But would the city still be there? When we are not empirically present in a place, does it still exist, at least in the same way? Though he’s well aware that the thought is absurd, that a professional philosopher could easily refute his naive doubt, Tomatis can’t help but ask himself the question every so often, though it’s more an irrational, almost animal confusion than a philosophical inquiry. Just like thinking too much about breathing can make it difficult to breathe, becoming conscious of living in both space and time at once can make even the most simple things complex and strange, and thus, from the time he left the city early that morning until he returns to it that night, its existence, which is completely dependent on his memory, becomes extremely problematic. Though he’s actually a fervent defender of the existence of the external, Tomatis can never discard the ideas, the impressions, and even the sensations that support the contrary thesis. Only habit, and distraction, furthermore, interfere with the observation or the conclusion that the place that we left some time earlier, decades or seconds ago, is no longer the same when we return, though all the elements may seem identical to how we left them. The passage of time, though imperceptible, whether of a few seconds or a few minutes, leaves clear traces in the apparent immutability of things; one only has to be conscious that those traces exist in order to perceive them. For the duration of our absence, the places outside of our empirical horizon continue to churn, a continuous, shifting network woven of various threads by a loom that incessantly produces, both archaic and new, the same interconnections: the world continues to spin, along with the solar system and the entire universe, and when we return to the kitchen from the dining room, or to the dining room from the kitchen, in the time it takes to find a clean knife in the utensil drawer, everything has changed, and sometimes we even have the vague or clear sensation of that change. If the same thing happens when we’re motionless, and we feel time pass through us, modifying space from within, how can we not feel, after leaving a place for a few hours or a day or a decade, that when we return, that momentary feeling of estrangement which follows our brief ceremony of recognition, is waiting for us? Just now, in the bus, he once again intuits the silent murmur of that change, and one might say that, with every displacement of our attention, the familiar is submerged into the unknown, and when we reencounter it, it’s no longer completely the same as it was.
Tomatis, tangled up in the vagueness of his thoughts, jumps when he sees one of the two boys from the back standing in the aisle next to his seat, smiling. That’s last night’s La Región, isn’t it? Could we borrow it a while? Tomatis, reacting quickly after the surprise, notices the copy of La Región that he bought that morning because the Buenos Aires papers hadn’t arrived yet; as he was taking the manila folder from the briefcase to finish reading the history of precisionism, he’d taken out the paper as well, and because the vibrations of the bus had caused it to fall to the ground twice, he’d put it under the briefcase to keep it still, intending to leave it on the bus when he reached the city. Tomatis hurries to pull it from under the briefcase and extends it, politely, thinking that if what they want is to deepen their knowledge about the Sunday match, they’ll be happily surprised to find that the sports page contains two large color photos of the local teams, in addition to a detailed history of every Clásico over the last fifty years, with the results, team rosters, and highlights of the matches, which Tomatis of course didn’t read, but which from having worked at La Región for years, as a section editor and intermittently as an editorialist, he knows the paper has an unfailing tradition of publishing two or three days before the game. The outcome is important: the winner keeps a spot in the first division, while the loser is forced to move down, Or something like that, Tomatis thinks, having not been to the stadium for a soccer match once in his life. You can keep it, I’ve already read it, Tomatis says. Thanks, the boy says, and returns to his seat, but as soon as he opens the paper he stands back up and walks back to Tomatis’s seat. Are you sure you aren’t collecting it? Did you see the color photos of the teams? he says. Don’t worry, Tomatis says, I have another copy at home. And the boy returns to his seat, walking backward, bent forward, reverent, in disbelief over the gift he’s just received. He’s probably a medical or architectural student, Tomatis thinks. Or maybe electrical engineering, degrees that our university doesn’t offer, at least not to the highest level. Maybe, if it’s the first of these, he gets his medical degree, he’ll take on a specialization, gastrointestinal surgery, for instance. And if some day, because of my inclination for white wine and gin on the rocks, my chronic gastritis becomes an ulcer or a cancer and they take me to the operating room and I see him walk in, smiling, and he pats me on the shoulder to reassure me about the operation just before they give me the anesthesia, I’ll remember that he collects color photos of the local soccer teams, and just as I close my eyes I’ll know that I’ve put my life in the hands of a dangerous man. Tomatis laughs to himself, trying to maintain an impassive, absent expression, though he knows that the two of them, concentrating on the sports page, have already forgotten that he even exists.
His right hand rests on the open briefcase, his fingers playing along the vertical, soft leather dividers that separate the four compartments, which, in fact, contains very few things: the manila folder containing the treatise on precisionism, which he finished reading a while ago, adding a few annotations in the margins, another folder, this one of light green card stock, containing an old article from La Región, with an even older photo picturing several well-known collaborators on the first volume of precisionism, during a dinner at La Giralda, along with a few other papers, in particular a letter that Pichón had sent him from Paris the month before, and to which, for lack of time, he’d only responded to the day before yesterday. In another compartment of the briefcase is the gift for his sister, a fantasy bracelet that Alicia picked out, wrapped in metallic paper, which he bought that morning on Calle Córdoba, and finally, in the fourth compartment, an alfajor given to him by the driver as he was getting on the bus, compliments of the house and included with the price of the trip, and next to the alfajor, a book about Hujalvu, the butterfly painter, which he’d been thumbing through on the way there, and whose French introduction “Vie et mort des papillons,” he’d begun to read (the book is a gift from Pichón, which he’d sent him from France for his birthday). Finally his fingers, and not Tomatis himself, decide to grasp the green folder, half-opening it, shuffling through the papers that it contains, and picking out Pichón’s letter and opening it in the light, unfolding it, to reread it:
Carlitos. How’s the March heat treating you? We’re still in the middle of winter here. You must be surprised to be getting a letter from me after our phone call on Sunday, but that night, after dinner, I came up with a poem that, from a distance, has to do with our conversation. So I’m sending it to you. It’s a vague parody of La Fontaine.