God damn it! And me in Frankfurt, thinks the Mathematician suddenly. Residue of The Incident. But he forgets it. Owing, apparently, in the era of Temistocles, to a man named Hippodamus, from Miletus they say, tasked with the so-called urbanization of Piraeus, Leto and the Mathematician, ruled by the chess set form of our cities, arrive at the next corner where the intersecting caesura of the cross street interrupts the straight gray line of the sidewalk. They pass from the sun to the shade, from the sidewalk to the street, from the street to the sidewalk, and from the sun to the shade again without changing the rhythm of their pace and without having to stop once, because, as luck would have it, no cars were passing just then on the cross street. The street is so empty that they can keep talking while they cross or, to be more precise, the Mathematician can continue his story — or rather can keep telling Leto the memory he’s been keeping, without having told the outside world a single detail, since the previous Saturday, an opaque and cloudy afternoon on the upper deck of the ferry — the memory, elaborated by Botón’s words and proffered between mouthfuls of chocolate, that he, the Mathematician, no? imagines like this: Barco, the Garay twins, Nidia Basso, and Silvia Cohen start setting the table under the pavilion, the fish continue grilling, the salads sit ready on the stove in the kitchen. There must have been some general commotion before they settled at the table, coming and going from the kitchen, chairs scraping, clinking of plates, of silverware, hesitations — How many are we? The kids already ate, me and Nidia two, Barco, Tomatis, La Chichito, and Beatriz and the twins eight, Botón and Cuello ten, Washington and Marcos Rosemberg twelve (Cohen: I won’t sit, just pick a little from the grill), Silvia thirteen. We’re missing Dib, Pirulo with Rosario, and Sadi and Miguel Ángel — a while must have gone by before they started to eat, thinks the Mathematician.
And he says: It’s the most diverse group you can imagine. In sixty-five years Washington had time to make friends in every sector, and for different reasons: Cuello, for example, who is twenty years younger, was born in the same town and calls him his mentor; Sadi and Miguel Ángel Podio, who are members of the left-wing labor union, admire him because in the twenties Washington published an anarchist newspaper; Pirulo and the Cohens discuss the humanities with him; Basso and his wife, Zen Buddhism; Beatriz (Leto imagines her rolling a cigarette) worked with him on a translation of some nineteenth-century French prose poems. Barco, Tomatis, and the twins are part of this entourage, and Marcos Rosemberg is the only one left in the city from Higinio Gómez’s generation. Botón considers himself a close friend. And me in Frankfurt, thinks the Mathematician. And Leto: I wasn’t invited.
According to Botón, Dib, who after abandoning philosophy opened a mechanics shop, brought three bottles of whiskey, Caballito Blanco, he — Botón, no? — clarified, approvingly, and they started to eat. And Botón says that Barco said (more or less): If we attribute the stumble to chance, it’s obvious a horse can stumble. But if we consider the stumble an accident, that is, deviance from a necessary action, it goes without saying that horses do not stumble. I’m of the chef’s opinion, in that case. And Cohen (also more or less): I don’t have an opinion. I’m only inferring the necessary implications in our notion of instinct. And Beatriz (also more or less and, to Leto, listening to what the Mathematician tells him, constantly rolling a cigarette): If we accept the cook’s notion of instinct, we would come to the conclusion that horses don’t die. Given that instinct is pure necessity, and the first necessity of a living being is its own survival, how can a horse die, given that it’s a living being?
Much more alive than some of us here, says the Mathematician that Botón told him Tomatis said. He can imagine Tomatis saying that from the other end of the table, while he slowly unwraps his fish and scrapes, with his knife blade, the burned skin that may have stuck to the newspaper. Washington, the Mathematician says, wasn’t saying anything. Several in the group must have been waiting for him to open his mouth, but Washington confined himself to eating, bent over his plate with a thoughtful smile, pushing down the mouthfuls from time to time with sips of white wine. Botón, on the upper deck of the ferry, says that Washington didn’t say anything. Botón says, the Mathematician says. Both imagine him: the Mathematician as blonde, curly-haired, with a blonde goatee, eating his chocolate bar to make up for the breakfast he couldn’t eat because he got up too late, the almost transparent clear blue of his eyes, recently showered and combed, getting ready to spend the weekend in Diamante, and Leto as dark-haired, imprecise, his skin dark and covered in acne, his hair straight and unruly, of an almost wiry stiffness, without Leto knowing or ever having asked himself, since he’s never seen him, why the word Botón, which evokes that string of unknown associations, summed up in the characteristics attributed to their name, makes him look like this.
Washington didn’t say anything, no? sitting there with his eyes lowered, leaning over his plate, where his perch sat unwrapped, open, with its filling of parsley and onions, on the charred newspaper page, and in some places fused, or confused rather, with the fish skin. But, according to the Mathematician, his eyes smiled thoughtfully and, two or three times, he was about to say something, lifting his head and looking at the whole gathering who, except for two or three, Beatriz, maybe, or the Centaur, or one of the two twins, El Gato probably, weren’t paying any attention to him. He seemed to be gathering, inside him, the ends of a phrase, of a memory, of something that demands a basic order before it will let itself be spoken — spoken, or rather laid out, articulated, through a sequence of muscular and respiratory combinations, among palpable and impalpable folds of organic material and thought, to the outside world — a familiar music that, even when it comes out in constant and conventional forms, allows itself to be stitched and unstitched in an infinite number of variations.