Before getting down to details, however, some clarifications are necessary. First: age. We would have been ten and eleven years old (or eleven and twelve: Omar was a year older than me; we were at primary school but in the final grades). Which is to say that we were no longer little children learning how to count, fascinated and amazed by the miracle of arithmetic. Not at all. Also, back then, thirty-five years ago, learning was no game: it was straight down to business; not a minute was wasted. Even in our semirural school (School Number 2 in Coronel Pringles: it still exists), the academic level was remarkably high; these days it would seem too much to ask. And all the children, though most of them came from farms and had illiterate parents, kept up with the pace, no two ways about it. The “hump” was sixth grade, and many stopped there, but if you were in that class you marched with the rest, and it was no dawdle.
The characters: Omar and myself. I never played this game with other people. I can’t remember if I ever tried, but if I did, it didn’t work. It was the kind of game that has to find its players, and does so only by a modest miracle. It had found the two of us, and we had adapted so well to its intricate, crystalline recesses that we had become a part of it, and it a part of us, and everyone else was necessarily excluded. Not so much because we would have had to explain the rules, or allow for idiosyncrasies (it was a mathematical game), but because the two of us had already played so much — all afternoon, hundreds of times — and we couldn’t start over; other players could, but not Omar and I.
Omar Berruet was not my oldest friend; his family had moved to the neighborhood a couple of years earlier, from Greater Buenos Aires (Berazategui), but his parents were from Pringles. His mother and mine had been childhood friends; one of his father’s sisters lived around the corner and had two sons, the Moraña boys, whom I’d known for much longer; the older one was in my grade all through primary school. The Berruets rented the house next door to ours. Omar was an only child, a year older than me, so we weren’t in the same class at school, but being neighbors we got to be friends. We’d spend the whole day together. He was tall and thin with straight blond hair, pale-skinned and lymphatic, unlike me in every way: the attraction of opposites brought us together. I suspect that I tended to boss him around and subject him to my erratic and fanciful moods.
He was happy to go along with my whims, but he also had a hidden strength that a number of painful experiences taught me to respect. Omar wasn’t lacking in intelligence, but when it came to demonstrating it, he was, again, my opposite: while I was all boasting, noise, and display, he responded quietly, with irony and realism. (This is as good a place as any to mention that he stayed in Pringles, became a bank teller, and had eight children, one of whom died.)
And finally, the scene. Back then, the town of Coronel Pringles was more or less like it is today, but a bit smaller, not so built up, with more dirt roads. Calle Alvear, where we lived, was the last paved road; another hundred yards and there were vacant lots (whole empty blocks), farmhouses, the country. On our block there were five houses, all on the same side: Uruñuela’s place on the corner, the house where my aunts Alicia and María lived, our place, Gonzalo Barba’s house (he was my dad’s nephew and business partner), and the Berruets. On the other corner: my dad’s business Aira & Barba, with its yard and offices. The houses rented by Gonzalo and the Berruets belonged to Padelli, and their backyards adjoined his place, which was just around the corner. On the other side of the street, behind a long wall, was the land belonging to the corner houses, Astutti’s on the left and Perrier’s on the right. The most interesting things in those wild tracts were, in Astutti’s yard, a supermodern mobile home that the owner’s brother (I think) was building or cobbling together (this hobby outlasted my childhood), and in Perrier’s yard, a tree, which was in fact a pair of twin trees, with intertwined branches, a gigantic conifer, the biggest tree in Pringles, as high as a ten-story building and perfectly conical in shape.
Nothing ever happened in the street: a car went by every half hour. We had vast amounts of free time: we went to school in the mornings, and the afternoons lasted entire lifetimes. We didn’t have extracurricular activities the way kids do today; there was no television; the doors of our houses stood open. To play the number game we climbed into the cabin of the little red truck that belonged to Omar’s father and was almost always parked just outside the front door. .
Right. Now, the game.
Who came up with it? It must have been one of us. I can’t imagine us taking it from somewhere else, ready-made. Thinking back, I’ve always seen the game as a blend of invention and practice. Or rather, I see the practice of it as permanent invention, without any kind of prior idea. And if I try to work out which of us was behind it, I have to conclude that I was the inventor. There’s something about the thrust of it, a kind of fantasy or exuberance, something elusive but utterly typical of me as I was at that age. Omar was at the opposite extreme. But, strangely, those vertiginous tunnels could be entered from the opposite extreme as well.
There were no rules. Although we spent our lives inventing rules for all our games, as kids always do, this game had none, perhaps because we realized that they were inadequate, bound to fall short, or just too easy to make up.
Now that I think of it, there was a rule, but it was transient and could be revoked at our convenience. We applied it once and forgot it the next time, but for some reason it has remained in my memory, and it must have remained in the game as well. It was pretty inoffensive: all it did was specify that the biggest possible number, the upper limit, would be eight. Not the number eight itself, but any number containing eight: eight tenths, eight hundred thousand, eight billion. It was really an extra accelerator (as if we needed one!) to take the game to another level.
It’s not that there were levels in the game, or series within the series, or if there were such things, we didn’t bother with them. But there were differences in speed, alternations between “step by step” and “leap,” and we could take them to extremes that are not to be found among the mobile, spatiotemporal sculptures of physical reality. These differences were always rushes, even our lapses into the hyperslow. But it never got out of control; even the all-encompassing acceleration was a kind of slowness. Which meant that within the game’s austere monomania, we could use speed to keep changing the subject of the conversation (since subjects are speeds).
“Three.”
“A hundred.”
“A hundred and one.”
“A hundred and one point zero one.”
“Eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
“Four million.”
“Four million and one.”
“Four million and two.”
“Four million and three.”
“Four million and four.”
“Four million and four point four four four.”
“Four million and four point four four.”
“Four million and four point four.”
“Four million and four point three.”
“Four million and four point one.”
“Half a trillion.”
We never bothered to find out what a trillion was (or a quadrillion, a quintillion, a sextillion, although we used the terms). Whatever it was, we stuck with it.
“Half a trillion and one.”
“A trillion.”
“Eight trillions.”
“Eight trillions and eight.”
We did the same with “billion,” although in that case we knew that it meant a thousand millions. So if a million was “one,” a billion was a thousand of those “ones.” But we never went as far as counting how many zeros it contained and using that to calculate (there should be nine, I think). It would have been tedious, a drag, no fun. And we were playing a game. We were impatient, like all kids, and we had invented a game ideally suited to impatience: the leaping game. Although we spent hours and whole afternoons sitting still in the cabin of the little red truck that belonged to Omar’s dad, we were exercising our impatience. Otherwise, it would have been a sort of numerological craftwork, and I would describe our game as art, not craft.