Before getting in the car, he takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and lays it on the back seat. The parking lot of the government offices is hotter than he’d expected. The afternoon has grown spongy and humid, colorless, vague. Despite his two showers, the first in the morning and the second at Lucía’s house in Paraná, he feels greasy and exhausted; something, he’s not sure what, wraps him up with a sense of indecision, of sadness possibly, of oppression. He’d like to go straight home and not come back till tomorrow. He shakes his head slowly, with a long exhale, and gets in the car and turns the key, but for half a minute, give or take, he doesn’t make the decision to move. As the day has progressed, certain regions inside him have grown opaque and confused, spongy like the afternoon light, ambiguous like the day itself, neither overcast nor clear, fall or winter, and finally coming to an end. When night falls, erasing not only the light but also the ambiguity, when he sits within the bright circle under the lamp, after dinner, reading or drafting a clean copy of the hours that have passed since he last woke, he might feel somewhat better, and the agitated sediment that clouds the fish tank will settle, sinking back to the bottom, and above, in the bright layer, the sharply colored, agile, silent fish will flash again. He pulls out slowly from the parking lot and drives around the Parque Sur, moving down a wide, tree-lined street that curves southwest, but two blocks later he turns again, to the north, once again on a straight, broad avenue that leads to the city center. The sidewalks lined with one- and two-story houses are nearly empty, the houses seeming deserted at that hour — the doors and windows are shut and no one is looking out to the sidewalk, maybe because of the indecisive weather, or the hour, or the fact that there’s really nothing interesting to see. Every so often, the first bags of trash appear on the curb. Halfway down the block, three boys, one no more than two or three years old, scruffy and filthy, have opened a bag and are digging through it. Getting a jump on the waste pickers, who’ve made a way of life from the rational exploitation of garbage, the boys rummage through the bags like animals, trying to satisfy some immediate need, hunger or thirst, or in search of some interesting object, a cardboard figurine, a piece of thread, or a shard of mirror, a lost coin without monetary value but which could become something distinct or a fetish or simply a toy, transporting them for a moment, through its imaginary value, or its precarious and recreational use, from the animal immediacy in which they exhaust themselves, to the tenuous, human expectation that poverty, from birth till death, ceaselessly, confiscates from them.
Two blocks later, he sees a man on the corner, staring south, and when he’s about half a block away, Nula recognizes Carlos Tomatis, with his perennial blue jacket and his light-colored summer pants, but this time he has on a white shirt and a dark tie that, cinched tight around his heck, slightly pinches the tanned skin that hangs below his jaw line. Nula slows down and finally stops next to Tomatis and, rolling down the window closest to the sidewalk, opposite the driver’s side, he leans toward the opening just as Tomatis’s dark face appears in it.
— I’m waiting for the bus, Tomatis says, but I had to let a few go by because they weren’t full enough.
Nula laughs and opens the door.
— Get in, I’ll give you a lift.
Tomatis gets in and sits down, giving him a pat on the shoulder.
— I accept, but your good deed has deprived me of one of life’s most exquisite pleasures.
Nula laughs again and shakes his head, indicating, with that slow gesture, the legendary incorrigibility of his passenger.
— So you’re waiting for the bus? Are you heading home? Tomatis says he is, but Nula keeps talking. What brings you to such a remote neighborhood at this hour, and looking so sharp in your white shirt?
— It may sound like a lie, Tomatis says, but I’m coming from a wake. The ex-publisher of La Región. He retired a long time ago. But he was the one who hired me at the paper and who somehow avoided firing me for years and wouldn’t even let me go when I decided I was finished with all that.
— He was a good person, then, Nula says.
— Bearing in mind that he ran a newspaper, there were still a few ounces of decency left in him, so I guess so, yes, Tomatis says, and after thinking it over a few seconds adds, sorrowfully, But he thought that running a newspaper gave him the authority to have opinions about literature.
— Well, Nula says, I sell wine but I still act like know something about philosophy.
— It’s different, Tomatis says, and though he seems to consider the reasons for that difference for a second, he apparently doesn’t think it necessary to explain them.
— You caught me in a good mood, Nula says. I have a present for you.
With a curious smile, his head turned slightly toward Nula, Tomatis waits for more details about what he’s getting. But Nula, acting mysteriously and moving deliberately slowly in order to prolong the wait and in this way postpone indefinitely the moment of revelation, gestures toward the back seat.
— Back there, the white plastic bag, he says eventually.
With some effort, twisting himself in the seat until his knee is propped up on it, Tomatis leans toward the back of the car, where, alongside Nula’s carefully laid out coat, there are two plastic bags, one blank and another with the large orange W of the hypermarket emblazoned on it. He picks up the first one and holds it up to Nula.
— This one? he says, huffing slightly and checking its contents. There’s two salamis inside.
— No! Nula shouts. Bad dog! And then, lowering his voice, says, The other one.
Without mentioning that, in his clumsiness, the unmarked bag has fallen on his jacket, though luckily without opening completely, Tomatis picks up the other bag and turns around in his seat, and, somewhere between confused and disappointment, asks, A gift from the hyper?
— Nooo! Nula says. Not on your fucking life. I put it in the wrong bag.
Tomatis peers inside.
— I regret to inform you that some goblin has transformed the gold watch you planned to give me into another couple of salamis, he says thoughtfully, with feigned resignation.
— Those are no mere salamis, Nula says, those are two handmade artisanal chorizos manufactured especially for Amigos del Vino, but because the labels came off I can’t sell them. And I can’t keep them either, because that’d mean I was skimming off the top. And because I obviously can’t give them to just anyone, I take the opportunity offered by this encounter, which transpired thanks to a chain of contingencies that in the end turned about favorably, the death of the former publisher, your noble, compassionate reflection before his remains, a series of insufficiently full buses, and my appearance, to carry out the offering. They’re yours.