Soldi is completely oblivious both to Gabriela and to the supposed attractions of the road. He’s recalling, analyzing rather, the morning that they’ve spent with Gutiérrez, first of all the interview, which started inside, continued at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, and was extended by the swimming pool while they drank a glass of white wine before going into the kitchen to eat. With a sort of juvenile haste, he, Soldi, had grabbed the yellow canvas lounge chair, which had caught his eye immediately, and sat down while the others continued standing, because he’d been momentarily stuck by the fear that Gabi or Gutiérrez might take it first, but he’d barely sat down before he felt guilty and stood back up, just as the others were arranging the other two lounge chairs, causing Gutiérrez to look at him quizzically and start back up to his feet, but Soldi, with a cryptic smile, gestured casually for him not to stand up while he pretended to arrange something in his pants pocket, as if he was afraid he’d lost or forgotten something, and sat back down. Of their three principal informants — besides the author of the anonymous text, there are many others, but as sources they’re more fragmentary and weren’t as close to the events — Cuello, Gutiérrez, and Tomatis, Gutiérrez is the most impartial and scrupulous. Cuello knew Brando’s father, who was also a friend of Washington’s, and according to him, and he’s not the only one who’s said this, the head of the precisionist movement was even hated by his own father, but Cuello, despite his efforts at objectivity, has an excessively negative perspective on the subject. And just hearing the name Brando makes Tomatis furious, and he treats the precisionist aesthetic with the same irritated disdain as he does its author. Only Gutiérrez strikes him as impartial, though Soldi can’t suppress a slight doubt that always accompanies that assessment: Maybe too much so. Clearly it’s pleasurable for him to recall that period of his life, for reasons that probably have nothing to do with precisionism. They’d already discussed that issue several times with Tomatis: first off, it concerns his youth, and the distance from which he remembered it over the years had caused him to end up confusing his own feelings with the place he’d come from and he’d idealized that time without realizing that it’s himself and not everything else that he’s remembering, blending space and time and the internal with the external. But neither he nor Tomatis feel completely satisfied with that explanation. There’s a darker side to it, which Gutiérrez can’t talk about openly with people he only knows slightly, and about which he let something slip during Nula’s first visit, surely thinking that he was a simple wine salesman with no personal connection to his friends or acquaintances. It’s hard to tell if Gutiérrez is aware that, besides the two or three friends he’s told, many people he knows already suspect it, and some have even been discussing it, more or less openly, since he came back to the city. But there’s something else about his surprising composure, something embedded inside him, disconnected from the external world, a complete seed that needed no cultivation and that sprouted alone, something he’s probably not even conscious of, and now Soldi realizes that he’d driven off suddenly in the middle of the conversation because, behind the urbane banter that the three of them had passed back and forth between their cars, and which he’d of course enjoyed, he, Soldi, had needed to be alone a while to reconsider the various impressions that Gutiérrez had left him with that morning. Two or three times during their interviews over the past few weeks he’d heard him say, I chose screenwriting because I wanted to disappear better as an artist, because a screenwriter doesn’t have his own existence, and to disappear as an individual, I use a pseudonym that apart from my producer no one knows. That declaration, spoken in a lighthearted, cheerful tone, had intrigued him, and it seems to him to reveal something more than a straightforward professional or private discretion in Gutiérrez, but he can’t tell what. Soldi suspects that Gutiérrez’s generous but exact critiques are in fact the consequence of the sort of tolerance that doesn’t exclude the person who offers them, and if he himself is their first object, he’s also the last one he thinks deserves it. But it’s a cold tolerance, unburdened of the emotions that inspired it, an ultimate calm that sees the whole universe and all its parts, as infinitesimal as they may be, as lost causes from the very moment when, appearing suddenly and incomprehensibly from out of nowhere, as colorful as they are illusory, they bloom.
That attitude seems to be confirmed by his sense that as soon as anything appears in the world, whatever the reason, a catastrophe immediately gets to work on it, dizzyingly slow but sure to destroy it, with himself as the clearest example of that process. Clearly he treats the things around him — the house, the furniture, the garden, the countryside, the city, the world — and especially those that belong to him, as though they were foreign, with a gentle indifference, without suspicion or pretension, seeing only their use value, and he, Soldi, when he’s visiting the house, often gets the feeling of possessing them more than their owner, in any case of using them more carefully, as though it were he and not their owner who was aware of their true value. The only possession that he seems to claim is the precise memory of his years in the city, starting when his grandmother, who was his only family, had sent him from their insignificant, remote village, to parochial school, hoping that he’d finish high school so she could rest in peace, and what happened afterward, the law school, the three somewhat older and richer classmates — though anyone would’ve been — Rey, Escalante, and Marcos Rosemberg, the Roman Law professor who noticed his poverty and took him on as a clerk in his firm, the harsh conscription as occasional secretary to Brando and the precisionist movement, and the final days in the city, events so closely linked and so obscurely experienced that for a long time afterward they produced suspicions, inquiries, and conjectures among his friends until finally they forgot about him, and which caused him one fine day to disappear from the city without saying goodbye to anyone and then reappear and move in just as suddenly almost thirty-four years later. In his memory those years are inexhaustible, and if every memory, like every event, as insignificant as it might seem, is by definition infinite, then Soldi wonders if the interviews with him and Gabi allow Gutiérrez to relive them over and over, with meticulous tenacity, drawing to the clarity of his present consciousness a multiplicity of details that he might have considered disappeared forever, and which he finds still surprisingly fresh and vivid in some lost corner inside himself. His total lack of hope regarding the possibility of recovering the vividness of his past experience down to the minor details, among which one might have to include precisionism, is what produces that calm tolerance, that lucid indulgence of even the most malicious acts and the most sordid gossip. It’s as though he were telling his interviewers, They’re the only years I was really alive, so I have to take them as a whole because they were so few that I don’t have the luxury of rejecting any part of them. And Soldi thinks that Gutiérrez has a point: With the stories we were told as children, before going to sleep, which we wanted to hear over and over, always exactly the same way, we wouldn’t have let the narrator censor the sad or violent parts, or the ones that, because of the accumulation of details, delayed the advance of the plot or the arrival of the climax. All those elements of the story, happy or dramatic, moral or immoral, enjoyable or painful, had the same value, formed a part of it, were the whole story and not just its parts, and the most intense sections wouldn’t have had any meaning or the capacity to touch us if the transitions that sometimes may have seemed superfluous hadn’t held them together.