mate on top of the table. Cat, he tells me circumspectly, has gone to the city, to see me: he’ll be back at six. But six is also when the last motorboat leaves for La Guardia, where it meets with the last steamboat. I tell him to keep working, I’ll wait. I regard him fleetingly, two or three times, while he writes on the typewriter. Now he’s sitting in the chair. No longer is he like the last time I saw him, in November, on the patio of his house, a mate in his hand, standing next to Cat and Tomatis, talking about the fundamentals of Tendai, beneath the hot sun, against a background, fresh and flowering, of birds of paradise and laurels. Now he is seated before me. The keys of the machine resound, pounding against the white sheet, in an atmosphere of circumspection. He is, facing me with his white head, his dry face, the color of earth, despite his wool shirt with large red and white checks beneath whose half-open collar peeps a woolen undershirt, despite the invisibility of the time that he has lived, or perhaps more than anything because of it, in which he has been a child, an adolescent, an adult, despite his multiple lives, sitting before the typewriter, without glasses, tidy, extravagant, an old man. Voices keep coming rapidly, in bursts, from the patio, and when the typewriter stops and Washington sits with his hands suspended in the air, over the keyboard, his gaze fixed on the piece of paper, they sound louder, sharper. Now I am standing on the balcony out back, seeing the tents scattered on the patio, among the trees, and among them a bonfire, whose tallest flames are even taller than the tents, spreads a reddish splendor in the still-bright air. Don Layo has greeted me, among the tumult of his nephews and the women who are preparing pots and kettles around the fire. Then he disappeared inside one of the tents. Five or six dogs prowl in the background, behind the tents which are separated from the balcony by a great expanse of open terrain where there are not even trees, in which are strewn car batteries half-buried in the ground among the yellowing grass, the tips of which has been singed by the cold. Men, tents, trees, mixed up, extinguishing themselves with the day, are enveloped and cushioned by a lilac twilight, now that I have gone out again with the glass of gin in my hand to pass along the balcony I hear, faintly, with momentary pauses and new starts, intermittent, weak, hesitant, the tapping of the typewriter that comes, in bursts, from inside the house. Our two shadows project, silently, against the white wall, enormous. He has just said that Cat, unless by exceptional means, won’t be coming. For him to manage it, there would have to be the possibility, utterly remote, of obtaining permission from the police or the army to cross the suspension bridge, by foot, at night, and the possibility, afterward, of some embarkation from the Boating Club to La Guardia, and furthermore of walking from La Guardia to the entrance to El Rincón, and managing to find someone to bring him in a canoe from the entrance of town to the house, in the middle of the night, which would oblige one, like it or not, to dismiss the idea that he could be coming back tonight. He takes a large sip of gin, a shorter one, leaves the glass on the table, slips a cigarette, deliberately, into the black mouthpiece, bites down on it, tasting it a little with his lips while he searches for the matches on the table, lights the cigarette, draws a mouthful of smoke, drops the matches back onto the table and, pulling the mouthpiece between his teeth, supporting it over the edge of the table and waving his hand in front of his face to disperse the smoke, smiles briefly and adds that if everything indicates he won’t come now, it may very well turn out the opposite, because with Cat, I know quite well from experience, you just never know. Now I am sitting before the typewriter, my hands held above the keyboard, waiting for Washington to dictate to me. If, as I hear his voice and bend over quickly, pounding the keys with the pads of my fingers, someone were to enter, seeing us, without knowing, from the doorframe, holding his hand out to greet us, affable, he would believe, and would continue to believe if we didn’t reveal his error, that I, leaning over the keyboard, was someone else. And I myself, at the moment I begin to type, emptied of prejudice, of spite, of fear, of indifference, dedicated simply to writing, suspend myself, erasing myself, without being myself, and having, for a moment, if not the possibility of being someone else, the certainty, at least, of being no one, nothing, just as I am not the sentences that come from Washington and pass through me, from my arms, exit through the tips of my fingers and imprint themselves, in pairs, on the paper sitting in the machine. The smoke from our cigarettes is filling up the sphere of light