SUNDAY: THE HUMMINGBIRD
THE FIRST TWO WITHOUT PULLING OUT! GUTIÉRREZ THINKS at the moment he wakes up, even though more than thirty years have passed since that summer morning, so similar to the one in which he’s just opened his eyes, when he slept with Leonor naked at his side for the first and last time, because every other time they saw each other it was always in the afternoon, the appropriate time of day of adultery. But there’s no virile pride or arrogance in the thought, only incredulous happiness, retrospective excitement, gratitude. Ever since that distant, scorching Sunday, somewhat unreal because of the excessive heat, the multiplicity of sensations up till then unknown to him, the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, until that peaceful April morning, almost as hot as the first, Gutiérrez has been convinced that his life began that night and ended a few weeks later, when he took the bus to Buenos Aires and disappeared from the city. He thinks he owes this to Leonor, and is prepared to pay that infinite debt forever: You get seventy years for a few hours, a few minutes, of life, and then there’s nothing to do with the rest; it’s just killing time.
After spending a while in the bathroom, shaving, defecating, taking a warm, meticulous shower, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, dressing — underwear, a white undershirt, dark blue pants, sandals — and getting the thermos and the mate in the kitchen and eating a few buttered buns that Amalia picked up at the bakery, Gutiérrez is walking from the kitchen to the courtyard, and moving away from the pavilion, and beyond the swimming pool, stepping off the white slab path that leads from the house to the pool — believing he would move in to that house after retiring from his many activities, Doctor Russo thought big — he steps onto the stretch of lawn that, still wet from the dew, dampens his feet through the opening of the sandals, producing, in the warm morning, a delicious sensation. At a distance, Faustino leans attentively over a hibiscus, possibly searching for dry branches or flowers, withered during the night, to prune.
Gutiérrez empties the gourd in two or three energetic pulls through the straw and falls still. The entire lawn around him is covered in multicolored drops into which the morning light decomposes. That immense, unique, often colorless substance that is incessantly scattered over even the most remote corner of the visible world rests at his feet now in a shimmer of yellow, green, orange, red, blue, and indigo drops that, if he moves his head slightly as he looks at them, seem animated, change color, grow more luminous, emitting iridescent sparks. The humidity of the night, condensing in the morning cold, was deposited into colorless drops over the green leaves of grass, and now the sun has risen to a certain height, a precise location in the sky, and its rays, striking the drops at a certain angle and at no other, refract into a manifold iridescence, as if a rainbow had exploded and its splinters continued to shine around him, tiny and multiplied, on the wet ground. This intimate, domestic enchantment gives way to a momentary and fragmented sensation, an abstract certainty about the common essence that circulates among every part of the whole, connecting them to each other and to everything else, and the at once astonished and estranged impression of always being somewhere larger than where our systems of habit mistakenly accustom us to believing we are. Gutiérrez takes two or three steps and stops at a spot where the grass is somewhat higher, and when, after having stepped on the leaves, separating them, his feet are once again motionless, they close over his sandals once again, causing them to disappear into a kind of cave of green grass in which, every time he moves, sparkling iridescently, a reflective surface of multicolored drops shimmers.
Yesterday morning at around nine, Amalia had come in to tell him that there was a man looking for him. It was Escalante. He was passing by to let him know that he wouldn’t be coming to the cookout after all.
— I figured you were here for the flashlight, Gutiérrez said, laughing.
— The flashlight?
— The one that Chacho loaned us when we went looking for you at the club.
And he went into the kitchen and returned to the courtyard with it.
— Thanks, Escalante said, and for a moment neither one knew what to say.
— I knew you wouldn’t come to the cookout, Gutiérrez says finally. But I never thought you were so sensitive that you’d come tell me the day before.