Читать книгу La Grande - Juan José Saer - Страница 11

HALF-PAST FIVE, GIVE OR TAKE, ON A RAINY AFTERNOON in early April. Nula and Gutiérrez are approaching, at a diagonal, the corner of an open, nearly rectangular field bordered at one end by a mountain sparsely covered in acacias, and behind which, still invisible to them, the river runs.

The sky, the earth, the air, and the vegetation are gray, not with the metallic shade that the cold in May or June brings them, but rather the greenish, warm porosity of the first autumn rains that, in this region, can’t quite extinguish the insistent, overwhelming summer. Both men, walking neither fast nor slow, a short distance apart, one in front of the other, are still wearing lightweight clothes. Gutiérrez, walking ahead, has on a violently yellow waterproof jacket, and Nula, who hesitates at each step, unsure where to place his foot, a red camper made from a silky material with a slick and shiny texture, that in his family dialect (it was a gift from his mother), they jokingly call parachute cloth. The two bright spots moving through the gray-green space resemble satin paper cutouts collaged on a monochromatic wash, the air the most diluted, and the clouds, the earth, and the trees the most concentrated grays.

Nula, because he’d come on business—to deliver three cases of wine, a viognier, two cabernet sauvignon, and four local chorizos ordered the week before—and planned to visit a few other clients that afternoon, had dressed somewhat carefully, and besides the red camper has on a new shirt, a white, lightweight, short-sleeve sweater, freshly ironed pants, and shiny loafers that explain his cautious advance in contrast to the other’s inattentive, sure step and constant chatter as he carelessly and noisily sets his muddy rubber boots on the saturated patches of grass bordering the narrow, sandy path or in the sporadic puddles that interrupt it.

The gray background lends the red and the yellow an almost extravagant, overwrought brilliance that intensifies their presence to the eye in the empty field while paradoxically, somehow, causing them to lose, to the mind, a good portion of their reality. In the desolate poverty of the landscape, the striking garments, possibly because of their price (the yellow one, although it’s European and more expensive, nevertheless looks more worn-out) produce an obvious contrast, or constitute, rather, an anachronism. The excessive presence of singular objects, though they break up the monotonous succession of things, end up, as with their overabundance, impoverishing them.

Calmly, concentrating on each word, Gutiérrez holds forth with disinterested disdain, half-turning his head over his left shoulder every so often, apparently to remind his company that he’s the one being spoken to, although because of the distance that separates them, the open air, the movements that disperse the sounds he utters and, especially, the forceful sound of the boots against the puddles and submerged weeds, in addition to the concentration demanded by the protection of his loafers and pants, Nula can only fish out loose words and scraps of phrases, but in any case getting the general point, even though it’s only the third time he’s met Gutiérrez and even though their first meeting only lasted two or three minutes. From what he gathered at a previous meeting, as he listened with surprise and curiosity at some length when he brought the first three cases of wine, when Gutiérrez talks, it’s always about the same thing.

If Nula imagined himself summarizing those monologues in a few words to a third person, they would be more or less the following: They—people from the rich countries he lived in for more than thirty years—have completely lost touch with reality and now slither around in a miserable sensualism and, as a moral consequence, content themselves with the sporadic exercise of beneficence and the contrite formulation of instructive aphorisms. He refers to the rich as the fifth column and the foreign party, and the rest, the masses, he argues, would be willing to trade in their twelve-year-old daughter to a Turkish brothel for a new car. Any government lie suits them fine as long as they don’t have to give up their credit cards or do without superfluous possessions. The rich purchase their solutions to everything, as do the poor, but with debt. They are obsessed with convincing themselves that their way of life is the only rational one and, consequently, they are continuously indignant at the individual or collective crimes they commit or tolerate, looking to justify with pedantic shyster sophisms the acts of cowardice that obligate them to shamelessly defend the prison of excessive comfort they’ve built for themselves, and so on, and so on.

The vitriol in the sentiment contrasts with the composure of his face each time he looks over his left shoulder, with the calm vigor of his movements, and with the monotone neutrality of a voice that seems to be reciting, not a violent diatribe, but rather, in a friendly, paternal way, a set of practical recommendations for a traveler preparing to confront an unfamiliar continent. His words aren’t hastened or marred by anger, not cut off by interjections or indignant outbursts; instead, they pass easily and evenly across his lips, interspersed here and there with a Gallicism or Latinism, and if they sometimes stop or hesitate for a few seconds it’s because in the three decades living abroad, one of them, relegated by disuse to some dark corner of the basement deep inside himself where he stores the incalculable repertory that constitutes his native tongue, is now slow to rise through the intricate branches of memory to the tip of the tongue that, like the elastic surface of a trampoline, will launch it into the light of day. His discourse is at once ironic and severe, spoken with a distracted intonation, difficult to peg as either authentic or simulated, or if the almost sixty-year-old man who uses it does so to communicate either a contained hatred or rather as a solipsistic and somewhat abstruse humorous exercise.

With regard to their ages, Nula is in fact twenty-nine and Gutiérrez exactly twice that, which is to say that one is just entering maturity while the other, meanwhile, will soon leave it behind entirely, along with everything else. And although they speak as equals, and even with some ease, they refrain from the familiar tú form, the older man possibly because he left the country before its general use came into fashion in the seventies, and Nula because, as a commercial tactic, he prefers not to use the tú form with clients he didn’t know personally before trying to sell them wine. Their use of usted and the difference in their ages doesn’t diminish their mutual curiosity, and even though it’s only the third time they’ve met, and though they’ve yet to reach a real intimacy, their conversation takes place in a decidedly extra-commercial sphere. The curiosity that attracts them isn’t spontaneous or inexplicable: to Gutiérrez, although he’s as yet unaware of the exact reasons for Nula’s interest, the vintner’s responses the day they first met seemed unusual for a simple trader, and his parodic attitude when they met again, as he mimed the typical gestures and discourse of a merchant, interspersed with discreet allusions to Aristotle’s Problem XXX.1 on poetry, wine, and melancholy, enabled him to glimpse the possibility of a truly neutral conversation, which would be confirmed immediately following the commercial transactions of that second visit.

The first meeting didn’t last more than two or three minutes. Dripping wet, Gutiérrez emerged from his swimming pool and walked toward him across the neat lawn with the same indifference to where he placed his bare feet, Nula recalls, as he shows now, the rubber boots stepping through puddles that interrupt the path, or onto the wet weeds that border it. Nula had been recommended by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and had spoken to him, Gutiérrez, on the phone the day before to set up the meeting for eleven thirty. Because this took place a few weeks before, in March, it was still summer. In the harsh, radiant morning sun, Nula watched Gutiérrez advance toward him from the white rectangle of the pool, itself framed by a wide rectangle of white slabs on which sat three wood and canvas lounge chairs—one green, one red-and-white striped, and one yellow—all inscribed on a smooth, green landscape bordered at the rear by a dense grove, and flanked, beyond a stretch of green earth, by the white house on the left and on the right by a pavilion with its obligatory grill and a shed that likely contained tools, bicycles, a wheelbarrow, a lawnmower, and so on. I don’t know if it was actually Gutiérrez, but whoever built it must’ve been inspired by those California houses that, from what I’ve learned on television, are made for people who’ve succeeded in life thanks to some righteous or dark arts, suggested Tomatis the day he recommended Gutiérrez as a client. It actually wasn’t such a luxurious house, but in any case it was definitely the most expensive in the area around Rincón, and even though Nula had never been to California he’d seen a lot of the same shows growing up, and so as he took in the assemblage as Gutiérrez, dripping wet, approached him, he realized that, as usual, and possibly for purely rhetorical purposes, Tomatis had exaggerated.

Instead, what surprised him was Gutiérrez’s physical appearance. He’d expected someone elderly, but this was a vigorous man, with a flat stomach, with proportioned angles, tanned by the sun, and whose gray hair, as neatly cropped as the lawn surrounding the swimming pool, and abundant rusty gray body hair, which must have been black in his youth, sticking, because of the water, to his chest and shoulders, arms and legs, increased rather than diminished the impression of physical vigor, so much so that, considering the contradictory situation—less luxurious house than anticipated and younger owner than imagined—Nula thought for a few seconds that he’d come to the wrong address. The contracted and somewhat deformed shadow that, owing to the height of the sun, gathered at the feet of the approaching man could have indicated, in an indirect way, a somewhat more complex inner life than his appearance and the conventional tranquility of the setting it moved through suggested.

—I didn’t know how to let you know that I couldn’t meet you today, after all, Gutiérrez had said. And Nula:

—Clearly it’s the time for taking the water and not the wine.

Gutiérrez had laughed, shaking his head toward the pool.

—Not at all, he said. What happened is I received an unexpected visit this morning.

Just then Nula realized that although Gutiérrez had left the pool the water sounds continued: someone, invisible from where he stood, was still splashing and swimming around. At that moment, in a fluorescent green one-piece, its shoulders bent, with that same abstracted, preoccupied manner, tanned and maybe slightly more solid than five or six years before, the body of Lucía Riera, which Nula had come to know so well, was emerging up the metal ladder from the side of the pool closest to the house. Without even looking at them, Lucía had thrown herself onto the green canvas chair next to the pool. Gutiérrez had followed Nula’s surprised expression somewhat worriedly, and a shadow there seemed to suggest that an explanation of some kind was called for.

—Don’t imagine anything irregular, he said. She’s my daughter.

The customer is always right, I get it, Nula had said later that same night to Gabriela Barco and Soldi at the Amigos de Vino bar, where he’d run into them—they changed bars frequently for what they called their “work dates”—it comes with the territory and, thanks to my stoic indifference, costs me nothing. But I actually know Lucía Riera, married to the doctor Oscar Riera and separated for some time I believe. It’s true that I lost touch with her for several years up until this morning, but I know perfectly well who her parents are, though I never met them. A man named Calcagno, a lawyer, was her father—he died several years ago—but her mother, barring evidence to the contrary, is still alive. It took effort not to punch Gutiérrez in the teeth when he told me she was his daughter, and I wasn’t just furious but stunned too, because I couldn’t believe he’d lie so blatantly, and I was even a little embarrassed that he’d dare do that to me. He must have sensed something like that in my face because he got serious and polite and solemn and said he’d walk me out. We left it that I would call him to set up another visit, something that, obviously, I don’t intend to do. Nula stopped, satisfied he’d conveyed his indignation, but when he looked up he saw that Soldi was avoiding his gaze. After a few seconds, Soldi looked him straight in the eyes and, somewhat sheepishly, said, And yet there are those who say that it might be or at least could be true. You should probably look for something else to get indignant over.

And so, out of curiosity, Nula had called Gutiérrez again the following week, and they set a day and time for the second meeting. In a sense, the practically imperceptible incident, which didn’t quite mean anything in particular for either, but drew them both for a few seconds from the neutral and conventional territory where mercantile transactions are understood to take place, had made them mutually interesting and enigmatic in their own way, something that both took silent note of during the short telephone conversation when they set up the second meeting, and which they took pains to conceal when, several days later, they were once again face to face. The wine sale took place quickly—a case (six per) of viognier and two of cabernet sauvignon to start, plus four local chorizos—and once it was settled, the bill and the check signed and the receipt in Gutiérrez’s hands, they took up a conversation that lasted more than two hours, on various topics that had little or nothing to do with wine, and during which, every so often, Gutiérrez elaborated his serene, disinterested soliloquies about them, the inhabitants, referred to with ironic disdain, of the rich countries he had lived in for over thirty years. They had sat down on a bench at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, after touring the property inside and out, though its details, if they sparked Nula’s interest from time to time, seemed invisible to their owner. Their respective biographical details, which certainly interested them, did not form part of the conversation, at least in a chronological way, although every so often some personal element cropped up or was taken into consideration, like for example the medical and philosophical studies that Nula abandoned in succession, and his project, before selling wine, of writing his Notes toward an ontology of becoming, or the reasons (never clarified, and cited as a means of formulating an aphorism rather than an actual confidence) that had propelled Gutiérrez abroad: I left in search of three chimeras: worldwide revolution, sexual liberation, and auteur cinema.

Finally, at around four thirty today, without calling, Nula had brought the wine. He parked the dark green station wagon in front of the white gate at the main entrance, just as Gutiérrez, coming out of the house, was preparing to lock the front door.

—I have the order, Nula said as he stepped from the car. Were you heading out?

—On an expedition in the area, replied Gutiérrez. Looking for an old friend. Escalante. Do you know him?

He’d never heard of him. According to Marcos Rosemberg, he lives in Rincón, on the outskirts of the town, but on the city side, about three miles away, and Gutiérrez had decided to invite him to a party he was planning to throw on Sunday and to which he was thinking he, Nula, might come too. Nula looked at the greenish sky and the dark horizon and, without saying anything, had laughed sarcastically.

—I would also like to order some more wine, knowing the habits of some of my guests.

And so, after carrying the three cases from the station wagon to the kitchen, Nula filled out another order: more white wine, more red, and more local chorizos. When they came out to the front gate, Nula looked at the heavy sky and said:

—Actually, the walk is tempting, even though it’s definitely going to rain and I have a couple of clients waiting for me.

In fact, he regretted it the moment he began speaking, but the quickness and frank satisfaction of Gutiérrez’s response immediately erased the fear of having shown his feelings too openly: Gutiérrez’s sincerity neutralized his own. They still didn’t know each other well enough to be spontaneous, and their reciprocal attraction stemmed from what they hadn’t figured out about each other: Gutiérrez’s dubious paternity and, in addition to the sudden emotion he showed when Lucía emerged from the pool, Nula’s singular conversation, blending, sometimes without a clear dividing line, commerce and philosophy.

When they reach the upper right corner of the rectangle they’ve been crossing at a diagonal, the bright yellow spot and the red one that follows it start up the mountain covered with acacias, at the same pace as before, neither slow nor fast, in a straight line toward the river. There is no path, but the ground is almost pure sand, so not much grass grows among the trees, and the rain, rather than softening the earth and forming puddles or wet layers of mud, had packed it down, and the two men walk on ground so hardened by the water that their footsteps hardly leave a trail. Clumps of pampas grass, gray like everything but the yellow earth, lay across the sandy ground, though when they reach the river, the vegetation of the island, on the opposite shore, some fifty meters away, seems more green, and the sand on the slope more red, a brick-like red that’s almost orange from the sand mixing with the ferrous clay, in contrast to the pervasive grayness: the river, lead-colored and rippled, is darkening with the afternoon at the end of a rainy day that hasn’t once seen the sun.