radiating from the lamp, and from outside, no noises, no voices come to us, nor the horizon of animal sounds, polyphonic, that the water forces, so to speak, according to Washington, toward the dry border, where they are stored. There is nothing, now that Washington, absorbed in the translation that he is dictating to me, thinks neither of me nor of Cat, but only about the sentences that he polishes with his gazed fixed on his notebook while he wrinkles his forehead and arches, reflectively, his white brow, nothing but my conviction, extremely weak, my impoverished certainty, to corroborate the idea that I have not been here all day, sitting before the typewriter copying Washington’s translation, and that rather I only arrived here a few hours ago, on a boat, on an orange motorboat, on a canoe. I have just conserved, weakly, mixed up, diffused, the little flame burning, that now, suddenly, at the moment when I return to re-reading, at Washington’s request, a sentence I have already written, when my attention is displaced, insignificant, dies out. I end up thinking that the two of us are outside of something, something that has bid us goodbye, leaving us outside and closing the door behind us at the edge of darkness, even when we are perhaps the only ones, in the darkest point of a night replete with water, who are exposed in full light, arid and slow, as if under observation. I am not in that exteriority; although he is absent, Cat is there. Now Washington dictates to me: A good laborer a good laborer does not make with a needle more than with a needle a good laborer does not make more than five stitches per minute comma more than five stitches per minute comma per minute comma while certain circular machines While certain circular weaving machines make thirty thousand in the same time period Every minute of machine work every minute of machine work Every minute of machine work is equal therefore Every minute of machine work is equal therefore to a hundred hours of work by a laborer semicolon or rather every minute of work or rather every minute of machine work allows the laborer permits the laborer ten days of rest period ten days of rest period Now I am walking behind Washington, who carries the lantern, with the bottle of gin and the glasses, following him in the direction of the kitchen, behind the swinging lantern that produces continuous, irregular movements of light and shadow all around, crossing two of the large white rooms, practically empty. Now Washington cuts an onion into fine slices on the stove while I am peeling, a cigarette hanging between my lips, potatoes that now I begin to dry and cut into slices so I can throw them into the oil that crackles in the black saucepan, over the fire. Born from the belly of a woman, fed by two great white tits and sheltered by a firm skirt against the broad belly of his mother in the years of his infancy, obsessed during his adolescence with the delirium of women’s bodies, married, divorced, then both again, father of a daughter, frequenter of prostitutes at sixty, surrounded by women like a stamen surrounded by petals, Washington does not seem, now, leaning over the stove, as he slices the onion, either androgynous or hermaphroditic but asexualized, as if the floodgates of sex had closed for him, in him, and now there were a pair of old people living together at the end, tranquil, reconciled, at the same time, in the same body. And eating, now, separated by the bread and the bottle of wine, I see, firmly, his age. He chews slowly, erect, ascetic, never allowing his rough, wrinkled hands, or his lined mouth to be stained or shine with oil. He condescends to speak, even though I am not Cat. He holds his glass of wine in the air, chewing, serious, and affirms: to travel, you will see, is to pass from the particular to the universal, and as one travels the particular turns into the universal, and the universal, the particular; they do nothing, that is, but switch places. Now he is setting the lamp on the table, next to the typewriter. I contemplate him; I can, if I like, he says, sleep, though it will only be a few hours, in Cat’s bed; Don Layo, in the morning, will take me to the road. From the bed I hear the typewriter, in the other room. On the table the light burns, tranquil, a lamp; it doesn’t even flicker. Lying face-up as I smoke, I extend, without looking, my hand toward the nightstand and pick up the tall glass of gin. I sit up and take a sip. Now there is no more noise from the typewriter. Nothing is audible. Hearing nothing, one knows that one is within the black point of the present, a grain of sand, so to speak, in the lunar sphere, the black point of the present that is as long and as wide as time itself, in someone else’s bed. And now in the sun, in the back hall, I see boys playing against the tents and the smoke, while I listen to Don Layo chewing his