Читать книгу Scars - Juan José Saer - Страница 10

THERE’S THIS FILTHY, EVIL JUNE LIGHT COMING through the window. I’m leaning over the table, sliding the cue, ready to shoot. The red and the white balls are across the table, near the corner. I have the spot ball. I have to hit it softly so it hits the red ball first, then the white, then the back rail between the red ball and the white ball. The red ball should hit the side rail before mine hits the back rail, which it should make for at an angle after it’s hit the white ball. Like so: mine will just kiss the red—which will then hit the side rail—and ricochet toward the white as the red comes back toward the white ball, in a straight line, from the side rail. My ball will trace an imaginary triangle. The red will travel the base of this triangle, from one point to the other. If the vector isn’t perfect, the red won’t have time to travel far enough toward the white. It will need to have crossed enough of the table—coming from the side rail—before mine hits the back rail and comes back again, slowly, at an angle.

That cold, filthy light coming through the window. It’s colder than who knows what. And what we need is a sun that’s like the people, not this watery light. All it’s good for is showing how the cigarette he just threw on the tiles is still lit. A thin, disintegrating, blue smoke column that rises and disappears. And with everything so slow it always looks like the same thin column and always the same disintegrating trail, not a continuous trail of smoke rising and disintegrating into an imaginary block of light. No, not a block. That filthy light couldn’t be a block. Who knows what rancid sun it came from. It shouldn’t be here, there’s no use for it. It should make for some other bar on some other planet, some godforsaken, misbegotten planet somewhere else. It shouldn’t be here. We need something different, a hot, dry, blinding light. Because it’s cold. It’s fucking cold. Cold as the blessed mistress. The polar icecap is probably a sauna compared to this. It’s nuts. In Antarctica you could be walking around butt naked, and here you hock up a ball of phlegm and an ice cube hits the sidewalk. Everyone goes around coughing up ice. Just the other day some guy walking down San Martín opened his mouth to say Hi to his friend on the opposite sidewalk and couldn’t close it again because it filled up with frost. They had to take a soldering iron to his mouth because the cold was pouring in and freezing his blood. If this keeps up, the first chance I get I’m jumping in bed with like ninety blankets and not coming out till January.

Since flicking away that cigarette he hasn’t done a thing. He’s standing there, stock still, with the cue in his hand. Watching how I slide the cue, aiming, slowly. He doesn’t seem to see. Thinking of something else, for sure. Who knows what. Maybe he’s thinking about a pair of tits, because he’s one of those guys whose brains are all at the back, pressed against their spine by a big pair of tits that takes up at least eighty percent of their skull. Some guys, all they have in there is a pair of tits—a pair of tits and nothing else. Some guys you can even see the nipples coming out through their eyes. Those are the guys with purple pupils. You can tell right away by looking at the color of their pupils—they’re purple. Maybe he’s not thinking about that. Maybe he’s thinking about the week ahead, one night, sitting down under the desk lamp and in one go writing something that changes the world. Tons of guys pass the time thinking one week to the next, pow, they’ll rock the world with a single uppercut. All they have to do is raise their hand (condescend to raise their hand, as they see it) and like that they’ve covered the surface of the earth with the holy word. Maybe he’s also thinking that the cigarette burned his mouth, that he should roll his tongue and collect some saliva to cool it off, then spit, or that now he’ll take his right hand from the cue and put it in his right pants pocket. Or maybe nothing. Maybe even the tits are gone and now there’s nothing in there, nothing but surface, not the pale cone of light or the dim field of sound echoing around the pool table, the cone of light that contains just the three balls, the cues, the table, and the two of us—and him just barely—nothing but the dry green-black walls, corroded by the built-up rust of old thoughts and memories, dark all throughout. Watching, motionless, hunched, as I slide the cue, slow, aiming. He looks, but I don’t know if he sees. Who could swear he does? Not me. If someone wants to swear he sees, go ahead and swear. I won’t. All I know is that after flicking the cigarette he turned his head toward where I’m bent over the table sliding the cue, that an exhausted, absolutely evil June light is coming in through the bar window, and that my task holds back every external thing that’s flooding in toward the table. My task is to make my ball run slowly toward the red, hit it, then ricochet toward the white, connect again, then rebound off the back rail, returning at an angle, in the opposite direction, giving the red enough time—after it hits the side rail—to return in a straight line toward the white and reunite in a way that leaves my ball, which passed behind the red, in a good spot for the next carom.

—Six, I say. But it still wasn’t the sixth: the ball was rolling close to the rail, after softly hitting the white ball, which belonged to Tomatis, on a straight line back toward the red. When they hit, I was moving toward the other end of the table and Tomatis was still standing there, leaning against his cue, which was pressed into the tile floor, his outline contrasting sharply against the yellow rectangle of light crashing through the bar window. The contrast covers his thick body with shadows, but a kind of luminous haze surrounds the outline. When the spot ball stopped, after hitting the red, I bent over it again and aimed the cue. Even though I was concentrating on my shot, I knew Tomatis wasn’t paying any attention, standing there, holding the cue against the floor with both hands, looking at the tiles, or the tips of his shoes, surrounded by the haze, the sheen.

—Experience doesn’t come with maturity, I don’t think, he says. Or should I say maturity doesn’t come with experience?

I aim and take a bank shot. After hitting the red ball and the rail, my ball makes for the white ball.

—Seven, I say.

—They’re adding up, Tomatis says, not even looking at the table.

The spot ball hits the white and makes its peculiar sound in the large hall full of clatter, murmurs, shouts. The cone of light that falls on the green table isolates us like the walls of a tent. There are several cones of light across the hall. Each so isolated from the others, and hanging so perfectly apart, that they look like planets with a fixed place in a system, in orbit, each ignorant of the others’ existence. Tomatis is standing at the very edge of that tent of light, with that amazing sheen behind him formed by the light coming in from the nearby window.

I get ready to shoot the eighth. I bend over the table, prop the side of my right hand on the felt, then three fingers, place the cue on a kind of bridge I make with my thumb and index, and with my left hand slide the cue from the base. My gaze alternates from the spot on my ball that the tip of the cue has to hit to the spot on the red ball where my ball will hit, to where the white ball—or my opponent’s, Tomatis, in this case—sits.

—Well aimed, Tomatis says, not even looking. He’s not paying any attention at all to the game—I’ve made thirty-six caroms, and he’s only made two. The two he made were completely by accident, and when he shoots it seems like he wants his turn to end as quickly as possible, so he can return to standing next to the table and running his mouth. The impression you get is that the more caroms his opponent makes the happier he is, since that will allow him more time to stretch out his speech. He’s not clumsy, just careless. I would even say he handles the cue really well—you can tell by how he holds it—compared to lots of people who play straight rail. But, bearing in mind that he can handle the cue, that he’s always the one suggesting a game, and that everyone he invites—Horacio Barco, for example—plays more than he does, I’ve decided that Tomatis uses the game of straight rail as an opportunity to be the only one to talk, and about whatever he wants.

Then he adds:

—Unless you’re an exceptional specimen, but those don’t count as people.

I raise my head before I shoot and say:

—There’s a democrat among us.

—I’ve developed a reputation for wiping my ass with any shit-eating brat who tries to put the screws to me, says Tomatis, laughing.

And so on in that fashion. I started working at the newspaper on February seventh, thanks to him, and they gave me the courthouse section and the weather report. He did general reporting and edited the Sunday literary page. My relationship with Tomatis went back a year. I had just read one of his books, and one day I saw him on the street and followed him until I caught up. He was smoking a cigarette and didn’t realize I was next to him until he stopped at a lottery kiosk and started examining the results.

—You’re Carlos Tomatis, aren’t you? I said.

—So they say, he said.

—I wanted to talk to you because I really enjoyed your book, I said.

—Which one? said Tomatis. Because I have more than three thousand.

—No, I said. One you wrote. The last one.

—Ah, said Tomatis. But it’s not the last one. Only the second. I’m planning to write more.

Then he turned to the results, chewing his cigarette.

—Two forty-five, two forty-five, two forty-five, he muttered, looking at the list of numbers. Not once, two forty-five.

He said goodbye and left. But later we saw each other a few times, and even though we were never able to talk about his second book, I went to see if he could find work for me when my father died and I was left alone with my mother. I knew other people I could ask for work, much more connected than him, but I wanted to ask him. I wanted him to give me something. And he did, because somehow on February seventh at ten in the morning I was with Campo, the old man who had been in charge of the section for ages, and who was about to retire, going up and down the dark corridors between the courtrooms, up and down the polished marble stairs, in and out of desolate, high-ceilinged offices overflowing with filing cabinets.

—This, Campo was saying, wrinkling his old monkey nose, is the Second District Civil Court, that’s the secretary. There’s the law school. Go to the press office on the second floor if you have any questions and ask for the manager, a Mister Agustín Ramírez, he will help you with anything you need.

He labored over several words: “District,” “legal holiday,” “press,” “Ramírez,” waiting for me to write them down. I wasn’t even listening. While Campo’s old monkey face (a tame, sweet monkey, stranger to the civilized world) gestured with every one of its folds, I passed my distracted gaze along the dark corridors where the blurry outlines of litigators and staff came and went, the tall filing cabinets that easily called up the word Kafka, the marble staircases that ascended to the first floor with a wide, anachronistic curve, and the February sun penetrating the lobby through the large entrance.

With the weather report my role was pretty much God’s. Every day around three I had to go to the terrace of the newspaper building and take notes from the meteorological equipment, which I never understood. And when I went to ask Tomatis, who had also started out doing the weather, he told me he hadn’t ever understood them either and as far as he could tell the most rational choices were either duplication or fabrication. I used both methods. For twenty days, in the month of February, I sent the same information about the weather to the print shop, copied letter-for-letter from what had appeared the day before I started at the newspaper. For twenty days, according to the observational devices of the newspaper La Región, the meteorological conditions in the city were the following: at eight in the morning, atmospheric pressure 756.80, temperature 24.2 degrees Celsius, relative humidity 64 percent. With Tomatis’s help I came up with a genius headline for the section: No Change in Sight. On the twenty-seventh of February, a piece of shit rain destroyed the project. Unfortunately I had already handed in the report, because I left early, so when I got to the publisher’s office it had already rained fifteen centimeters since noon the day before, and it was only eleven in the morning. The publisher had a stack of the February editions on his desk, and the weather report section on each copy was marked with a furious red circle.

—We’re not going to fire you, said the publisher. We’re going to suspend you for five days. Not out of charity. We don’t want problems with the union. But the day I happen to feel like it’s cooler than usual and a breeze is in the air, even if it’s only because I woke up in a good mood and the sun is slightly farther from the earth, and that sensation isn’t registered in detail in the weather report, you won’t be walking out of here on your own legs.

So I switched to fabrication. At first I was guided by the opinions of the copywriters, and I guessed numbers based on their predictions. For the first week I took it to the publisher for him to look over, then I stopped after I had regained his trust, or maybe after I realized that he just glanced at them quickly and checked them off with the red pencil, completely satisfied. Eventually the copywriters’ opinions on the weather weren’t enough. It seemed like fabrication from scratch was better, and in accordance with the numbers printed in the columns of the paper, the city was oppressed, melted, felt more youthful with spring warmth, and suffered waves of blood in their eye sockets and furious, deafening popping in their eardrums from the atmospheric effects I had created. It was a real fever. I stopped and went back to fabricating prudently after realizing that Tomatis, who knew every detail of my work, was starting to offer increasingly exaggerated alternatives. It was March sixth, the night of the dinner party they threw for Campo because he had just retired. (After the dinner, old Campo went home and poisoned himself.) During the publisher’s toast, Tomatis started suggesting I invent rainstorms that hadn’t happened, for example storms that had supposedly happened at dawn, and which few people would be in the position to confirm or deny. I realized he wanted to get me fired. At the same time I understood that he hadn’t gotten me the job at the paper out of sympathy or for any other humanitarian reason, but to have someone to talk to in the office, and to borrow money from once in a while. I told him that. And he started to laugh and recited:

I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,

and told him so, but friendship never ends

And he was right. But I held out and muttered:

—The weather report is mine. I decide if it rains or not.

