Soldi imagines that Gutiérrez is aware of the base acts, but simply observes them from a distance or glosses them unemotionally, not as though they made no difference to him, but rather as though he’d exhausted all his supplies of anger and outrage a long time ago. During lunch, for example, his customary monologue about them, the inhabitants of the European countries he’s lived in for over thirty years, which he never names, never calls them the Italians, the Swiss, the French, the British, etc., and not even them in fact, unless the construction of the sentence forces him to use the pronoun, that monologue which at times becomes a soliloquy, as though he were articulating thoughts that aren’t even directed to the people present, isn’t spoken either with gravity or violence but rather with a calm and ironic, almost delicate tone, as if he were referring to a hopeless case that doesn’t deserve more than a distant and dispassionate description, possibly thinking that even the most atrocious crimes, repeated ad nauseam, become monotonous and comicaclass="underline" Society there is as chaotic as a natural phenomenon, and just like someone with a roof over their head tolerates the rain, they get along by trading their workdays for extravagance, which, like the air they breathe, they can’t do without, allowing themselves to be treated like slaves, not realizing that even if they could take a step in any direction it would make them an accomplice in the most atrocious crimes. And because the glut has temporarily dulled their instincts, they’ve traded ethics for a guilty conscience, and if because of that same excess the rest of the world declines, deprived of everything basic, they’ll let twelve-year-olds in other parts of the world work fourteen-hour days when they’re not getting raped by the perverts on vacation in those places or worse yet buy newborns and adopt them as their children when they can’t have them any other way, all so that their own children are well-fed and well-dressed and get what they consider to be a decent education. The ruins of the places they’ve sacked, pyramids, temples, devastated jungles, empty savannahs, ravaged geological layers, fossils that they lay claim to by giving them ridiculous names, all serving as decoration, as a mirror to what they insist are their souls, which they insist are fabulous, rational, and profound. And they’ve transformed the few livable places left in those wasted lands into kitschy destinations for their so-called holidays, the so-called setting for their supposedly unforgettable so-called pleasures. Their bestial sensualism isn’t a product of their own desires, which have become incomprehensible to them because of their philistinism and the constant, ubiquitous brainwashing, bombarded as they are by political and commercial propaganda, rather they’re the byproduct of generic stereotypes and secondhand needs inculcated by that very same propaganda. They refer to themselves as individualists and yet whenever they open their mouths all that comes out are clichés so fashionable that they end up being interchangeable with anything that their worst enemies, who pretend to be different, might have on hand. The religions they practice don’t commit them to anything, nothing more than following a soccer team, and their obedience is certainly less stringent than to their weekly magazine subscriptions or to the guidebooks that dictate their mindless travels. Even though they wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago, they pretend they’re still shaped by the precepts dictated by their gods, which according to them sanction their commerce and their genocides as long as every once in a while they donate their old clothes and unwanted food, their table scraps in a word, though it’s well-known that the god they adored kept them on their knees or treated them like rabid dogs or forced them to wash their bodies before they asked it for anything — always the same irrational fantasies, of course — and the others, the ones they all feel proud to have descended from, pretended to live in a brotherhood of rational and benevolent deities when in fact, and for no other reason than their thoughtlessness, jealousy, resentment, and cruelty, they would descend from Olympus to betray them in battle, demand the sacrifice of what they held most dear, rape their mothers and wives and daughters and transform them into rocks or animals. Evil was already engraved by fire in the natural order before they multiplied it insanely with science, technology, commerce, and religion, their avarice causing them to speak of it euphemistically and, when they couldn’t control it any more, infecting every corner of the world with it. But they’re happy as long as they’re well-educated and can condescend to foreigners, and even though everything they pretend to know they’ve read in newspapers or heard on the radio, they’re ashamed when they have to put their pets on diets so they don’t lose their figure.
Soldi laughs, and Gabriela turns toward him and, intrigued when she sees his bearded profile, smiles too.
— Gutiérrez, Soldi says. The things he said at lunch about Europeans.
Gabriela’s smile widens.
— He has a talent for description, she says. It must come in handy for his screenplays.
Soldi makes a vague movement with his head and shoulders, and once again serious, returns to his thoughts. Gabriela, staring abstractedly through the windshield at a random point on the pavement that shifts and changes as the car moves — only the distance between herself and the car remaining constant—“sees” the dark green station wagon again as it moves down the sandy road, turns to the right, and stops next to the white bars of the gate. Now she sees Nula getting out of the car, pushing the half-open gate, stopping at the white front door, and hesitating a few seconds before deciding to ring the bell. His walk through the garden with Gutiérrez, as she sees it, is halting and fragmentary. Maybe, as with herself and Pinocchio before lunch, they sit down in the lounge chairs next to the pool, or maybe they sit down at the bank of trunks under the trees at the back (eucalyptus, acacias) where she and Pinocchio had once sat while they waited for Gutiérrez, who’d stepped out, to the city, leaving a message telling them to wait so they could resume their interviews. But now they’re inside, standing next to the round kitchen table, inspecting some wine bottles they take from the cardboard cases. They might have a cup of coffee, or Nula might simply drop off the order, take his check, and return to the city. Gabriela looks back at the road they’ve been leaving behind, and which gets more and more narrow as the car advances, first through the side view mirror and then through the rear window: no short, dark green station wagon appears on the straight and empty pavement. No, he must still be there, trying to make another sale, or reporting, in his ironic, juvenile way, the conversation they’d just had, between their cars, on the embankment that descends from the highway to the sandy road. Maybe they’ve settled their business and have moved on to what Pinocchio referred to earlier as the ontology of becoming, Nula, with that provincial womanizer attitude, being of course, alongside Pinocchio, a real expert. But he doesn’t really have the fingernails of a guitarist, Gabriela tells herself, using an expression so conclusive and circular, smoothed and polished by its infinite iterations in popular speech, that for a fraction of a second it displaces the images that had occupied her, the words that comprise the expression imprinted on the bright stage of her mind like a neon sign switching on and off periodically against the black background of a dark, obscure city. But she’s not sure that he doesn’t have those fingernails: simply put, he shouldn’t act so sure of himself. Now she sees him again in the lounge chair by the pool, drinking coffee and discussing philosophy, exhausting the declensions of the verb to be. And Gabriela recalls a story that her father told her once: he and Tomatis were leaning over the railings of the suspension bridge, watching the water, and it occurred to Barco to ask, Carlitos, in your opinion, what is a novel? And without hesitating even for a second or looking up from the water swirling around the pillars of the bridge several meters below, Carlitos had answered, The decomposition of continuous movement.