—Southeast, Nula says when they reach the shore, pointing at a downward angle toward the leaden water and the waves that crest its surface in the direction opposite the current. His voice, as though it issued from someone else, sounded strange to him, not during its fleeting sonorous existence, but in the soundless vibration it left in his memory as it faded, perhaps caused by the silence that had taken hold after the sound of the scrape of their steps on the sandy earth had disappeared. The soft breeze from the southeast is only perceptible on the water. Or maybe Nula and Gutiérrez can sense it on their faces, but, accustomed to the inclemency, they don’t notice what they feel. Each of them surveys the landscape with the same withdrawn expression he might have assumed had he been alone in this deserted place, the details each observes not coinciding with the other’s, each of them assembling it therefore in his own way, as though it were two distinct places, the island, the sky, the trees, the red slope, the aquatic plants at the riverbank, the water. For several seconds, Nula’s thoughts are absorbed by the leaden, rippled surface, each of the identical, curling waves, continuously in motion, that swell and form an edge which could best be represented not by a curve but rather, more precisely, by an obtuse angle, seeming to attend the visible manifestation of the becoming that, by presenting itself through repetition or a counterfeit stillness, permits the coarse heart the illusion of stability. For Nula, who often catches himself observing the same phenomena that once occupied his Notes, the island ahead, the alluvial formation, is proof of the continuous change of things: the same constant movement that formed it now erodes it, causing it to change size, shape, and place, and the coming and going of the material and of the worlds that it makes and unmakes is nothing more, he thinks, than the flow, without direction or objective or cause, of the time that, invisibly and silently, runs through them.

—See that? They’re all the same, he says.

Gutiérrez looks at him, surprised.

—The waves, Nula says. Each one repeats the same disturbance.

—Not the same one, no, says Gutiérrez, without even looking at the surface of the water. His gaze passes curiously over the island, the air, the sky, darkening from the fading light and from the mass of clouds, a denser gray, that have been moving in from the east.

Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to notice that Nula is watching him openly, as though he were concentrating on what he sees less because what surrounds him is particularly interesting than because moving his gaze over the landscape allows him better access to what’s happening inside himself. What little Nula knows about him makes him an enigma, certainly, but with a touch of irony Nula tells himself that ultimately even the things that are familiar to us are unfamiliar, if only because we’ve allowed ourselves to forget the mysterious things about them. Quantitatively, he tells himself, without a single word corresponding to his thoughts, I know as little about him as I do about myself.

Even what they know about him in the city is fragmentary. Everyone knows something that doesn’t quite coincide with what everyone else knows. The ones who knew him before he left—Pichón Garay, Tomatis, Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, for example—had lost touch with him for more than thirty years. One day he just disappeared, without a trace, and then, just as suddenly, reappeared. From that group, the first to make contact with him, and completely by accident, had been Pichón Garay. I was on the afternoon flight back to Buenos Aires, and he asked the man sitting next to me to change seats, he wrote to Tomatis a week after returning to Paris. (Pichón had spent a couple of months in the city, liquidating his family’s last holdings, and in mid April Tomatis and Soldi had taken him to the airport, where he caught the afternoon flight to Buenos Aires, which at that time connected with a direct flight to Paris.) Before sitting down, he introduced himself. Willi Gutiérrez, did I remember him? It took me a second to place him, but he remembered everything from thirty years ago—El Gato’s stories more so than mine, actually—and I’m still not sure if he knew which of us he was talking to. He said he saw us with Soldi at the airport, but he couldn’t come over because he was checking a suitcase. He said you looked the same as always. For the fifty minutes the flight lasted he did practically all the talking, spouting off about Europe, and I learned that he’s living between Italy and Geneva, but that he travels all over. His trip to the city lasted a day, of three in the country altogether. The afternoon before, he’d landed in Buenos Aires from Rome, slept at the Plaza that night, and the next morning had skipped up to the city to visit a house in Rincón that he was looking to buy (I didn’t offer mine because it was all but sold), saying that he planned to settle in the area. That night he was staying at the Plaza again, and then back to Italy the next day. Our destinies, as you can see, are contradictory: he’d come back to buy a house, and I was there to sell one.

According to Tomatis, the first people Gutiérrez had contacted when he moved into the house in Rincón had been the Rosembergs. The first that I know of, he’d clarified, because from what I can tell, he lives in several worlds simultaneously. And Nula, who’d met up with Tomatis for coffee and to sell him some wine, had responded: Just like everybody else. And Tomatis, in a falsely severe tone, said, Don’t get cute, Turk, I’m serious. He lived a double life before he left, one that even his closest friends didn’t know about, and now he’s come back to it. Tomatis’s suggestive tone apparently implied that he might know more than he was saying, and when, about a month later, after his first trip to see Gutiérrez, Soldi, in the Amigos del Vino bar, reluctantly hinted that Gutiérrez might not be lying when he said that Lucía was his daughter, Nula remembered the suggestion, but for now nothing quite makes sense as he stands on the riverbank, watching the leaden, rippled surface of the water, and his hand reaches into the camper’s inside pocket for his cigarettes and lighter.

The real estate agent (who in fact was representing an agency from Buenos Aires in the transaction), a guy named Moro, was also one of Nula’s clients. His assignment consisted in picking Gutiérrez up at the airport and taking him to see the house in Rincón, or rather on the outskirts of Rincón, at the north end of town, on the floodplain opposite the highway, where some new money had moved early in the 80s because they hadn’t been able to buy in the residential section of Guadalupe, which other, wealthier people had bought up first and transformed into a kind of fortress, with private security and everything, blocking so many roads that the buses were forced to change routes. Moro figures that Gutiérrez must be very rich. Leaning toward Nula over the desk in his office on San Martín, like he was sharing a secret, a large map of the city hanging on the wall behind him, riddled with different colored pins no doubt distinguishing the current states of the diverse property that his agency administered, Moro, rocking his comfortable swivel chair slightly, looking over his shoulder to check that no one was listening, though there wasn’t anyone but them in the office, narrowing his eyes and lowering his voice, had hissed, admiringly, I figure you’d have to measure it in palos verdes, that is, by the millions.

The house had belonged to a cardiologist, a Doctor Russo, a public health secretary in the government that followed the military dictatorship. According to Moro, this Doctor Russo, who now lived in Miami, had been implicated in the disappearance of funds allocated to improving hospitals and the Public Assistance program, not to mention a shady story concerning bribes to pharmaceutical labs, and even as a businessman he’d been blemished in the eyes of the law, having served on the board of the Banco Provinicial, where, after his tenure, something like a hundred million dollars turned up missing, and not to mention the fact that the board members had passed around low-interest loans that were meant for poor people to buy a modest house somewhere, but which the board used to build mansions for themselves, some in Mar del Plata, and abroad even, in Punta del Este, in Florida, and in Brazil, north of Río de Janeiro, with the end result, according to Moro, that between the board and their rich friends all the funds for the preferential loans had been spent, and the hundred million dollar discrepancy caused the bank to go under, so none of them had to return the money they’d taken. A judge took an interest in the case, but the investigation went nowhere and anyway the responsible parties were already living in Marbella or Punta del Este or Florida. This had been the case with our Doctor Russo, who’d sold the house in Rincón and a bunch of others around the country, bought, according to Moro, with the money he’d made as a cardiologist and the dividends from his private clinic, and had left for Miami.

According to Moro, Gutiérrez’s visit to the house didn’t last more than ten or fifteen minutes. He walked through the interior rooms first—the six bedrooms plus the large living room, the bathrooms, the kitchen, practically bigger than the living room, all of it on a single floor—and then, at the same speed, went out to explore the grounds, the grove at the back, the pavilion, the tool shed, and the swimming pool with nothing at the bottom but a puddle of muddy water where several generations of dead leaves were putrefying and in which a copious family of toads had taken residence. Gutiérrez spent the whole trip back to the city interrogating him about painters, about people specializing in cracked swimming pools, about the chances of finding a woman to take care of the cleaning, and a gardener and caretaker, about someone who could fix the thatch roof over the pavilion, and so on, and so on, like the house was already his, and without uttering a single word for or against it—a place which he, Moro, knew hadn’t been signed for in Buenos Aires—Gutiérrez spoke of it as though he owned it. To Moro he’d seemed like a nice enough guy, though slightly off: he was calm, quiet, polite even, and he always had this friendly and somewhat distant smile pasted on his face. Moro said that he ended up feeling slightly uneasy, in any case, because everything he said or did, the usual stuff you do when you’re settling a deal, seemed to confirm something for Gutiérrez, something he’d come searching for, and that ultimately he, Moro, realized that Gutiérrez was looking at him like some kind of museum piece or some exotic fish in an aquarium that he’d traveled thousands of kilometers to see firsthand. Moro told Nula that he’d been told by the Buenos Aires office to take Gutiérrez out to a fancy lunch at a place on Guadalupe where all the celebrities in the city, starting with the mayor, took important visitors, but that Gutiérrez said he didn’t want to take up any more of his time, that he wanted to spend some time alone before the flight and would prefer to be dropped off near the grill house on San Lorenzo, a place that had its fifteen minutes back in the fifties, but which had turned into just another dark neighborhood dive. Nula knew the place well; in his last year at the university he and a group of classmates would go there to learn to get plastered. The place wasn’t actually that bad, just like the fancy place on Guadalupe wasn’t that good. But he stopped himself from saying this because Moro was already saying that he’d seen him again that afternoon. At around four, he’d passed the estate agency without coming in, walking slowly along the shady side of the street, like people from the area did, gazing at the storefronts, the houses, and the people with a discreet look of indulgent satisfaction. According to Moro, he’d seemed happy, and since just then he was walking south out of the agency to visit a property they wanted to put up for sale, and since this was the direction that Gutiérrez was also walking, totally by happenstance and without meaning to he ended up following him for several blocks. Moro said that finally he, Gutiérrez, after looking at his watch, had gone into the arcade—even though there are five or six others, everyone calls it that, the arcade, quintessentially, because it was the first in the city to open, in the late fifties, and all the others, which are more modern, more important, and more luxurious, have to be referred to by their full name—and took a table in the courtyard. Moro sat thinking for a moment. He was just over forty, already pretty bald and with a bit of a paunch, well-dressed and friendly, a spontaneous sort of friendliness that had nothing to do with his business, but which actually came from his private life, because in fact he’d inherited the estate agency, a flourishing family business started by his grandfather and established in the area for over seventy years, meaning that, not having any financial problems of his own, he could lend a personal turn to business matters, reflecting in a disinterested way about people and what they did. There wasn’t a block in the city, or in the neighboring smaller cities and towns, or likewise in the surrounding countryside, where you wouldn’t find the proverbial signboard: ANOTHER (in red letters printed at an angle in the upper left corner of the white rectangle), in the center in larger, black letters MORO PROPERTY, and below that, in red letters again, FOR RENT (or FOR SALE). And so whenever Nula would deliver his wine, the visits would last somewhat longer than with his other clients, although the sale of wine, because of the literary aura that surrounds the product, always overflows, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the person, into the private sphere. Nula was surprised to see him fall into such an introspective moment; from his expression, Nula could tell that he was trying to get his head around some unusual thought, something that he found difficult to put into words. Then he said, While I was following him, I had this weird feeling I’ve never had before, and which, no lie, really bothered me. It was like we were walking down the same street, in the same place, but in different times. It occurred to me that if I walked up and said hello he wouldn’t recognize me despite having spent the whole morning together, or worse yet he wouldn’t even see me because we were moving through different dimensions, like in some sci-fi program.

The day after his walk along the coast with Gutiérrez, Nula will see Tomatis at the southern end of the city, around six in the afternoon, behind the capitol building, and, stopping his car, will invite him in. I accept, Tomatis will say. I’m waiting for the bus, but one that’s full enough hasn’t come along yet. After exchanging some pleasantries, they’ll end up talking about Gutiérrez, whose return to the city has, in fact, ended up causing something of a stir. Tomatis will tell him that, through his sister, he knows the couple—Amalia and Faustino—who work for Gutiérrez. The wife takes care of the house, the shopping, and the meals, and the husband the courtyard, the landscaping, the pavilion, the pool, and the garden. His sister relays the gossip from another woman, a sister-in-law of the first, who comes two or three times a week to help out around the house. Little things, purely circumstantial details (the couple is too earnest, according to Tomatis, to commit any sort of indiscretion) that Tomatis nevertheless interprets methodically and thus forms a general picture of the situation. What I remember from thirty-some years back is that Gutiérrez left the city suddenly, that he stayed in Buenos Aires for a year, and that in the end the earth swallowed him whole. With other people who’d gone to Europe, to the States, to Cuba, to Israel, or even to India, we heard reports every so often, but with him nothing, not a single thing. It was like he’d died, gone missing, disintegrated, evaporated, or dissolved into the impenetrable, innumerable world. Although . . . now that I think about it . . . hold on, let’s see . . . yeah, one night, many years later, in Paris, Pichón took me to a party where I met this Italian girl who, when she heard where we came from, Pichón and I, told me she knew a Gutiérrez who was from the same city and who lived between Italy and Switzerland and wrote screenplays under a pseudonym. His name was Guillermo Gutiérrez, but she didn’t know what pseudonym he used for the screenplays. I’d forgotten that detail almost as soon as I heard it, and now, suddenly, it came back to me. Actually, the Italian girl was wrong, Gutiérrez wasn’t from the city. He came from someplace north of Tostado called El Nochero. His grandmother, who was dirt poor, had saved up some money with the help of the church to send him to school in the city. He went to a Catholic high school, and, the moment he graduated, his grandmother died—it was like she’d been staying alive just to make sure her grandson was on the right track. He enrolled at the law school, where he met Escalante, Marcos Rosemberg, and César Rey, and they became inseparable. The four of them formed a sort of political-literary avant-garde that didn’t last long—besides their youth and their friendship they didn’t have anything in common, not even politics or literature. Since he didn’t have a penny, unlike the other three, who despite being older still had school paid for by their families, Gutiérrez started working, a little bit of everything, until his Roman Law professor, who liked him, took him on as a clerk in his office, where he was partners with Doctor Mario Brando, a poet and head of the precisionist movement, as far as I know the most hateful fraud ever produced by the literary circles in this fucking city. But on that count I suggest you consult with Soldi and Gabriela Barco, who are researching a history of the avant-garde in the province. I’ll get off at the corner. Thanks for the ride. And Nula will answer, Not a problem. But what was it you were telling me about the couple that works for him? And Tomatis, with a studied gesture of indifference, will downplay its importance, while letting slip—unintentionally, of course—two or three melodramatic and mysterious little details: This and that. Nothing really important. But if push came to shove I believe we’d find that those two, although they haven’t known him long, would sacrifice their lives for their new boss. And then, before getting out, he’ll discuss the weather and other mundane things.