—Still, said Tomatis, I am the author of the idea and I suppose I have a say in the matter.

He was smoking a cigarette, chewing it, and squinting his eyes while blowing smoke in my face.

—I’m getting to know you, I said. First I’m supposed to report a storm that never happened, and eventually I’ll end up writing about a rain of fire.

—And why not? said Tomatis, chewing his words behind his cigarette. It wouldn’t be bad. They’ll feel burnt whether it happens or not. And in any case, Sodom was Disneyland compared to this shithole city.

Then he stood up, in the middle of the publisher’s toast, and left the restaurant. He was always doing that—absentminded, I supposed. But people said Tomatis didn’t do those kinds of things out of distraction, but because he was an asshole pure and simple. So the next day, at Campo’s wake, I asked him.

—Tomatis, I said. Didn’t you realize that the publisher was talking when you got up and left the restaurant?

—Yes, he said.

—Then why did you leave? I asked.

—He pays me a salary to write for the paper, not to hear him give toasts, he said.

So he wasn’t doing it out of distraction. We left Campo’s wake and went to a café.

—Are you writing? I asked.

—No, he says.

—Translating? I asked.

—No, he says.

He was looking at something behind me, above my head. I turned. There was only a blank wall, painted gray.

—What are you thinking about? I asked.

—Campo, he said. Didn’t the old man seem to be laughing at us? I don’t mean that figuratively. I’m not referring to the corpse. I mean last night, at the dinner. He shouldn’t have gone to the party. He should have killed himself before. He made us all look ridiculous. He was always a piece of shit.

I told him he always seemed like more or less a good person to me.

But he wasn’t listening anymore. He was looking over my head at the gray wall.

—I think he killed himself to spite us all, he said eventually.

During the five days of the suspension, I didn’t leave the house once. Only on the fifth of March did I shave and walk out. I spent the five days lying in bed, reading, sitting in a wicker chair on the porch, in the afternoons, or in the mornings walking a hundred laps around the bitterwood in the courtyard. At night I would sit in the middle of the courtyard looking at the stars, in the dark, with a coil lit to keep off the mosquitos. At two or three in the morning sometimes, my mother came home. I would see her open the front door, her outline appearing for a moment against the doorway, and then disappear into the darkness and move quietly toward her bedroom. I would hear the slow, cautious creak of the door opening and closing and then nothing else. She thought I was sleeping. I wouldn’t breathe normally again until I was sure that she was completely asleep. Then I would light a cigarette, fill a glass with ice and gin in the kitchen, take it to the courtyard, get naked, and sit down to smoke and drink the gin in slow sips. I would stay that way until I saw the first glow of the morning light. Sometimes I masturbated. The night of March fourth, when my mother hadn’t gone out, I was out there with my gin in one hand and the cigarette in the other and suddenly the porch light came on, and I saw my mother looking at me from the door to the bedroom. She looked surprised. I had drank more than half a bottle. I jumped up.

—Salud! I said, lifting the glass in her direction and bringing it back for a drink.

She stood there blinking for a few seconds, stock still, looking me up and down. Then, without turning out the light, she went back in her bedroom and slammed the door. Only after she was gone did I realize that I was completely naked, and I had a hard-on.

At that point things started getting bad between us. It was nothing at first, but when we were together we soured. My mother was about thirty-six at that time, and kept herself up very nicely. She was tall and trim and dressed fashionably. Maybe she didn’t have great taste, because she preferred tight clothes. A general idea of her look at that time: once I was with a guy I went to high school with and my mother passed us on the opposite sidewalk, called my name, and blew me a kiss, and when I turned back the guy said he knew that woman, that he had seen her do a strip tease in a cabaret in Córdoba the year before. I told him it was my mother and that he must have been confused because my mother hadn’t been to Córdoba in at least seven years, I was sure of it. Before I could finish the sentence, the guy had disappeared. I think my mother would have been much more attractive if she had left her hair dark instead of dyeing it the month after my father died. Blonde didn’t suit her. My father, while he was bedridden with cancer, could talk to her about how much she went out, and I saw him outright angry when she told him she wanted to dye her hair. My father said he wouldn’t allow it while he was alive. My mother replied that, in any case, the time when she could decide for herself wasn’t far off.

So I was out of the house a lot, especially if there had been a fight for some reason. I was out mostly during the day, because at night was when she wasn’t home. After leaving the paper I would walk around downtown or would go watch the river, and if I didn’t have money to eat something, I would go back to the house around ten thirty—when my mother was sure not to be there—and make whatever I found in the fridge. Then I would take a shower and sit down to read. During the five-day suspension, when I didn’t leave the house, I read The Magic Mountain, which I liked a lot; Light in August, excellent; this little green book called Lolita, a real piece of shit; The Long Goodbye, a seriously genius book; and two idiotic Ian Fleming novels. I read very quickly, and I think I remember pretty well. After my mother found me in the courtyard naked with a hard-on, it wasn’t as easy to move freely around the house, and so at night, when she wasn’t home, was better. Sometimes I would have a beer with Tomatis, until ten, and if I came close to the house and saw a light on, I would wait at a neighborhood bar until I was sure to find the house empty.

March and April were hell. My mother had turned into a panther. At first I decided not to let on, to face it only if it looked like things might get worse, but that wasn’t always possible. And in the end she forced me into a corner. If, for example, I hung my shirt over her bathrobe—a bathrobe anyone with the slightest hygienic tendency wouldn’t touch with a cane—she would show up in my room, standing in the doorway with her legs wide, muttering furiously:

—I told you a thousand times not to put your filthy shirts on my things.

I would get up, walk to the bathroom, take my shirt from the hanger, and throw it in the hamper. She followed me the whole way. When I finished throwing the shirt in the hamper and was walking back to the room, she was blocking my way at the bathroom door, saying:

—Don’t bunch up your clothes; I’m not your maid and don’t need to be taking care of it. You’re old enough to know how to treat your clothes.

I wouldn’t say a thing and walked back to my room. She glared at me the whole way until I sat down, picked up the book, and started reading again. She went back to her room and less than half an hour later she was back.

—Are you going to sit in there all day? she would say. All that garbage you have in your head.

—Garbage? Head? I would ask, confused, looking up at her from the book, not understanding a thing.

She would look back furiously, the cigarette hanging from her lips.

—Do whatever you want, just don’t play stupid with me, she would say.

Then she would disappear again. One afternoon she hit me for saying, as gently as possible, that I didn’t like her answering for the milkman in her bra. She walked straight up and slapped me. I grabbed her arm so hard, to stop her from hitting me twice, that I cut her with a fingernail and she bled—it left a black mark for like a month. When I saw the blood stain on her round, white arm, I let go and let her hit me until she got tired. She went at it until she had enough and then shut herself in her room crying and didn’t come out until that night. All day I felt fine, and around ten she brought me a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of wine and then disappeared. She was dressed to go out, in a yellow dress that fit her like crazy. She didn’t even look twice when she saw that I was using my white shirt as a towel to dry my sweat off.

Fall came at the end of March, though on the twenty-first I made a small comment in the weather report about the change in temperature, the odor of fluttering mothballs, the golden leaves falling from the trees and forming a crinkling carpet on the ground. When he read it, Tomatis cracked up laughing and asked if I had been reading the modernistas again. In the fall the nights under the stars and the glass of gin in the courtyard stopped, and instead I sat in my room, in an armchair, under a lamp, until the morning. My mother came in at dawn, clicking her high heel shoes on the tiles in the corridor. And it didn’t matter if I heard her come in—she actually seemed to have some interest in me hearing her. Sometimes she even looked in my room and said, with some hostility: Oh, you’re still reading, or, It’s obvious he’s not the one who pays the electric bill, and then disappeared. I knew when my mother was about to get home; first I would hear the sound of a car stop and then start up and drive off. Then the sound of the door to the street and then the high heels clicking. Only once did she come in my room after having been in the bathroom then gone to her room and even turned off the light. I was sure she was in bed, and I was completely absorbed in reading The Long Goodbye, which I was reading for the third time in a little over a month, when suddenly the door opened and my mother appeared, in a nightgown, barefoot. The expression on her face was a mix of resignation and distress. She looked at me a second, and just to say something she muttered, Don’t read so much, you’ll get sick in the head. Then she closed the door and left. I had jumped up, startled. Luckily, I was fully dressed.

On April twenty-third it broke out. It rained all day and neither of us went out that night. My mother, who was typically acting like a panther, that night seemed like that special kind of panther who has tasted human flesh and likes it. I always let her do whatever she wanted, but what I could never stand was her walking half-naked around the house, especially when strangers were around. A certain scruple had always existed between us, meanwhile, regarding the gin and cigarettes. The unspoken agreement, especially since my old man died, was that we each had our own bottle of gin and each our own pack of cigarettes, and whoever ran out simply went and bought some. And so around eleven, when it’s raining like crazy, I go to the fridge looking for my gin, bought the day before and which I hadn’t drank more than two fingers from, and realize she took it. I walk slowly down the hall (it was raining buckets), not annoyed at all, just the opposite, and I stop at her bedroom door and knock.

—Who is it? my mother asks, as if fifty people were living with us.

—Me, Ángel, I say.

She hesitates a second, then says to come in. She is laying in bed, reading a comic book, a cigarette hanging from her lips, a glass, the bottle of gin, and an ice bucket on the night table. I’ve seen a bunch of trash heaps, and every one has seemed cleaner than my mother’s bedroom. If she had been naked, the impression would have been more seemly than the one you got from the underwear she had on. Less than three fingers were left in the bottle.

—Mamá, I say. Would it put you out if I poured myself a little glass of gin? That’s the last bottle.

—I thought we agreed that if you need gin you go out and buy a bottle, my mother says.

—That’s true, I say. But don’t you think that with this weather and how late it is that it would be kind of problematic to go out and find a store where you can buy a bottle of gin?

—You should have thought of that earlier, my mother says. It’s not my problem.

—That’s fine, I say. I’m only asking you for a little glass of gin and to try to look away when you talk to me because I could faint any second.

—I hope you’re not trying to say I’m drunk, my mother says.

—I’m not trying to say anything.

—Besides, my mother says, I never liked you drinking.

—Well I never liked my mother letting me see her practically naked, I say.

—I’m not the one walking around naked all night in the middle of the courtyard, my mother says.

—In the dark and when I’m alone, I can walk around however I like. It would be something else entirely if I knew people were watching, I say.

My mother pretends not to hear me and goes back to reading her comic book. Eventually she looks up and realizes I’m still there.

—Still raining? she asks.

—Yes, I say.

My mother looks at me a second, blinking. She puts out the cigarette, stretching her arm out to the night table, sitting up slightly, without taking her eyes off me.

—Besides, I say, staring back. It’s my bottle. You drank my bottle.

I see her smooth, white face go suddenly red, but she doesn’t move for a few more seconds. Then she leaves the comic book on the bed and gets up, very slowly, without looking away. She walks toward me, not furious or hurrying, staring me in the eyes, and stops half a meter away. The flush that had stained her face gradually vanishes. My mother raises her hand and slaps me twice, once on each cheek, then stands there, staring, and probably the two red stains are now on my cheeks instead of hers, as though we traded them. After a few unblinking seconds I raise my hand and slap her twice, once on each cheek. The red stains, now disappearing on my cheeks, appear on hers. Tears gush out. She’s not crying—they started gushing for some inexplicable physiological reason, because no one who is crying could have such a hard look on their face. A pale circle forms around her pressed lips.

