MAÎTRE CORBEAU
Maître corbeau là-haut perché
rien de bon n’annonçait,
ni d’ailleurs, rien de mauvais.
Il se tenait là-haut, neutre et muet.
Aucun présage ne l’habitait.
Aussi extérieur que l’arbre, le soleil, la forêt
Et aussi privé de sens que de secret:
forme noire sans raison répétée
tache d’encre dans le vide imprimée.
Maître corbeau là-haut perché.
What do you think? Don’t tell me anything right away. The question begs reflection. What, on the other hand, I want you to send me soon is a detailed explanation, on paper, of your thesis on Oedipus. Certainly in this century Oedipus has become a stereotype, a two-dimensional caricature like Batman or Patoruzú, but one of his characteristics, his blindness, still fascinates me. Hugs to everyone. Pichón. P.S., What do you think of Hujalvu? A western specialist says that he’d specialized in a single species of butterflies (Inachis io), but one of his students wrote, in the mid-eighteenth century, that he always painted ONE SINGLE butterfly.
Tomatis finishes rereading the letter, but he continues to hold it, motionless, even with his face, just below his eyes, without refolding it. For the last month the problem has intrigued him. The same butterfly? Aesthetically, the choice is reasonable, and, one might even say, necessary, but how would it be possible to keep a single butterfly intact over an eighty-year life without it eventually disintegrating, unless, after a certain point, he was painting from memory, not from the material, pulverized after a few decades, but rather the shape imprinted on him forever, which, having observed it to the point of possession, he was able to turn in every possible direction. Tomatis shakes his head thoughtfully, with an almost imperceptible slowness, and without much conviction refolds the letter, handwritten in green ink, and drops it into one of the compartments of the briefcase.
Moving directly north along the highway in which, over a hundred and sixty-seven kilometers, there’s not a single curve, at ninety kilometers per hour — the legal speed limit for interurban passenger transport throughout the country — Tomatis has the west to his left, the east to his right, and the south to his back. After leaving Rosario, along the loop road surrounded by shantytowns, in the right lane of the highway, as far as San Lorenzo more or less, the traffic was very dense, but afterward it began to thin out. All the same, at the moment when he drops the folded letter into the briefcase, an engine roars to his left, and the most likely empty tractor trailer that passes at a high speed hides the sun for several seconds, and the increasingly horizontal rays of light are erased, intercepted by the double trailer of the truck, and almost immediately, when the truck has finished passing them, they reappear. Every so often, cars also pass them at full speed, advancing along the fast lane, and disappear quickly to the north. In the opposite direction, cars, trucks, and buses follow each other mechanically, but at moments long stretches of the highway are empty. The buses, green, red, and orange, announcing the names of their companies in large letters everywhere along the highway, drive toward Rosario and Buenos Aires, and some, the specials probably, toward Mar del Plata and even Bariloche, from the city or from Paraná or Resistencia or Asunción del Paraguay. Once, at a stop between Rosario and Buenos Aires, in San Pedro, Tomatis saw a double-decker that was going to Machu Picchu. Tomatis remembers thinking, A bus to Machu Picchu? And why not Tibet? And he smiles again, and turns around discreetly again, afraid that the two at the back will catch him laughing to himself, but apparently they’ve been subjugated by the sports page from La Región that he’s just given them.
