He sells them eighty-four bottles, five cases of white and nine of red: among the white, a chardonnay-chenin blend, two chardonnays, a sémillon from Río Negro, and one sauvignon blanc, the same wine they drank three bottles of last night — the first paid for by himself, the second by Tomatis, and the third by Soldi — at the Amigos del Vino bar. Among the reds, he suggested a few varieties, a malbec, a merlot, a syrah, and a few blends, a mixture of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, for instance, which Nula never forgets to describe as a fundamental blend in the production of Bordeaux wine, something which, as a consumer incentive, never fails. At around two, he’s arriving at his house; the kids are at nursery school and Diana is tanning, naked, out back, lying on a plastic mat in the yard. A red bathrobe, glowing in the sun, is hanging from a wicker chair. When she sees him come out, she picks up a small towel and covers her pubis and hips, hiding the triangular patch of pubic hair and the protuberance that marks the beginning of an even more intimate region; the rest of her body, from her head to just below her bellybutton, and from the tops of her thighs to her feet, remains exposed to the sun, and her skin, still darkened by the summer sun, has a light shine, and is dampened, especially on her face and around her breasts. Her arms, stretched out alongside her body, display the only visible asymmetry, product of her missing left hand.
— A Doctor Riera from Bahía Blanca called, Diana announces. His number is next to the telephone.
— A ghost from the past, Nula says. What did he want?
— He arrives tomorrow, and he wants to meet me, Diana says, laughing and sitting up, resting on her left elbow, which makes the forearm that ends in the stump elevate obliquely at her side. She looks at him.
— Tomorrow? Well you’ll definitely meet him in that case, Nula says. I’ll call him back later. Right now, I’m going to eat something and I’ll be right back to get some sun with you.
— Oh, hurry, please! Diana says, shaking her only hand, parodying an exaggerated happiness combined with a simulated desperation. And immediately she stretches out again on the mat. Eventually, Nula comes out, naked, from the front of the house, with a white towel wrapped around his waist that covers him to his knees and a plastic mat under his arm; he carries a jug of cold water and a book: One Hundred Homemade Pasta Recipes. He places the jug under the chair, so that the shade will keep it cool, and covers it with the book to prevent an insect from falling inside. Then, laying his mat out next to Diana’s, he removes the towel and lies down, face up. Finally, he picks up the towel and, laying it between his open thighs, pulls up a corner of the white cloth and carefully, delicately, covers his genitals. Diana, who’s been watching him ever since he appeared through the kitchen door, comments, in a low voice:
— His most precious garment. His identity. The torch that guides him through the darkness. The spear that leads him through the world. The cosmic megalith. Omphalos.
Motionless, face up, keeping the towel still, in place, Nula smiles, his eyes closed, and a few seconds after she stops talking, motionless in a similar position, her smile identical to his, he adds:
— The diver that makes you crazy when he touches bottom.
Diana’s fingers caress him softly on his left thigh.
— The battle of the sexes is growing worse, Nula says. How about a truce?
And matching, as they say, actions with words, he extends his hand and places it softly on Diana’s pubis, in the center of the white rectangle formed by the towel. Diana doesn’t even flinch.
— Can’t happen before tonight, she says.
— But I’m getting back late tonight, Nula says, adding with a deliberate but neutral vagueness, which no doubt makes him slightly uncomfortable: There’s a dinner with the people from the hyper. I don’t even know when or where it’ll be.
With her eyes closed, laughing silently, Diana shrugs.
— Tomorrow, then, she says.
Nula doesn’t answer and removes his hand. The conversation, which he would have preferred not to happen, has made him uncomfortable. The lying upsets and disturbs him: on the one hand, Diana deserves the truth, and on the other, in a sense contradictory to the first, to what extent does she believe him? Luckily, the internal flux, made of flashes of lucidity, of autonomous images, of capricious and fragmentary memories and passing emotions, displaces his misgivings in a current that ceaselessly churns that heterogeneous, loose material, replacing it with recurrent, obsessive fantasies and sudden and insistent desires. The sun begins to warm his skin, especially on his belly, on his face, and on his thighs, and an indulgent image of his own naked and tanned body appears, so unexpected and savage that his penis, which was resting peacefully under the towel, begins to harden and swell, something which, beyond the pleasure it produces, embarrasses him slightly: despite his close intimacy with Diana, that untimely erection, just when they’ve decided not to make love, has something coarse and even ridiculous about it. If Diana noticed it, she’d probably laugh. Nula looks for an explanation for that sudden arousal, caused by his own body, and he realizes that he’d caught a glimpse of himself in a strange, empty room, preparing to move through a doorway into the adjacent room — he’s unaware of what might be in that other room, or who might be there, but what he’s sure of is that what aroused him was a gaze, the specter of a gaze, regarding and desiring his naked body, that, because it was absent from the image, he substituted for his own. Now, the solar fullness erases every image inside him, and the last contours of the visible world, persisting under his closed eyelids, change shape and color, becoming more and more abstract on his retina. Drowsy, forgetting his desire, which distends his alert genitals, Nula surrenders himself to the light that flows from the empty, blue sky, refracting at moments and becoming visible, like drops of rain, invisible in the darkness, are made visible — he thinks, or remembers rather — as they cross a beam of light. Groping along the grass, he seeks out Diana’s hand and grasps it softly.
— So, Riera wants to meet you, he says, laughing tersely, skeptically, suggestively. I should warn you that he insists that there are two kinds of men: the kind who wants to reform prostitutes and the kind who wants to corrupt the wives of the bourgeoisie. He belongs, by his own admission, to the second category.
— Actually, both kinds overlap in the middle, Diana says after a few seconds of thought. In both cases the object is a sexually experienced housewife.
— That is not untrue, Nula agrees, cautiously, and releasing Diana’s hand, lets his own fall on the grass, his arm outstretched next to his body, grazing the length of the narrow mat, and he falls silent.