—I should have died instead of your father so I wouldn’t have to see this, my mother says.

—Not just this, I say. Any way you look at it, it would have been more convenient.

She slapped me again, and I went into a rage and started hitting and pushing her, threw her on the bed, took off my belt, and didn’t stop hitting her until she started screaming. She didn’t even try to defend herself. When I saw all she was doing was crying, I calmly put my belt back on and poured myself a glass of gin, careful to leave some for her, then dropped two ice cubes in the glass and went back to my room.

I couldn’t concentrate on reading anymore because I had said one unfair thing to her, about the supposed convenience of her dying instead of my father. That was unfair any way you looked at it because my father was so insignificant a man that if the smallest ant in the world died instead of him it would have made more of an impact. He was a middle manager in a public office because he was too stupid to have a regular worker’s responsibility and too weak a personality to be able to give anyone real orders. He didn’t smoke or drink, never felt disillusioned or ever experienced any sort of happiness he might take pleasure in remembering. He had dodged military service through some defect in his sight (he told the story fifty times a day, in such detail and with such enthusiasm that you would have thought he was the general San Martín recalling the battle of San Lorenzo), but it wasn’t such a bad defect that he was prescribed glasses. He was thin but not too thin; quiet but not too quiet; he had good handwriting but sometimes his hands shook. He didn’t have a favorite dish, and if someone asked his opinion on anything at all, he invariably responded, Some people understand those things—not me. But there wasn’t an ounce of humility in his response, rather an absolute conviction that it was the truth. And so when my father died, the only change in the house was that there was now air in the space he had occupied in the bed (for the last six months he hadn’t gotten up). I think that was the most noteworthy change he ever produced: to make space. To open up 1.76 meters (because he was also average height) of vertical space and a certain width so that what he displaced with his body could be reconverted into a breathable substance for the benefit of humanity.

When I went to the paper the next day and found out that Tomatis had gone to Buenos Aires and wouldn’t be back until the twenty-ninth, I felt bad. I had planned to tell him everything. I don’t really know why, since Tomatis rarely seemed to be listening, but still he was the person I trusted the most, and he might understand me having hit my mother. She, meanwhile, stopped speaking to me, and when she had to she used the formal usted. We barely ever saw each other, and now that it was cooler out (it rained almost every day in April, which made it so I could copy the same weather information several times without anyone noticing) my mother didn’t walk around half-naked anymore, like she often did in the summer. Truth is she would put on these loud sweaters that would have been too tight on a fakir, but that was the way she liked to dress and I had to let her even though I didn’t like it. She kept going out at night, and when she came back would go to bed without coming to my room. I would get up late and go to the paper at ten in the morning and wouldn’t come back until ten at night, and sometimes not even then. I remember the fight over the gin happened on April twenty-third because the next day I turned eighteen. I asked for an advance from the management and went to eat a steak. I barely touched the food, but I drank a liter of wine. I wasn’t angry or anything, just wanted to drink some wine, for the fun of drinking it and for the comfort of knowing that I could always have my cup full, to empty in one swallow, and if the bottle kicked I could call the waiter and ask for another from the long rows stacked up on the walls—all that made me feel amazingly good. Then I hesitated between the movies and a hooker and chose the hooker. I didn’t have to wait or anything. They showed me through an entrance where there wasn’t anything but a wooden bench and a standing coat rack, then down a corridor, and finally they put me in a kitchen with two women in it. Both were blonde. They were drinking mate and didn’t even get up. One had a comic book in her hands. I picked the other one. They were so alike (both had on black pants and a white sweater) that now I’m not sure if in fact I went to bed with the one with the comic book or the other one because they might have passed the comic book from one to the other without me noticing, or the one with the comic could have left it on the table as I came in and the other one grabbed it before I noticed. In any case, my selection wasn’t so precise, since I only made a gesture with my head in the direction of the one I thought didn’t have the comic book, and I’m not even sure anymore which one of them got up first. The one who led me away—the one with the comic, or the other one, I’m not sure anymore—took me through a courtyard into a room filled with what I remember as the odor of Creolin, and which was so clean and organized that immediately I thought of my mother’s, by contrast. When she got naked I saw she had the mark of an operation on her belly, a half-moon scar, crisscrossed by the lines from the stitches. I went to bed with her and then went home to sleep.

Tomatis came back the morning of the thirtieth, euphoric, smoking North American cigarettes. He walked into the office with energetic steps and sat down in front of the typewriter. He looked freshly washed and shaved. I told him I had problems with my mother and wanted to talk to him.

—Come have dinner at my house tonight. Bring wine, he said, and started working.

Then I left for the courthouse. A light rain was falling, so that day I sent the same weather report to the print shop as the day before. The gray courthouse seemed more gray in the rain, but a shining gray. The wide, marble stairs in the lobby were dirty with wet mud. They had scattered sawdust on the floor of the entryway, which was full of people. I passed through the law school and then saw Chino Ramírez, from the press office. Ramírez poured me a coffee that looked like it was brewed from the mud in the lobby. Instead of teeth Ramírez had two tiny, brown sierras. I don’t know what disease could have rotted them so badly. He stopped himself laughing to hide them.

—Your judge friend wants to see you, he said. He asked for you.

—I haven’t killed anyone, I said.

—You never know, said Ramírez.

—I guess that’s true, I said. I gestured toward the coffee and, standing up, said:

—Keep an eye on your staff, Ramírez. They’re confused and are serving us the prisoners’ coffee.

He would have laughed more, had his teeth allowed. He gave me the papers he had prepared, and I left the office. Ernesto was working on his fucking Wilde translation. He took it everywhere. When he saw me come in, he closed the dictionary and marked a page in The Picture of Dorian Gray with his red pen.

—Lose my number? he asked.

Something in his face made him look like Stan Laurel, only slightly fatter.

—I haven’t been able to call you because I’ve had a mess of problems with my family, I said. Then I pointed to the Wilde book.

—How’s the translation coming?

—Good, he said, smiling. No one else would think to translate something that’s been translated a million times already.

A report lay on his desk. I managed to read the word homicide.

—Have you sent many people to prison? I asked.

He squinted his eyes before responding and collapsed in his chair.

—Lots, he said.

—Have you ever been to prison? I asked.

—Visiting, a few times, he said.

He guessed what I was thinking.

—It’s the same, he said, inside and outside. Everything is completely the same. Alive, dead, everything is exactly the same.

—I disagree, I said.

—Well it’s a free country, he said, laughing.

—Ramírez said you were looking for me, I said.

—I wanted to see how you were and if you’re free tomorrow night, he said.

—Tomorrow night? I asked. What’s tomorrow?

—I can forgive the youth anything, he said, except coyness. Tomorrow is the first of May.

I must have blushed.

—Yes, I said. I’m free.

—Do you want to have dinner at my house? he asked, standing up.

I said yes, and so the next night I went to his house. It started raining about nine, after a bracing, cold day. I was walking from Tomatis’s house, at the other end of the city, in the north, so I ended up walking through the whole city center to the southern end. The center was deserted, and it was exactly nine when I passed the Banco Provincial building, I could tell by the round clock mounted in the wall over the entrance. In the arcade I drank a cognac and then kept going. Now it was raining. Out on San Martín I walked, whistling, down a few dark blocks where the weak streetlights shone at the intersections. I passed the courthouse, crossed the Plaza de Mayo at a diagonal in front of the government buildings, then back onto San Martín, which at that point became a curved, dead-end street with a single sidewalk and the tree-lined edge of the Parque Sur bordering the opposite side in the darkness. After ringing the bell I turned and briefly saw the lake water glow between the trees. The door opened and I turned around suddenly.

—I was waiting, Ernesto said.

I shook my head.

—It’s raining, I said.

We went upstairs and straight into his study. Ernesto opened the shades covering a large window and then poured two whiskies. On the desk were the Oscar Wilde book, the dictionary, and the composition notebook with the fucking translation manuscript. I leaned over the desk and examined the handwriting: it was so small and tight that it was impossible to tell the vowels apart. Ernesto handed me the glass.

—It’s indecipherable, he said.

—So it seems, I muttered, looking again. Where are you?

Ernesto recited:

—Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say. Something dreadful about marriage. Don’t say it. Don’t ever say things of that kind to me again. Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me. I’m not going to break my word to her. She is to be my wife. I’ve just gotten to wife.

I drank my whole glass at once, feeling Ernesto’s eyes on my face. Then I went to the window. The lake shone over the trees in the park, their leaves glowing green in the darkness. It was crazy looking.

—I like your house, I said. It’s comfortable.

—It is, yes, he said. It’s comfortable.

He was staring at me.

—You should come more often, he said.

—I do what I can, I said, and crossed the room to pour myself more whiskey.

I felt just like one of those toys they sell on the street, which the barker controls with an invisible string, a dark string that he hides and no one else sees: Sit down, Pedrito, and Pedrito plops his cardboard ass on the pavement. His gaze was the string, and I felt cornered in his field of vision, in those square meters illuminated by the warm lamps of the study, and walking toward the bar or the window, it felt like the tension of his gaze would reach its limit any second and I would suddenly find myself stopped with my back to him, up against the end of it. But Ernesto spoke softly, and tried honestly not to hide what he was thinking. Or maybe that’s just me, and it wasn’t honest. We set up all these rules in advance to tell the good from the bad. Even if Ernesto knew he was capable of doing something I called bad didn’t mean that he was honest, and he may have been hiding something even worse behind the thing they call bad. But I think this now and didn’t then, the night of May first, because the night of May first I thought that Ernesto was honest because he was capable of recognizing the bad thing in him.

Then we went to the dining room, and just as we were sitting down (it was eleven), the telephone rang. Ernesto’s servant told him the guard at the courthouse was on the phone. Ernesto put his whiskey down on the table (we were still standing, talking) and disappeared into the study, closing the door. I couldn’t hear a thing. For several minutes it was perfectly silent in the house, so when Ernesto opened the door to his study, on his way back to the dining room, the sound rang out not only at the moment it was produced, but kept echoing the entire time it took Ernesto to cross the long, dark corridor that separates the study from the dining room. It dissipated when Ernesto’s figure reappeared in the entrance to the dining room. He had a stony expression and looked pale. We sat down at the table and ate the first course in silence. Despite being more or less pudgy, Ernesto ate little, in almost insubstantial mouthfuls. I, on the other hand, devoured what the woman served me. During the second course—a chicken that was insanely good—Ernesto finally opened his mouth for something other than the tiny mouthfuls that would have starved a sparrow.

He had barely looked at me during the meal, and now he raised his eyes and whispered:

—A man shot his wife to death with a shotgun earlier today, in Barrio Roma, he said. They want me to take his statement tonight, because they don’t have space for him at the station. I told them to wait until tomorrow afternoon.

—Why did he kill her?

—I don’t know anything, said Ernesto. I know he shot her to death with a shotgun, outside a bar.

—Are you going to take his statement tomorrow? I asked.

—In the afternoon, probably. I have other appointments in the morning, said Ernesto.

—Can I come? I asked.

—We’ll see, said Ernesto.

