Gabriela, recovering from her indecision, instead of sitting down takes a few steps to the right and approaches the counter, just as Nula, turning his back to the room, has started to prepare something, his posture so similar to the way he looked in the dream that, elbowing Soldi, she whispers:
— Watch him serve us a live fish, realizing as she says it that Soldi is only laughing to be polite, because, as is to be expected, he hasn’t understood where the joke is in what she’s saying, and much less what she’s alluding to. But Nula doesn’t have a live fish in his hand when he turns around, but rather a dish of green and black olives.
— You got here in time for the first bottle, Nula says.
— I was thinking a while this afternoon about the question of becoming, Gabriela says point-blank. What does this sentence mean to you? What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is?
— Timaeus 27, Nula says. An important but easily refutable moment of the dialogue on the topic.
— It suddenly smells like school in here, Tomatis says.
— Yeah, Diana jumps in. Finishing school.
— Key moment? Gabriela ventures. Obviously it’s just a riddle to please an old fag whose corruptive political fancies forced him to flee Syracuse dressed as a woman, like some vulgar tranny.
Given the value of the joke, which has been told at Plato’s expense a thousand times in similar or different ways since the third century before Christ, her listeners respond with a moderate smile, surprised at Gabriela’s mysterious peals of laughter, unaware that what makes her laugh so much isn’t the joke itself but rather the fact that she’d previously attributed it to Nula during an inexplicably hostile daydream, not realizing, when she did so, that it was not Nula but rather she herself that had made it.
— Pass those glasses to the table, Nula says to Gabriela and Soldi, who pick up three each, each glass destined to one of the six friends, and distribute them around the six seats that are either occupied or empty. Gabriela sits down to the left of Tomatis and Soldi, who also brings the dish of olives and places it in the middle of the table and then sits down next to Gabriela, across from Diana. Nula, who has been delayed a few seconds writing two or three quick symbols on a white receipt pad, arrives after them with the bottle and shows it to the group.
— In the arid lands at the base of the mountains, a chardonnay will become ponderous and will lose its fruit and lightness. A slightly more acidic grape holds up better. Ladies and gentlemen, he says, raising the bottle, Sauvignon Blanc from Mendoza! On the house.
And he starts to serve, expertly, carefully, a small amount of wine in each glass. Violeta reaches for the olives and Nula stops short and shouts:
— No! Wait till after you’ve tried the wine.
And when he finishes serving, before he sits down at the end of the table opposite to Tomatis, he raises a glass and gestures for a toast. The rest make a similar gesture, and Nula tries the wine, concentrating on the flavor so as to get the best description.
— White flowers, Diana says.
— And grapefruit, Violeta says.
— The summer sun wasn’t able to over-sweeten it, Nula says. Clover. It’s my favorite.
He sits down. Gabriela and Tomatis are taking a second sip, holding the wine on the tips of their tongues. Tomatis purses his lips and his mouth takes on a wrinkled and circular shape resembling a chicken’s asshole. Satisfied, with his glass elevated, Nula looks around at the group, and then, leaning toward his wife, passes the back of his free hand over her cheek. Gabriela, for whom all that rhetoric (not without irony in the present case, of course) is slightly nauseating, notices Nula’s gesture and is pleasantly surprised: she didn’t expect that kind of spontaneous expression from the person whom, after the conversation they had between their cars this afternoon, and because of certain unmistakable looks that betrayed excessive confidence in his seductive powers, she considers the world champion of pretension. The (incredibly beautiful) Diana, meanwhile, having inspired immediate sympathy in Gabriela, seems to improve, transitively she supposes, her image of Nula, and even Nula himself. And in fact, all rhetoric aside, the wine is exquisite, and when she sees Violeta pick up an olive with a toothpick, she thinks that Nula’s insistence that she not eat one before tasting the wine wasn’t completely impertinent. Gabriela is hungry, and as she waits for something more substantial — this place serves, among other things, some delicious cheese empanadas and a very good prosciutto — she thinks a few olives wouldn’t be a bad idea. But how to begin, with the green or the black ones? Violeta took a green one, left the pit in the ashtray, and now she’s taking a black one. For Gabriela, the mixture of green and black olives in the dish constitutes a chaotic situation, and it befits a rational being to introduce order among the chaos: this is what Violeta appears to have done, unless she was choosing randomly with the toothpick. What’s more likely is that she has some reason for choosing as she did. Before serving herself, Gabriela decides to wait for Violeta to pick a third olive — it’s a green one — and decides to do likewise, rationalizing her selection in this way: the black ones tend to be stronger than the green ones, which means that it makes sense to eat a green one first, in order to taste it better, followed by a black one, whose stronger flavor will saturate the palate. The problem comes with alternating back for the second green olive, whose flavor would be neutralized by the persistence of the black one’s much stronger flavor. Maybe, Gabriela thinks, plucking a green olive and bringing it to her mouth, the proper method consists of eating three or four green ones in a row and then switching to black. And when she bites into the smooth pulp of the green olive, she decides that this is the method she’ll use from here on out.