atelier that he shared with a Greek painter, a surrealist. The painter was a lesbian. She smoked cigarettes. She drank kirsch and, at dawn, went out onto the street to steal the milk bottles deliverymen left on the doorsteps of groceries. Now he turns to me: is it true, that story Cat would tell about the brother of our great-grandfather who was an intern in a hospital in Buenos Aires during the yellow fever outbreak, and who, according to Cat, abandoned his post for fear of the contagion and appeared in the city, in our great-great-grandfather’s house, no one knowing what in the world he was doing there; and who, according to Cat, says Héctor, had brought the fever with him and died four days later, spreading the plague? Héctor asks me if it is true. I say that if Cat said it, it must be true. Héctor laughs. They are quite different, says Alicia. Cat is the plague, says Raquel. That glut, that abandon, that oblivion, that death, is necessary so that one may begin, gradually, like a sun, to rise up, tracing a parabola with a zenith and a nadir, with its own rhythm, at the time when histories are intertwined, confused, superimposed, corrected, perfected, falsified, in a cold dawn in an illuminated shed with white walls, heated by electric stoves. Cat, who, once, at the School of Fine Arts, shattered a cast of the Venus de Milo; the time Cat and I shared the same woman, and we alternated weeks sleeping with her, convincing her that we were the same person; the version Cat came up with, in which the woman also had a twin sister, who switched off with her to receive us; the man who, last year, threw himself out the window of the courthouse after being sentenced by the judge, my cousin; the time during which Héctor and the lesbian made copies of famous paintings and sold them on the Pont des Arts; stories about Washington. Fixed, closed, we shuffle them like cards for two hours. They move from mouth to mouth, like passwords. They have been, so to speak, polished so much, like stones, their contours so precise, distinguished so easily from one another, that it is as if, at a certain moment, they stop being stories, things that have happened in space and time, and turn into objects, algae, blossoms. It is easy, since they are already in the past. But what is happening in time, what is happening now, the time of the stories we remain inside, is inexpressible. Now we are standing again before the arid, vertical rectangle. Héctor, whose elastic face has grayed a bit, traces imaginary vertical lines before the canvas with the mouthpiece of his pipe. Raquel asks if it took him a long time to paint it. A month of Sundays, says Héctor. Now we are sitting again at the corner of the table, drinking coffee. Héctor drops a lump of sugar into a glass of water and we sit watching it dissolve. The objective durée, says Héctor. The what? asks Alicia. The objective durée. The durée. Durée. Duration, says Héctor. To be objective, says Héctor, one must measure it, one must be present. His painting, he says, is an amplified fragment of the objective durée. At the bottom of the glass there remains a sandy sediment of little crystals. Then nothing more. The glass alone remains, with the water, without any durée. Look: not even a trace of the objective durée, says Héctor. To listen to Héctor, who has explained the meaning of the painting, I have reverted my gaze to his elastic face, taking it from the glass. When I look back at it, there is at first the sandy sediment and then nothing: the glass with the water, with no