Then we went back to the study and Ernesto put on the record player. He poured whiskeys, and we sat down to listen to his favorite record, Shönberg’s Violin Concerto (Opus 36). We didn’t say a word while the concerto was playing. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about a girl I was in love with for a full year two years ago. Her name was Perla Pampiglioni. The first time I saw her she was standing at the bus stop near the suspension bridge, on the train station side, to be exact. I went crazy the moment I saw her: we were two meters apart, both standing at the curb, looking sidelong at each other. She had on a yellow dress that showed her arms and neck and her suntanned legs. Her hair was like polished sheets of copper. We took the same bus, and by chance there was only one double seat open, so I sat next to her, giving her the window. She was pretending to look out the window, but every once in a while she glanced at me. I did the same. In the bus’s rear view mirror I could see her knees. We went more than twenty blocks together, and at one point her arm brushed up against mine. Then, in the city center, she got up and left. I thought about getting off at the same corner and talking to her on the street, but I got the feeling that she was watching me the whole trip, so I decided to get off a block later. When I got back to the corner where she got off, she was gone. For three days I wandered around the train station, hoping to see her again, but didn’t find a single trace. I saw her a week later. I was at the bar in the arcade, drinking a cup of coffee with a college friend who had been in medical school in Córdoba for six months, and I see her coming up the corridor toward the bar, again in that yellow dress, the copper sheets of hair bouncing on her shoulders. I liked her perky little tits and realized that she had seen me because she started looking bored. She went up to a toy store window. And then Arnoldo Pampiglioni gets up, walks over to her, gives her a kiss, and they start talking. They were five meters away and the fucking son of a bitch couldn’t invite her to the table for coffee and instead left me waiting fifteen minutes. Then she turned—not before throwing a sidelong glance at me—and went back down the corridor toward the street, shaking the roundest, tightest—the word is perfect—ass I’ve seen in my life. Arnoldo sits down again and says, Perlita only gets a pass because we’re cousins. I exhaled and asked who she was. She’s Perlita Pampiglioni, Arnoldo said. She got her masters this year. He told me where she lived and everything. Then he went back to Córdoba. The next day I launched the operation. Based on the address that Arnoldo gave me, I looked for her number in the phone book and found what I was looking for. Her father was José Pampiglioni, and he lived in Guadalupe. There was also a José Pampiglioni downtown, under the heading Home Furnishings. So I posted myself a whole afternoon in front of the shop on San Martín until I saw all the workers leave, and finally, half an hour after the shop closed, a fifty-year-old man locked the door, leaving the shop lights on.

The next day, around eleven, I went in and asked the price of a vacuum cleaner, if I could buy it on credit, and if the credit could be in my name, because I was under age and wanted to surprise my mother. The salesman asked if I worked and I said yes, and on top of that I regularly got a two-hundred-dollar-a-month allowance from my mother’s brother, a Mister Philip Marlowe, from Los Angeles, California. The salesman told me it might be possible, but in any case I would need an older person, someone with property, to guarantee the loan. Just then I felt something strange behind me; I turned, and she came in: she had on these super tight white pants and a white shirt. She trailed a soft perfume as she passed toward the back of the shop and entered the offices, disappearing inside. Unfortunately we were at the end of the conversation, and it was obvious that the salesman was trying to put me off until I came back with more security. I asked if he could get me a credit application, and if it wasn’t convenient I could make my case to the owner, but the salesman took me to the register at the back, gave me an application, and told me it wasn’t worth talking to the owner because the situation was perfectly normal as long as I could find someone older, with property, to guarantee the loan. I asked him to show me the vacuum cleaner again, that I wanted to try it out some more. The salesman told me that there was nothing else to see, that he had shown me all the functions and features of the machine, and if I came back with the application in order and had the down payment, I could take the vacuum cleaner home and work it as much as I wanted.

So I left and set up on the corner to wait. I was there more than a half an hour in the sun. Around twelve fifteen, after the rest of the workers had gone, I saw her leave with her father. They turned toward the opposite corner, but as her father was turning back to lock the front door, I realized she was looking in my direction, very discreetly, and was making like she knew I was there. I started following them, for something like thirty meters. Her father had his arm around her shoulder. They reached the first corner on San Martín and turned right toward 25 de Mayo, passing in front of the Banco Provincial, whose round clock read twelve sixteen, and then continued toward the Parque Palomar. The old man had parked his car next to the park. It was sky blue, long, and wide, and must have had at least two or three different climates and indoor plumbing. They talked a second before getting in (I had stopped at the corner, pretending to wait for a bus), and finally I saw the old man give her the keys and she sat down behind the wheel, but not before throwing a sidelong gaze toward where I was standing. Then they left.

I went half crazy realizing that I was up against more than her body, that her body was something frail compared to the element that had just appeared: her car. And so began the long period in which I waited for her to appear in her car. I waited for it so fiercely, with such conviction, that it appeared twice. Once was on the waterfront, a rainy afternoon—I was leaning on the railing, watching how the rain fell on the river, sheltered only by a tree, thinking, Right now she’s going to show up in her car and take me away, right now, and I turned around suddenly and saw the massive blue car coming slowly up from Guadalupe along the wide, deserted waterfront. It took forever to get there, growing slowly out of the gray horizon, and as it approached I could make out the regular movement of the windshield wipers clearing the drops that were falling on the windshield and blurring the face behind the glass. It passed by and it wasn’t her. And the second time, an afternoon in January, I was crossing another completely deserted street, and just as I’m thinking, Her car is going to turn the corner and come this way, I hear the squeal of brakes and see the blue car speed around the corner, growling on the boiling asphalt. Again it passed by and again it wasn’t her. But I realized that I was developing the ability to manifest the blue car and bring it where I was, no matter where it had been before.

I saw her five more times, always on foot. Even with all the long stakeouts I did around her house, I only managed to see her there once. She came out, crossed the street running, and went into a house on the opposite side. She was wearing the white pants and white shirt. I waited three hours for her to come out, but she never did. Over the three hours it got dark. I saw so many whitish blurs passing quickly in the darkness, between the black trees, that the millionth time I thought I saw her I decided that I was playing the fool and went home to sleep. The second time was at the movies: I walked into the darkness and sat down, and when the lights came up I realized that she was sitting next to me. She had on a leather jacket and her skin was whiter, because it was the middle of winter. I thought I saw her blush when she realized who the guy sitting next to her was. Then the lights went out again, and we spent the whole movie rubbing elbows on the armrest; if on the way out someone had asked me how the movie was or even what it was called, I would have been dumb as a stone. Ten minutes before the end of the movie she got up and left. The third time was at the bar in the arcade. We walked up to the register at the same time, her from the courtyard, me from the street, and I let her order first, even though I had reached the register a few seconds earlier. She ordered an Orange Crush and a hot dog. She took them to her table, and I drank my coffee at the bar, looking at her every once in a while, but she had her back to me and didn’t see me. When I turned to look at her for the last time, she was gone. The fourth time I saw her I was on the bus and she was standing on the corner. I watched her from the rear window until she disappeared. A month later I was the one standing on the corner while she passed on the bus. Then I didn’t see her for several months, and finally I forgot about her.

When the violin concerto finished I stopped thinking about Perla Pampiglioni and walked over to the window. Ernesto switched off the record player.

—It’s so quiet, he said.

We were standing in an illuminated block. Outside there was rain, the black trees, and the lake in the park. I had a momentary feeling that the block of light was covered with a dry clarity, floating in empty space, in a slow drift, not spilling a single ray of icy light into the blackness. Ernesto sat down.

—What have you been doing all this time? he said.

I turned back from the window and sat down in front of him.

—Nothing, I said.

—Read anything? asked Ernesto.

—Yes, I said.

—Sleep with anyone? asked Ernesto.

—Yes, I said.

—Meanwhile all I’ve done is try to translate this goddamned book, said Ernesto.

—And sent several men to prison, too, I suppose, I said.

—No one recently, said Ernesto.

Then we were silent again for about ten minutes. During that time Ernesto didn’t take his eyes off me once. He was sunk so low in his chair that it looked like he would never be able to get up again. That he would break in half and die sitting right there. I observed him with a sort of disbelief. His eyes were half shut, and he held his whiskey in one hand. Suddenly he shifted slightly and the ice clinked against the sides of the glass. That clinking terrified me—I didn’t know why, but I started to panic and wanted to talk, to say something so that the clinking would be lost in the sound of my words. Ernesto listened, but he seemed absent.

—I’ve had a bad summer, I said. Really bad. I’ve spent whole nights in the courtyard, looking at the stars, and I’ve seen strange things in the sky. I’ve seen signs in the sky that scared me. I haven’t told anyone yet. This is the first time. I’ve seen the stars moving, and one night I saw the moon fill up with tigers and panthers tearing each other to pieces and staining the sky all around the moon with blood. Then I saw a carriage diving to hell, full of people I knew who still hadn’t died.

I hadn’t seen any of that, but had hoped to. The only thing I had seen was a million glowing-blue naked women floating in the blackness.

—There are worse things to see, and not just in the sky, said Ernesto, sitting up slightly and taking a drink of the whiskey.

I spent another hour at his house and then went home to sleep. It was still raining. I crossed a dead, black city, and when I passed the Plaza de Mayo I saw the courthouse again, transformed into a dark mass with glowing shades of gray. My shoes filled up with a pink mud, and I had to dry my face and hair and feet when I laid down between the icy sheets. I shivered for a half an hour, not able to sleep, and I masturbated to warm myself up. I only succeeded in staining the sheets, because I was still cold after. Not only were there no panthers or tigers in the moon, but no naked women radiating a blue iridescence into the blackness either. There was only the frozen darkness, and the only thing I could locate in its center—if in fact there was a center—was the illuminated block, drifting, with Ernesto sitting in a chair, and the muted clinking of the ice against the sides of the glass. I turned on the light, looked around the room, then turned it off so it would be dark again.

But I didn’t know that would happen when I left the courthouse the day before, around noon. I would have to go through an afternoon, a night, and a whole other day and part of a night before drying my hair in my room and then getting in bed between the cold sheets with the image of the illuminated block drifting in the black, empty space of my head. The whole plaza was saturated with the gray sheen of the rain, and several men, blurry, hunched over, crossed it slowly. I went to the paper and found Tomatis drinking coffee with the head printer, a tall guy with glasses who I couldn’t stand. Tomatis gets along with everyone because he doesn’t care at all about anyone. With cigar smokers he smokes cigars; if they take their coffee with cream, so does he; if they don’t like salt, he doesn’t either. But he isn’t easygoing or anything, however much he seems to be. You actually get the impression that there’s nothing in the world that could interest him in the least. I don’t think anything at all interests him. And because of this, he can do whatever he wants. It’s crazy.

When he leaves the printer’s office, Tomatis comes up to me and says:

—I challenge you to a game of straight rail after lunch.

—Done, I say.

At the billiard hall, Tomatis takes the white and gives me the spot ball, botches the break, and leaves me to make all the caroms so he can run his mouth all he wants. He stands next to a little table, turning his coffee cup endlessly. The enormous hall is full of cones of light that make the green felt glow and wash the balls with reflections as they move and collide, making that peculiar sound. I count the tents of light—six—then lean over and aim the first carom.

—Hey! Tomatis shouts. I turn around, startled. He had called to the lottery vendor, a gray-haired man who was missing a leg, and whose crutch clicks on the tiles as he moves around.

—Do you have the results? says Tomatis.

—The first ten games only, says the lottery vendor.

—Did two forty-five come up? says Tomatis.

The man takes a list of numbers from his pocket and gives it to Tomatis, who studies it a second.

—Nothing, he says, returning the table.

The man leaves. I take the first shot and set up for the second. Tomatis looks through the window at the street.

—It’s going to rain all year, he says.

I finish the game with five strings: one of twelve, one of fourteen, one of nine, one of seven, and one of eight caroms. I make the one of fourteen because Tomatis had left the balls together in a corner—deliberately I think—and I don’t let them separate until the fourteenth carom. When I’m shooting the fifteenth the cue slips for lack of chalk, and I miss. Tomatis’s cue slips immediately, and I make nine more. I don’t think Tomatis saw a single one of the caroms I made, and at least one wouldn’t have counted, easily called out in any international competition. Tomatis’s gaze passed from the window and slid slowly across the large hall full of sounds and echoes.

