— He resurfaced in the seventies, Soldi says. In ’76, his brother-in-law, General Ponce, the son of the other General Ponce, his father-in-law, tried to get him a ministership, but Brando pulled out and instead wrote a few articles justifying the coup. When Elisa and El Gato disappeared, Tomatis had gone to see him.
An intense expression appears on Gabriela’s face. Of course, she’d known that story long before she and Soldi started their history of precisionism and the other avant-garde movements in the province. It feels personal to her, and though she never knew either Elisa or Gato Garay, she is aware of how difficult it must’ve been for “Carlitos”—that’s how she’s called him since she learned to talk, sometime before her first birthday — to go see Brando and ask him to intervene for his disappeared friends. That story is part of her family history, she heard it often during those years, whispered by her parents, and much later, after she came back from the U.S., where she’d gone to finish her literature degree, from Tomatis himself, not as a tragedy but rather as a farce whose subject wasn’t his friends’ disappearance but the personality of Mario Brando.
From the other car, Nula carefully studies Gabriela’s expression, while simultaneously considering her, in a sincerely disinterested way, at least consciously, as a sexual object. Earlier, it seemed that she was studying him in the same way, but he’s learned, especially after his marriage, that when other women undertake a similar appraisal they tend to do it simply out of habit, often without feeling at all implicated by it, and it’s therefore the impression of having been observed by her shortly before that sanctions his own sexual consideration of her. Her face is full and attractive, accentuated by wavy chestnut hair and a vivid and mobile gaze. A slight blush had appeared on her cheeks, darkened by the recent summer, in a sudden concentration that caused her lips to pinch slightly and her eyes to glow and then narrow and her head to freeze, as though she were bracing herself against an old injury. But she recovers herself immediately and, returning to the present, adopts a languid and earthly expression and prepares to continue. Nula compares her to his own wife and finds some points in common, though it’s not really surprising since they are the same age and come from similar backgrounds; Diana, though, seems to control her emotions better. Last night, for example, when he’d gotten home after having been with Lucía in Paraná and visiting two clients in the city, it was obvious that Diana would’ve liked more details about the way that he, Nula, had spent is day, but he knew there was no way she’d ask him, and he couldn’t have given them anyway because on his moral spectrum (an extremely subjective one, in fact), silence is permissible but lying isn’t. After dinner, they’d made a game of repurposing lines from Omar Kayyám for the promotional cards, and what made them laugh the most was how hard it was, because in the Rubaiyat the glorification of wine was always followed by the violent critique of one thing or another, power, religion, conformism, death, themes automatically prohibited from advertising language, and though Américo is a self-proclaimed agnostic, he has enough common sense to know that publicity shouldn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities. And it wasn’t hard for him and Diana to realize that the tone of ecumenical tolerance that dominates official discourse in every corner of the planet has the same characteristics as advertising language. For example, one stanza read, This night, two cups of wine, / will make me rich twice over, which works well as a tagline, but the third verse, although before I must reject reason and religion, were useless as ad copy because they’d offend both the religious pretensions and the religious sentiments of the consumer. Another verse, Without wine it’s impossible to live or to drag this body along, were also useless because the marketing fiction about alcohol pretends that wine is a pure pleasure that produces instant joy without creating any sort of dependence. And they couldn’t pick any stanzas (there were many) in which Kayyám refers to death, because its proximity to mentions of wine would give the product a negative image, so instead they amused themselves by cutting and pasting verses and rearranging them in such a way that none of the counterproductive elements would end up on the cards. They had enjoyed themselves after dinner, and when they went to bed they were about to make love, but at the last minute Diana decided she didn’t want to. Nula went to sleep annoyed, not because he wanted her so badly that night, but rather because he believed, without realizing it, that the sexual act with her would erase the consequences of what had happened that afternoon with Lucía, sweeping it more quickly into the past, a superstition that he suffered from every time he had extramarital relations.
From his privileged position, having had erotic contact with two beautiful young women the day before, Nula congratulates himself on his impartial and disinterested assessment of Gabriela Barco as a sexual object. It doesn’t occur to him to think that Gabriela experiences something similar, and that she might have even more compelling reasons to consider herself authorized to it: having achieved the principal object of all amorous practice, she’s momentarily indifferent to its secondary benefits, and the countless number of men who could have provided them to her are clumped together in an asexual mass, not counting José Carlos, her partner, an economist in Rosario who at one point in the two or three thorough and affectionate embraces the month before had managed to plant the seed of what, this morning, once she had the results from the second test, has begun to enchant and fascinate her, enveloping her for the duration of the process that has been initiated, a transitory and autonomous system inaccessible to others from several different points of view. The recollection of this fact flushes her tea-colored irises with a glow so different from the introspective fury that just now inflamed them that Nula, disconcerted, turns his eyes from Soldi to look at her, while Soldi himself, having been watching Nula, tries to look at Gabriela from the corner of his eye without surrendering his perpendicular position, his back upright against the seat so as to not block their visual field, without being able to see anything in particular in her face. And when Nula finally meets her eyes, from which, by now, any trace of emotion has disappeared, Gabriela continues. According to Gutiérrez, she says, Calcagno had given him the job at the law firm to help him with his own work, but less than a month into the job, Brando was already giving him work that had to do with the precisionist movement generally, and with his own career in particular, and so often that he soon became a sort of private secretary. Not only did he edit the magazine and set up meetings and arrange the movement’s activities, but he also typed out its leader’s poems and articles and sometimes even wrote his personal correspondence. Gutiérrez claims that Brando wrote lots of poems that had nothing to do with the precisionist aesthetic and which were better, as far as he could tell, than the ones he published, but she and Soldi hadn’t been able to confirm this because the family — his wife was still alive and his two daughters, who’d both married naval officers, had moved to the south — refused to collaborate with them or even to see them, and except for a few pre-precisionist poems written during his adolescence and published in La Región’s Sunday literary page and in some student magazines, there was no trace left of his traditional poetry. Every so often, Gutiérrez would quote the first line of an alexandrine sonnet that, according to him (and he seems to be the only one who read it), was called “To a pear,” and which went, Gabriela says, concentrating a second to remember the exact phrasing of the line she’s about to quote: Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate. When he hears the line, Soldi, relaxing and turning toward Nula, as though he’d just woken from a dream, filled with a light and emphatic euphoria, interrupting Gabriela Barco without taking the trouble to ask, in a voice raised a bit too much by his sudden excitement, interjects: Gutiérrez also remembers the first hendecasyllable of a precisionist sonnet—he practically shouts, in the tone of someone proffering a revelation—that apparently he never published or even finished. The line, according to Gutiérrez, Pinocchio says, goes, The scalpel scratches the epithelium. And shaking her head and laughing, not at all put off by Solid’s sudden interruption, Gabriela repeats, The scalpel scratches the epithelium. With a short, almost inaudible sarcastic laugh, Soldi flattens himself against the seat again and falls silent.