocutor, has continued at a diagonal and reached the corner almost at the same time as Leto, one block away. And again almost at the same time as Leto, it crosses onto a parallel street, behind a government building, and disappears. In turn, Leto reaches the opposite sidewalk. Now, apart from the colonial building of the historical museum, with its tile roof, its gallery supported by columns of carved wood, its well — that’s what they call it — painted white, in the patch of rare grass before the entrance, apart from the museum, we were saying — or rather yours truly, as I was saying just now, was, no? — apart from the museum building there are no others, and its front section and its green spaces occupy the whole sidewalk, until the next sidewalk, wide and deserted, beyond which, behind the palo borrachos, the blooming lapachos and timbos, the colonial church can be made out, white like the museum and the well — or so they call it — and also, like the museum, with its tile roof. When he reaches the corner, since he has to wait at the curb for a large bus from Rosario to pass, Leto observes a moment, to the east, of the ethnographic museum, built in a false colonial style that, trying to look like the others, only manages to accentuate its differences. The bus passes, turning south around the park, accelerating after having slowed through the intersection, and Leto manages to see its metallic side painted green and a row of pale, brief faces, a few of which return his gaze through the windows. Protected, restored, exhibited to preserve, contain, even represent and prolong the past, the church and the museums, wrapped in the insidious ubiquity of the morning light, nonetheless fail to escape the anonymous strangeness of the present — which may be, and why not, the name for it — exposed and dispersed in that light, already a museum maybe, or maybe since the beginning, with its perpetual display of objects without specific, or at least arbitrary, use, subject to what you might call the unique, monotonous variation of the fugitive and repetitive rhythm of mineral stability. Seeing the bus move away under the curved row of blooming lapachos, an intense red, bordering the park, Leto crosses, walking slowly, in full sun, stepping on his own shadow as it follows him, continuously smaller, over the large cement slabs, cracking in places and splattered here and there with oil stains scattered around the wide, deserted street that Leto leaves behind at touching, with the sole of his shoe, the cable guardrail.

Advancing along the park sidewalk, he leaves behind the grass and trees that precede the church and starts to parallel, under the first of the lapachos rising from the sidewalk, the lateral gallery of the convent. The sidewalk is covered in red flowers, flattened and rotten or fresh, almost intact, as though they’ve just fallen, and, lifting his head a little, he sees a few red stains that, detaching from the trees, fall through the air and land, softly, on the pavement. The flowered tops of the lapachos, without leaves, composed entirely of blooms, until the curve of the street disappears many dozens of meters ahead, emit a kind of rose-colored luminosity, whose proliferation, overflowing but contained in tops of regular, almost identical shapes that blend together to form a sort of large, curved, cylindrical cloud whose overflowing proliferation, as I was saying, instead of inspiring an aesthetic reaction in him, Leto, produces a kind of hatred, brief of course, that surprises him, that he would like to retain in his consciousness in order to examine it, and which he can guess the cause of, of course with nothing resembling words, beyond the innocence of the trees and the blind servility that makes them, an insignificant speck in the universe, bloom, puerile and repetitive, every year. Abruptly, discharging a short laugh because of his thoughts, he turns from the sidewalk and, taking one of the dirt paths, advances among the trees of the park, toward the lake. Beyond the cool shade that now dominates, the clarity of the morning and the blue sky shine over the open space of the lake. Suddenly, more fragile than its stone, iron, concrete, and plaster objects would have it appear, the city, with its prolific, almost primitive crisscrossing of straight streets and its diffuse clamor, seems to disintegrate behind him, itself likewise entering, with all of its unlikely presences, that anonymous place which the word past, of such fragile pronunciation, seems to denote so well, though without it having, on the reverse of the sounds uttered in speaking it or in the traces of ink left in writing it, any precise image to represent it.

But Leto is not thinking about this. Curious, he lends, as they say, his ear to a specific place — though it’s always the same, no? — in the park, where agitated, sharp screeches are breaking, to put a word to it, the silence. Cutting across one of the flowerbeds, Leto walks toward the screeches, and when he discovers its source, stops, surprised, to look. A number of birds of a species he has never seen, ten or fifteen maybe, very large, black on their back and on their long, thin tail, yellow on their breast, with a long, black beak and a very strange silhouette that were it not for their size would resemble a paper kite, swarm and screech at a precise spot in the park, between the lower branch of a tree, a shrub growing at the edge of an embankment, and the space that opens between the embankment and the edge of the lake, which Leto, from where he is standing, is not able to see. The birds swarm, land, take off again, move away and return, screeching, flapping, gliding, and landing again on the branches of the tree or the bush, or even on the edge of the embankment. Their ridiculous paper kite silhouettes are not without, because of the increasing frenzy that agitates them, a sort of tragedy. Sometimes they plunge toward the water but almost immediately reappear, more frenzied still, closer to panic than to fury, rushing up as though terrified of having dared to graze the apparent cause of their agitation, they move away again, contaminated by its lethal essence or burned by its incandescence. So as not to scare them, Leto approaches slowly along the edge of the embankment, trying to figure out the cause of their flutter. But the birds do not even notice his presence. Observing them closely, he realizes that it’s a foreign species, diverted, who knows why, from its migratory course. Agitation, terror, panic, the incessant, feverish swarming, the short, sharp, almost petrified screeches, and the plunging flight interrupted over and over by an abrupt change in direction, away from the object that impels them — Leto advances and gets so close to the birds that more than once he has to duck so that one doesn’t graze him on its flight or knock him over. Now, from where he is standing, he can finally see the object: it’s a large beach ball, made of yellow plastic, which some child must have left behind the day before and which, abandoned at the edge of the lake, tangled up in aquatic plants, rocks, slowly, with every imperceptible wave that arrives, periodically, to displace it. Between the more and more agitated screeches and the frenetic alarms of the birds, which are indifferent to his presence, Leto scrutinizes the yellow sphere that concentrates or spreads intense radiations, an incontrovertible but simultaneously problematic presence, a yellow concretion less consistent than nothingness and more mysterious than the totality of the existent, and then, with some compassion, seeing the birds’ maddened swarm increasing around him, he, Leto, who is just starting to deconstruct his own, intuits the sense of loss, of awe, of wonder that are absent in a creature unable to raise, in the house of coincidence — which could just as easily be called something else — the sanctuary, in more than one sense superfluous, of what they call, apparently, their gods.