—In Buenos Aires, he says, I never left the hotel. I ordered a box of North American cigarettes, and every time the producer came up I had to shake off this paralysis that would set in again the moment he left. The producer would come with the director. They would grab me, take my clothes off, make me shower, dress me in a bathrobe, and sit me at a table with a pencil in my hand. Every once in a while the director would slap me. Use your imagination, he would say. The whole film crew is waiting. We brought three technicians from the US, the producer would say. Alright, what is it you want? I would say. You have to finish the dialogue between Fulano and Mengano, the director would say. Where was I? I would ask. At the word “money,” the director would say. Money, I would say, Yes, exactly, money, the producer would say. At this point a blonde would walk out of the bedroom in a nightgown, holding two empty bottles, one in each hand. Haven’t I told you more than a thousand times not to leave your empty bottles in the suitcase? she would say. Sometimes she would come in totally naked. But no one looked at her, not me or the producer or the director. I don’t think we even saw her. Money, I would say. Money, perfect. And I would start scratching my head wondering why I had written money the day before and what the hell this movie was about. Show me what I wrote yesterday, I would say. Forget about that, the producer would say. The last sentence went something like: I need money. And I would say, with conviction, You never say money outright—you use euphemisms, like “cash,” “bread,” “means.” Money isn’t said. I couldn’t have written that. And the producer would hit me again, twice. Don’t theorize, Tomatis, he would say. I’m not paying you for theory, I’m paying you to write a screenplay. Finally we would come to an agreement—Fulano asked Mengano for money, and Mengano loaned it to him on the following condition: Fulano had to give way as regards a certain lady. Then we would write the dialogue. As he was leaving, the producer would collide with the waiter who was bringing the first bottle of the day. The producer would start talking to me, and what I could make out over the sound coming from the bathroom, the blonde singing, and the tub filling with hot water for the bath, sounded something like, You’re a good guy Tomatis. A cool guy. I’ve seen a lot of cool guys but no one as cool as you. If I didn’t have this two hundred million dollar company, which feeds cool guys like you, and could get by with my two factories and my cattle, I would spend all my time talking to you. I’m positive we’d get along like crazy. I’ve even seriously thought about giving you a stipend so you can write your novels and mail them to me. But I swear on my mother’s ashes that no movie I ever make again will be written by you. And then he would leave. I would start laughing, shake my head, and dive into the bath. With the blonde and me inside, it would overflow, and sometimes we’d get off by spitting jets of bathwater on the waiter’s ass.

Then I went back to the paper, and Tomatis said he was going somewhere or other. The print shop asked me for a headline for the weather report, which I had forgotten when I sent it in, and after turning it over a hundred times I decided on: No Change in Sight. I sent it to the shop and smoked a cigarette without anyone coming around to bother me. Then I went down to the machine room, and when the first copies came out I took one with me to the bar at the arcade. It was full of people, and when I got to the last page—with the comics and the classifieds—it was after seven-thirty. It was dark by then, and it was still raining. The neon signs reflected off the pavement, and since it was too early to go to Tomatis’s, and I had no interest in running into my mother at home, I decided to follow the first suspicious-looking guy I saw. I picked one who was dressed fashionably, with a white raincoat and an extremely fancy black umbrella that he had closed and was using as a cane. He was around thirty.

I was set up in one of the entrances to the arcade, protected from the rain falling on the sidewalk, and saw the guy coming south to north on San Martín. He stopped a second in front of the window to a shoe store and then went in the tobacconist that divides the arcade walkway in half. He bought pipe tobacco and left. I followed. He walked four blocks up San Martín and turned right toward the Plaza de Mayo, and after walking around the block he turned back onto San Martín, this time north to south, on the opposite sidewalk. I was following some forty meters back, not losing a step. In the entrance to a shop he took shelter from the rain and lit his pipe, taking three or four deep drags to make sure it was lit well. I stopped no more than two meters away, pretending to look in the window of the shop where he had stopped. When I realized that it was a lingerie shop, I turned away quickly and went ahead a few meters, but I stopped again because the guy was walking so slow that I was already ten meters ahead. I waited on the corner, and he passed next to me, stopping a second to open his black umbrella because the rain was getting heavier every second. The guy went six more blocks north to south on San Martín and then turned back, south to north again, on the opposite sidewalk. I didn’t lose a step the whole trip. He was walking so slow it was crazy. He passed by the illuminated walkway of the arcade again and at the first corner turned toward the bus station. At the entrance to the platforms he stopped, grabbed the pipe he had been chewing on the whole time, and with his mouth open gazed at the post office on the opposite sidewalk, where the windows were completely illuminated. The guy looked the building up and down, his mouth open the whole time, raising his head so high that at one point I thought he was going to fall backward. Then he went to the ticket window to Rosario and bought a fare. I went up to the window and got close enough to hear that the ticket was for the next day, at eight-ten in the morning. Then he went out onto the platforms, opened his umbrella again, crossed to the opposite sidewalk, and started walking back the way he had come. On the corner of 25 de Mayo he stopped in front of the windows of the Monte Carlo bar and looked in curiously. Apparently he didn’t see anything interesting because he turned around and kept walking north up 25 de Mayo. At the corner he closed his umbrella and went in the Palace Hotel. I went in after. The hotel lobby was incredibly bright and clean. There wasn’t a doormat, and yet there wasn’t a single muddy puddle on the floor. The guy went to the concierge desk and I followed him.

—Two twelve, he said.

The concierge gave him the key. The guy turned around without even looking at me and got in the elevator. I stood there watching him through the elevator gate as the metal box rose and then disappeared. Then the concierge asked me what he could do for me.

—I’m wondering if a Mister Philip Marlowe is staying in this hotel; I expected him this morning, I said.

—Mister what? said the concierge.

—Philip Marlowe, I said.

The concierge started looking over the registry.

—Arriving from where? he said.

—Los Angeles, California, I said.

The concierge looked carefully over the guest registry.

—He hasn’t arrived, sir.

—Thanks, I said, and left.

The clock at the Casa Escassany rang nine times. I passed through the deli, bought two bottles of red wine, and went to Tomatis’s place. It had stopped raining now, but the humidity was madman. I caught a taxi on the corner of the central market and gave Tomatis’s address. When Tomatis invites you to his house, he means you should go to a tiny apartment he rents for work, in a remote neighborhood, jammed between two avenues. When he says to come to my mother’s house, he means the house where he lives with his mother and sister, downtown. I actually prefer the room Tomatis has on the terrace of his mother’s house, because there’s a pullout sofa, a desk, a small library, and a reproduction of Wheatfield with Crows over the sofa, on the yellow wall. The apartment on the outskirts is more comfortable, but you rarely find him there. It’s likely he won’t answer phone calls because he’s either working or in bed with someone. Sometimes he invites me over and he’s not home when I get there. The city rolled by past the taxi’s windows, drenched. The sidewalk in front of Tomatis’s house was darker than the bottom of the ocean, but a trace of light escaped through the foot of his doorway. I rang the doorbell twice and waited a long time before anyone opened the door. Horacio Barco was the one who answered. He took up the whole entrance with his bulk, which was stuffed into a wine-colored turtleneck sweater and these wool pants I’ll ask to borrow the day I take up begging.

—Hello, he said.

He let me in, and I crossed the threshold into the house. He followed me into the first illuminated room. There were two armchairs and several chairs scattered around, a bookcase, and a desk. A sofa bed was pulled out, and I supposed Barco had been there because only a person of his dimensions could have made a hole like that in a bed. The late edition was on the floor, strewn around. I left the wine on the table and asked Barco if he had some idea were Tomatis could be.

—I’m absolutely certain he’s somewhere, Barco said.

—He invited me to dinner, I said.

Barco extended his arm.

—I think there’s stuff in the kitchen, he said.

—I can wait a while still, I said.

Barco made a gesture that meant absolutely nothing and threw himself on the bed. He stretched out face up and was snoring two minutes later. I went over to Tomatis’s desk and saw an open notebook, full of scribbles in the margin and a handwritten text that went as follows:

To catch a rabbit, you need a point the rabbit can’t cross;

to make him tired, you need a field for him to run;

to make him die, you need a place, in the open country or in a tangle of branches, where death can find him.

Only the light he carried inside himself was unreal.

Then some blank pages I slid back with my forefinger, among them a loose sheet, handwritten, that said:

The faint farmhouse, erased, moving away,

the sparse habitations warmly illuminated,

where pale-faced men walk from the table to the window,

the beds filled with an animal smell,

the melancholy bars with sticky floors where turbulent music plays,

the government office and the police precinct, the courthouse,

the parks abandoned in the rain,

women face-down on mossy, arabesque rugs,

the pavement and the smoke of sad chimneys, mixing with the rain,

the white city hall, it’s dark windows,

the slow buses traveling the empty streets,

the murmur of a million minds constantly running,

a slow disintegration

The sound of the street door startled me, and I hid the sheet of paper inside the notebook. I left the notebook open on the table, the way I had found it. Tomatis appeared at the entrance to the room, followed by male and female voices. I heard the sound of high heels in the corridor. Tomatis stopped, surprised to see me. I realized that he had forgotten the invitation but remembered it right away. Then he glanced quickly from the bed to the table and, seeing the notebook open, gave me a suspicious look and went and closed it. Immediately behind him were three young women and a guy with glasses who was dressed in a blue jacket and wool pants. The women’s faces I recognized. The guy I had never seen in my fucking life. He was holding a raincoat. The women were folding up their umbrellas and one of them, wearing this madman green dress, untied a headscarf and started shaking out her hair, throwing it backward. Tomatis went and shook Barco, who sat up in the bed and looked around. Then he rubbed his hands over his face a few times and got up. One of the women, wearing a white raincoat cinched at the waist, carried a straw bag in her hand. Tomatis took it and put it on the table. He opened it and started taking things out: two bottles of whiskey and a pile of canned food. From the bottom he pulled a loaf of homemade bread. Two of the women disappeared farther into the house, and Tomatis followed them, so in the room the only people left were Horacio Barco, the girl in the green dress, and the guy with the raincoat folded over his arm. The guy was standing near the door; Barco next to the bed, his hands in his pockets; I was resting a hand on the table, near the cans and the bottles of whiskey; and the girl in the green dress stood in the middle of the room, with her green umbrella in one hand and her scarf and handbag in the other. I was about to say something, because no one was talking and the situation was getting awkward, but just then Tomatis and the other two women reappeared and started taking the cans and bottles to the kitchen. Barco crossed the room behind them and disappeared, so the only people left were the guy in the blue jacket with his raincoat folded over his arm, the girl in the green dress, and me.

—Is it raining again? I ask.

—A little, says the girl in the green dress.

The guy with glasses stares but doesn’t say a thing. After a second, I gesture to the bed and the chairs and say:

—Should we sit?

The girl in the green dress shrugs and sits in a chair, without letting go of the umbrella or the handbag or the scarf. The guy with glasses stands there as if he was made out of stone. I sit down on the edge of the bed. I take out my cigarette pack and offer, but no one accepts. So I light a cigarette for myself and put the pack away. I bite the filter, my lips apart and head back slightly so the smoke doesn’t get in my eyes. If they don’t have a filter to chew on, cigarettes don’t interest me. What I really like is chewing the filter, not smoking. The girl in the green dress looks at me with her eyes wide open. I’m sitting on the edge of the table, my legs stretched out, my hands in the pockets of my raincoat, chewing the cigarette filter. My eyes are half shut and my head is back. The other guy is still standing there, not moving, and I’m tempted to go over and shake him to see if he’s dead or not. Just then Tomatis comes in, holding a glass.

—Make yourselves comfortable, he says, looking at me. I would prefer it if your ass didn’t touch the table.

The girl starts laughing.

—Carlitos, she says, where did you get this chair?

—I inherited it from my grandmother, Tomatis says. He goes over to the statue of a man with a raincoat over his arm and slaps him on the shoulder.

—Don’t just stand there.

The guy obeys and sits down.