But Tomatis will only tell him these things tomorrow, at around the same time, after another cloudy day that, as it ends, will nonetheless allow fragments of pale blue, faintly red from the last rays of an already disappeared sun, though still clean and luminous, to shine through the breaks in the gray clouds that high winds will begin to disperse. For now, though, as he takes a cigarette from the pack and brings it to his lips, the air and the rippled surface of the river, both an even, leaden gray from the double effect of the dusk and the increasingly low, dark clouds, remain in shadow. Two meters away, Gutiérrez, his silhouette sharply outlined against the darkness, over which his bright yellow waterproof jacket glows with an attenuated splendor, seems absorbed by an intense memory or thought, so much so that his arms, separated slightly from his body, have stopped in the middle of a forgotten movement. Less than a minute has passed since they stopped at the edge of the water, but because they’ve been silent, separated from each other by their thoughts, time appears to have stretched out, seeming to pass not only on the horizontal plane that their instincts recognize, but also on a vertical one, to an inconceivable depth, suggesting that even the present, despite its familiar brevity, and even along its unstable, gossamer border, might actually be infinite. Gutiérrez, apparently remembering that Nula is with him, returns to his open, slightly urbane manner, and smiles.

—I was time traveling, he says.

—And I was riding the present, trying not get bucked off that wild bronco, Nula says.

—Which luckily can sometimes be a gentle mare, says Gutiérrez.

—If we keep developing the metaphor, we’re going to end up in the zoo.

—Screenwriters are contractually obligated to use the primary local material. In London, it’s always got to be cloudy, and don’t dare forget to fill the Sahara with camels, says Gutiérrez, a quick spark of retrospective disdain in his eyes. And, bringing his hand to his forehead, he rubs at something as he raises his head and looks up at the sky. A drop, he says.

—Two, Nula says, touching his nose while scrutinizing the dark clouds. Looking back down and around himself, he thinks of his red camper, his white pullover, his new shirt, his freshly ironed pants. He looks at his loafers, where a rim of yellow mud has formed along the entire perimeter of their soles and a few stains of the same yellowish substance have stuck to their insteps, and he makes two or three involuntary gestures, at once ambiguous and contradictory.

Gutiérrez watches him openly, laughing, as if his misfortune amused him, and then, deliberately reaching slowly into an interior pocket of his raincoat, the wide and open kind, like a marsupial pouch, that some of those coats have, he withdraws an umbrella with a short handle, where he presses a metal button, and the canopy of smooth and glowing fabric divided into seven different colored sections unfolds with a sharp sound, sudden and exact, and a perfection that approaches the theatrical. The sections of the canopy represent the color spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, with identical segments, and the composite of the two men and the umbrella form a multicolored blotch that is clear and mobile and that stands out sharply against the gray background darkened by the double effect of the clouds and the dusk.

Nula, slightly stupefied, takes in the umbrella’s multicolored apparition, but he doesn’t rush to shelter himself under the canopy’s limited circumference, typical of the shelter offered by collapsible umbrellas, despite their price. Nula’s reticence to seek the protection that placing himself shoulder to shoulder with Gutiérrez would offer has two motives: the first is that for now he’s sensed only a few sparse and scattered drops that couldn’t yet be called an actual rainfall or even a spitting one, and the second is that just as the multicolored canopy is unfolding, giving the impression that the two phenomena had been synchronized deliberately, in one of the pockets of his camper his cell phone has started ringing. Moving a few steps away mysteriously, he puts back the cigarettes and lighter that he’d just taken uselessly from his pocket. (He actually smokes very little, but he tends to carry cigarettes to share with clients, though today, he can’t really tell why, he feels a stronger urge to smoke than usual.) Nula pulls the cell phone from his other pocket, and, with a subtle gesture of apology toward Gutiérrez, turns his back to him as he brings the phone to his left ear and answers the call. Gutiérrez observes him patiently but skeptically, isolated within the imaginary cylinder that the umbrella’s circumference projects toward the sandy ground, forming an illusory refuge for surveillance, and when he moves his arm slightly and the multicolored circle shifts onto an inclined plane the ideal shape to contain him becomes a truncated cylinder.

Although for a man of almost sixty, however well he keeps himself up, youth tends to seem insolent, and although Nula’s full and virile twenty-nine years, the fastidiousness of his clothes, and his apparent self regard seem overly manifest for his taste, Gutiérrez watches him indulgently, almost with pity, thinking that the energy the young radiate—so stimulating that, subjugated by it, they confuse it with the essence of their own singularity—they might not actually deserve. The indulgence is erased when Nula, turning around, raises his voice and makes two or three comical faces in his direction, shaking his free arm as he explains to the person on the other end (later he’ll explain that it was his boss) that, because he’s with an important client (and he extends his arm and wags his index finger at Gutiérrez with an exaggerated and complicit smile) he has to cancel the two appointments he has for later in the afternoon. Apparently, the person on the other end of the line lets himself be easily convinced, and from the things he says, Gutiérrez realizes that Nula, without having to insist much, but by the sheer effect of his communicative euphoria, has induced his boss to call the clients and reschedule their appointments for the same time tomorrow. Nula shuts off the apparatus and, stowing it in his pocket, takes two or three decisive steps toward Gutiérrez.

—Free as the wind until tomorrow morning at eleven, he says when he reaches Gutiérrez’s side. And he turns his head sharply upward again because suddenly and silently a dense rain has started to fall. With two hops he reaches Gutiérrez, claiming for himself, in a tacit way, a portion of the meager protection offered by the umbrella.

Without really knowing why, Gutiérrez, who likes every kind of rain, prefers that silent kind, without storm or wind or thunder or lightning, and which forms gradually, almost surreptitiously, of low, dark clouds, so loaded with water that, from this excess, they split, suddenly, and empty themselves upon the world. In general, it will fall in the afternoon, and, often, after the warm spell of a wet day. Indifferent to Nula’s somewhat ostentatious irritation (he’s almost pasted to him, and, shuffling his feet impatiently, seems to want to incite him to keep walking), Gutiérrez watches it, not in the sky, which has brightened a bit and where the drops, despite their size, are invisible, but rather on the plants, on the yellowish ground, on the river, where, as they collide, after an incorporeal flight in which they seem to cross an extrasensory void, they rematerialize. Gutiérrez’s senses perceive the rain across the deserted expanse that surrounds them, while his imagination projects it over the contiguous and distant spaces they have crossed and that, despite their imaginary provenance, are complemented by and confused with the empirical plane that surrounds them. What he perceives from the point in the verdant space where they find themselves, his imagination likewise assigns to the entire region, where, for the past year or so, after more than thirty years away, he has been living. And he thinks he can see, in the leaves that shudder silently as the drops fall, in their impacts with the yellow earth, and, especially, in the agitation that the drops cause as they cover the rippled surface of the river over an infinite number of simultaneous points, the intimate cipher of the empirical world, each fragment, as distant and distinct from the present as it might seem—the most distant star, for example—having the exact value as this, the one he occupies, and that if he could disentangle himself from the grasp of this apparently insignificant present, the rest of the universe—time, space, inert or living matter—would reveal all its secrets. Gutiérrez senses that Nula has guessed his thoughts, or has inferred them from his demeanor, and so has suppressed his annoyed gestures, opting instead for what appears to be sincere patience and calm. He allows himself a few seconds more, and then, giving Nula a gentle push on the elbow, urges him on.

They advance in silence, a bit faster than before, but, from their demeanor, they don’t seem worried by the effects of the rain on the expensive clothes they’re wearing, and Nula especially, thinks Gutiérrez, after having postponed the mercantile obligations for that afternoon, no longer seems interested in the state of his shoes or the pulchritude of his red camper. Actually, because the multicolored umbrella is too small to cover them both completely, the rain now soaks not only the lower parts of their bodies, depending on their position and according to the rhythm of their stride as they hike over the rough terrain (from which the path has disappeared), but also cascades over the edges of the canopy onto their shoulders. The bright and mobile blotch that travels along the riverbank is startling, because of this very brightness, against the uniform gray of the landscape.

This is the exact impression that comes across, fifteen minutes later, to the inhabitants of the first ranches that, on its outskirts, a dispossessed stretch of land they seem exiled to, nonetheless marks the edge of the town. Many surprised faces mark their arrival under the rain from the sleepy and utter misery of the settlement, the only variation from the tedious and inescapable exclusion where poverty relegates them. Ten or fifteen shacks of straw, branches, cans, bags, and cardboard—refuse from the nearby dump—half falling apart or possibly never completed or more likely repaired and reappointed every so often with the haphazard and heterogeneous material offered by that same trash heap, constantly at the edge of collapse and in any case inadequate for living or even dying in, crowded together in a barren field among four of five sparse trees so ragged that they seem infected by the poverty, and where a mess of knickknacks, busted chairs, dismantled wardrobes, rusted grates, broken toilets crumbling among the weeds, paper and plastic bags twisted and half-buried in the mud, trunks, animal and human excrement, leather, bones, and dead branches litter the narrow space between the structures, and where three or four chickens and a dozen dogs, all of them rawboned and afflicted, wander around. At the back of a plot of untilled ground, two thin horses, indifferent to the rain, nibble at the yellowed grass. The filthiness of the ground stretches over the fifteen or twenty meters to the water. The smell of rotten fish, of sewage, and of carrion rises from the riverbank, and the earth is covered with dirty paper, cardboard disintegrating in the rain, broken bottles and rusted cans, ashes clumped together by the humidity, and even the carcass of a dog, hardened and dried despite the rain soaking it, a carcass whose owner, in the previous weeks, had managed to suffer, die, rot, and dry out again, so that, at its death, what it left behind will end up as dust, returned to the earth, or as bone forever.

Some of the shacks are shaded near their doorways by a kind of eave propped up on a pair of twisted poles and under which a rickety chair, old crates, or a stack of two or three trunks serve as seats. Outside one of the shacks, a double car seat, on the ground, leans against the partition that frames up the entrance. The poles of an abandoned garden, in the open ground where the settlement ends, point, in parallel lines, toward the gray sky. Both adults and children watch them as they pass. Some come out of their shacks and stare openly, but, apparently, without interest. The multicolored anachronism they comprise—contrasting with the immense gray-brown blotch of the settlement, which also stains the vegetation, the animals, and the people—seems to activate slow, rusted sensory mechanisms in the inhabitants, consigned to some remote corner of their mind by lack of use. Gutiérrez, raising his free hand, offers a generalized greeting as they pass that the others fail to acknowledge, or acknowledge only later, behind the curtain of rain, when they have already passed and can no longer register it, not from suspicion or timidity, and much less so from aggression, but rather from stupor, from indecision, from indifference.

—I feel like a sideshow freak, Gutiérrez murmurs. I wish I’d never been born.

—It’s not so bad, Nula says, also in a low voice, prefaced by the same short, dry laugh that, as he emits it, he realizes he uses only with Gutiérrez, meant perhaps to display a self-control that, in fact, is far from authentic. But I know what you mean, he adds. My father was convinced that the real problem with the world isn’t poverty, but wealth, and that’s why he had to die.

Turning his head suddenly, Gutiérrez observes him carefully, but all he finds is Nula’s profile, because Nula, as though he hadn’t noticed anything, continues looking ahead, into the rainy space that separates them from a crop of saturated trees.

—Someone over there traded in his car, and so your father had to get murdered, mutters Gutiérrez, turning back toward the trees that obliterate the horizon at the end of the landscape. And, after a short pause, the litany, which Nula could see coming, starts up again: who’ve ransacked the planet and now seem determined to do the same thing to the whole solar system, all so that they don’t have to resole their shoes and instead buy themselves a new pair every month; who build luxury resorts in the poorest areas so they can water ski and scuba dive and get a tan in the middle of winter and stay in bungalows that simulate a primitive existence but where they serve all-you-can-eat breakfasts and lunches that Roman orgy-goers would be embarrassed by, and especially at night when they go clubbing and swap wives and then complain when the locals kidnap a handful of them that they never hear from again, they, who would ravage everything to see their privileges maintained or amplified and are inclined to do the same over the ruins of the whole universe simply from the voluptuousness their dominion arouses. And Nula, with resigned irony, thinks, Yeah, but he bought himself Doctor Russo’s mansion, two kilometers from a shantytown, and, according to Moro, you’d have to calculate his fortune by the millions.

Though they walk downstream, the direction the river runs is not indicated by anything on the surface but the tension created there by the many rough and parallel waves, riddled with the projectiles of rain that pierce them as, pushed by the southwest wind, they encounter the resistance of the current. This tension is so uniform and the fall of the drops so regular that the rippled surface of the water seems less like a medium whose impulse is renewed continuously by the opposing forces that push it in contradictory directions than like a fixed, gelatinous substance that, because of some hidden tremor, trembles and vibrates constantly, and the drops that strike it, despite being always new, seem always the same, captured for a gray but distinct instant.

