mother tells me, according to the bulletin in the afternoon, that the military has exploded dynamite along the coast road to allow the water to flow out and reduce the pressure that has been building for days against the suspension bridge, threatening to sweep it away. She asks me if I have heard the explosions. Now I am putting on my jacket, slowly, and then my overcoat. I close the door behind me, putting on my gloves. It’s utterly dark outside. The murmur fades. Standing in front of the counter of the bar in the galleria, I drink a cognac, slowly, smoking. There’s hardly anybody here. The cashier, dressed in green overalls, flips through a comic book. A man eats green olives from a plate and drinks vermouth, sitting at one of the tables in the hall. Now that I am in the taxi headed toward Héctor’s studio, it occurs to me that I am no longer in the room with the two desks, the room with the two beds, or intercepting the screen with my body as I pass through the living room, or standing in the bar in the galleria. Nor am I in the place where I began thinking, because the taxi is cutting through the cold night and leaves behind street corners fading ever darker. Yet, having stood for a moment between the two desks, under the light, or crossing the living room, intercepting the blue steel of the television screen with my body, I am struck by the fact that the living room and the room with the desks are still in their places, emptied of me, at this very moment. Of all the things in this world, I am the least real. Moving an inch, I am erased. And I see, as we move away from the city, through the streets growing darker and darker, more and more deserted, through the frosty glass, the fixed neighborhoods on whose sidewalks leafless trees expose their ruins to the first frost. Constant and practically lifeless, soundless, a straggling light from a pharmacy or a corner store that shines on the sidewalk, a quick message shouted from one side of the street to the other, a car passing on a cross street, they extend around me, as I pass through rapidly, these neighborhoods that persist. Héctor comes forward to receive me when I clap my hands to announce I’ve arrived. There’s still no one around. He has invited the whole world, he tells me, to come at nine. He says that he wanted to set up the grill and talk to me in peace. All of the lights in the studio are lit and the white, arid walls refract the light and compound its clarity. Only the very top lies in darkness. On the back patio, while he watches over the fire and the meat, and the smoke pries tears from his eyes that dry into the folds of his elastic face, Héctor, who has laid a bottle of wine and two glasses on top of a table covered in a white piece of paper, says that if the water continues to rise, the highway from Boca del Tigre will be cut off and the bus taking me to Buenos Aires won’t be able to get through. I tell him not to exaggerate and Héctor laughs. He’s a bit drunk; weepy. He says that exaggeration is an art form. Cat has perfected it, he says. He does everything too well, he says, Cat does, and he is too well provided for to be capable, even when he tries, and he has tried, moreover, many times, to stick with something. We return to the shed and Héctor shows me the painting he is finishing. It is an arid, white rectangle that in no way differs from the white walls of the studio. It is perhaps a bit whiter and more arid than the walls. The whiteness of the walls has, on the one hand, it seems to me, the purpose of suggesting a certain width, as well as a certain height; in the painting, the horizontal quality is, I have the impression, so to speak, erased. Its whiteness is exclusively vertical. I don’t know if I have seen this or if it was Héctor himself who told me so this morning. In Héctor’s paintings, everything is vertical; not ascending, not descending, just vertical. Serving glasses of wine in the open air by the fire in the back patio, Héctor smokes his pipe and tries to explain to me what it is he wanted to express. We are interrupted by someone clapping their hands in the entrance. It is Raquel. She kisses us quickly on the cheek and disappears into the studio. She returns without her coat and with an empty wineglass in her hand. After taking her first sip of wine she asks us, looking more at Héctor, if we heard the explosions last night. Héctor responds that he was with people, at a party, and that I, when the first explosion went off, was with Tomatis, passing through the door to the games room at the Progress Club. He says that when the second went off the cards on the table were the ace and the king on top, the jack and the knight below, Héctor says. And I told him that life imitates art, he says. For a moment, while the meat crackles over the coals and the smoke rises in a dense, diagonal column, we smoke in silence, taking small sips of wine. Raquel asks me how I feel now that I’m about to leave for Paris. I say nothing. Raquel’s green wool dress hugs her thick body. We are, so to speak, almost cold, between total exposure and the hot splendor of the coals. Héctor starts up again about Cat. Cat is the plague, says Raquel, laughing. A new interruption: Héctor disappears toward the front door, and there comes an increasingly loud tumult of familiar voices, male and female. Quiet, we look at the fire. Now, before Héctor and the recent arrivals appear on the patio, other knocks at the door ring out and the voices multiply. They are all too familiar for us to pay attention to them. In a low voice, Raquel asks me if we could get a drink alone together after the party. Before I can answer, Héctor reappears on the patio. He invites us to come inside. The recent arrivals, six all together, contemplate, arranged in a semicircle before the easel, Héctor’s latest painting, the white surface. They admire it, each in his or her own way. Now the semicircle breaks apart and we greet each other in scattered groups. We talk about the explosions. The night bulletin, someone says, has reported that the water is still rising, and will continue to rise. Alicia, dressed in blue, disappears toward the patio, because Héctor has been called away for a moment to the door. He watches us serenely, his pipe in his mouth, jutting out from his elastic face. At the very moment Alicia disappears, Elisa comes through the front door, without knocking. She greets us seriously, but not coldly. Kissing me on the cheek, I feel her tense a little, as if she were