— It’s time, Tomatis says after they’ve finished eating the dessert and an indecisive silence has settled on the table. Opening the plastic bag, he takes out a large box of Romeo y Julieta cigars, his favorite brand, and tearing off the sticker that holds it closed, he lifts the lid and extends the box to José Carlos, who exults at the neat rows of thick cigars before picking one and passing the box to Soldi, who examines them quickly, curiously, before giving the box to Clara Rosemberg. Clara and Marcos study the contents and take out a second cigar. The box passes around the table to Gutiérrez, who seems ecstatic over the situation, and after looking admiringly at the rows of cigars, passes the open box to Nula without serving himself. Nula, studying the box, feigns a look of skepticism, which creates a degree of anticipation at the table, until finally, still scrutinizing the cigars suspiciously, he says loudly, Che, Tomatis, they swindled you — this box is full of Romeos! General laughter receives the joke and the box continuous its course, without stopping, to Tomatis, who offers it to Faustino, who rejects it emphatically, shouting, I don’t smoke! Tomatis takes a cigar for himself, closes the box, puts it back in the plastic hypermarket bag to protect it from the heat, and leaves it on the table.
José Carlos smokes a cigar alone, but Tomatis and Violeta, Clara and Marcos Rosemberg smoke it in pairs: they pass it back and forth every so often, pulling slowly and loudly, and then return it. Clara narrows her eyes, apparently concentrating, before every pull, and discharges mouthfuls of thick, gray smoke into the warm afternoon air, while Marcos regularly checks the fire at the end. All of them, with the exception of Tomatis, are occasional smokers, what you might call enthusiasts, but, under the circumstances, their pleasure is apparently authentic. They are, in fact, happy under that pavilion, outside that house, with that company and that singular host who disappeared from the city one day without telling anyone and reappeared, for good it seems, some thirty years later, with the same economy of explanations as when he left. A gentle mutual acceptance, a surrender to the moment, allows them an unexpected sense of well-being, removing them from the internal murmur, the solitary rumination, that fills the hours of the day, allowing them to find in the external, like a momentary source of relief, an interesting and pleasurable life, if only for a few moments, in the exceptionally hot April Sunday that gives them the illusion of living in an endless vacation. The wine, in particular, has contributed to that sensation, and now the cigars provide the moment with a meditative perfection. Their words are slower, more carefully thought out than usual, and private conversations have disappeared in favor of a collective attention to which anyone who speaks directs themselves. Everyone hopes for something interesting from the others, not a revelation so much as a story, a well-turned series of events that lead to an unexpected conclusion, to a surprising and unforeseen situation, filling the colorlessness of time with a bright glow as they’re recorded by the imagination, settling like a layer of sediment in a glass of wine in their at once receptive and deceitful memories. And suddenly, Violeta begins: after taking a pull from the cigar, she hands it back to Tomatis, and while she exhales the smoke she says that during the dictatorship, during the terror, when fear, disgust, randomness, cruelty, and pain occupied everything, in the middle of the contempt and the killing, things happened that were simultaneously agonizing and comical, so absurd sometimes that they ended up being hilarious. Because at that time the military was hunting out so-called subversive books, people were forced to scatter their libraries, burning or burying suspicious books in the backs of their courtyards. One night she was having dinner at the house of a studious but incredibly naive colleague, and when she commented on a set of books covered in brightly colored striped paper he’d explained to her that they were among the books considered subversive at the time and that he’d covered them like that so if the police came they wouldn’t be able to read what was written on their spines. Good idea, wasn’t it? Tomatis adds to reinforce the effect of Violeta’s story, intending to make it more humorous to its recipients. Several people laugh, and Faustino, impatient to tell his own story but somewhat inhibited by the size of his audience and the anxious gaze of Amalia who, from the other end of the table, seems to fear an incongruous comment from her husband, refers to some neighbors in La Toma, public servants who one afternoon were taking some fresh air at their window when they saw a caravan of Ford Falcons, from whose open windows extended the barrels of machine guns, coming down the street, which prompted the woman to say to her husband that they must be looking for someone and that they must be making a raid, and since they weren’t guilty of anything they remained sitting calmly in the window. But it was their house that they were coming to. Twelve men got out, all armed, and entered the house, but they didn’t touch anything, they simply wanted to terrorize them, and by the next week the couple was already in Barcelona. After the dictatorship they returned, and they still laugh when they remember what the woman said, and tell it to their friends, They must be making a raid, and, according to Faustino, it turned out that they were coming to theirs.
Amalia relaxes, and Faustino, still excited by the success of his story, collapses into his chair, satisfied. And then Marcos Rosemberg interjects from the other end of the table, using the cigar as a kind of pointer with which he underscores his words. He once had to go to some military official — a sort of legal advisor to General Negri who had the rank of colonel, celebrated for his bad faith and his dangerousness and his evil nature in particular — to get some information about a disappearance. The colonel asked him in and ordered him to sit down on the other side of the desk, and without speaking to him again he continued doodling on a paper for several minutes, deliberately forcing him to wait as a way to assert his authority. He finally looked up and gave him a studied look somewhere between inquisitive and severe, and so he, Marcos, started to inform him that he was there as an attorney, trying to get some information on the whereabouts of someone who’d disappeared three days ago, but the colonel, pounding the table, shouted that no one had disappeared in the country, only subversives who’d fled abroad to escape justice and that to pretend otherwise amounted to an insult to the armed forces and to the government. The problem was that, with the violence of the punch that he’d given to the desk, his wig had shifted slightly on his head, and his supposed assertion of authority was contradicted by the incongruence of the poorly pasted wig against his scalp. Drunk on his own words, the colonel continued to pontificate and threaten, but Marcos wasn’t listening any more, and was instead making a tremendous effort not to start laughing, fearing, simultaneously, that if the colonel’s state of excitement didn’t subside his wig would fall off his head, and as the situation continued, it became increasingly obvious to Marcos that if the colonel realized it, he was a dead man, he’d never walk out to the street again. And so, in the middle of the colonel’s speech he stood up, making to leave, muttering that they’d never see eye-to-eye, but with two energetic strides the colonel walked around the desk and stopped thirty centimeters from his face, giving him the most threatening look available in his repertory. But with his sudden movements the wig had shifted even more and was now almost hanging over his left ear. Split between laughter and fear, Marcos decided to exaggerate his fear, thinking that if he didn’t manage to contain himself and started to laugh the colonel would think it was out of nervousness. Suddenly the colonel gave him his most underhanded insult, addressing him as tú, and shouted, You’ll walk out that door or it’ll cost you dearly! and Marcos turned toward the door just as the first wave of laughter started to shake him, just like a retching before vomiting, and the colonel, seeing him from behind, must have thought that he was shaking so much out of terror, and ratcheting up his insults as Marcos was crossing the doorway, he muttered, Bolshevik shitbag! But Marcos continued laughing, so much so that the soldier who was on guard, without knowing the reason, started laughing too, infected by it. And when he got in his car and started driving along the waterfront toward his house and remembered that the colonel had called him a Bolshevik even though he hadn’t been a communist for years, because he’d become a socialist, he told himself that, for a security agent, he seemed very poorly informed, and this detail redoubled his laughter, though he didn’t know, ultimately, if his laughter was humorous or nervous.