When they reach the grove and start to cross it, the tall crowns of the eucalyptus planted in rows parallel to the river—they have to turn away from the riverbank slightly as they approach the center of the town—shelter them from the rain, but at the same time the rain seems more real among the trees than in the open; the bark of the trees seems lacquered by the damp, and the ochre trunks, dark and shining where they’re not covered with bark, soaked in water, make it more distinct, as do the drops that cascade from the branches, and the odor of eucalyptus that the water amplifies, and the soft but numerous sound that the drops, continuous and polyphonic, produce against the branches and the trunks, against the leaf bed rotting on the ground, against the earth. At their arrival, two or three toads, motionless at the foot of a tree, stiffen and puff up from anxiety, from anger, or from fear, and then immediately flee with ineffective and clumsy jumps in various directions, while in the treetops a tumult of leaves and wings produced by invisible birds—of considerable size judging by the sound’s intensity—indicates that the presence of Gutiérrez and Nula has not gone unnoticed. As they leave the grove they are able to make out, beyond a narrow ditch so choked with weeds that it’s impossible to tell if there’s water at the bottom, the first houses, on the first streets, which apparently follow the straight line that the municipality assigned them, but, lacking sidewalks or gutters or even trees to mark the boundaries between street and sidewalk, are not yet fully streets; there are only a few isolated houses, built of unplastered brick or adobe, two or three per block, constructed along the outer perimeter of the rectangular territories that delimit the blocks, as in so many other towns, whose outskirts, though included within the urban space by the geometric design that demarcated them before the town was chartered, before materializing into houses, streets, life—an abstract idea of the town, diagramed with a ruler, in the same imagination of those who projected it—are confused with the countryside. Where the sidewalks should be there are weeds that, in some cases, extend from the sandy street all the way to the edges of the houses; sometimes, because the inhabitants have pulled them up, but almost always because their simple coming and going has eliminated the weeds, a thin path of bare earth has been opened from the fence (when there is a fence) to the middle of the street.

The rain seems more mournful in the empty town than in the countryside or on the river, and though the houses are becoming more and more frequent as they approach the center, and, here and there, though it’s not yet dark, some are lit up inside, these lights do not manage to give an impression of shelter or well-being. In the front gardens the plants drip water, and at the foot of each—hibiscus (which in the area they call juveniles), roses, dahlias, chrysanthemums, and many others—lies a multicolored jumble of fallen petals flattened by the rain. Through one window, an old woman holding a forgotten mate in her hand meets their gazes but does not respond to their subtle greeting. In the side yards and rear courtyards, visible through screen doors or open gates, hanging clothes, propane tanks, blackened furniture, broken dishes, and brightly colored plastic toys, abandoned on the ground, shine with water. Finally they reach the town proper, but the neat cabins with their trim lawns and swimming pools don’t lessen the oppressive feel, and not only from being empty in the middle of the week, because the ones that are lit up, with a new car parked out front or in a garage whose door was left open, and even those where they can see people coming and going through the windows, also secrete tedium, if not affliction. In many houses the flickering lights, caused by the discontinuity of televised images they project, make patterns that filter through the windows, despite the curtains or shutters being closed, and Gutiérrez and Nula, without making any comment, as they advance through the silence that accompanies the splashing of their footsteps, under the multicolored umbrella that, like the yellow rain jacket and the red camper, glows dimly in the blue dusk, both guess, from the fragmentary sounds that reach them every so often—voices and music that retain their shape despite the lack of context and the distance—that in every house they’re watching the same show, some afternoon soap opera no doubt.

Closer to the center of town, the sidewalks are fully formed, some are even made of brick, and on the streets immediately surrounding the square these are ancient structures, high above the street, bulwarks against the floods that, when they’re heavy, Nula explains, can overrun even the highest sidewalks and flood the inner courtyards beyond. An illuminated doorway opens onto the high brick sidewalk and a uniformed guard—the watchman at the entrance to the police station—watches them curiously, slightly intimidated, apparently, possibly because of their expensive clothing, since it goes without saying that the wealthy inspire deference in the keepers of the peace and that they serve at their pleasure. Gutiérrez stops suddenly, and Nula, realizing it only after a few seconds, takes two or three steps beyond the umbrella’s protective canopy and stops in the middle of the sidewalk without turning around. From where he stands, he can hear the sound that the guard’s shoes make as he comes to attention, the exchange of greetings, and the cordial and intricate directions that the guard’s heavily accented voice gives Gutiérrez to Escalante’s house.

—It’s on the other side of the square, Gutiérrez says when he catches up with Nula and they resume their walk under the umbrella.

Nula doesn’t answer, but as soon as they reach the next block, lowering his voice, fractured slightly by some violent emotion, he says:

—A few years ago, there were lots of people who crossed that doorway and never came out again.

—Your father? Gutiérrez asks in a low voice.

—No. He was killed in greater Buenos Aires.

They fall silent again. Now that the dusk has reached the edge of night, more lights are coming on around the square. And because the streetlights are still off, a last luminescence, somewhere between gray, blue, and green, causes porous and dark reflections to shine, here and there, off the wet objects. Inwardly, Nula senses Gutiérrez’s confusion, but out of cruelty pretends not to notice it in order to prolong his discomfort, telling himself, almost reflexively, but immediately feeling guilty for thinking it, that Gutiérrez must have had it good in Europe while so many were tortured to death, defenseless and blind, in the town they’re walking through under the rain. Nula realizes that his cruelty doesn’t come from any sense of moral superiority, but rather from the brutal suspicions that have been plaguing him since the moment when Lucía, in that green swimsuit, had stepped from the pool dripping wet, and, without looking at him once had sat down in the yellow canvas lawn chair. He’s only just now realized that if she hadn’t even glanced at him as she came emerged from the water it was because Gutiérrez had already told her he was coming. Soldi can think whatever he wants, he says to himself, but I’ve known who Lucía’s parents were for years. The momentary attack of rage passes immediately when he hears Gutiérrez’s slightly contrite voice.

—Now I get why you kept walking and didn’t turn around.

Nula is about to say something about the terrible years they lived through—he was just coming out of adolescence—but his reluctance makes him adopt a gentle and benevolent tone.

—No, no, he says. I didn’t realize that you’d stopped, and then I was looking at the square.

But he knows that, though he pretends to accept the explanation, Gutiérrez doesn’t believe it. They cross the street, and when their feet touch the corner of the square, aimed at a diagonal, the streetlights come on suddenly. A kind of iridescent halo, like a floating vapor, forms around the globes of white light distributed around the square. And the rain, as it crosses the illuminated space, becomes visible and audible as it cascades over the branches and trunks of the giant rosewoods and the floss silk trees, pouring over the cobbled paths and dripping over an infinite number of points, not only in the square, but in the town, in the region, in the province, in the world. They leave the square and enter a dark street behind a white church. Gutiérrez stops and looks around, trying to get oriented.

—He said it was behind a church, a block and a half away, he says doubtfully.

—It must be there, Nula says. After his vindictive overtures just now, he demonstrates an exaggerated desire to cooperate in the search for this Escalante. But, while exaggerated, this desire is actually sincere; despite the rescheduled appointments, the interminable walk under the rain, the mud, and the damp, not for one moment has he regretted following Gutiérrez on the expedition.

They pass the church and start to cross the street. Despite the streetlight, which hangs in the middle of the block from intersecting cables that support the lamp and the shade that protects it, Nula, who is studying the houses on the next block for some possible sign of what they’re looking for, steps into a deep hole in the sandy street, the only one full of water, where, with a hard splash, his left foot submerges to the ankle, causing him to pull it out so violently that the brown loafer, lodged in the hole, comes off and stays where he stepped.

—You fucking bitch! Nula screams, speaking to the universe in general, to the infinitely complex and therefore impenetrable order of things that, indifferent to his designs and desires, put the puddle in the street, at the same instant and in the exact spot where his loafer came down. He rolls forward, standing only on his right foot, turns, and jumping on one leg, returns for the shoe, but Gutiérrez, already recovered from the sudden agitation the incident caused—agitation manifested especially in the umbrella, which trembled, whirling down and up again, producing a brief, colored tornado that, in the dusky half light, took on a muted splendor—has already bent over and is pulling the shoe from the hole, and, straightening up, he holds it out to Nula as he simultaneously offers a precise and sober analysis.

—When your foot went in, he says, the water in the puddle splashed into the street, and because the hole is so narrow, the shoe stayed on top, with the heel on the edge; don’t worry, no water went in.

—Look at my sock and pant leg, Nula says reproachfully.

And Gutiérrez, who did not let Nula’s somewhat cruel silence when they walked away from the police station go unnoticed, and just as he’s feeling guilty for having talked to the guard, thinks, despite his impassive demeanor, that actually Nula’s current situation isn’t altogether undeserved. Nula shakes out the shoe and slips it on, stomping his heel two or three times—in a possibly overly ostentatious way that his shadow appears to mimic—against the sandy street tamped down by the rain. They reach the sidewalk in silence, and Gutiérrez is starting to get irritated by Nula’s persistent moodiness, when Nula, who seems to have realized something analogous to this, relents.

—What just happened constitutes the broadest cause for laughter, he says. And you didn’t laugh. Thank you for that.

—At my age, you learn to control your emotions, Gutiérrez says, laughing gently to signal that he considers Nula a good sport and that his self-control allows him to concede a certain level of irony toward the misfortunes of others.

—Right now I could be in some warm office in the capitol, selling wine to some aide to the governor, Nula says, exaggerating his plaintive tone. And then, laughing as well, adds, But I don’t regret a thing. This outing takes me out of my routine.

—If Ulysses had made it straight home, the Odyssey wouldn’t exist, Gutiérrez says.

—Possibly, Nula says. But these days the epic form is an anachronism.

—As a professional screenwriter, that notion takes the bread from my table.

—Not just the bread, Nula says. The wine and local salami, too. Which, by the transitive property, takes it from mine.

They laugh. Their recent troubles seem overcome. Now, farther from the corner, the sidewalk is darker, and their shadows disappear into the darkness. The houses are neither rich nor poor. Some are very old, and abut the brick sidewalk directly; others have a small front garden, separated from the earthen path by a chain-link fence. A woman carrying a plastic bag emblazoned with the W of the hypermarket and loaded with provisions, is about to enter one of the houses, stooping to slide the bolt to the screen door. Nula calls out. The woman looks around nervously.

—Good evening, Nula says. Excuse us. We’re looking for the Escalante family.

—You mean Doctor Escalante? she says.

Nula hesitates.

—Yes, that’s right, Gutiérrez says. He’s a lawyer.

—He’s retired, the woman says. That’s them next door.

The woman points to the next house over. There’s a flower bed out front, behind a fence; an expanse of neat lawn around the side courtyard, with an enormous orange tree at the center; and, at the back, a garden, judging by the cane and wire plant trellises, visible thanks to the light that shines through the windows on the far side of the ivy-covered house. Delicia! Delicia! the woman shouts. After a minute or so the door opens and a feminine silhouette, apparently very young, is cut from the rectangle of light.

—What is it? she shouts.

—Delicia, it’s me, Celia. There’s two men here looking for an attorney.

The silhouette in the doorway hesitates a few seconds.

—Who are you? she finally shouts.

Gutiérrez steps up to the fence and shouts back, I’m a friend from abroad, coming by to say hello.

Suddenly, and inexplicably, the silhouette in the doorway starts to laugh.

—I know who you are, she says. Sergio’s at the club. Sorry not to come out but I’m washing my hair. Good to meet you. Celia, honey, can you show them where the club is?

—Look, says the first woman. Go past the church and turn right. It’s three blocks, on the river side. The sign says El Amarillo.

—Thank you, Nula and Gutiérrez say in unison, acting much more polite than if they were speaking to a man, somewhere more crowded, and in the middle of the day. They turn back the way they came, then right on the second corner, pass the church, and walk a block parallel to the square. After crossing the street again—Nula sees the same iridescent vapor haloed over the light at the intersection that covered the white globes in the square—they enter another street, darkened by the trees that border the sidewalk, but also by the night that has now fallen completely. To the west, behind them, Nula imagines, the curtain of darkness must have already lowered completely, erasing the last fringe of blue light that hung on the edge of the horizon. They don’t speak now, and despite the constant rubbing of their shoulders, forced together by the meagerness of the shelter and the irregularity of the sidewalks, their steps splash with the same rhythm. And though both, for different or possibly even opposite reasons, are impatient to arrive, each seems to have forgotten the other. In fact, they’re only strangers, and despite the ease with which they exchange the words that the other finds suitable, precise, smart, and so on, both are unsettled by what they might come to learn when the respective opacities that mutually attract them are finally illuminated. It’s possible this discomfort is caused, as often happens, by not fully comprehending that the curious attraction they feel comes from unwittingly associating the other with something they both want to reclaim, and which they’ve long kept hidden in some remote corner inside themselves. They cross the street again, onto another dark sidewalk. Halfway down the block, a wide strip of light, which divides the darkness in half, suggests that they’ve reached the place they sought. And, in fact, a tin sign hangs from a bar that extends over the sidewalk from the brick wall:

EL AMARILLO

FISH AND GAME CLUB

A rough, childish drawing of an elongated fish, painted the same bright yellow as Gutiérrez’s jacket, decorates the metal rectangle under the name.

—We’re here, Gutiérrez says, and, apparently forgetting Nula, who is left outside the umbrella’s protective cylinder, takes a few steps toward the open door and inspects the interior. Nula walks up and does the exact same thing, with very similar movements, not realizing that, because Gutiérrez has his back to him and can’t see that Nula’s movements so closely resemble his own, someone watching them from behind would think that Nula is deliberately aping him. Suddenly, Gutiérrez closes the umbrella, turns around, and shakes it over the sidewalk to release some of the water. Through the space he opens as he backs up, Nula can see inside the club. It looks like a newly built storehouse, made of unplastered brick, and while the thatch roof is in perfect shape (having been built pretty recently), the floor, by contrast, is simply tamped-down earth. Two small lamps hang from one of the roof beams, and a few lamps are attached to the walls, but only two or three are lit up. Three small tables and their respective folding chairs, arranged somewhat at random, a bit lost in a space that could contain many more, are scattered around the room. Two long planks, some collapsed trestles, and a stack of folding chairs is piled up against a wall. At the back there’s a counter and a set of shelves loaded with glasses and bottles, and next to that a yellowed household fridge with a larger door below a smaller one to the freezer, which, Nula thinks, some member of the club probably donated after buying a new one. When they appear in the doorway, a man with a full, smooth beard, standing between the counter and the shelves, stops in the middle of drying a glass, watching them with an inquisitive and somewhat severe expression. At the only occupied table, four men are playing cards and three others are standing behind them, following the course of the game. None of them appears to have noticed their presence yet.

