— Lucía, Gutiérrez says softly. I’m taking your mother to Paraná.
— Don’t worry, Lucía says, finally looking up at him. I have to leave too, to take the baby to a birthday party.
— I’ll call a cab later. We’ll talk tonight? Riera says.
Lucía kisses him on the cheek and, without saying a word, separates from him, walking heavily through the water to the metal ladder. As soon as she steps on it, she turns to Nula and Diana: I’ll come say goodbye on my way out.
— It’s okay, Diana says.
Gutiérrez, it seems to Nula, observes the scene with curiosity. Or, maybe, with an irony that is at once amused and benevolent.
Now Tomatis is the one sitting up with is back against the trunk, and Violeta the one who is lying on the ground, drowsy, her head on the lap of Tomatis, who amuses himself listening to the sounds around him, the ones coming from the pool, of course, but also from other swimming pools in neighboring houses. Every so often a car passes, invisible to him, the muted sound of its engine audible, along with, from the asphalt road, the distant vibrations of passing trucks. Televisions and radios are turned on nearby. The Clásico starts at seven, but other games are being played in Buenos Aires or in Rosario and more than one fan must have taken his television or portable radio out to the courtyard, contributing to the cloud of noise pollution that has devastated every Sunday in the republic from time immemorial, Tomatis thinks sarcastically. Luckily, the announcers’ voices come from too far away to disturb the calm drowsiness of the courtyard, and besides, they’re so typical of Sundays that, as strident as they may be, many people don’t even hear them anymore. All day, he’s been paying attention to the birds, who are relishing the good weather: around noon, he’d heard the pigeons, cooing in the shade, the constant chirp of sparrows all morning, and, after lunch, at the hottest time of day, the flocks of guira cuckoos gathering noisily in the trees, enjoying the unexpected summer. Two or thee times he’s seen a pair of nesting birds passing, looking among the grass for something to eat. Every so often the cry of a kiskadee rings out, or a kingbird passes, or a cardinal, crossing from tree to tree, from courtyard to courtyard, from the sandy streets to the countryside perhaps, beyond the asphalt road and the town and the river and the islands, across the river.
From where he’s sitting he can see, beyond the clearing for the courtyard, the house, the pool, the pavilion. Gutiérrez and the Rosembergs, who’d disappeared inside a while before, appear through the side door of the house. Gutiérrez walks to the edge of the pool and speaks to the people in the water. Marcos, who is only wearing swimming trunks, sits down in one of the lounge chairs and leans back. But what catches Tomatis’s attention is Clara Rosemberg; from that distance, he can watch her easily. Clara, with hesitant slowness, starts to cross the courtyard. Despite the heat, she walks with her arms crossed over her chest, as if she were cold. Her vague, thoughtful smile, which is actually a kind of mask, remains on her face. With long, slow strides, her youthful silhouette crosses the courtyard in one direction, then in another, distant from the afternoon, from the rough and bright present, from the whole universe possibly. Tomatis, who always found her interesting, thinks that’s she’s carried, since she was a child, an abstracted sadness. Now a sudden movement of her head reveals that she’s discovered some flowerbeds planted in the shade under a few trees, and then, without uncrossing her arms or accelerating her walk, she approaches and examines them carefully. Every so often, she leans down, and, stretching out a hand, touches a flower carefully, so as not to damage it, then withdraws her hand, stands back up, and crosses her arms again, still observing the multicolored flowerbeds. She does this three or four more times, walking among the flowerbeds: she leans over, touches a flower or caresses it, studies it a while, and then straightens back up and crosses her arms. Tomatis thinks he can see, from that distance, the thoughts that bubble behind her enigmatic forehead. It’s as though he were seeing her naked, at her most secretly intimate, and ashamed at his indiscretion he narrows his eyelids, so as to not continue watching her without her realizing it. But his curiosity is stronger than his reservations and he opens his eyes again. In any case, Clara is too far away for what he’s doing to be considered indiscrete, and besides, to him the scene is unexpectedly enchanting, as though he were seeing her in a theater. Clara’s gaze passes calmly over the flowers, and Tomatis remembers a haiku by the nun Seifu: an aged butterfly / letting its soul play / with a chrysanthemum.
