It’s not actually worth getting upset over such improbable complications. Tomatis would never say anything, and as far as the wine salesman is concerned, apart from being overly self-confident, there’s really nothing else to fault him for, at least for now — well, one thing, actually, maybe the shameless way he looks at women. Laughing, without opening her eyes, Gabriela shakes her head slowly, summing up, with this gesture, Nula’s essential predictability, possibly some automatic program from his early years that’s unconsciously set in motion every time he sees a chick. With gentle, condescending indolence, she puts Nula aside. She wants it to be after six already so she can call Rosario; Caballito can wait till tomorrow or even till the weekend, because she wants to be sure that she’ll get her father on the phone rather than her mother, if she happens to answer, though she’s usually incapable of even stretching her arm as far as the end table, where the phone is kept, and if her father is far from the house, in the garden for example, he has to run to answer it and usually comes too late. Besides, José Carlos should be the first to know — although he already has two teenage children from his first marriage, Gabriela knows he’ll be happy. They’ve lived together for almost four years, but they’ve known each other since before she went to New Jersey to finish her degree. Actually, it’s been several months since they stopped using protection, and they’d started feeling somewhat disappointed that nothing had happened yet, until finally her period hadn’t come, and when it was almost three weeks late she decided to buy a test at the pharmacy; the result was positive, but to be sure she wanted a lab test, which settled all her doubts. Because Holy Week is coming up, she and Pinocchio decided they’d work till Wednesday with Gutiérrez and Cuello, and she’d go to Rosario to see her doctor — this morning, after getting the test results, she’d called for an appointment — and, if the doctor allowed it, she’d take advantage of the holiday and would spend the weekend in Caballito with José Carlos. When had it happened, Gabriela asks herself, when did she and José Carlos get what they were hoping for? After her last period, over a weekend in Rosario, they’d made love twice, the first time on Saturday morning — she’d arrived late Friday, after having spent the whole week working with Pinocchio, and José Carlos had taken part in a conference on economic planning at the university that had lasted two full days — and then on Saturday night, before going out to eat, and after a quiet day at home and then at a party that had lasted till late, they’d started up again. It must have been the second time, that night, Gabriela decides. They’d been talking and caressing each other for a while, mostly naked — it was still hot then — and she’d been getting turned on gradually as he played his fingers softly through her pubic hair, wrapping and unwrapping them and sliding them every so often along the damp edges of her opening. A reddish shadow covered the room, into which the last light of the afternoon filtered. They were happy, and though they seemed distant from the world, they were unwittingly working in its favor. When José Carlos’s fingers dipped a bit more and pushed open the damp edges, she’d had the sensation, in which pleasure mixes with a slight and luckily passing anguish, of not belonging to herself, of losing herself in a remote, forgotten corner of her own body, where blood and tissue and fluids, the silent life of her organs, steered her toward divergent and external shores. She’d experienced that singular feeling from time to time, but never as intensely as that Saturday night. When she touched his penis, it felt silky and tense and quivering against the tips of her fingers and the palm of her hand, and when he entered her Gabriela thought it felt harder, thicker, longer, hotter, and wetter than usual — she’d thought this later, as she showered, because at that moment the sensations filling every corner of her body didn’t leave much space for thinking — and the drawn out pleasure culminated during her orgasm in a kind of fury that made her muscles ache for days afterward and left José Carlos with his back covered in scratches. Gabriela had felt him finish with a thick burst of semen, and for a while after he’d pulled out she’d been sensitive there, and had liked the feeling of José Carlos’s organ still being inside of her. Yes, Gabriela thinks, it must have been that time, it couldn’t have happened in any other way but in the middle of that pleasure, and she happily abandons herself to that thought for several minutes, though of course she’s aware that for its self-perpetuation that ancient, opportunistic, and single-minded substance could work under any conditions,
in vivo or in vitro, and as long as contact happens between the two protagonists who must unite in order to guarantee its persistence it makes no difference whether there’s pleasure or suffering, design or accident, love or indifference, consent or violation. Gabriela lies still, satisfied, smiling to herself, but suddenly, without warning, the smile is erased and a hard expression takes over her face, and when her mouth opens abruptly, as though her lower jaw had unhinged, the hardness is transformed into confusion, irritation, anger: she’s at Gutiérrez’s house, sitting at the table with Pinocchio, and the owner of the house, who has his back to them, is preparing something at the stove, and when he turns around he’s the wine salesman, and as a mean joke he’s serving her a plate of live fish. Opening her eyes and crying out, Gabriela is suddenly awake and sitting up on the bed. The disorientation of the sudden dream gives way, in her recovered thoughts, to amazement: in the fraction of a second that she was asleep, the dream took disparate fragments of experience and constructed a new world as vivid as the empirical one, and whose meaning is as difficult to unravel. At an infinitesimal intersection of time, a tangential episode, endowed with its own time, unfolds into events that, were they put into the order in which they occur in reality, would take hours, days, weeks, months, years, the way a single sentence of a story can gather together centuries of empirical time.