The severe look of the barman at the unexpectedness of their sudden intrusion doesn’t seem to intimidate Gutiérrez, who, Nula thinks somewhat anxiously, walks in with the same ease and self-assurance with which one of its founding members or even its president could have. Nula, following him submissively, wavers between disapproval and confused admiration, and is so surprised by Gutiérrez’s determination that he’s not even conscious of what he’s thinking, which, translated into words, would be more or less the following: Or maybe this is all so familiar to him, it’s such an intimate part of himself that despite the thirty-some years away the words and gestures come on their own, reflexively or instinctually, or rather—and it would be offensive if this were the case—he thinks that the millions that Moro attributes to him give him the right to walk in this club as though he were actually its president.

Without even glancing at the barman, Gutiérrez, scrutinizing each of the players at the table and the three men following the game behind them, walks slowly toward the table. He stops suddenly, staring at one of the four players, who is receiving, his eyes down, the cards that the player to his left is dealing. The man’s hair, a slicked-back shell pasted to his skull, is thick and smooth; it’s patched in white, gray, and black, like the hair of an animal. A cartoonist would represent it by alternating curved black lines with corresponding white gaps of varying width between them, and a few black, white, and gray blotches interrupting the lines to mark the spots where the black and white separate. Two hollows amplify the forehead that, along with his nose, comprises the most protrusive part of his face, which narrows into a triangle toward his chin. His skin is a dark and lustrous brown, its similarity to leather accentuated by the wrinkles on his neck, on his hands, and around his eyes, whose half-shut eyelids obstruct the view to his eyes themselves, which closely study the two cards he’s been dealt as he prepares to pick up a third, just thrown across the greasy table, itself a brown only slightly darker than his hands.

—Sergio, Gutiérrez says.

—Willi, says the other man, his tone neutral, not even looking up from his cards.

Patiently, Gutiérrez waits. Nula is unaware that recognition, approval, confidence, and mutual history have just been exchanged, tacitly, by the utterance of their names. Gutiérrez hasn’t said a thing to anyone else, but the others, who’ve now understood that they’re not being asked for, don’t seem at all interested in their sudden appearance. Only the barman stands alert, paused in the middle of drying the glass, but when Nula, to indulge him—because Gutiérrez hasn’t looked at him once—makes a friendly gesture with his head, the man, as though the nod triggered a remote control, looks down and keeps drying. Escalante picks up the third card, studies it, places it over the others, and deposits all three, so perfectly aligned that they seem like a single card, face down on the table. He looks up at Gutiérrez. Then he stands up slowly, inspects the three men following the game, chooses the one that seems most qualified, and gestures for him to take his place. He walks around the table, and when he reaches Gutiérrez he doesn’t hug him or shake his hand, only looks him in the eyes and gives him a soft nudge on the chest with the back of his hand. Gutiérrez smiles, but with a look of protest.

—I live practically around the corner, and it took me a year to find you, he says.

—I saw you once, in a car, but before I could put two and two together, you were gone, Escalante says. And another time you walked down my street, but you were with someone. How’d you know I was at the club?

—Your daughter told us, Gutiérrez says.

—My daughter? Escalante says. I don’t have children. That was my wife.

Opening his eyes wide and biting his upper lip and shaking his head hard, Gutiérrez’s face takes on an exaggerated look of admiration.

—It was no great feat getting such a young wife, Escalante says. For her, it was between poverty and me, and she lost: she got me.

It’s difficult for Nula to sense the irony in Escalante’s words; his tone is so neutral and flat that it seems deliberate. It’s like he’s talking to himself, Nula thinks, speaking to something inside. And he realizes that he’s been thinking about how Escalante’s wife laughed when, referring to Gutiérrez, she said, I know who you are. That cheerful sentence implied that she and her husband had already talked about him, and that there might be a sense of irony between them when it came to the subject of Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, when Nula sees them face-to-face, it seems impossible—unless they’d been avoiding it on purpose—that they never once met in the past year. Who knows what reason they might have had to delay the meeting, since they must have known that it would happen sooner or later. When they exchanged their names across the table of truco players without looking at each other, Nula realized, without understanding exactly what it meant, that despite their efforts at pretending otherwise, both men had been aware of even the most intimate details regarding the other for all of the past year. And then he thinks that it’s not impossible that when he saw Gutiérrez closing the door to his house he wasn’t actually planning to come to Rincón, and that only at that moment did he decide to go, because without him, Nula, he wouldn’t have dared come looking for Escalante at home. And Nula is so absorbed in these thoughts that Gutiérrez has to say his name twice in order to introduce him.

—Mr. Anoch, he says, wine merchant. Doctor Sergio Escalante, attorney.

The overly formal manner of the introduction, in particular the use of their surnames and professions, underscored by his sober tone, suggests to the two men that Gutiérrez’s regard for their persons goes well beyond these superficial details—antithetically, in fact, to these social characteristics—in the quarter of authenticity and courage, of hard-fought individuality, of nerve, of introspection, and of a fierce marginality. Without much emotion, both Nula and Escalante nod their heads, accompanying the movement with a brief and rather conventional smile to show that they’ve discerned, approvingly, the irony of the introduction. When he smiles, Escalante reveals an incomplete set of teeth almost at brown as the skin on his face, and, realizing this, he raises a hand to his lips. The teeth must have been missing for a while, because the gesture seems automatic, and its slight delay could be due to his familiarity with the other players, in whose frequent company he thinks it superfluous—his teeth are no longer a secret to them—but now a reflexive modesty has induced him to conceal his mouth, too late in any case, though Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to have given the matter even the slightest importance.

As the other players resume the game, Escalante starts walking toward the bar, and Gutiérrez follows, but Nula is delayed by a survey of the damages the walk has caused to what he rightly considers a kind of uniform: the loafers (the left one in particular), as well as the cuffs of his pants, are covered in yellow mud, and a few splatters of this watery substance, which have already begun to dry, managed to reach his fly and even the front of the white pullover, two circles with a tortured circumference and a dense center, like a pair of symbolic bellybuttons drawn on the white material for some cryptic, supernatural purpose. And on the red camper—like on his pant legs—some damp stains around the shoulders illustrate that the shelter offered by Gutiérrez’s multicolored umbrella has been less than perfect. But Nula, after assessing the results of the walk, shakes his head with a smile that, for some reason, unknown even to himself, expresses less annoyance than satisfaction, and, with a few decisive steps, joins the others at the bar.

—What’ll you have? Escalante says.

Gutiérrez, apparently uncertain, slowly inspects the shelves. The barman, who has left the towel and the glass he was drying on the table, waits, with a calm expression, neither impatient nor servile, for Gutiérrez to decide.

—A vermouth with bitters and soda, on ice, he says finally.

Escalante asks Nula with his eyes.

—The same, Nula tells the man at the bar.

—Orange for me, Escalante says.

As the barman starts to make their order, Nula watches the two men. They’ve fallen silent, and don’t seem in a hurry to talk. Finally, without a hint of reproach, Escalante says:

—You left so suddenly. Swallowed up by the earth.

—I was in Buenos Aires for a while, and then I crossed the pond, Gutiérrez says.

Escalante shakes his head thoughtfully. He’s taller than Gutiérrez, but his extreme thinness, and possibly his seniority, make him look foreshortened in comparison. With his hawk-like nose, his brown skin, his prominent Adam’s apple, and his dark eyes that despite being evasive (due to some ocular handicap, perhaps) gleam when they settle on something, a person, animal, or object, the cruel epithet vulture that people assign to lawyers seems even more apt to him, not to mention the indifference he projects for things of this world, and the self-control—with the exception of the gesture to hide his teeth, a residual concession to aesthetic considerations—so internalized by now that it seems like his natural state, a false cloak against everything that erodes us, ceaselessly, day after day, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die.

—You did the right thing, not saying goodbye to anyone, Escalante says. And Marcos, have you seen him?

—He was the one who told me you lived in Rincón, as far as anyone could tell, Gutiérrez says.

—I used to run into him at the courthouse. But then he got into politics and I retired. I haven’t seen him for years.

—Well, I came to invite you over on Sunday, Gutiérrez says. You can see him there.

Escalante bursts out laughing, and raises his hand to cover his devastated teeth.

—At Doctor Russo’s house? he says. It’s haunted. They say the doctor’s ghost comes back from hell just to rob the guests.

—He’s not in hell, Nula says. Worse, actually—he’s in Miami.

—Sorry, Gutiérrez says. But I’m out of touch with the local mythology.

—It doesn’t matter, Escalante says. So you’re inviting me over? Will many people be there?

—A mixed bag, Gutiérrez says. But you and the Rosembergs are my guests of honor. The rest—forgive me, Mr. Anoch—comprise the glamorous court I’ve assembled to receive my old friends. The only one missing will be Chiche, but as our young friend would say, El Chiche deserved something better than Miami, and we’d have to fetch him ourselves from the inferno to get him to come.

Escalante’s eyes, gleaming ironically under his eyebrows, arched and gathered around his nose, lock on Gutiérrez’s.

—Did you know, he says, that I’ve been sleeping with my maid since she was thirteen and I was forty?

Gutiérrez, slow to find the appropriate response, puckers his lips into an awkward smile.

—I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, he says finally. Always the good pastor.

Nula watches them curiously. Since the first words they exchanged, and possibly to conceal their emotions, their demeanor has been remote and caustic, but to Nula it seems that rather than express the reticence of alert, disillusioned maturity, that style has something juvenile about it, adolescent even, as though something had been suspended in each of them over the thirty years apart that was automatically put in motion again at their first meeting. Calculating the difference in their ages—when Gutiérrez, without telling anyone, and without a trace, left the city, he still hadn’t been born—Nula experiences the vaguely disorienting feeling that he’s unwittingly crossed an invisible border, and that he’s now moving through the territory of the past, perceiving with his own senses a pre-empirical limbo that preceded his birth. He feels like he’s crossed into a space where nothing is real, only represented, like some character in the movies who, during a scene that takes place in a false airport, pretends to have just disembarked from a plane that carried him from a distant country, and he speaks of that country as though he’d really just come from there, but his words are empty of experience, they’re just simulacra authored by someone else, and when they’re spoken, to describe things that never happened, as interesting as these things might be, they must sound bewildering and strange to the actor. With their lightly evoked juvenile irony, the two older men also seem to have been spirited away, and now float in that parallel universe in which, during their first meeting after a prolonged separation, their lives seem to have paused years and years earlier in the other’s imagination. The empirical decades that have passed while they were apart are surely an impenetrable and reciprocal mystery that—while they might spend the rest of their lives elaborating them for each other—they’ll only manage to recover as a series of vague, irregular fragments. It occurs to Nula that, for now at least, those decades don’t interest them: all they seem to want is to renew the interrupted course of shared experience that time, distance, and the temporarily-overpowered inconstancy of their respective lives had steered into the limbo where for now, exchanging measured, ironic lines that carry with them authentic pieces of information, putting the external world between parentheses (where they’ve put me along with it), they try to reunite. And Nula’s conclusion could be summed up as follows: That’s why he came in here like he knew the place. It’s got nothing to do with the millions that Moro attributes to him. He’s trying to act like he never left.

The barman deposits the bottles, ice, and glasses on the counter, along with a dish of peanuts and another of green olives. Nula takes out a cigarette but (because he’s lost in thought) doesn’t offer one around, and, after lighting it, returns the lighter and the red and white packet wrapped in cellophane to his jacket pocket. When they’ve finished preparing their drinks, Nula holds out his glass, as though he’s about to give a toast, and he’s just about to add his own ironic comment when he realizes that the other two men, poised at the threshold of old age, have lapsed into thought after taking their first sips (Escalante drinks his orange soda straight from the bottle), and so he keeps quiet. Suddenly, he understands what Moro had been trying to explain to him at the estate agency when he described his meeting with Gutiérrez on San Martín and said that at one point he got the feeling that if he spoke to Gutiérrez the other man wouldn’t even have noticed his presence because he seemed to be in a different dimension, like in some science fiction show. The past, Nula thinks, the most inaccessible and remote of all the extinguished galaxies, insists, endlessly, on transmitting its counterfeit, fossilized luminescence.

And yet, Nula realizes, they don’t allow themselves, in public at least, either nostalgia, distortion, or complaint. They exchange words that, from the outside, seem formulaic, but which Nula can sense are loaded with meaning. They start talking about Marcos Rosemberg and his political altruism, exchanging a brief smile that Escalante tries to hide with his hand and that signals their tacit recognition of a certain disposition, crystallized some forty years before, that they attribute to Rosemberg and which seems to provoke both sympathy and disbelief. And Nula, who knows Rosemberg well, since he, too, is a client—Rosemberg was the first to suggest selling wine to Gutiérrez, saying that if he told Gutiérrez he’d sent him, he would definitely buy some—thinks he can guess that the sympathy comes from their affection for him and the sincerity they attribute to his political activities, while the disbelief, modeled after a self-fashioned image of the cynic, reflects their doubt regarding the actual likelihood of the efficacy of those very activities.

—And you? Gutiérrez says.

Before answering, Escalante considers Nula’s presence, apparently asking himself whether or not it’s the right time to disclose his personal life, and Nula, as he thinks this, and as Escalante looks him over quickly, tries to muster, not altogether convincingly, a look of neutrality and indifference. But the one that appears on Escalante’s face after the inspection, when he begins to speak, doesn’t indicate a favorable appraisal of his person, but rather something more generalized, a sort of philosophical posture or moral reflection through which he recalls how trivial and revolting anyone’s private life is.