Gabi, Soldi, and José Carlos, sensing some movement around the pool, stand up and walk to the front part of the house. They’ve seen Violeta and Tomatis, who for a while now have been taking a siesta, resting in the shade of the trees not far from the bench where the three of them have been sitting, do the same. They’ve been discussing a little of everything, politics, economics, literature, in particular the local avant-garde, which has occupied Soldi and Gabriela’s time for months, but also the personality of the owner of the house, his not at all ordinary life, his mysterious past, his tact, and his slight eccentricity had filled a good part of the conversation. All three agree that there’s something elusive about him, and that in some of his apparently inconsequential actions there’s nevertheless something deliberate, an effort to show things in a different light. His elusiveness, Soldi has said, is definitely a result of that tacit exercise. It’s like he’s trying to say something, but without words, and that’s what feels disturbing. The three of them also wonder about the unique relationship that Gutiérrez has with Leonor and Lucía Calcagno, but out of discretion none of them comment on it. The arrival of Leonor, whom none of them had ever seen, surprised them, but what was immediately obvious wasn’t mentioned by any of them: she and Gutiérrez couldn’t have been more different, and it seemed impossible that they could ever understand each other or even maintain a conversation, and yet he left everything he had in Europe to move into that house, near her, and had accepted the idea that Lucía was really his daughter without demanding any serious proof of it. Of course, when they were alone, Gabriela and José Carlos would talk about it, and she and Soldi would bring it up as soon as they saw each other again, but doing so in Gutiérrez’s own house seemed, to all three of them, though they never discussed it, sordid and disloyal.
When they reach the area between the pavilion and the pool, they realize that almost everyone is there: Nula, Diana, and Marcos are sitting in adjoining lounge chairs; Diana, Soldi observes without saying anything, is sitting in the yellow one; Faustino arrives from the front of the house, carelessly shaking his clothes, because he’s been lying on the ground, in the shade of the trees out front, taking a siesta; Clara, Violeta, and Tomatis are talking in the sun, standing on the white slab path that leads from the house to the pool and the pavilion; Riera swims noisily through the rectangle of blue water; and Amalia takes in, politely but without too much interest, from the doorway to the room attached to the pavilion, the tableau vivant that they seem to represent: Sunday in the country: Afternoon. When he arrives, Faustino deviates slightly from his path and walks up next to her. Amalia, seeing him, notices that he still has some branches and blades of grass sticking to his shirt and pants, and she brushes them off, passing an expert hand over her husband’s back and buttocks. Riera starts to climb slowly up the metal ladder in the shallow end and steps out of the pool, shaking water, concentrating, absent from his surroundings, like an animal passing from one element to another, adapting to the change, not realizing that everyone present is looking at and perhaps admiring him, the forty-year-old man without a single gray hair or a single wrinkle, tall, without a belly, his damp hair sticking to the tanned skin of his arms and legs and chest. Surfacing from his animal self-absorption, he notices the others’ gazes and brandishes, without an ounce of affectation, the wide and slightly degenerate smile that, as paradoxically as it may seem, awakens the immediate sympathy of both men and women, so much so that, because of his inexhaustible energy, his frank and open amorality, several women he tossed aside still talk about him with a tolerant smile, and a few husbands whose wives he seduced, or, in his own words, corrupted, are still his friends today. Hesitant, unsure what to do, he finally decides to sit down in one of the unoccupied lounge chairs on the other side of the pool, immediately across from the ones occupied by Diana, Nula, and Marcos. Almost at that exact moment, dressed to leave, carrying a bag in her hand, Lucía comes out of the house followed by her mother and Gutiérrez. Seeing her walk out, the three guests who occupy the adjoining lounge chairs stand up simultaneously, but Riera continues sitting; because Lucía has given him a conspiratorial gesture, Nula gathers that he’s preferred to remain sitting so as to not have to run into his mother-in-law. Lucía begins her circuit of goodbye kisses with Diana, marking her fondness with a few caresses and pats on her naked back, then Marcos, and finally Nula, an extremely fleeting brush against his cheek, as if her lips had rebounded when they touched it. Looking around, Lucía decides to move on to the door of the utility shed, and gives Amalia a kiss and Faustino a handshake; she crosses under the empty pavilion and approaches the two groups of three: José Carlos, Soldi, and Gabriela, and on the other side of the pool, standing on the white slab path, Clara, Violeta, and Tomatis, whom she avoided a moment ago when she turned toward Diana. Once the round of kisses is finished, Lucía walks toward Leonor and Gutiérrez, who wait for her near the door. Gutiérrez pats her affectionately on the shoulder and, waiting for Leonor to give a general farewell to the group, consisting of an imperceptible smile and a slight movement of her head, accompanies them to the white gate, but after taking two steps he stops suddenly, causing the two women with him to do the same, and pointing toward the middle of the front courtyard at a flowering bush, lowering his voice, but not so much that they can’t hear him, and then moving his extended index finger and placing it vertically against his lips to urge them to be silent, he says: