Two or three days later the autopsy reveals that he shot himself on Friday at around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, meaning that he said goodbye with a grin at the station, reminding him before he left that on Wednesday they would cross to the island with Lopecito, then, still grinning, boarded the train back to their neighborhood, walked the block between the train stop and the house at a calm and regular pace, and no doubt without losing his grin entered the house, crossed the hallway, shut himself in the bedroom, and without hesitating or losing the fixed, vindictive grin, blew his brains out.
— I call that an insolent suicide, said César Rey, a few months later, at the bar Montecarlo, in the city, while they watched the sun, through the window, rising into a cold autumn dawn. And Rey can speak with authority because the day before, in fact, he had gotten a hotel room, intending to slit his wrists, but at the decisive moment he had suddenly changed his mind, and after leaving the hotel, he had run into Leto at the arcade’s bar, where they proceeded to go on a bender.
— The insolent suicide, says Leto, shaking his head. Isabel and Lopecito were left stupefied by the event — in the director’s absence they no longer knew exactly what role they played in the comedy — but Leto himself thinks he has known how to conserve enough cold blood to keep him from the path of the gunshot, though the suspicion of having been the primary target for the last few weeks could be, without his realizing it, proof of the opposite.
The insolent suicide, he thinks, discreetly watching the Mathematician, whose eyebrows indicate a laborious reflection that Leto cannot know, and is not interested in knowing, but which is more or less the following: Where does instinct come from? Does it belong to the individual or the species? Is there continuity between individuals? Does the latter individual take over the instinct from the point where the former left it or does he reconstruct, from zero, the whole process from the start? Is it substance, energy, reflex? What is our idea of instinct? How was it first formed? By whom? Where? As opposed to what? What, in a living thing, isn’t instinct? And then, forgetting Noca, Noca’s horse, instinct, the images he has built up thanks to Botón’s story on the ferry, the previous Saturday, on the upper deck, images of Washington’s birthday at Basso’s ranch, which he didn’t attend but will remember for the rest of his life, the other questions, always stirring, underground, and sometimes rising to the surface, suddenly, that follow us, form us, lead us, allow us to be, the old questions first brought up in the African dawn, heard in Babylon and asked again in Thebes, in Asia Minor, on the banks of the Yellow River, which sparkled in the Scandinavian snows, the soliloquy in Arabia, in New Guinea, in Königsberg, in Mato Grosso, and in Tenochtitlán, questions whose response is exaltation, is death, suffering, insanity, and which stir in every blink, every heartbeat, every premonition — who planted the seed of the world? what are the internal and the external? what are birth and death? is there a single object or many? what is the I? what is the general and the particular? what is repetition? what am I doing here? — that is to say, no? — the Mathematician, or someone else, somewhere else or at some other time, again, though there is only one, only one, which is always the same Place, and always, as we were saying, once and for all, the same Time.
For the twenty-seven seconds, give or take, that it took the Mathematician to refocus, silently, on his thoughts, and for Leto to remember, in quick, fragmented and disordered images what, as I was saying, I was saying just now, their bodies advance, in a regular way, down the narrow sidewalk, to the south. Neither of them notices that, without disruption, and without it being possible, with any clarity, to separate the two dimensions, they are advancing in time while doing so in space, as if every step they take moves them in opposite directions, inasmuch as time and space are inseparable and one is inconceivable without the other, and both inconceivable without each other, Leto and the Mathematician, the pedestrians, the street, and the morning form a thick current flowing calmly from the source of the event. Leto thinks (more or less, no?), For her to come along a year later with the story of an incurable illness just proves her inability to accept the transparency of his message—and you could add a comparison: with excessive, but for him necessary, means, like the physicists who build a tunnel several kilometers long where they shoot an infinitely small particle because the behavior of that particle will explain all matter and therefore the universe. And the Mathematician, walking alongside him, thinks again, Set in motion by, but says:
— Everyone was looking at Washington, who wasn’t saying anything.
Always according to Botón. Anyway, he wasn’t saying anything, but it seemed, from his pensive and half-smiling expression, his white eyes, the smoke of the Gitane Filtre (Caporal) rising to his face from his hand, which he held more or less at the height of his diaphragm, that he was about to say something. And in fact, he was. Leto imagines him at the head of the table, under the illuminated pavilion, close to the grill, the unforeseen pavilion installed hurriedly among the orange, grapefruit, and mandarin trees, in the dark patio, at the end of winter — Washington, the night of his sixty-fifth birthday, dressed warmly in his thermal undershirt and plaid wool shirt, plus a v-neck sweater with the shirt’s collar poking through the top, plus his wool blazer and over his shoulders maybe a poncho or a blanket, his white hair messy and thick, the skin on his face sagging a little but still firm, thick, clean-shaven, and healthy, one of those old men who, maybe because they work a farm, or go fishing, or often ride horses, or sit in the garden to read the paper during the siestas in winter, are tanned year-round, Washington, I was saying, while he forms, with a more and more pronounced smile in his eyes, which he keeps raising to his interlocutors, and a more and more vague smile on his lips, what he is about to say, shaping words, phrases, and gestures, he raises, parsimoniously, his cigarette to his lips and between puffs of smoke exhaled through his nose and mouth, begins to speak.