—Everything Marcos must have told you about me is true, Escalante says, and Nula remembers thinking, a few minutes before, that despite his apparent curiosity and subtle exclamations of surprise, they’ve both known everything about each other ever since Gutiérrez came to the city the year before.

—I was married, I was locked up, I gave myself to the game, for years, and then I got together with my thirteen-year-old maid. After I lost everything, I took up the profession again, trying not to exhaust myself, until I was able to retire. But my wife works now. He falls silent, and then, in a murmur, adds, The perfect crime.

—Balzac said that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, Gutiérrez says.

—Is that true in your case? Escalante says, and, from under his arched and graying eyebrows, joined at the bridge of his nose, he locks his smoldering eyes on Gutiérrez’s.

As his only response, Gutiérrez nods his head slowly, in a pantomime of suffering, and recites:

I am the knife and the wound it deals,

I am the slap and the cheek,

I am the wheel and the broken limbs,

hangman and victim both!

Escalante listens to the verses carefully, motionless, as though they were a riddle, a code, or an oracle, and when Gutiérrez finishes speaking, his expression turns severe and brooding, attempting to interpret, for himself at least, its possible meanings. Then, gasping softly, he concludes, worriedly, It wouldn’t surprise me, which, for some mysterious reason, or which, in any case, Nula interprets as such, apparently produces an inexplicable sense of satisfaction for Gutiérrez.

When they finish their vermouth, Escalante, who hasn’t finished even half of the orange soda, offers them another round, which they decline. Nula, his back to the bar, throws three or four peanuts into the air, one after the other, and, twisting his head and rolling his eyes to follow their trajectory, catches them in his mouth. Then he is still again, and, looking across the room at the front door, watches the rain cross, obliquely, the light that projects onto the sidewalk against the backdrop of the night.

—Are you coming on Sunday? Gutiérrez says, signaling, indirectly, their imminent departure.

—I have to think about it, Escalante says.

—If it’s because of your missing teeth, Gutiérrez says—bringing his hand to his mouth and removing a set of dentures from the bottom row and leaving a gap in the middle of his bottom lip—I too can reveal my true face to the world.

Escalante’s own face, impassive up until that moment, has become unstable, covered in folds, creases, and wrinkles, on his forehead, around his eyes and mouth, as though he were making a tremendous effort to hide an emotion, and he darkens slightly, possibly because his skin is so lustrous and dark that the blood that flows to his cheeks can’t quite turn them red. Finally, the creases on his face disappear and Escalante is able to smile, and when his hand, his fingers curled, starts to move toward his mouth, he notices the gesture and stops it at his waist, hooking his thumb between his belt and the waistline of his pants. Nula, languidly chewing his peanuts, slows the movement of his jaws until they stop completely and his mouth is left half open as he stares at the other men, as the barman does, and who does so with an expression that combines surprise and uneasiness and even anger. Gutiérrez, with a gesture that vaguely resembles a magician or a variety show host, and which consists of holding the dentures aloft for the public, has also fallen still, displaying the false teeth mounted on a bridge of pink substance that resembles the color of his gums, and ends with two metal hooks that must attach to the actual teeth, and when he returns Escalante’s smile, his lower lip, sunken into the hole that has opened in the middle of his face, folds and collapses into his mouth, disfiguring the countenance that Nula, over the course of their three meetings, had started to get used to. Slightly agitated, Nula thinks, And I thought he walked in here that way out of arrogance.

—Alright, fine, Escalante says. Maybe you convinced me. Maybe I’ll come.

While Nula thinks, What strange people, Gutiérrez, narrowing his eyes and rolling his pupils backward, reinserts the teeth and stops a few seconds to install them, tapping his upper row against the lower one to make sure they’re in place.

—Chacho, Escalante says to the barman. Do we have anything our friends could take back with them?

—Let me see if there’s anything in the fridge, the man named Chacho says.

—No, Escalante says. I meant in the water.

Escalante’s preference immediately generates a certain regard in Chacho for the visitors—somewhat diminished by the scene he’s just witnessed—and a resigned smile decorates the ambivalent manner with which he gazes, through the doorway that leads to the sidewalk, at the slanting rainfall that crosses the light against the dark backdrop of the night.

—I have a couple of catfish, he says. They’re the first of the year.

—So they don’t leave empty-handed, Escalante says.

A childish, intensely joyful look appears on Gutiérrez’s face, which the barman notes with a spark of satisfaction and possibly even malice, and Nula, without hesitating, attributes the look to some idealized image of the local color that, during his years away, Gutiérrez had hoped to recover, and which, at this moment, by some unexpected and benevolent concession granted by the external world, is now really real. Chacho disappears into the back of the building, through a doorway next to the fridge.

—Don’t walk past the dump this late, Escalante says. You’ll be slaughtered and eaten up.

—Where oppression reigns, its victims are always suspect, Gutiérrez says.

—They came forth for no good reason, and now they squirm around like a bunch of larvae, Escalante says, and, with a hoarse laugh, adds, Just like the rest of us.

—Yet we claim to embody something more elevated, Gutiérrez says. Power, knowledge, wealth, tradition, and, worst of all, virtue.

—Larvae that pontificate, buy cars, and drink fine wine, Nula says, rubbing his hands together. My golden goose.

Chacho reappears in the opening that leads to the other room: he’s now wearing a burlap sack shaped into a sort of cloak over his shoulders; he carries an enormous flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other.

—Do you know where it is? Gutiérrez says.

—Doctor Russo’s place? Escalante says. I once brought charges on behalf of two or three poor bastards who lost everything they had because of him.

—See you Sunday, Gutiérrez says.

They tap each other on the arm and Escalante nods at Nula, a kind of economical greeting that is also a gesture of approval, as though, despite having exchanged only two or three conventional words with him, he were granting him something resembling a certificate of approval. Chacho comes around the bar, and his corpulence, while surprisingly greater than it seemed at first, contrasts with the energy and even agility with which he moves. Gutiérrez and Nula follow him, but Gutiérrez takes a couple of hesitant steps and then stops, turning back toward Escalante.

—I’ll have you know, he says, that when a European pauses thoughtfully, pencil in hand, it’s because he’s doing a crossword puzzle.

—I imagined as much, Escalante says, without stopping, and practically without looking at him, as he turns back toward the table of card players, and Nula thinks, again, but with a shade of irony this time, What strange people.

They step out into the rainy night, and, under the entrance sign, Gutiérrez once again unfolds the multicolored umbrella, but Chacho is moving so quickly that he has to stop and wait, realizing that the others have been delayed by a couple of seconds. As soon as they leave the swath of light that projects over the sidewalk, Chacho turns on the flashlight and an intense white beam shines over the sandy ground, the uneven brick sidewalks, and the saturated weeds that border the street. On the next corner, as they cross the illuminated intersection, Chacho turns off the flashlight, but after only a few meters he turns it on again. They pass the last of the street lights, and the tall silhouettes of darkened trees ahead appear to block their path, but it wouldn’t make sense to say that the trees interrupt the road: just like when they came into town from the north, the sidewalks and the street are now level, separated only by a ragged strip of weeds that reflects fragments of the white flashlight beam, and, strictly speaking, it’s already hard to tell them apart and there doesn’t seem to be either a street or a sidewalk anymore. In reality they now walk down what, had there been one, could have been considered the middle of the street. Seeing Chacho covered in the sack, Nula feels a bit ridiculous under the small, multicolored umbrella, his left arm constantly rubbing against Gutiérrez’s right elbow, elevated because he’s holding the umbrella in his right hand, making their walk so difficult that Chacho, just ahead of them, has to stop every so often to wait, but the rain, fine and silent, is too heavy to face unprotected. When they reach the trees that darken the path, Chacho leads them to the right, onto an embankment that is somewhat more slippery and wet than the rain-tamped, sandy street.

—This is clay through here, Chacho warns them, and slows down a bit. Nula and Gutiérrez move cautiously, feeling the wet mud against the soles of their shoes, squeaking under Gutiérrez’s now hesitant boots. The flashlight beam, projecting over the earth, reveals a brilliant, glistening circle of reddish mud. After walking some fifty meters over the embankment, noisily and with a few slips and hasty acrobatics, and crossing a scrub, they come out on another sandy road. To one side stands a large, whitewashed ranch, a light shining through a small window, and, to the other, they can sense the splashing and unmistakable smell of the river. A sudden watery upheaval betrays the rise and immediate submergence of a large fish. Chacho probably hasn’t even heard it, and though Nula and Gutiérrez are both familiar with the sound, it produces, because they don’t often hear it, a sense of pleasure.

Chacho, passing the flashlight beam quickly over the roof and white facade of the ranch, says, That’s my house, and turns back toward the river.

A cluster of young acacias struggle near the riverbank.

—Watch your step, the water’s up, Chacho says, and he stops so suddenly that Nula and Gutiérrez, pressed together under the umbrella and colliding as they brake, almost run him over. He passes the bright beam over the trees, the earth, the bank, the water, and eventually the light collides, somewhat weakly, against the vegetation on an island across the river. As the light beam retraces the same path, in reverse, Nula is able to make out, on the surface of the river, the parallel waves pocked with rainfall and formed by opposite forces, the downstream current and the wind from the southeast, apparently the same ones they saw upriver earlier that day, and whether they’re the same waves or identical waves it’s difficult to know, because the law of becoming, manifested here as false repetition, constructs its shabby platform of permanence right in the eye of the whirlwind.

A red canoe, shining in the rain, rocks gently among the reeds. Three damp ropes, tied to the trunk of a tree, extend from the water’s edge. Chacho studies them a moment and then, crouching, grabs one of the three, lifts it slightly, and starts to haul it in, energetically but carefully. Then he turns around and extends the flashlight to Nula.

—Shine it here, please, he orders politely. Obligingly, Gutiérrez raises the umbrella slightly, not enough to cover the other two, and Nula, with a hint of treachery, thinks he must want to play a part in the scene—singular, at least to men from the city—that is developing in the rainy darkness. Pulling up on the rope, slowly, carefully, Chacho takes out a wooden cage built from a wine case, its interior compartments disassembled and a few panels added to the outside to cover the openings without closing them off completely, allowing the cage to fill with water when it’s submerged.

—Shine it here, Chacho repeats, brusquely, and, releasing a few hooks, opens the lid. Nula points the flashlight at the opening, and the white circle shines into the bottom of the cage. Two gleaming, silver fish with long whiskers and trembling dorsal fins twist desperately inside, and, lunging spastically, they collide and crash against the walls of the cage. With a single, deft movement, Chacho, who, in his burlap cloak, looks like a priest at some ancient ritual, grabs one of the fish by the middle, near the dorsal fin, and without straightening up, moves it slightly away from the cage into the flashlight beam, flips it belly-up, and splits it with a single incision, liberating it, Nula thinks, from the spasm of agony that still convulses the other, removing it forever from its strange fishy universe, as incomprehensible to the fish as to the three men standing overhead, a universe that, as cruel and adverse as it might seem, has yet to be seized from his associate struggling at the bottom of the cage. After splitting the fish, Chacho drops the knife on the ground, inserts his free hand into the open belly, and, in one tug, yanks out its guts and throws them into the river, causing, as they hit the water, a sudden upheaval, a noisy and violent tremor, as other, hungry fish struggle over the unexpected offering. Chacho places the dead fish on the ground, picks up the knife, and, with the same quickness, carries out the same operation on the second fish. Then he carries both fish to the water and washes them in the river, and then his hands, and finally, standing up and taking from his pocket a wrinkled plastic bag emblazoned with a green W from the hypermarket, drops the two fish inside and extends the bag to Gutiérrez.

—Here, he says.

Nula follows their movements with the white flashlight beam, but because of how close they are the circle is constrained and the only things that appear in the beam of light are their arms, a section of their bodies at waist level, and the plastic bag, whose logo Nula recognizes. Gutiérrez’s free hand goes into his pocket and comes out with a few bills, moving toward the hand that’s just given him the bag; this other hand shakes vigorously in the white light while Chacho’s voice, from the darkness above, firmly protests.

—No, sir, I couldn’t. Those fish belong to the club. When you need some more, I can sell you some of my own if you want.

—Thank you, Gutiérrez says in a grateful voice (maybe too grateful, Nula thinks, not feeling, because he’s never left the area, the same fervency toward this altogether commonplace situation) from some vague space in the rainy darkness between the white circle that illuminates the lower parts of their bodies, on the sandy riverbank, and the multicolored umbrella above their heads.

—If you’re going to Doctor Russo’s house, don’t go by the river side at this hour, Chacho says. Take the road instead. It’s easy from here.

He holds out his hand for the flashlight. The quick movements, the change of hands and direction, make the beam of light land randomly, a fleeting disorder, on fragments of distant and near things, on trees, on the grayish, slanting rain, on the earth, the river, and their bodies, disparate moments of space and time floating in the blackness, which to Nula seem a more accurate representation of the empirical world than the double superstition of coherence and continuity that men have grown accustomed to under the constant somnolence that the tyranny of the rational enforces. They move away from the river again. Chacho walks at the head of the group, through the young acacias punished by the rain, by the season, and, most likely, by the rise and fall of the water. The coastline silence is undisturbed by the rain, and when they have moved far enough from the water that they can no longer hear its rhythmic splashing at the riverbank, all that is heard is the sound of their steps, snapping, scuffling, against sand, water, weeds, wet mud, a complex but sustained rhythm interspersed with the ephemeral dissonance of scrambling or involuntary interjections. When they are close to the ranch, Chacho veers off to the left, and the flashlight beam tracks from his sandals some ten or fifteen meters ahead, illuminating what appears to be a road. Above it, at a distance that’s difficult to measure, possibly two or even three blocks ahead, appears a row of streetlights, shining tenuously.

—This here runs into the road. When you get there, turn right, to the north, and it’s only a few minutes to the Russo place. Here, he says, and puts the flashlight back in Nula’s hand. Give it to Doctor Escalante tomorrow or the day after, or bring it by the club.

—Thanks for everything, Nula says.

—Not a problem, Chacho says. Good luck.

—Right, Nula says. Now that it’s over it’s stopped.

—So it goes, Chacho says, laughing, and he disappears into the darkness. They listen to the fading sound of his sandals, which must be completely soaked, snapping as they hit the ground. Gutiérrez stands motionless, looking into the darkness where the other has disappeared.