—You can go in the kitchen and serve yourselves what you want, Tomatis says. Gloria and la Negra are getting the food ready and Barco is eating it. He’s always hungry. Once he ate a whole cow.

—I don’t believe it, says the girl in green.

—Well, he left the horns and the tail, Tomatis says. He nods toward me. Angelito is a friend of mine from the paper. He writes the weather report. He’s responsible for this incessant rain.

The woman in the white raincoat comes in and starts taking it off. Underneath she had on a sea-blue dress and a sweater of the same color. She finished taking off her raincoat and throws it on the bed. I saw she had hair on her temples, and I wondered if she would be too hairy underneath her clothes.

—We’re eating in ten minutes, she said before going back.

—Negra, said the girl in green, I can help if you need it.

—Barco’s helping, said la Negra, and disappeared.

Even though he was sitting, the guy with glasses still had his raincoat folded over his arm. He was on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, his raincoat folded over his arm and his arm resting on his thigh. Not a single muscle on his face was moving. I thought that if you went up behind him and took out the chair, the guy would stay in the exact same position, floating there. Tomatis was still standing, holding a glass. His beard had grown some since the morning, and his cheeks gave off blue, metallic reflections. His hooked nose was shining at the bridge.

—Where were we? he says.

—That he left the horns and the tail, says the girl in green.

—So we were talking about the devil, Tomatis says.

The girl in green laughs. Tomatis leaves the glass on the table and picks up the pages of the newspaper, arranging and folding them up.

—Tomorrow’s old news, he says, and stands up, his face red from the effort it took to bend over.

Horacio Barco comes in, covering the entire doorway with his body. He’s chewing something and has a glass of wine in his hand.

—Carlos, he says. There’s no salt.

—Impossible, Tomatis says.

But Barco has already disappeared back into the kitchen. Tomatis goes out behind him.

—Are you a writer as well? says the girl in green.

—No, I say.

—What do you do, besides the paper? she says.

—Nothing. Sometimes I do some work for the police, but not often, I say.

—What kind of work? says the girl in green.

—Follow people, shakedowns, I say. Nothing much.

—How exciting, says the girl in green.

—Not really, I say. It’s boring, mostly.

—Yes, I can imagine, says the girl in green, thoughtfully. Everything ends up boring in the long run.

Tomatis comes in just as I’m raising his whiskey to take a drink from it. He waits until I’m done and then takes the glass.

—There are two bottles, in the kitchen, he says.

Then he goes up to the guy with the raincoat folded over his arm, who must have died by then.

—You can serve yourself something in the kitchen, Nicolás, he says.

The guy stands up without saying a word and leaves, taking his raincoat with him. When he disappears I turn to Tomatis:

—Is it sewn to his arm? I ask.

—What? says Tomatis.

—The raincoat, I say.

Tomatis laughs weakly and tells me to go to the kitchen if I want to drink something, and to shout when dinner is ready.

—No, I say. I don’t want to drink anything for now. With dinner, in any case.

—Ángel is a character, Tomatis says.

—So it seems, says the girl in green, looking at me with some curiosity.

I throw the cigarette on the floor and jump off the table, crushing the butt with my shoe. The floor is covered with mud stains, and from the center of the room to the kitchen door there’s a trail of puddles. The girl in green has her legs open, and her gathered dress shows half of her thighs, which are madman. I try every possible way to not look in that direction, but some crazy force makes me turn my head again and again. She doesn’t even notice. I even get the impression that she barely knows I’m there, and the questions she asks come out of her mouth mechanically, as though she has them prepared for whenever she’s with someone whose face isn’t totally familiar. The last look she gave me was the most vivid, but she grazed my face with it so lightly that it ended up annoying me.

—Your face is familiar, I say.

—Could be, she says. In this city, everyone knows everyone.

—No, I say. I have a feeling that we were talking once before.

—Could be, she says. I talk so much. And with so many people.

—But I have a feeling we were talking intimately, I say.

This has no effect. She makes an ambiguous gesture and shrugs, admitting the possibility. Tomatis stares at me. Just then the guy with the raincoat over his arm comes in holding a glass of whiskey in his free hand. He stops near the door, motionless. He has on these enormous brown shoes with rubber soles so thick that they look like orthopedics.

—Nicolás, you’ve filled your tank I see, Tomatis says cheerfully.

—We can go to the table now, Nicolás says.

So he could talk. It was pretty amazing, considering his striking resemblance to a human being. I thought it possible that he was some plastic android for whom Barco had quickly improvised a mechanism in the kitchen that made it possible for him to formulate the expression, We can go to the table now. Or that Tomatis himself was the one who responded, like a ventriloquist. The girl in green got up and left.

—Don’t rush off, Ángel, Tomatis said. Pupé doesn’t have a cunt. She was born that way. But she’s lots of fun, and useful for conversation. In any case, she doesn’t understand anything about anything.

The dinner was awful. They had opened like fifty cans of peas, boiled them with onions, and ended up with a flavorless, runny stew. I don’t know who convinced Nicolás to leave his raincoat on the back of his chair, but his posture didn’t change much—the whole time his arm stayed in the same position it was in when he’d been holding the coat. Because there weren’t enough chairs, Gloria ate sitting on Barco’s lap, from his plate. Apparently they had gotten quite intimate during the cooking, or most likely they already knew each other before. Gloria had on these very tight black pants, and her hair was in a ponytail. She had a long, thin neck, like a pole, and Barco held her back so she wouldn’t fall. I sat between Tomatis and la Negra—Pupé was sitting next to Tomatis—and noticed that la Negra’s hair even grew behind her ears. I imagined her covered in hair, like a monkey. When he took his first mouthful, Tomatis said that maybe with rotten onions the stew might have come out a little better, but there was still time to dig through the trash for some condiments to add. Then he said a movie producer is easy to recognize right off by the thickness of his cigar, but with a director it’s trickier, because behind the frontal bone of a movie director’s face there’s only air. Then he argued with Barco, who was saying Othello wasn’t a jealous man, that Iago was only presenting him evidence of Desdemona’s deception, and in the end he was just an easily influenced person. What was more apparent, according to Barco, was his masochism, and Shakespeare’s vulgar construction of a tragedy based on the stereotypical idea that all Arabs are jealous and impulsive. From that he starting talking about how the phlegmatism of the English was a product of the intense humidity. Tomatis laughed at Barco’s arguments but admitted that Othello wasn’t a jealous man, agreeing that it was obvious Othello wasn’t jealous because his behavior wasn’t typical for a jealous man, since it’s common knowledge that jealous men don’t beat to death the women who have betrayed them, but rather they dedicate themselves to calculating the dimensions of their banana plantations and examining the path of the shadow cast by the last column in the southeast corridor of their guest house. It’s elementary, Tomatis shouted, punching the table. No jealous man beats his wife to death. That’s cheap psychology. A real jealous man is a maniac for details. And the one time in my life I felt real jealousy, I had the irresistible urge to find a carpenter’s rule and go take the measurements of the queen-size bed where I suspected the deception was being perpetrated.

In my opinion, Tomatis was exaggerating, but the theory was original. Barco responded that it would have been better to use the carpenter’s rule to measure the object for which Tomatis has been substituted. If you have to unfold it the full meter to measure it, he said, then you’ve found the reason for the deception. Then they stopped yelling and it was silent for more than five minutes, and I spent the whole time hitting the edge of my plate with my spoon. When the silence started to bother me, I got up and went to take a piss. I crossed a tiled courtyard that led to a yard full of bare trees—behind their branches I saw a whole lot of clouds moving quickly, opening up for the glow of the moon and a section of starlit sky. But there was no wind in the courtyard, and the black, naked branches stayed motionless. I didn’t even reach the bathroom. I pissed in the courtyard, standing on the strip of concrete between the red tiles and the dirt. When I got back to the kitchen, it felt like they had been talking about me because I noticed something suspicious in the silence, different from what I had left earlier.

—I was changing the olive water, I said when I came in and noticed the silence. Tomatis asked me to go to the front room and get a pack of cigarettes from the desk drawer. I went and opened the drawer and saw there were two packs of North American cigarettes. I pocketed one pack and took the other to Tomatis. When I gave it to him, Tomatis opened it and offered one to everyone, me included. I bit the filter and lit it, blowing a mouthful of smoke over the table. I raised my head and squinted my eyes, the filter stuck tight between my teeth.

Then we all moved to the front room. Gloria and Barco threw themselves on the sofa bed, head-to-toe, and every so often Barco would tell her to get her feet off his face. Nicolás grabbed the edge of a chair and sat there like a corpse, not opening his mouth or even breathing probably. I was about to sit down on the edge of the desk again, but Tomatis stopped me, saying, I don’t like visitors putting their ass where I work, so I sat in a chair and Tomatis leaned up against his book case. La Negra and Pupé sat in two armchairs. Pupé didn’t even bother trying to cover her legs, while la Negra spent the whole time pulling her skirt down over her knees, and my suspicion that she was hairier than a chimp grew stronger each time. Gloria complained over and over that Barco wasn’t giving her any space on the bed and she could fall off any second. Tomatis said that in the hotel where he stayed in Buenos Aires there was a maid so tall that she couldn’t get in the elevator, and once when he was going down to the front desk (because the only time I left the room I went to the front desk to ask them to fix the phone because it was busted, he said) the elevator opened and there she was, crouched in one of the corners. I asked the concierge if it wasn’t disruptive to have such a tall maid, Tomatis said, but the guy said she did a great job cleaning the ceilings and was in bed with the owner, who was crazy for tall women. Pupé asked if he was writing anything, and Tomatis nodded several times, squinting his eyes, and said, Yes, I’m writing something. Pupé asked him what. I’m not sure yet, said Tomatis, I’ve only written about three hundred pages. Pupé asked, But is it a novel or what? And Tomatis said, There’s only one genre—the novel. It took years to discover this. There’s only three things in literature: perception, language, and form. Literature gives form, through language, to specific perceptions. And that’s it. The only possible form is narration, because the substance of perception is time. I applauded. Pupé shook her head two or three times, and Nicolás opened his mouth for the second time all night. According to Valéry, he said, for certain internal states, discourse and dialectics should be reinforced by narration and description. Tomatis said, Exactly—he says this in reference to Swedenborg and the mystic state. Which provides us with a wider field for narration. And further, if the mystic state, the state of ecstasy par excellence, is subject to narration and description, then what happens with fleeting moments of consciousness and jolts to the senses? When discourse and dialectics are no longer scientific or philosophical truths, they transform into a narrative of the error and the perspective of the consciousness that imagined them.

I applauded again. With Nicolás, I was even more convinced that he was some kind of life-size, plastic robot, built by Tomatis to say, Dinner is served, and interject the Valéry quote in the conversation to support his argument.

Finally Barco managed to throw Gloria off the bed, and she got back up and sat on the edge, next to Barco, and started slapping him softly in the face. Her long neck was tilted toward Barco, and when she moved her head her ponytail swung crazily over her shoulders. I realized she was the most complete woman of the three there. I couldn’t forget Tomatis’s warning about Pupé, and with la Negra the idea of going to bed in the dark with a hairy monkey made me shudder with terror. Gloria’s tight pants framed an ass that was madman, and when I saw she was letting Barco move his hands complacently along her thighs and back and all that, I realized that any second I was going to end up with a hard-on. I go nuts when I see a woman in pants. A million naked women radiating a blue iridescence could walk past me and I would hesitate about which one to choose at first, but if in that million one comes along in pants, I’m likely to drop on her like a lightning bolt. Gloria was lifting Barco’s head and feeding him whiskey in short sips, then she would drink. In an hour not a drop was left of the two bottles. Suddenly Barco got up and said he was leaving. Tomatis didn’t even say goodbye. I don’t think they exchanged a single word all night, and as far as I know they’ve seen each other every single day since they were born. La Negra asked if he was going to the city center, and Barco said he was, so she asked him to wait. She went to the back of the house, to take a piss I assume, and then put on the white trench that fit her so well, and probably worked to camouflage that black tangle of monkey hair that I’m sure covered her entire body. Nicolás, said Tomatis. They’re going downtown. They’ll get you close to the bus stop at least, because it’s already twelve thirty. Tomorrow’s May first and later tonight it’ll be hard to find transportation. Nicolás got up, grabbed his raincoat, folded it over his arm, and left with Barco and la Negra.