saving for me the little hostility of which she is capable, or perhaps because she has seen, over my shoulder, just as she kissed me, Alicia appear on the patio, followed by Héctor’s misty eyes, which contrast against his dried up, elastic face. At the table, Elisa sits to my right, Raquel across from me. Like a spontaneous, stable, even warm radiation, Elisa’s hostility crashes constantly against my circumspect profile, which sometimes turns, gently, toward her, and rebounds against her wide, stony face. No one who doesn’t know us well, who isn’t habituated to our most intimate particularities, and sometimes even under those conditions, is able to tell us apart, Cat and I, and even we ourselves look at photographs in our desk drawers and doubt the mirror in which we contemplate ourselves reciprocally, identical, and she, who for at least five years has been thinking day and night about Cat, who has been sleeping with him two or three times a week for at least two years, cannot be less than two meters from me without starting to radiate repugnance and hostility. It’s as if I were the inverse of Cat. And he will stay: he will keep waking up every morning beside the river, in the house in El Rincón, will pass through the bars of the city getting drunk until morning, and he will pass through the door of the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, he will look at the white municipal building sitting at his desk, not reading or writing anything, and then he will go out onto the street to meet her, to stretch himself out over her, naked, in some hotel, in the house in El Rincón, where Héctor knows he shouldn’t go without calling first, as do I, greeting, on the corner of San Martín and Mendoza, someone who has wished him a good afternoon thinking he is me, he will be standing on the corner in the afternoon, in a T-shirt, freshly bathed, in the summer, smoking. Héctor talks about the breaches. He has seen them, he says, with me, this morning. They are several meters wide and the crumbling borders look like the mouth of a volcano; all the asphalt is strewn with rubble; they are inspecting the area with helicopters, and all around, up to the horizon, smooth, monotonous, yellowing, rising ever higher, is the water. Someone tells us that he was sleeping at the moment the first explosion went off; another, making love. One of them asks me where I was when I heard them; I was with Tomatis in the games room of the Progress Club, I say. Now some people walk across the great white shed that, apart from the easel with the painting, the disordered tables and chairs, contains practically nothing. I am sitting on a divan jutting out from the wall, between Raquel and Alicia. I see people, from afar, who cross the shed, groups that converse, laughing faces coming toward me, and talking to me: from time to time when I serve myself wine and smoke, I talk. The words form between my teeth and my lips, so that they slip out half chewed, half smoked. Even so, at this time, I am not absent; I am here. Nowhere else. Here. I see Elisa go out; she has said goodbye to some people, not to everyone, not to me. It must have been to avoid coming close to Alicia. I see her dress, red and blue flowers printed on a white background, disappear beneath her overcoat, and then the rest of her disappears, suddenly, through the front door. Now the huge white shed is practically deserted. Héctor, Alicia, and a couple are standing in front of the easel, looking at the arid, white, vertical rectangle. Slowly, at a diagonal, someone crosses the empty shed, and goes to sit in a chair, behind the easel. Raquel is stretched out on the divan, her head in my lap, her eyes closed; her hand, hanging over the side of the divan, holds a cigarette that burns out on its own, sending up smoke between her fingers. The four figures, standing out starkly against the broad background, speak in low voices and sometimes shake their heads or lift a hand, that they immediately drop, indicating, without enthusiasm, the painting. Now there are no more than four of us in the studio. Héctor, Alicia, Raquel and I, looking, without speaking, for a moment, in the same direction, at the white wall before us, from the other side of the empty shed where the brick floor ends. Now the light goes out. I see the form of Raquel’s body stretched out beside mine, in the reddish semidarkness produced by the electric stove by the divan. The white walls, in the semidarkness, emit a weak phosphorescence. The white painting, from far away, is, so to speak, like a window from which one is watching the sunrise. I feel, from beneath her dress, Raquel’s warm, slightly loose flesh. Now we are naked, covered by a blanket. From the attic noises filter down to us of the wood of the floor and the bed creaking, hushed voices, laughter, and later cries and moans from Alicia. Hearing them, Raquel lets out a short cry, which she muffles by pressing her mouth against my shoulder. It remains there for a moment. There is a mouth against my shoulder, open, the same mouth that hours before has asked me to go with her to get a drink after the party. The mouth descends my right arm to my elbow and stops there. Her whole body has been fidgeting beneath the blanket. Now that the mouth has paused on my arm, she is quiet. Nothing comes from the attic. Her body, standing, bending, moves a little, before her mouth begins to move, now that the mouth moves from my arm to my belly and even a little lower. The mouth begins to make some noises that resound in the empty shed. I catch a glimpse of Cat sleeping in El Rincón. He is not me, so that I am not him either, he who is standing on the corner, in summer, in a T-shirt, freshly bathed, nodding to someone who has confused him for me. A summer so large that, so to speak, I cannot fill it completely. The mouth, without a body, without me, works, with a regular rhythm, in the reddish semidarkness, while my confused thoughts intermix, the way an insomniac experiences a vivid dream and then, slowly, begins to wake. The light is on again now, Raquel and I beneath the blanket, naked, and Héctor and Alicia, dressed, standing beside the stove, facing the divan. We make space at the end of the table, among the remains of the cold food, and we sit down to snack, sipping wine. Raquel’s mouth receives the pieces of cold meat, chews them slowly, flashes her tongue when she licks her wrinkled lips, talks. Héctor speaks, once in Paris, they, too, had held a barbeque in an