—Sergio must have some good left in him, for his friends to treat us like this, he says in a low voice, but loud enough for Nula to hear. Then he turns and walks alongside Nula, who shines the light across the successive fragments of ground they venture over. When they reach the first streetlight, Nula turns off the flashlight, and though a few small, isolated ranches have begun to appear, they keep to the middle of the road. Three horses are pastured in the darkness, near an unplastered brick house. Out of curiosity, Nula turns on the flashlight and illuminates them, but the horses don’t even look up: all three are in the same position, their necks angled toward the ground, their teeth pulling at the grass, their heads still, two of them parallel to the street, facing opposite each other, and a third, who’s only visible at the hindquarters, its tail shaking slightly. Nula turns off the flashlight.

When they reach the paved road Nula slips climbing up the embankment and Gutiérrez grabs his arm with the hand that carries the plastic bag—the other holds up the multicolored umbrella—to keep him from falling over. They cross the road so as to walk against traffic, and their steps become noisier, but also more firm, against the asphalt paving. For a while, they walk without speaking. They pass a brightly lit, empty gas station on the left, and on their right the main road into town, the illuminated, perpendicular streets that extend from the road toward the town center, the square, the levees built up against the floods, the river. Every so often, the headlights of an oncoming car force them to step onto the shoulder, into the mud and saturated weeds, and when the car passes they step back onto the pavement, moving more easily again. For a good stretch they seem to have forgotten each other, but every time headlights appear against the black backdrop of the lamp-lit, asphalt road, gleaming in the rain, they step sideways in a way that appears practiced and synchronized, without advance notice, deftly and exact, onto the shoulder. In the quickly approaching headlights the invisible rain takes on a fleeting, grayish materiality that is vaguely spectral, dense, and slanting, pierced by the beams, shining, and then, as they pass, is suddenly swallowed again by the darkness. And after the car has passed, Nula turns on the flashlight and the circle of white light, at once steady and mobile, restores it.

Of all the witnesses from that time, Gabriela Barco said, he’s turned out to be the most useful—he remembers everything. And Soldi: He can recite from memory entire books that the authors themselves don’t even remember writing. After he first met Gutiérrez, by the swimming pool, when he happened to run into the two of them at the Amigos del Vino bar and Soldi hinted that Lucía might actually be his daughter, they started describing their interviews with Gutiérrez on the literary scene in the city during the fifties. His Roman Law professor, Doctor Calcagno—that is, Lucía Riera’s legal father—got him a job at his firm, where he was partners with Mario Brando, a firm that, by the way, was one of the most important in the city at the time, Soldi said. And Gabriela: Brando was the head of the precisionist movement; the precisionist specialty consisted of integrating traditional poetic forms with the language of the sciences. They made some waves at the time. Gutiérrez, though he had nothing to do with the movement, saw Brando constantly, because he worked for him, and while his bosses went about their political and literary lives, he did all the work for the firm. He worked there for a while until one day—it was Rosemberg who first told us this, but Gutiérrez later confirmed it, implicitly—suddenly, without saying goodbye to anyone, and without anyone knowing why, he disappeared. The other day, Gutiérrez explained why he left: besides his three friends—Rosemberg, Escalante, and César Rey—he didn’t have anyone else in the world. Because they were working, Soldi and Gabriela had a stack of papers on the table, and Soldi’s briefcase, as usual, sat open on the chair next to him, within reach, containing papers, books, index cards, pencils, and so on, which he would arrange and rearrange. He grabbed a notepad, and, while he talked, consulted the notes that he’d been taking during the interview, which they’d also recorded: He remembered the first and last names of almost every precisionist because Calcagno had taken him to quite a few meetings and because Brando, who never invited the group’s members to the law firm, would sometimes send him on errands for the group. Brando was a true strategist, and Gutiérrez says that despite his apparent lack of empathy, his talent for publicity and organization was undeniable. And Gabriela: Not only does he remember everything, but the act itself, when our questions require it, seems to cause him incredible pleasure. All it takes is a name, a date, or the title of a book or a magazine, and he starts talking in that calm voice, which doesn’t change even when he’s recalling polemics, betrayals, or suicides. He seems to get the same pleasure from it that someone else might get from describing Paradise, but he doesn’t try to gloss or hide anything, and in that same smooth, even tone, he can be ironic, disdainful, mocking, and cruel. Turning the pages of his notebook, backward, rereading his notes to find what he’s looking for, Soldi continued speaking without looking up: Before leaving, he said, he burned all his papers, stories, poems, and essays, and he left for Buenos Aires intending to commit himself to writing, but he happened to meet a movie producer who offered him a job proofreading screenplays that were about to be filmed. And with what he made from that he left for Europe. As a joke, he recited a few poems that he’d written at the time, and that, in his own words, despite having been burned before he left the city, had been impossible to forget, which illustrated the Buddhist belief in reincarnation: not being able to forget his own poems proved that he was paying for his crimes in another life. I jotted down two verses: “The rigging will never see this port / there will be no other moment for your sadness.”

Nula’s cell phone, from the bottom of his pocket, announces a call. Lost in thought, he only hears it after the third ring, and, passing the flashlight to his other hand—he only turns it on now when passing cars force them onto the shoulder—he takes it from his pocket and brings it to his ear. Addressing himself to the person on the phone, who calls from some unspecified place, but at the same time to Gutiérrez, who walks beside him silently in the darkness, Nula shouts:

—Where am I, you say? I’m on the river road, north of Rincón, soaked to the bone under a toy umbrella. It’s raining buckets and for the last three hours I’ve been with a client who decided to tour the landmarks of his far-off youth. Because everyone knows that when it comes to the Amigos del Vino, as the sales manager taught us during the practicum seminar, the customer is always right. Is everything set for tomorrow, both at the same time as today? You’re a genius, Américo. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.

Nula hangs up the phone and puts it back in his pocket. That was my boss again, he says. He’s perfectly obedient, as you can see.

—This drenching has earned you a roasted catfish, Gutiérrez says.

—Are you inviting me over for dinner? Nula says. I accept, if I can bring the wine.

—Why not? An astonishing country, where everything is free, Gutiérrez says.

But it is written that tonight they won’t eat together. A light is on in the house when they arrive, and a compact black car is parked next to Nula’s green station wagon. Nula turns on the flashlight and casts the beam over the cars, the front of the house, the trees in the side courtyard, and finally shuts it off.

—A visitor, Gutiérrez says, and pushes open the gate, the same white gate that, Nula recalls, Gutiérrez locked before they started their hike along the river.

—Come in, I’ll introduce you, Gutiérrez says.

—Is it family? Nula says, following obediently, feeling his heartbeat accelerate and trying, simultaneously, to keep his voice steady when he speaks, in such a high-pitched tone that he’s forced to cough in the middle of the sentence in order to recover his usual gravity. But Gutiérrez, who moves toward the door, closing the umbrella, doesn’t seem to hear him.

—Come in, he says again, even friendlier than before. He’s about to put the key in the lock when the door opens from the inside, so suddenly that Nula jumps, an involuntary, barely audible exclamation escaping from his mouth. But Lucía, smiling, is already standing in the illuminated, rectangular doorway, and, receiving Gutiérrez, gives him a quick, noisy kiss on the cheek. Gutiérrez steps aside, and, with a slightly mysterious half-smile that Nula, stupefied by his emotions, tries unsuccessfully to interpret, assumes the need to offer them an utterly conventional introduction.

—Do you know each other? Mr. Anoch, enologist and philosopher—but which comes first? Lucía Calcagno.

Nula is about to stammer something, but Lucía preempts him.

—No, she says, still smiling, and offers her hand.

No, Nula thinks, as he holds out his own. She said no.

—Good to meet you, he says, his voice breaking. They shake hands two or three times and then let go.

—I had some stuff to do in the city and when I was on my way back to Paraná it occurred to me to come say hi.

—Great idea, Gutiérrez says, shaking the plastic bag. There’s two catfish here begging for the oven. Come in, come in, he says to Nula again.

Nula stands frozen in the doorway.

—No, thank you, I’ll leave you to your family, he says, thinking, constantly, and evermore intensely, as they say, She said no. Another time. Sunday.

After the door closes behind him and he starts to walk toward his car through the rainy darkness, Nula shakes his head in disbelief. She said no, he thinks, and a dry, sarcastic, inward laugh escapes his lips. The headlights, when he turns them on, illuminate the entire facade of the house, the white wooden gate, the white walls, the space that separates the gate from the front door, the trees growing alongside the house, but the image through the windshield, pearled across its surface by droplets of rain, is disintegrated and luminous. The white surfaces, even the white, lacquered wood bars of the gate, seem paradoxically more irregular, and the contours of things more uncertain, lines seemingly drawn by a seismograph, and the lights from the house, or from the headlights bouncing off the white gate, refract in each of the drops stuck to the windshield, a static flicker that the wiper blades, after he starts the engine, take several passes to erase, a pointless exercise, in any case, since after each pass, new drops fall, luminous, from the black heights of the countryside and cover the glass again. He puts the car in reverse, then goes forward, then reverses again, and finally starts down the sandy path toward the paved road. The glimmer disappears, only to reappear each time the headlights of an approaching car reflect off the drops that, despite the ceaseless arcs traced by the wiper blades, their trajectory accompanied by the same resonant sweep, accumulate repeatedly against the glass. Holding the wheel with one hand, Nula takes the cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his camper, moves the pack to the hand resting on the upper portion of the steering wheel, takes out a cigarette, and, after putting it between his teeth and lighting it and releasing a thin cloud of smoke, returns the cigarettes and lighter to the camper pocket. (He wasn’t wrong when he thought he’d be smoking a lot today.) He shifts slightly in his seat to find a comfortable position, grabs the wheel in both hands, and accelerates slightly by applying unconscious pressure to the gas pedal with his foot. With another short, sarcastic laugh, which makes the cigarette quiver, shaking his head back and forth, he mutters, She said no! She said no! He laughs again, and though he thinks he gets the complexity of the situation—he doesn’t realize yet that the situation might be much more complicated than he imagines—there are, undoubtedly, traces of bitterness in the sarcasm.

The enormous hypermarket complex appears to his left, its eight theatres, its parking lot, its coffee shops, its cafeteria, and its restaurant all seemingly deserted despite the grandiose display of lights and colors hovering in the darkness of the countryside. The lights shine off the wet bodywork of the fifteen or twenty cars scattered around the parking lot, none of them near the main entrance. A year before, the land that is now occupied by the hypermarket was just a swamp in the middle of an empty floodplain—constantly under water, even when it was dry everywhere else—between La Guardia, where the road splits toward Paraná, and the branch of the river from which the city rises. Nula hesitates a few seconds, slowing down, deciding whether or not to turn into the complex; on Friday, Amigos del Vino starts a week-long promotion there, and he wants to finalize a couple of details with whomever’s in charge, but immediately he changes his mind and accelerates again. The network of lights and colors passes, then reappears for a few seconds, fragmentary, in the rear-view mirror before it disappears completely. Now the road widens into four lanes, and is lit up by tall, downward-curving poles projecting onto the reflective asphalt. The city lights appear overhead, to the right the straight line of lamps on the waterfront, and, to the left, less regularly, the lights on the port, on the avenues converging toward the river, on the buildings of various heights that stand out from the rest, on the regatta club. The car reaches the bridge. It’s so brightly lit that the city, despite its multiplicity of lights, appears dark on the other side. She said no, Nula says again, and, to underscore his disbelief, shakes his head in such a way that the cigarette, which he hasn’t taken from his lips since lighting it, and which he’s consumed a good portion of by now, vibrates in the air, disturbed by the words he says, by the movement of his lips as he shapes them, and by the negative sign, turning his head from left to right and right to left, several times, in the darkness, that expresses his at once ironic and confused bitterness. The combination of these movements causes the smoke that rises from the lit end of the cigarette and from his lungs, though his nose and mouth, to form a turbulent cloud between Nula’s face and the windshield, where the rain drops, swept aside by the wiper blades, rematerialize, obstinately, and it’s through this cloud that Nula, leaving the bridge, with another short, dry, and sarcastic laugh, sees the first rain-soaked streets as the car enters the city.

Gutiérrez also ended up alone early. Lucía didn’t accept his invitation to dinner, and left for Paraná almost immediately after Nula’s sudden departure. And so Gutiérrez has put the fish away in the fridge, and, to counteract any negative effects of the rain, has taken a hot shower, eaten some cheese and grapes he found in the fridge, and settled into what, with self-directed irony, he calls the machine room (satellite television, videocassette player, video camera, computer, printer, modem, radio, compact disc player, telephone, library, record collection, video collection, and so on), trying to work for a while. The millions that he’s unaware of Moro assigning him are in fact imaginary. It’s true he has some savings, and that the sale of a screenplay for Wolf Man two years before secured him his best fees ever for a movie, even though it was never filmed, but there’s nothing in the world that could get him to stop working, and at this moment he’s editing two other screenplays for which he’s already been given an advance, so he couldn’t abandon them even if he wanted to. Though it may be expensive for the area, the riverside house—the people in Buenos Aires who sold it to him never mentioned Doctor Russo, and he only heard the name after he’d moved in—cost him much less than an apartment in Rome or Geneva would have, and actually its location isn’t inconvenient: if he had to make a Thursday afternoon meeting in Rome, for example, he’d simply have to take the Wednesday morning flight at nine fifteen from Sauce Viejo, connect in Ezeiza three hours later, and he’d be at the Piazza de Popolo for lunch by noon on Thursday. Luckily, the Swiss producer, his longtime employer, is also an old friend; he considers Gutiérrez reliable, his principal collaborator on screenplays, and though he never knew Gutiérrez’s reasons for moving to Rincón, and never completely approved of the decision (for personal rather than professional reasons), Gutiérrez knows that he can depend on him, and while the producer’s business continues to operate they’ll continue to work together. Since he’s been in Rincón, he’s already made two trips to Europe, one to Rome and another to Madrid, but a week later he was already anxious to finish his work and return to Doctor Russo’s house. (Everyone calls it that, and one night Marcos pointed out that, wherever he was, in this world or the next, the doctor had once again managed, nominally at least, to hijack another man’s home.)