When it was just the four of us, I threw myself on the bed, hoping Gloria would come pour whiskey in my mouth, but she stayed put in the chair la Negra had been in, listening to Tomatis tell the story of the producer and the director and the blonde in the hotel in Buenos Aires. If I heard right, in the latest version there were now two blondes, identical twins who walked naked around the hotel room while he and the two movie guys tried to write dialogue. Suddenly, Gloria was asleep. Tomatis and Pupé had been talking in low voices for at least ten minutes, I’m not sure about what, then they got up and went to the back of the house. I fell asleep, for about ten minutes. When I opened my eyes I saw Gloria kneeling next to the sofa, looking at me intently. Tomatis and Pupé still hadn’t come back.

—I was looking at you, Gloria said.

I sat up.

—You looked dead, Gloria said.

She had a thin, freckled face. She was thin all over, trim, except that sensational ass. Her hair was pulled tight around her head. I could see a mole on her left cheek.

—Well, I’m back, I said.

I sat up on the edge of the bed.

—I’m gonna go change the olive water, I said.

I left the room, and walking past the bedroom I heard Pupé’s hushed voice. The door was half open and the room was faintly lit by a candle.

—So we’ve gotten naked and gotten in bed, said Pupé, what’s the point of this?

I went out to the courtyard. It was cloudy again and cold, but it wasn’t raining. When I came back in I tried not making noise and stopped next to the door to listen.

—You should try everything, Tomatis was saying, how could you not like it?

—I just don’t, Pupé said.

I was pressed against the wall, listening, and suddenly I looked up and saw Gloria studying me from the other end of the hall, her arms folded and shaking her head. I walked toward her and went back into the room with her.

—He can’t convince her, I said.

—I can imagine, Gloria said.

Then Pupé and Tomatis reappeared, and when I was about to leave Tomatis said I could sleep there if I wanted. Gloria and Pupé left, and Tomatis showed them out. He told me to sleep on the sofa, that he was going to his room. I got undressed and got in bed. Before leaving, Gloria gave me a kiss on the cheek. I whispered in her ear that she should stay and she started laughing, didn’t say a word, and left. I told Tomatis that I wanted to talk to him before going to sleep, but I didn’t hear him come back. When I opened my eyes again it was ten in the morning and Tomatis was sitting at the desk, writing. A gray light, opaque and uneasy, was coming in through the windows facing the street.

I looked at Tomatis a long time without him realizing that I was awake. The room was spotlessly clean and put together, and Tomatis had on a gray sweater, from which the collar of a white shirt showed through, and wool pants. He looked perfectly clean and calm. He would look out through the gray window frame, his eyes wide open, without seeing anything, then he would lean over and start writing again. I kept my eyes half shut so he wouldn’t catch me looking at him if he turned around. The whole time I was watching him he probably only wrote twenty words. Then I spoke and he startled.

He turned around suddenly. His beard had grown a little overnight, setting off his facial features.

—I didn’t realize you were up, he said.

—I just woke up, I said.

—There’s coffee in the kitchen, he said.

I got dressed. Tomatis turned toward the window again. Then he leaned over and wrote another two or three words. I left the room and heard Tomatis close the door behind me. I went to the bathroom and sat a while reading an old newspaper that was on the toilet. I looked for the weather report and found the headline: No Change in Sight. Then I looked at the date—March fifteenth. Then I washed up and combed my hair and went to the kitchen.

The coffee was cold, so I had to wait around while it heated up. I poured myself a cup and drank it. Then I poured myself another. In a black tin in a cabinet I found some pastries that I dipped in the coffee and which came apart as soon as they touched my tongue. I ate all the pastries, and when I dipped the last one in the coffee cup it came out dry because the cup was empty. I went back to the front room and stopped a second in front of the closed door, hesitating. Then I went in. Tomatis didn’t even turn around; he was looking at the gray window frame, his eyes narrowed and his mouth open. I don’t know what he saw there that was so interesting. I went to the table to get a cigarette.

—Don’t touch it! he shouted.

I jumped back, and Tomatis laughed.

—Sorry, he said. I was distracted.

He sat looking at me without saying anything else. I lit a cigarette, bit the tip, and exhaled a mouthful of smoke.

—I’m almost finished, said Tomatis. Half an hour more and I’m done.

I walked out and closed the door. I went to the courtyard to finish the cigarette. It was a gray day, and the fresh, cold, and gentle breeze made me flush. The sky was covered with a dense, gray sheet. After the cigarette I went back to the kitchen and drank more coffee. There was nothing but black sediment left in the coffee pot, and after the last swallow I had to spit out a mouthful of grounds. Then I got up and opened the door to Tomatis’s bedroom. Gloria was lying in the bed, her face flattened against the pillow. She had undone her ponytail and her hair fell in black clumps over the blankets. The black pants and gray sweater she was wearing the night before were folded over a chair. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, were her little black shoes. I tiptoed close to the headboard. Her mouth was open, and next to it, on the pillowcase, a damp stain had formed. I stepped on something soft and looked down; it was a pair of tiny black panties. They must have belonged to her, unless Pupé had forgotten hers the night before.

I shrugged and went back to the kitchen, closing the bedroom door behind me. Just as I was sitting down at the table, Tomatis appeared. He was euphoric, the same kind of euphoria I had noticed at the paper the morning before. He washed the coffee pot and put more water on. He asked if I had slept well.

—Perfectly, I said.

—How did you like the party? he asked.

—Oh, so fun. A dead body was the only thing missing, I said.

—And how did you like the girls? said Tomatis.

—La Negra was appealing, but I’m worried that she’s an ape, I said. I didn’t really notice the others.

Tomatis brought a finger to his lips and gestured toward the bedroom.

—Gloria’s still here, he said.

—I didn’t realize, I said.

Tomatis prepared the coffee and offered me a cup.

—I’ve had enough coffee, I said.

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the pack of cigarettes I took from the desk drawer the night before. It was still sealed shut and had flattened out. I squeezed it hard. Tomatis sat down with a cup of coffee and started sipping it.

—For a week I’ve been trying to tell you about something that’s been happening to me, and I can’t get you to listen, I said.

—You can’t really count on people for much, he said. Besides, it’s not my fault that you asked Gloria to stay and she didn’t want to. She decides if she stays or not and who she stays with, don’t you think?

So she’d told him. I was blinded for a minute. I could hear Tomatis’s voice but didn’t understand a thing. I felt a shudder in my stomach, and then I asked Tomatis for a cigarette, just to say something, because he was quiet again, and if there’s something I can’t stand when I’m with someone else it’s silence. Tomatis went to his bedroom and came back with two packs of North American cigarettes. He threw one on the table.

—Keep it, he said.

Then he offered me a cigarette from his pack.

I lit the cigarette and told him the situation with my mother.

—In my opinion she’s not being fair with me, I said. I’m the reasonable one. I’ll let her dress however she wants, but she can’t answer the door naked. It doesn’t matter that she’s my mother or whatever. It’s not right. I don’t think the milkman, for example, is at all comfortable with her answering the door in a bikini when she exchanges the bottles. And then there’s the thing with the gin. She knew it was mine all along, and there was no reason to pretend it was hers and I was the one in the wrong. And even if the bottle had been hers, it’s still willful ignorance because she knows full well that she steals piles of cigarettes and cash from me and I act like nothing’s happening. And another thing: How does she have the right to keep telling me that my brain is going to rot from so much reading, when all she does is read romance novels and a pile of gossip rags? In any case, it’s not my fault she turned on the light and saw me with a hard-on. I didn’t call her. I’m not in the habit of calling my mother to come see every hard-on I get. Ever since my father got sick I’ve turned a blind eye each time she went off on one of her nocturnal excursions to God knows where, so it doesn’t seem like asking too much to expect her to respect my rights the way I respect hers. There was no reason for her to come and turn on the light suddenly, thinking she’d find me doing who knows what with who knows who. I don’t think she heard a strange noise and turned on the light suddenly to scare a burglar or something like that. No: her idea was to surprise me in flagrante in who knows what imaginary crime she assumes I commit every night. Another question: How can she hit me for saying that the bottle of gin she had in her room, and which she’d drank two-thirds of, was in fact mine and not hers? She knew full well the bottle was mine. She shouldn’t have gotten up from the bed and slapped me. I got angry and hit her back. Then she slaps me twice again and I couldn’t take any more; I took off my belt and start whipping and punching her until she surrenders and curls up on the bed crying and all and doesn’t look up or say a word when I pour myself a gin and take it back to my room.

—So you gave your mother a beating, says Tomatis.

—Exactly, I say.

Because Tomatis doesn’t say anything, I add: She was making life impossible for me. It seemed like the best way to get her to leave me alone.

—I suspect you didn’t come to the decision as calmly as you’d now like to make me believe, says Tomatis.

—I probably wasn’t thinking ahead when I hit her, I said.

—Yes, said Tomatis. That’s the impression I get.

—And what about her? I asked. Does it seem normal to you to get so enraged that it completely changes our relationship because she saw me in the courtyard with a hard-on?

—How old is your mother? asked Tomatis.

—Thirty-six, I think.

—You should be more careful around the house, said Tomatis.

Then Gloria walked in, and Tomatis told her to make breakfast. Gloria looked at me and smiled weakly, but it seemed like she hadn’t woken up completely. She had the pale skin and puffy eyes of someone who’s just gotten out of bed, and she couldn’t focus her gaze on anything. Tomatis shook his head and gestured for me to follow him to the front room, but I had already forgotten the thing with my mother and would rather have stayed in the kitchen checking out Gloria’s ass while she got the food ready. Clearly Tomatis was trying to show interest in my problems after making me wait more than twenty-four hours, but when we got to the front room I didn’t feel like talking anymore and went to the window to look at the street. No one was out, and the shrubs bordering the sidewalk were frostbitten. Across the street, the sky’s tense gray color seemed even more tense and more gray over the skeletal frame of a house under construction.

Tomatis waited for me to say something, and when he understood that I preferred to stand there the whole time looking through the window with my hands in my pockets, he said: I’m not going to give you advice, Angelito. It’s not something I do. But I suppose you want to find some explanation for what’s happening. If we analyze the facts, maybe we can come up with something.

—She’s a slutty old bag, I said.

—First off, she’s not old, said Tomatis.

—I hope you’re not talking about me, said Gloria, coming in just then.

—Not the old part, I said.

—Give me a cigarette, Carlos, said Gloria.

Tomatis handed her a cigarette and lit it. I had an unopened packet in each pocket, and I squeezed them both.

—Come in and eat, if you want, said Gloria, and walked out.

