You, Tomatis, who know how much things are worth, will be able to recognize the hidden treasure here. And Gutiérrez, who frequently orders Italian and French wine, along with champagne, through an importer in Buenos Aires, and serves it generously to his friends, drank wine with ice and seltzer at the grill house while eating precooked intestines and greasy, proletarian empanadas. Watching him eat, Tomatis tried to unravel the situation, the enigma of the man who kept the best wines in his cellar and took his friends out to the best restaurants in the city or, he was sure, in Rome or Geneva, but when he went out alone he went exclusively to the San Lorenzo grill house. It’s a frequent topic of deliberation for Tomatis, and the day they went out together, as he watched him put ice and seltzer in his wine, intrigued, adopting a knowing air, but trying to provoke some sort of clarifying response, he told him with a smile that tried to be conspiratorial, For the sake of consistency, you’ll need to do that with your Château Margaux, and upon hearing this, cracking up and shaking his head, Gutiérrez answered, That sounds more like your style! It’s not at all like that for me, which did nothing to resolve Tomatis’s perplexity. He often told himself that he, Gutiérrez, was frozen in his own past, which sometimes seemed evident, and once he even said to Soldi, He confused his youth with where it took place, but the explanation was altogether too simplistic, Gutiérrez was too lucid not to be conscious of that error. No, it had to be something else. And, every so often, Tomatis was stuck wondering, Is it this or that thing, isn’t it actually, or maybe. . But none of the explanations were consistent with Gutiérrez; there was always some detail, some trait, some hypothesis, that didn’t coincide with him. The fact that he was so similar and yet so different from his friends from the city, both new and old, could not result entirely from his long absence; there was something intrinsic to him that had to explain it. And his friendliness, at once affectionate and distant, wasn’t produced by hesitation or duplicity. What was most mysterious was the infantile pleasure that the most banal things gave him: a word that he’d forgotten after all that time and which someone had spoken as he passed them in the street, or the way some children behaved when they were leaving school, or the tree buds in September, or the suggestive look he exchanged with a girl searching for a rich client from her table in some downtown bar, produced a sort of mild hilarity in him that seemed at once exultant and sympathetic, and which intrigued anyone in his company. They seemed to provoke a kind of recognition in him, and the things that had been like loose threads of unperceived experience within the incorporeal plane of his recollections, after so many years away, suddenly, in the tactile evidence of the present, were actualized. Tomatis shifts in his seat, bothered by a slight agitation, feeling that, once again, his understanding has come up against a limit. It doesn’t seem sufficient to explain him through simple nostalgia and a reencounter with the things of the past. And then, suddenly, after a few seconds in which his mind, unable to think, is submerged into a kind of painful void, he receives, through an association of ideas, the revelation: he hasn’t come looking for anything; he’s come back to the point of departure, but it’s not a return, and much less a regression. He hasn’t come to recover a lost world, but to see it differently. From the series of incalculable transformations, large and small, that he suffered since the day he left, another man has emerged, modified in imperceptible ways, especially to himself, by each change. And the man who now goes into ecstasies over the banalities of the world knows, having paid for it with his life, that every banality is shored up by a brace that flowers on the surface and stretches down into an unfinished, black depth. He seems to have reached the ultimate simplicity, but only after a long tour of the inferno. He, Tomatis, has never heard him raise his voice, and every time he thinks of Gutiérrez, he pictures him smiling vaguely, the slight smile more present in his eyes than on his lips. Even when he starts in on his enumerative diatribe against rich countries, though the terms he employs can sometimes seem too cruel, the gentle irony with which he speaks expresses more disillusion than rage, and, if you pay attention, sometimes, there’s a noticeable trace of indulgence. The world that he celebrates now, with an almost constant and subtle exaltation, is not at all the one of his youth, but rather one that he came to discover over the course of his successive transformations, and the person he’s become is now seeing it all for the first time. He didn’t actually return to his point of departure, but rather to a new place where everything is different. And though he may have lost his innocence, his capacity for acceptance has grown, inclining toward simple things without idealization or disdain. He must’ve thought that if he managed to recognize and appreciate simplicity, he could reconcile himself to the world. The distant, even absent quality that is sometimes evident in him is probably a result of that exercise in reconciliation, the consciousness and effort of it long ago dissolved into the benevolent sincerity with which he regards the world; he even finds a way to qualify Mario Brando. And Tomatis elaborates a formula that seems to give him enormous satisfaction, the multiplicity of meanings it contains only apparent to him: He left his house and had to cross the whole universe to get to the corner, and now he knows the effort required to reach the corner, and the significance of the immediate.