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“Look,” she said turning the ring around with two fingers from her other hand. “Can you see how the words of the inscription recombine to form other words, spelling out both of my two degrees?”

I couldn’t, of course, due to the lack of light and my befuddlement at that late hour, but I could admire the mechanism. I kissed those fingers.

May God forgive me, but I began to doubt the seriousness of the course of studies at that tropical university. All those exchanges and caresses in that discotheque were part of a larger context through which I was taking a measure of Nelly’s true intelligence. All my seductive moves, both the innocent and the daring, and even the most impassioned and sincere, have in common the same backdrop: my constant evaluation of the intelligence of the woman in question. I can’t help it. Even further in the background must be my adolescent fantasy of having a sex slave, a woman who submits, without any reserve, to the will of my desire. For this, her intelligence must have a very special size and configuration. But intelligence is mysterious. It always gets the better of me, escapes my manipulations — even my literary ones — and remains an insolvable enigma.

I was interested in Nelly for another reason, both more positive and more ineffable. She was Amelina’s best friend, her confidante, she knew everything about her. . Among other things she knew where she was hiding. She was in on the secret, though secretive herself, thereby establishing a continuum of love. The two women weren’t at all alike, they were almost opposites. Once I had compared them, in jest, to the sun and the moon. There in the disco, in my intoxicated state, I had next to me, throbbing and perfect, a reality that touched all other realities and spread through them until it encompassed the entire world. Nelly’s dreamy eyes lost themselves in the night and in me.

VIII

At dawn, things emerged from their reality, as if in a drop of water. The most trivial objects, embellished with profound reality, made me quiver almost painfully. A tuft of grass, a paving stone, a scrap of cloth, everything was soft and dense. We were in the Plaza Bolívar, as lush and leafy as a real forest. The sky had turned blue, not a cloud in sight, no stars or airplanes, as if emptied of everything; the sun should have appeared from behind the mountains, but its rays were not yet touching even the highest peak to the west. The light intensified and bodies projected no shadows. The dark and the light floated in layers. The birds didn’t sing, the insects must have been asleep, the trees remained as still as in a painting. And, at my feet, the real kept being born, like a mineral being born atom by atom.

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.

“So, am I capable of love?” I asked myself. “Can I really love truly, like in a soap opera, like in reality?” The question surpassed the thinkable. Love? Me, love? Me, the brain man, the aesthete of the intellect? Wouldn’t something need to happen to make it possible, some cosmic sign, an event that would turn the course of events around, an eclipse of a kind. .? Inches away from my shoe, one more atom crystallized in a blaze of transparency, then another. . If I could love, just like that, without the universe getting turned upside down, the only persistent condition that made reality real was contiguity: that things were next to things, in rows or on plates. . No, it was impossible, I couldn’t believe it. Nevertheless. . Plop! Another atom of air, in front of my face, initiating another spiral of splendid combustion. If all conditions can be reduced to a single condition, it is this: Adam and Eve were real.

Nelly and I, sitting on a stone bench under the trees, were as pale as a sheet of paper. My features were as drawn as could be, an old man’s face, pale, bloodless, my hair sticking out. I knew this because I was looking at my reflection in the glass of the Exoscope we had in front of us. The actors of the University Theatre had brought it to the disco at the end of the party, to pay me a goodbye homage; we danced around it like savages enacting a rain dance, watching our reflections in miniature and upside down. Afterward, drunk as they were, they left it behind, and I made the effort to carry it to the plaza, thinking that sooner or later they would remember it and come get it — they needed it for the show’s official opening.

I had to admit they had done a good job. The dawn was fully reflected in the Exoscope, and in that dawn, the two of us, as if after the end of the world. With great effort I turned my eyes away from the instrument’s glass and looked directly at Nelly. Without knowing why, I asked her a stupid question.

“What are you thinking about?”

She remained quiet but alert for a moment, her eyes lost in the void.

“Do you hear that, César? What’s going on?”

I could have sworn the silence was absolute, though as a foreigner I was unable to determine what was normal or abnormal within that silence. In any case, it was not the silence that was puzzling Nelly. Awakening from my reverie, I heard shouts of alarm, cars suddenly accelerating, sirens, all in a kind of dull buzz that pulsated around me, still not disturbing the otherworldly peace of the city center, though approaching.

“The birds have stopped singing,” Nelly whispered, “even the flies have gone into hiding.”

“Could it be an earthquake?” I ventured.

“Could be,” she said noncommittally.

A car drove past the plaza at full speed. Behind it came a military truck full of armed soldiers, one of whom saw us and shouted something, but they were driving so fast we couldn’t understand him.

“Look!” Nelly shouted, pointing up.

I looked up and saw a crowd of people on the roof terrace of a building, all staring off into the distance and shouting. The same thing was happening on the balconies of the other buildings around that plaza. Right in front of us the cathedral bells began to ring. In a flash the streets were thronging with cars filled with entire families. . It seemed like collective madness. As far as I was concerned, it might have been normaclass="underline" I didn’t know the customs of that city, and nothing precluded this from being what happened every Sunday at dawn: the locals coming out onto their balconies and terraces to check the weather, and shouting out joyfully that it was a beautiful day for their outings and sporting events; the cathedral bells, for their part, calling people to morning services; families leaving early for their picnics. . If I hadn’t been with Nelly I could have taken it as the normal Sunday routine. But she was extremely puzzled, and even a bit alarmed.

It was obvious that whatever was happening was happening far away, and far away in this small, enclosed valley meant the surrounding mountains. We couldn’t see them from the plaza, but there were panoramic views from any of the adjacent streets, one of the city’s great tourist attractions. I stood up. Nelly must have been thinking the same thing because she also got up and quickly figured out the closest spot where we could find out what was happening.

“Let’s go to the archway on Humboldt Street,” she said, already starting off. That archway, which I was familiar with, was about one hundred yards away; it stood at the foot of a very long public stairway that was so steep you could see half the valley from there. I started to follow her, then stopped her with my hand.

“Should we leave this monstrosity here?” I asked, pointing to the Exoscope.

She shrugged. We left it and walked off quickly. In the brief time it took us to get to the archway, just a short distance away, the activity in the streets had increased so much it was difficult to make our way through the crowds. Everybody was nervous, some were terrified, most were rushing around as if their lives depended on it. Everyone was talking, but I couldn’t understand a word, as if they were speaking foreign languages, which must be a natural effect of panic.