We stood there in silence for a moment, and I could hear Gloria’s footsteps moving down the corridor toward the kitchen. She looked like she’d woken up completely, and her thin, freckled face, with the mole on the cheek and the lips curved slightly upward, had regained the soft shape of the night before. When we were walking to the kitchen and I started to smell fried onions, I worried that we were going to have to eat that revolting canned soup again, but Gloria had changed out the peas for some pieces of beef liver that must have gone rotten while the cow was still alive. If she’d fried it in jet fuel it might not have been so terrible. And she and Tomatis swallowed it so easily and with so much appetite it was like they were eating rose-flavored milkshakes. It seemed like Gloria didn’t know how to do a thing, apart from letting herself get fondled all night by one guy and then jump in bed naked with another one. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my head—her face flattened against the pillow, her mouth open, and the little saliva stain forming on the white pillowcase. But she was able to do more than spread her legs all night, the tramp. She played poker a thousand times better than Carlitos and me, and she won more than a thousand pesos from each of us in less than an hour, when we went to the front room to play a game after breakfast. And after winning she said that something must be open despite it being May first, and she went out and bought a kilo of cream puffs to eat with tea. Then she started reading some poems aloud in English, from an anthology Tomatis had just bought in Buenos Aires. The book had a strange odor, which I can’t recall without shuddering. When she grabbed it the first time and brought it to her nose and smelled it with her eyes closed, I thought it was a put on, plain and simple. But then she handed it to me so I could smell it, and I realized the smell was something madman. Then she read a section of Robert Browning’s “Pompilia,” then “The Chambered Nautilus,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “This Bread I Break,” by Dylan Thomas, “To Waken an Old Lady,” by William Carlos Williams, Yeats’s “Vacillation,” Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” Pound’s “A Study in Aesthetics,” and half a million others. It was obvious she knew everything and had perfect taste, the bimbo. That made me even angrier, and I told her not to read any more in English because I couldn’t understand a thing (even though I had studied English for four years and could read it easily) and Tomatis cracked up laughing.

—He’s mad because you told me he’d asked you to stay last night, he said.

They barely survived that, and only because I wasn’t carrying a .45 pistol and a handful of hollow-points. She started laughing and put down the book and walked over and kissed me on the cheek and told me I was a cute kid. Then she put her hands in her back pockets and went to look at the gray sky through the window. Tomatis was lying in the bed, propped up against the wall with his legs hanging over the edge, and I was standing there like an asshole next to the table, squeezing the cigarette packs in my pockets. To punish Tomatis I told him his theory that the novel was the literary genre par excellence was nonsense (although when he said it, it sounded right) and that actually everything was theater, that theater was the only real genre, and that Discourse on the Method was a long monologue by someone who was playing the role of a philosopher and who spoke in a way that had nothing to do with how he talked in real life, that talking like that he imagined himself a philosopher and was hoping to pass it off on everyone else. But this didn’t bother Tomatis at all, and it actually sounded interesting to him, and he came over and slapped me on the back and told me I was an intelligent guy and I was going places. Then I told him I hadn’t read Discourse on the Method, and he said it didn’t matter, that he had read it and that it was accurate more or less the way I had put it. He finally convinced me. Then Gloria went to make tea, and by the time she brought it steaming to the front room, I wasn’t angry any more.

It got dark and we turned on the lights. The sky was like a metal sheet. The room was full of smoke, but it wasn’t dirty or anything because Gloria kept cleaning the glasses and ashtrays as they got dirty. We sat there a half hour looking at each other, and I got the impression that they wanted me to scram, but since I wasn’t sure I stayed till around eight. I realized that they didn’t have any problem with me staying when Tomatis said I could sleep there again if I wanted, but I told him I would rather go home. Then Tomatis said he was going to lay down a while and Gloria followed him out. For about fifteen minutes I listened to their voices and stifled laughter, and then everything was quiet. I took out the pack I had grabbed the night before and put it back in the desk drawer. Then I shouted from the corridor that I was leaving. Gloria responded that one of these days we’d see each other again, and I left.

I walked something like thirty blocks. It took me ten minutes to get to the avenue, then I turned onto 25 de Mayo, and when I reached the intersection with the Banco Provincial, whose clock read exactly nine, I turned onto San Martín. I drank a cognac in the arcade and then turned off San Martín and came back to it crossing the Plaza de Mayo, where the courthouse stood, hazy and dark like a dense, black mass glued to the black sky. I stayed at Ernesto’s house until well after midnight, and then I went home to sleep.

It was raining the morning of May second, and I stayed in bed late, in a kind of daze, thinking about the double. Since the night of the gin incident with Mamá, I hadn’t thought about him. I had forgotten him completely the last ten days. I first saw him on March fifth, after not having left the house for five days. I got on the bus at around nine in the morning, and when it turned at an intersection with San Martín, I saw someone with a very familiar face coming out of an optician. The face was so familiar. When the bus reached the opposite corner, I jumped up and got off. I had realized it was me.

When I got to the corner there was no sign of him. I went in the optician and stood by the register, waiting for one of the workers to recognize me. One of them came up and asked if I needed anything, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. I said I was picking up some glasses that had been brought in for a new lens, under the name Philip Marlowe, and the guy looked through a pile of envelopes filled with glasses, with the names of the owners on the back, but he didn’t find the one I had asked for. I told him I must have gotten the wrong shop and I left. I walked around the block twice but didn’t see him again. Then I went to the paper.

I saw him a second time two days later, coming out of the courthouse. I was walking down the marble steps at the entrance and I saw a guy in shirtsleeves waiting next to a taxi for someone who just then was paying the driver. The guy in shirtsleeves had his back to me, but there was something familiar about him. I didn’t associate him with the person I had seen coming out of the optician two days before, and when the passenger got out and the guy got in the car, I was looking up at the sky because I still hadn’t done the weather report, and it was crazy hot out. When I looked back down the taxi was accelerating, and I saw the side of the guys face in the back seat, saying something to the driver. It was me. I started shouting, running down the steps, but the only thing that came out was the word taxi. The driver, without slowing down or anything, stuck his head out the window and shouted, Can’t you see I’m occupied, numbnuts? The guy in the back seat gave me a sidelong look (there was something malignant in it), and then I couldn’t see his face, because the car accelerated, turned the corner, and disappeared. I ran to the corner, but when I got there the car was already gone. I stood there, stiff as a board, for like half an hour, staring off in the direction the car had vanished. I don’t know how I kept from passing out. For the weather report that day I entered 46 degrees in the shade, and I wasn’t far off, because the report they gave on the radio had it at 44.8. Then I went back to the paper and found Tomatis on the phone. Do me one favor, he was saying to the guy on the other end of the line. Look at the results and tell me if two forty-five came up. When he hung up he turned toward me, and I must have looked strange because he asked me what was wrong.

—I saw myself in the street, twice, I said.

—Don’t go egomaniacal, Ángel, said Tomatis, uninterested. Then he started typing.

The third time he didn’t see me, and I was able to follow him for two blocks. It was during Carnival. A million people were lined up watching the murgas and the masquerades, and the guy was standing on the edge of the sidewalk, trying to cross the street. I was moving through the crowd, looking to write a fluff piece about the parade, for some extra cash, and I saw him from the opposite sidewalk, just as he started crossing toward me. I was blown away seeing him there, a cigarette pressed between his teeth, his head lifted, his eyes narrowed to keep the smoke from bothering him. My heart started pounding—he was walking straight at me. But he didn’t stop, and he didn’t seem to see me, but he passed so close that his shoulder rubbed against mine. I froze up when he touched me. Something turned over in my stomach. He looked so much like me—he had on a discolored blue shirt and white pants, exactly like the ones I was wearing—that on his right arm, exposed through his short-sleeved shirt, I even saw a white scar that was identical to mine, a long, whitish stain that the summer sun hadn’t been able to tan. I followed him. It was easy, at first, because he was walking against the wall and everyone else was pressed up to the edge of the sidewalk to get a better view of the parade, leaving a path open between the wall and the crowd. Less than ten meters separated us. He stopped suddenly because a water balloon flew past, exploded against a shop window, and splashed him. Instinctively, I brought my hand to my face to wipe off the drops. The guy took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dried his face and part of his head, then put the handkerchief away. I watched him and started following again when he walked on. Just above the right back pocket of his pants I could see two dark stains and realized they were ink stains I had made, a few months back, putting a pen away in the back right pocket of the pants I was wearing. He crossed the street and I followed him. On the next block I decided to speed up so I could talk to him—I had no idea what to say, but I wanted to talk to him—and I had already cut in half the distance between us when suddenly something blinded me. I felt a torrent of water—like a million liters—hitting me in the face. For half a minute I didn’t know if I was on San Martín or at the bottom of the Pacific, and when I opened my eyes I saw this shitty little brat looking at me from a doorway with an empty bucket in his hands, and when he saw my face—Mr. Hyde probably would have looked like Shirley Temple next to me just then—he took off into the house. When I dried my face off and looked up, the guy was gone.

I took a mental note of the address of the house, thinking the Vampire of Düsseldorf might want to pay a visit, and then I went home. I saw my double again in mid-April, but I couldn’t follow him because, just as I was catching up to him, crossing the street, a truck almost ran me over. And, in any case, I was sure I wouldn’t catch him.

On May second, before getting up, I thought about all of this. I wondered if seeing my double several times in the street, and once wearing the double of my discolored blue shirt and the double of my white pants with two ink stains on the back right pocket, wasn’t some feverish hallucination caused by the insane February sun roasting my skull. Because it had been a crazy summer. House roofs were cracking, and the walls had to be mopped up to dry the water pouring in. Millions of mosquitos were devouring anyone who went down to the riverbank to play sports—they lined all the jocks up along a wall and opened up the machine gun on them—and the pavement had turned black with the beetles that crashed against the streetlights and fell to the street with their wings broken. By January, the trees were surrounded by piles of charred leaves, and anyone who spent more than an hour in the sun would spontaneously combust. But I was sure it was real, because he had bumped into me the night of the parade. I was sure he existed. So I pictured him existing in a small world, like mine. Our worlds never overlapped, except through some unlikely accident that occurred three times. His world and mine, limited as they were, ran together if they approached each other, and his realm of experience was unknown to me, but familiar. I knew that the things that could happen to him in his world could be different from what happened to me in mine, but they were still similar. And if they seemed identical—if he looked at the back of his hand on April seventh at ten thirty-five in the morning, for example, at exactly the same moment as I was doing exactly that—they were, nevertheless, different things. Maybe he was following me in his world, along a duplicate and inverted path that I had mistakenly wandered onto the same night of carnival, when I was following him in my world. Or maybe we lived different lives. One thing I was sure of: our spheres—our worlds—were closed and only touched by accident. It could also be that everything has a double: Tomatis, Gloria, my mother, my notebook, my weather report, the La Región newspaper, Ernesto’s illuminated block where Shönberg’s Violin Concerto plays. If that was true, something different had to happen in the other world, because an exact replica seemed absurd and deranged to me, especially because it threatened to multiply indefinitely. There couldn’t be an identical bed repeated to infinity in which a guy like me, also repeated to infinity, thought about the possibility of the bed and the guy being repeated to infinity. That kind of thing was crazy. But when I got up I thought that it was just as crazy for there to be only one bed and one guy, and that the only horrifying thing about the double was the possibility that he was living a life I couldn’t. So I took a hot shower and went to the courthouse.

Ramírez said all the rain was caused by sun spots, which in turn had been caused by the atomic bombs. I said that the sun spots and the atomic bombs must have been what caused the coffee in the press office to taste like ass, and Ramírez laughed as best he could, but didn’t manage to hide the infamous, brown sierras that were all that was left of his rotten teeth. Then I went to Ernesto’s office and asked for him. The secretary told me that the judge was in a meeting. I told him to say that the La Región reporter was here and ask when the inquest we’d talked about would be. The secretary came back immediately.

—The judge says tomorrow at four, because he has to interview the witnesses first, he said.

So I went back to the paper. I typed out the courthouse report that Ramírez had given me on transparent paper, submitted the headline for the weather report—No Change in Sight—and then went to lunch. I didn’t see any sign of Tomatis in the office, but when I went to the administration to pick up my check, they told me that Tomatis had been in that morning to pick up his check and then had gone off who knows where. When I got back, Tomatis was opening correspondence addressed to the “Director of the Literary Page.”

—Regrettably, everyone in the world has feelings, he said. Because of this, everyone makes literature.