After working a while, almost till midnight, proofreading an Italian screenplay, Gutiérrez gets up and goes to the kitchen for a cold glass of water. Still on the table are the three cases of wine Nula brought for him and, in a plastic bag, the local chorizos. Gutiérrez stops in front of the wooden cases and scrutinizes them for a moment, as though he were trying to guess what they contain, then he opens the fridge, eats two or three grapes from a plate, and, after pouring a glass of water, takes it to his office and leaves it on his desk. He takes a few sips, and then, from a metal box in the second drawer, he pulls out a black and white photograph.

It’s an enlargement of a photograph of Leonor Calcagno, from the late fifties, when she was twenty-three or twenty-four. It was taken by a street photographer in front of the suspension bridge, the major tourist attraction in the city—along with the Franciscan convent, built by the natives in the seventeenth century—since 1924, the year it was built, until 1983, when the flood knocked it down. In the desk drawer, in the same tin box from which he’s just taken the enlargement, Gutiérrez has the original photo, in which he, in a light summer suit, is standing next to Leonor. The enlargement shows the blurry edge of his left shoulder, against Leonor’s, covered by her flower-patterned dress. Gutiérrez knows every detail of the photo from memory, and every time he would look at it, during his first years in Europe, he would concentrate on Leonor’s face, its features, its gaze, its expression. The idea for the enlargement came from thinking that, in the original photo, everything surrounding Leonor’s face was superfluous, and the enlargement, ultimately, was a way of fixing, optically and chemically, on a specific point, not the image itself but rather the unstable attention of the viewer, the enlargement, at once benign and insistent, presenting the brilliance of a detail cleansed of the useless detritus of the surroundings. A photo of Lucía sits in a glass frame on the desk. Gutiérrez holds the photo of the mother up to the one of the daughter and compares them. Their similarity is apparent, but they’re also very different. Lucía’s features remind him of someone he knew or still knows, though altered, but despite how hard he tries he can’t figure out who it is. He concentrates on the photo of Leonor again. It was the summer of 1958/59 and nothing had happened between them yet. They’d go for walks sometimes, pretty much out in the open. At the end of that summer, Calcagno, her husband, had gone on a trip.

Even though Calcagno was partners with Mario Brando, and was probably richer, and enjoyed a greater reputation as a lawyer, and was at least ten years older (and at least twenty years older than his wife), his admiration for Brando as a literary figure had practically enslaved him, something that happened with every other member of Brando’s precisionist movement. Despite having been a cultural attaché in Rome during the first Peronist government, Brando had shifted to the opposition in 1953, and after the Revolución Libertadora he began occupying official posts in the provincial government. But it was his literary reputation, which overflowed the borders of the province—validated by his regular publications in La Nación and in various magazines in Córdoba, Chile, Lima, and Montevideo—that ultimately subjugated Calcagno, an expert in Roman law, an excellent litigator, and the one who did practically all the work for the firm. To his followers, the founder of precisionism was simply charismatic; to his enemies, he was an autocratic tyrant who demanded selfless devotion to the precisionist ideals, not to mention complete obedience to the leader of the movement. According to César Rey, who once threw a glass of wine in his face—this was sometime around 1957, when he was drunk at a dinner party—Brando was a talentless puppet who used his alleged literary gifts to charm the rich into giving him legal work or official posts regardless of who was in power. But there were many people who believed the opposite, and the precisionist movement and its leader enjoyed a considerable reputation. To Gutiérrez, Brando was a good writer of sonnets who tried to pass himself off as avant-garde. What bothered him was when Brando would give him work that had nothing to do with the firm, which fed a certain ambiguity that made people think that Gutiérrez, who was still very young and too financially dependent on him to protest, was one of his disciples. What at the time made him uncomfortable seemed useful in retrospect, since thanks to his work at the firm he made connections with the literary scene. Gutiérrez valued Calcagno, not only because he’d been a good professor or because he’d found work for him, but also because he was intelligent and sincere. But, along with other personal reasons, his strange devotion to Brando, who was inferior to him in every way, ultimately brought out Gutiérrez’s contempt for him.

That summer, Calcagno and Brando had gone to a poetry festival in Necochea, and that trip had given them, him and Leonor, some space. They could see each other at any time of day without their time being limited, as it tended to be otherwise. They were at a point in their relationship when, no matter the subject, their opinions always coincided, something which they noticed every so often, euphorically, always with a renewed sense of astonishment. Gutiérrez still hadn’t expressed his feelings in any straightforward way, but the increasing precautions they took not to be seen together revealed, though they didn’t seem to realize it, the nature of their intentions.

They went out to a restaurant, a secluded place near the waterfront whose owner Gutiérrez knew. Since it was summer, there was hardly anyone there; if they weren’t on vacation, most people still preferred to eat outdoors, at grill houses or beer gardens, to escape the suffocation of the hot nights. The owner sat them in an annex at the back that only fit a handful of tables, all empty but for theirs. When they were alone, their hands caressed on the table, unselfconscious, almost distractedly, and at one point Gutiérrez had stood and stepped around the table, leaning over to kiss her, just when the owner, who, because he knew him, was serving them himself, came in unexpectedly with something, and pretended not to have seen anything. Soon after that, when Gutiérrez got up to go the bathroom, the owner called him over and told him there was a room behind the restaurant that could be rented by the hour, but that he could have for the whole night and even the next day if he wanted, since it was Sunday and the restaurant would be closed, and that he could stay as long as he wanted since the room was actually separate from the restaurant and had its own entrance through the courtyard, and that he could return the key on Monday morning.

When he returned to the table, Gutiérrez already had the key in his pocket, but he waited a while before asking Leonor to the back room. He was afraid that she’d be angry and that the night would be cut short. He was sure she wouldn’t accept, and he’d already decided that if she said no he wouldn’t insist—he couldn’t bear the idea that Leonor would be offended and stop seeing him—but when he finally suggested it, he was surprised by the open and straightforward way she considered the idea, interrogating him at length about the owner’s discretion and not about the intentions that a young law student might have regarding the wife of the professor who’d given him a job as a clerk in his firm. Actually, it was like Leonor hadn’t understood that the point of going to the back room was to make love, and simply wanted to clarify the owner’s ethics and his discretion, first of all, along with his sense of honor, his habits, and his family history. After discussing all of these points with Gutiérrez, Leonor seemed satisfied and accepted but said that they should wait until the patrons and two or three employees in the front of the restaurant had left. She would only go to the back room when, with exception of the owner, who would lead them through the dark courtyard and disappear, no one was left in the place but them. So they went on talking as before. About an hour passed, more or less, and the conversation was so animated that for a while Gutiérrez forgot that eventually they’d be going to the back room, and he was almost sorry when the owner interrupted them, around midnight, to lead them first through an old tiled courtyard with a large refrigerator, a covered balcony, and two or three half-open doors, then through a kind of storage room where, in the weak light, wine racks, sacks of flour, several folded chairs and tables, a soda machine, and two or three dozen bottles stacked around it were just visible, and then through another courtyard, with trees and brick path through flowerpots and vegetable beds. Finally, after opening the door to a small room attached to the back wall of the garden, whispering, The switch is to the left when you go in, and discreetly taking the money Gutiérrez had already prepared to give him when they reached the room, he disappeared silently into the dark courtyard that they’d just crossed, where the only thing that caught the weak light was the brick gravel path that had led them there.

They went in. At twenty-four, Gutiérrez was still a virgin. When he reached puberty, he’d masturbated just like everyone else, but in boarding school, where he’d been until he was eighteen, he hadn’t had either the occasion or the stimuli for it, unlike his classmates, who, despite the vigilance of the faculty, never did without it, alone, in groups, in the bedrooms or the bathrooms. In college, he had to work to pay for his classes (in fact, two years passed before he could produce anything, since all the temporary jobs he found didn’t leave him time to study) and after trying to go to bed with a prostitute a few times and failing, he’d stopped trying. The year before, César Rey, unaware of his virginity, had taken him to a brothel, and he was with one of the girls for a while, to no effect. The girl had gone about her work with complete earnestness for almost a full hour, every so often saying, It’s not getting up, honey, no matter how much I suck it and tug it, it won’t get up, and finally they’d given up and just talked until Rey came looking for him. But Gutiérrez knew he wasn’t impotent—prostitutes just didn’t turn him on. A few times he’d been with a friend, dancing or caressing her against a tree, in the shadows of a park, in a dark hallway, and his erection and orgasm had come, but that was at a time when women generally didn’t sleep with their friends or boyfriends, and they all knew that by letting him rub up against her or put his hand up her shirt, and even helping to masturbate him, letting him finish against her thigh, or, what was less risky, in her hand, they would keep him calm and help him to wait for their wedding night. He was a virgin not because he wanted to stay pure or because he was impotent, but only because he’d never been inside a woman. After a few months had passed since he’d gone out with anyone, he started to think, with a sense of defeat, that he’d been denied the vitality that sex incarnated and that could allow him access to what at the time he called normality and real life.

The opposite was actually happening. That vitality, as he called it, that mythic force that the young seek out, was in fact contained inside him, and had been waiting, with exacting patience, for the chance to manifest itself. That night with Leonor he had five orgasms, the first two without pulling out, he thinks whenever he remembers it—not with a sense of pride or self-satisfaction for his virility, but rather with gratitude for something he hadn’t realized was his, something that, unlike what happens to so many others, could only be manifested by a particular feeling (later, when the thing he’d felt during those months had vanished, he would realize that sympathy, admiration, friendship, and even respect, combined with a certain type of physical beauty, could allow him to periodically cash in his backlogged sexual quotas).

The availability of naked bodies produced at once a sense of euphoria and a sort of disbelief—it seemed inconceivable that the two wild animals who explored the most hidden parts of the other’s body, not only shamelessly but in fact ecstatically, with ease and dexterity, with their lips, tongues, teeth, hands, fingers, and nails, gladly swallowing and sharing their fluids, who coaxed spasms and agonizing pleasure from each other, who communicated with breaths, murmurs, moans, screams, and insults were the same people who moments before, over a relaxed meal, had described their work, their artistic tastes, their small pleasures, their travels, their childhoods, and who, for months, had barely dared to look at each other, to let their hands touch, allowing themselves, even when they were alone, only polite conversation. Gutiérrez couldn’t have imagined the double revelation that what was happening produced: a forgetting of the self and, paradoxically, the sudden awareness of being someone different from who he’d thought. Even now, as he examines the enlargement of her face, despite all her faults and failures, he has to acknowledge his debt to Leonor. For Gutiérrez, the person who could provoke that flood of ecstasy that at once transforms the person who feels it and the world he lives in, as imperfect as she may be, inevitably takes part in that splendor. Still, his continued devotion is directed less to the person than to the capacity, which, by some intricate design in the matrix of events, she, unaware of being a carrier, may have ignored or at least misinterpreted.

They copulated from midnight until the next morning, dozing off, half waking and starting up again, rubbing against each other with violence and tenderness. For the rest of his life, he thought about what happened that night. It taught him that love is filtered through desire, its own source, and that the parentheses of ferocity in which it traps its victims, who are also its chosen, are built of the illusion that in the wet embedment of their bodies the sense of solitude, which only increases in the act, is momentary extinguished. And it was this illusion that allowed the universe to seem transformed. When they turned on the light to the room, which was modest but clean and neat, they saw that in the bunk bed, the kind you find in certain family homes, there was a doll lying on the pillow, and, next to the bed, a bicycle against the wall. Before undressing, Leonor took the doll from the bed and placed it carefully on a chair. All night, every time his eyes found the doll, Gutiérrez got the feeling that she was looking back at him, and it seemed like in her frozen and at once vivid gaze there was a strange complicity with what was happening. The bicycle, meanwhile, provided him with what he called, mocking himself, as he often did, his taste of the infinite. In the subsequent decades he would sometimes get the sense, in the minutes that followed a satisfying sexual experience, that he was still in the room with the bicycle, and that a sort of continuity, or unity, rather, had synthesized his life, merging at once innumerable and fragmentary and disparate experiences that he’d for the most part forgotten. A sensory certainty of permanence, of rootedness on the edge of the ceaseless disintegration of things, of an indestructible, unique present, reconciled him, benevolently, with the world.

Their nakedness, their exhaustion, but also the summer night, the silence that settled in, and the desire that, though it only surfaces sporadically, is by definition infinite, and, like time, whose essence, in a sense, it shares, works unnoticed on those it transforms, brought them to the daybreak, to the morning, to the warm, empty Sunday. Before dawn, in the dark breathlessness of the twilight, a sparrow sang among the trees in the garden, and, with the first light, the goldfinches came, greeting the sunrise, the new day, with an excited racket that, Gutiérrez now thinks, is as splendid as it is absurd. And he sees himself again, naked in the bed, with Leonor sleeping naked beside him on the white sheet, twisted and soaked in sweat, and he can still hear, thirty-some years later, the clamor of the birds, who’ve once again forgotten that the same incomprehensible fire had come from the east the previous day, and the day before and the one before that, exhausting the sequence in an intangible past, previous even to memory, and who believe that the radiance that reveals the world and dissolves the darkness is meant for them alone and is happening for the first time, just like someone trapped in the magical halo of desire thinks that the feeling he gets from the rough touch of rough flesh is being manifested, finally, for the first time since the world began.

Of course, Leonor came to his house several times after that night; of course they happily made love again and again; of course they decided to run off to Buenos Aires or Europe or wherever; of course Gutiérrez arranged everything and of course Leonor changed her mind at the last second, choosing to stay with her husband, who heard the portion of the story, described as a strong mutual attraction, that, of course, did not include what they actually did. Of course, when he found out, Gutiérrez, who drank almost no alcohol at the time, got drunk and went looking for a whore to sleep with; of course, as usual, despite the girl’s best efforts, she couldn’t put him in the right condition. He woke up in an alley, lying in mud, his body aching and bruised. The next day he got on a bus to Buenos Aires, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, disappeared from the city for more than thirty years.