Gabriela steps aside and leans in to give Diana a kiss, and as their cheeks quickly and delicately graze, Gabriela’s gaze lands on the stump on the end of her left arm; she controls her surprise in time, pretending not to have seen anything, but her face burns suddenly, and she hopes that her summer tan hides the blush. But from Diana’s vaguely mocking expression—How incredibly beautiful you are! — she suspects that she must’ve noticed the look and is amused by her distress. Diana, possibly to calm her, raises her left arm and, with a slow and natural gesture, slides her hair behind her ear with the stump and then returns it to her lap, under the table. Hesitating, Gabriela continues standing next to the table, staring at the wall behind them, and after a few seconds the memory of the previous moments returns, as she crossed the threshold and closed the door, the tableau that has become fragmentary and confused by her intrusion, the bartender in the white jacket, smiling as she comes in, arranging, at the end of the bar near the door, oval salmon slices on a plate, the two people drinking red wine at the bar, the blurry patrons at the small tables near the entrance, and her friends at the last table, Tomatis at the head, his back to the bar, and to his left, their backs to the wall, Violeta and Nula’s wife, and behind Tomatis, on either side of the bar, Nula and Pinocchio, talking and laughing as Nula uncorks a bottle, the noisy greeting from her friends, like actors sitting around a table on a stage, performing the arrival of an actress who plays the role of the friend, in a typical bar scene with some extras who play the parts of the bartender and of the patrons pretending to have a conversation, all forming a scene so external to her that Gabriela feels nostalgia for its loss in the bottomless abyss where it collected with the more remote past, the previous week, the years of her childhood, the centuries buried forever, the innumerable masses dispersed over the world and eventually erased, the first moment of the universe, despite the fact that it occurred only a few seconds before.
— My father was an architect, my ex-husband is an architect, my first son is in his first year studying architecture in Rosario, and of course I’m an architect, so I think there’s still some hope of keeping these old ruins from collapsing; we might even modernize him, Violeta says to Diana, nodding toward Tomatis, who seems to draw extreme pleasure from the declaration, though he must’ve heard it several times by now.
Since they called him at La Región yesterday at noon to tell him about the publisher’s death, Tomatis has been running around, from the paper to the wake, and this morning to the private cemetery, Oasis de Paz, in the north end of the city, more than half an hour by taxi. The publisher had retired years earlier, long before he decided to leave, but Tomatis would see him every so often and had even visited him the year before at the hospital where he was admitted a few days and from which no one thought he’d come out alive, but he lasted another year, until that Wednesday morning, the day after turning eighty-three. Although he’d edited the Sunday literary page for a long time, Tomatis didn’t publish a single line in it after he started at the paper. In the first few weeks, he tried to include a few less-conventional authors than the usual group of contributors, all from the city and the surrounding region, and who were only read by each other, he even decided to invite some writers from Buenos Aires of differing political and literary tendencies to contribute, but about a month later, Tomatis and two other journalists with some literary sense were called in to discuss the upcoming issues of the supplement when suddenly the publisher appeared with a copy of the previous week’s literary page and told them, in a way that, despite being friendly and cheerful didn’t allow any room for objection, more or less the following: Look boys, this is a mediocre city and La Región is a mediocre paper. Which means that the literary page has to be mediocre too.
Thirty years later Tomatis still laughs, somewhere between incredulous and in awe, when he tells someone about it. And he’d admired the relationship they’d had too. The publisher, who’d been retired for a while, when he found out that Tomatis had decided to leave the paper, called him up to tell him it was a mistake, and when Tomatis told him that he’d already wasted too much time putting lipstick on a pig just to watch someone else butcher it, the publisher understood that his ex-employee, for some reason that he was unaware of, had lost the quality that had been so necessary to his work: his cynicism. And because his retirement had pushed him to the margins of power, because his children and the children of his partner, who’d died years before, had taken over the business, he said that it was good to leave, that it wasn’t worth looking after such trivial things. He didn’t say it out of cynicism: his was an average intelligence, his values were as relativistic as they come, and if old age and death hadn’t existed he would have gone on defending those values and judging the world according to them. Tomatis was fascinated by that sincere, slightly myopic mediocrity that nevertheless forced him to be a shrewd deal maker. His father, who founded the paper, had been an anarchist, and he was a member of the Jockey Club. From that combination he’d retained a taste for the popular, which made him feel more comfortable at cookouts with the print shop staff or at parties thrown by the newspaper carriers union than at ceremonies with the Archbishop, with the governor, or with military officials (although, while he was running the paper, he never missed one). The ideals that turn out lucrative become loathsome or sinful according to the moral resources of those who, disinterestedly at first, insist they can live by them. He spent his free time laboriously translating Shakespeare in order to improve his English, and writing, even more laboriously, stories about the peasants who lived along the river and the islands, and at the end he would shut himself up in his office to write them, ignoring everything at the paper, and eventually the heirs forced him to retire. He never doubted for a second that Tomatis’s worldview was the exact opposite of his own, but he trusted his cynicism more than the sincerity of the other journalists, the ones who thought like he did but who were incapable of measuring exactly what had to be said and how to say it, as Tomatis could, thanks to his energy and his education. When he’d stop by Tomatis’s desk, especially early on, he always, out of curiosity, tried to see what books he was reading, and if Tomatis, when he showed up at the paper, or before he left, passed by his office for some reason, most often to ask for an advance on his wages, he’d quickly swipe the book that he carried under his arm or in his pocket, looking carefully at the cover or thumbing through it slowly, knowing that their authors, of which he was totally ignorant, came from a world that he’d never be allowed into. In the obvious and natural indifference with which Tomatis treated the ostensible seriousness of the paper, and in the scrupulous and slightly humiliating (for the other journalists) facility that he had for doing his job, the publisher, who was aware of the strict limits to what he could demand, saw less an employee than a sort of counterpoint to himself.
Yesterday, Tomatis made the trip to the funeral home and stood a while before the publisher’s impassive, sharp, and now pale face, unable to suppress, at first, the clichés that death occasions, like What if he’s faking it? What if he suddenly opened his eyes and sat up? or maybe, It won’t be long before I’m in that box, or, Does cerebral activity continue briefly postmortem, in a confused, delirious way, at first neutral or increasingly painful, or less painful, until it becomes pleasant, which those who’ve come out of a deep coma or a long period of inertia have ended up calling limbo, inferno, purgatory, and paradise? But then he remembered the call he’d gotten from the publisher when he found out that he was planning to leave the paper, and how he tried to make him understand, by his tone, that he, Tomatis, was the only one he still trusted to do things the way he understood them, because the new generation of publishers and administrators, under the pretext of “internal restructuring,” as they say, had ceded control to the military dictatorship. Even for the publisher’s visceral mediocrity, that control was dangerous — its hungry opportunism lacked the weapons of his kingdom, which were cunning and negotiation. And he, Tomatis, was the only one who knew how to use them, and though he didn’t share those values, even disdained them, and actually worked constantly against them when he wasn’t at the paper, while he was there he was the only one who could understand the need for them and integrate them to the work.