But first he has to go see his brother’s dentist friend. As the car leaves the bridge and enters the city, a ripple of despair passes over him and immediately vanishes, not giving him time to think about it or even to realize that it’s happened. But in any case his mood changes, and the euphoria provoked by his imagined Friday night dwindles and leaves him feeling neutral, subdued, governed by financial matters, a thin varnish that covers, provisionally and laughably, the thing itself. The city is withered, in ruins. Nula sees its defects before anything else, but what he thinks he sees in the city, though he doesn’t realize it, is actually a projection from inside himself. He arrives at the dentist’s exactly on time. A nurse opens when he rings the bell and takes him to the waiting room, where two women and a man are reading old magazines. Five or ten minutes later, the dentist says goodbye to a patient who was in the examining room and gives Nula a friendly gesture to come in. He’s a little older than Chade, but more candid and friendly; he seems more at home in the world than his brother. Maybe his father was also a dentist and died in bed of natural causes, not riddled with bullets in a pizzeria, he thinks, but no matter how much he tries he can’t dislike him. Just the opposite: at some point during the meeting, which doesn’t last more than fifteen minutes, Nula starts to think that the man could have a positive influence on his brother, drawing him from his constant, intense standoff. He, Nula, couldn’t be friends with him: he’s too transparent; he’d be the ideal company for a casual chat in a bar or on the bus to Rosario — Buenos Aires or Córdoba would be too much — for a wine tasting at the Iguazú hotel, or something like that, but not much more. He’s apparently a pre-metaphysical being, without fears or regrets, the lack of the first sheltering him from the second, or, ultimately, Nula thinks, it might be the opposite. That more or less unconsciously open disposition is what’s lacking in his brother. The dentist tells him that he’s bought a wine cellar for his apartment with capacity for a hundred and fifty bottles and that’s he’s giving Nula free rein to stock it, thirty percent with white and seventy percent with red. He tells him the amount he’s willing to invest, a considerable sum, and gives him a ten percent deposit. And as he follows him to the door he tells him that his brother is an excellent dentist, that he’s well-respected by his colleagues and that he’ll go far in the field. He’s a scrupulous professional, and liked by everyone, despite his reserved nature, are his exact words. It’s clear he doesn’t have much time to waste because, Nula realizes, there are now five patients flipping through old magazines in the waiting room.
The meeting with the advisor lasts much longer. The governor’s aide doesn’t seem in a hurry to buy wine, as though all he really wanted to do was talk about vague, fragmentary, disconnected things with him. Every so often he mentions Beto—that’s the governor’s nickname, which everyone uses — gesturing with a slight nod toward somewhere on the first floor where his office must be, and once in a while smiles ironically when he refers to him, possibly to demonstrate his familiarity with the supreme leader, as they call him in La Región, or possibly for the opposite reason, to suggest to Nula that even though he holds an eminent post as political advisor to the government, he hasn’t sacrificed his right to critique it. He’s dressed with the conventional elegance of a politician, suit, striped shirt, tie, and has on his desk a stack of printed pages which he was in the middle of correcting, with an expensive pen, when Nula interrupted him. He’s affectionate, candid, and doesn’t appear to give much weight to his current position; he apparently doesn’t even seem to realize the contradiction with his past, much less to be embarrassed by it, and though all his gestures, his words, his actions, and his allusions seem to indicate that his situation is the most natural thing in the world, a damp glow in his eyes, which alternate, in conflict, between steady and evasive, betrays a disharmony, a lack of resolution, a wound that refuses to heal. Wrapped up as he is — and as he always will be — in his family history, Nula is unable to translate everything written in his look. All he sees is an effort to conceal, and implied by this same effort, the shame of still being alive, from the son of his murdered friend. But his father’s execution is only a detail in a larger picture: with neither cynicism nor indifference, he thinks that he’d be able to tolerate the advisor if some ulterior interest had justified it. His look says more than one, two, or a thousand murders could. It says, We thought we were out there to change our lives but it turned out we were seeking death. And the victims forget the taste of oppression when, little by little, and almost without realizing it, they become the executioners. It’s possible that even he himself doesn’t know what he’s thinking. The province of happy mediums in which he now survives, languishes, and drifts aimlessly, is comfortable enough and doesn’t demand the kind of moral bargain that he’s convinced he’d never accept anyway, though he doesn’t deny that his political reversals obey philosophical positions that could be considered relativist, eclectic, and above all realist. But if his interior life were compared to an electrical system, one might say that, although on the surface everything seems to be working fine, in the damp, weak spark in his eyes, the glow too steady or too unstable, to an attentive observer, the constant threat of a short circuit is obvious. But Nula’s suspicions aren’t political, they’re personal, because if the opposite were the case (and Nula is unaware of this), they’d apply to his father too. What’s clear is that, while the advisor continues to feel suspicious, and though he still doesn’t want to give him anything, he no longer wants to deceive him, and probably didn’t even want to before going up to see him, because he’d forgotten the false chorizos that he was planning to give him. At the end of the visit he sells him a small quantity of wine that he’ll deliver to his house next week. Nula packs up his brochures and the deposit check and walks out into the street.