The severe look of the barman at the unexpectedness of their sudden intrusion doesn’t seem to intimidate Gutiérrez, who, Nula thinks somewhat anxiously, walks in with the same ease and self-assurance with which one of its founding members or even its president could have. Nula, following him submissively, wavers between disapproval and confused admiration, and is so surprised by Gutiérrez’s determination that he’s not even conscious of what he’s thinking, which, translated into words, would be more or less the following: Or maybe this is all so familiar to him, it’s such an intimate part of himself that despite the thirty-some years away the words and gestures come on their own, reflexively or instinctually, or rather — and it would be offensive if this were the case — he thinks that the millions that Moro attributes to him give him the right to walk in this club as though he were actually its president.
Without even glancing at the barman, Gutiérrez, scrutinizing each of the players at the table and the three men following the game behind them, walks slowly toward the table. He stops suddenly, staring at one of the four players, who is receiving, his eyes down, the cards that the player to his left is dealing. The man’s hair, a slicked-back shell pasted to his skull, is thick and smooth; it’s patched in white, gray, and black, like the hair of an animal. A cartoonist would represent it by alternating curved black lines with corresponding white gaps of varying width between them, and a few black, white, and gray blotches interrupting the lines to mark the spots where the black and white separate. Two hollows amplify the forehead that, along with his nose, comprises the most protrusive part of his face, which narrows into a triangle toward his chin. His skin is a dark and lustrous brown, its similarity to leather accentuated by the wrinkles on his neck, on his hands, and around his eyes, whose half-shut eyelids obstruct the view to his eyes themselves, which closely study the two cards he’s been dealt as he prepares to pick up a third, just thrown across the greasy table, itself a brown only slightly darker than his hands.
— Sergio, Gutiérrez says.
— Willi, says the other man, his tone neutral, not even looking up from his cards.
Patiently, Gutiérrez waits. Nula is unaware that recognition, approval, confidence, and mutual history have just been exchanged, tacitly, by the utterance of their names. Gutiérrez hasn’t said a thing to anyone else, but the others, who’ve now understood that they’re not being asked for, don’t seem at all interested in their sudden appearance. Only the barman stands alert, paused in the middle of drying the glass, but when Nula, to indulge him — because Gutiérrez hasn’t looked at him once — makes a friendly gesture with his head, the man, as though the nod triggered a remote control, looks down and keeps drying. Escalante picks up the third card, studies it, places it over the others, and deposits all three, so perfectly aligned that they seem like a single card, face down on the table. He looks up at Gutiérrez. Then he stands up slowly, inspects the three men following the game, chooses the one that seems most qualified, and gestures for him to take his place. He walks around the table, and when he reaches Gutiérrez he doesn’t hug him or shake his hand, only looks him in the eyes and gives him a soft nudge on the chest with the back of his hand. Gutiérrez smiles, but with a look of protest.
— I live practically around the corner, and it took me a year to find you, he says.
— I saw you once, in a car, but before I could put two and two together, you were gone, Escalante says. And another time you walked down my street, but you were with someone. How’d you know I was at the club?
— Your daughter told us, Gutiérrez says.
— My daughter? Escalante says. I don’t have children. That was my wife.
Opening his eyes wide and biting his upper lip and shaking his head hard, Gutiérrez’s face takes on an exaggerated look of admiration.
— It was no great feat getting such a young wife, Escalante says. For her, it was between poverty and me, and she lost: she got me.
It’s difficult for Nula to sense the irony in Escalante’s words; his tone is so neutral and flat that it seems deliberate. It’s like he’s talking to himself, Nula thinks, speaking to something inside. And he realizes that he’s been thinking about how Escalante’s wife laughed when, referring to Gutiérrez, she said, I know who you are. That cheerful sentence implied that she and her husband had already talked about him, and that there might be a sense of irony between them when it came to the subject of Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, when Nula sees them face-to-face, it seems impossible — unless they’d been avoiding it on purpose — that they never once met in the past year. Who knows what reason they might have had to delay the meeting, since they must have known that it would happen sooner or later. When they exchanged their names across the table of truco players without looking at each other, Nula realized, without understanding exactly what it meant, that despite their efforts at pretending otherwise, both men had been aware of even the most intimate details regarding the other for all of the past year. And then he thinks that it’s not impossible that when he saw Gutiérrez closing the door to his house he wasn’t actually planning to come to Rincón, and that only at that moment did he decide to go, because without him, Nula, he wouldn’t have dared come looking for Escalante at home. And Nula is so absorbed in these thoughts that Gutiérrez has to say his name twice in order to introduce him.
— Mr. Anoch, he says, wine merchant. Doctor Sergio Escalante, attorney.
The overly formal manner of the introduction, in particular the use of their surnames and professions, underscored by his sober tone, suggests to the two men that Gutiérrez’s regard for their persons goes well beyond these superficial details — antithetically, in fact, to these social characteristics — in the quarter of authenticity and courage, of hard-fought individuality, of nerve, of introspection, and of a fierce marginality. Without much emotion, both Nula and Escalante nod their heads, accompanying the movement with a brief and rather conventional smile to show that they’ve discerned, approvingly, the irony of the introduction. When he smiles, Escalante reveals an incomplete set of teeth almost at brown as the skin on his face, and, realizing this, he raises a hand to his lips. The teeth must have been missing for a while, because the gesture seems automatic, and its slight delay could be due to his familiarity with the other players, in whose frequent company he thinks it superfluous — his teeth are no longer a secret to them — but now a reflexive modesty has induced him to conceal his mouth, too late in any case, though Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to have given the matter even the slightest importance.