Half opening the light green folder, separating its edges, he carefully pulls out, from between the few papers alongside it, the yellowed clipping from La Región, which is at least five years old, with the photo that, if the date that the article attributes to it is correct, is around half a century old at the moment in which he’s now studying it carefully. There are eleven men, all of them in suit and tie, except for one, who wears a dark bowtie. Though it’s difficult to tell much about the location, because the photo was taken from a practically empty corner of the room, Tomatis doesn’t need to read the caption printed below the photo to recognize La Giralda, gone for years now, since they tore down the central market. The article is titled “The Precisionist Group,” and a lead-in explains, On the eve of another anniversary of the creation of precisionism, this article recalls the history of the movement and the personality of its leader, Mario Brando. The caption printed below the photograph mentions the place where it was taken, but not the date, and identifies the people present. Seven are sitting, and four are standing behind them; in the background, turned away from the camera, standing in front of a black rectangle below a hanging lamp, there’s a waiter, facing what could be the entrance to the kitchen, obscured by the photograph’s narrow depth of field. It’s a classic after-dinner photo; the four who have stood up must have been sitting with their backs to the photographer, who must have made them move so that everyone would be facing the same way. Their chairs are not in the frame, except for one, a piece of which is visible in the far right corner of the picture, because they pulled them away from the table, and so the large, messy table is clearly visible. On top of the white tablecloth there are two siphons of seltzer, two oil bottles, half-full glasses, plates containing the remains of food, probably dessert (and probably cheese and sweets, after the alphabet soup and the obligatory Spanish-style stew), with utensils crossed on top or thrown carelessly on the tablecloth. There are ashtrays, but there aren’t any bottles of wine, and Tomatis remembers, as he does every time he looks at the photo and examines it up close, that someone, describing Brando’s control over his disciples, told him that if he wasn’t drinking then the others couldn’t drink either, and so many of them drank in secret. This same person told him that only when his brother-in-law, General Ponce, when he was still a first lieutenant, or a captain, attended the dinners, could the guests drink whatever they wanted, because the general would order large quantities of the best wines, something Brando disapproved of, though he never dared to contradict him, because the more Ponce drank, and though he never became violent, the more uncontrollable he became. Only the next day, in private, would Brando question him, thinking that family business should be conducted behind closed doors, but whenever he, Ponce, bumped into some member of the group on the street, and the first lieutenant, laughing, told him what had happened and how terrorized Brando kept his troops, it caused this person a dark pleasure to learn about his family affairs.
Though he is sitting in the far left of the photo, at the end of the table, turned decidedly toward the camera, which implies a marginal position, studying the photo closely, imagining the scene during dinner, with the four who are now standing behind the ones who are sitting, it’s immediately obvious that Brando, as he must have done at every dinner, is seated at the head of the table. The absence of women makes it possible to suppose that it was a work dinner, some decisive moment in the history of the group, before Brando’s departure for Rome. Despite the poor lighting of the image, his hands, pressed together, reveal his tense fingers and the knuckles jutting from his right hand, as well as the sleeve of his stiffly starched white shirt, clasped by a cufflink that in all certainty is made of gold. Everyone is very elegant, with a pointed handkerchief coming out of the breast pocket of their jackets, their shirts and even in some cases their light-colored vests, and even in silk ties, all of which betrays an equal interest in their public image and in the renovation of poetic language though the grafting of scientific vocabulary. Even the four who are standing, and who are the youngest, display the same taste; their medium-length beards (nine of the eleven have one) make them seem older, though most of them were at that time between twenty and thirty, and among the ones standing, three of them are barely twenty, and one of them, the third one from the left, not even nineteen. For Tomatis, this is the author of the extract resting in the manila folder in the briefcase. The close beard, the quiff, the silk tie, a bit more colorful and less conservative than the rest, and which, tightly knotted to the collar of his white shirt, emerges from the crossed lapels of his dark suit, would allow him to not stand out too much from the others, but something at once absent and preoccupied in his expression distinguishes him from them. Brando’s expression differs from the others’ too: his vague smile, the tension in his hands and the rigidity of his body, along with the almost imperceptible air of skepticism and cunning on his face, not to mention the fact that while everyone else around him rests their hands or elbows or forearms on the table, he’s pulled his chair out and crossed his legs, distancing himself almost half a meter from the edge, not even touching the circular, white tablecloth falling in triangular folds. The distance that he creates between himself and his disciples, at the same table where they’ve broken bread together, confirms, Tomatis thinks, the rumors of his duplicity, of his shuttling between those he considered his equals, the ignorant and pragmatic bourgeoisie who could even be brutal if they felt their interests were threatened, but who were useless for his literary career, and the others, his disciples, gathered from the most diverse environments, petty employees of public offices, high school teachers, journalists, with no patrimony but their readings, their facility for expressing themselves on paper, and their literary tastes (only one, years after this photo was taken, after his return from Rome, Doctor Calcagno, belonged to both worlds, and Brando made him not only into a partner, trusting him with all the work at the law firm, but also, as a literary lieutenant, the only one he trusted among the members of his own class, into a true slave). The absent and somewhat nervous look of the boy trying to go unnoticed among the others has nothing in common with Brando’s, unless it’s the knowledge that the pleasant end to a literary feast that the photograph pretends to immortalize — and which in a certain sense it achieves, as substantiated by the article in