One almost immediately after the other, the Mathematician perceives, as they reach the corner, two familiar faces: the first belongs to the owner of a newsstand on the beveled corner; as the man is sitting on a bench among his merchandise, situated so as to be shielded from the sun that’s striking on the cross street, his head stands out against the low background of weeklies, monthlies, and evening papers, against the color photos of movie stars in bikinis, political and syndical leaders, soccer stars, photos repeated several times, just like the regular, black headlines in the newspapers or the characters in comic strips. From their repetition, the images, which form an oblong background, become almost abstract, transforming into a kind of multicolored guard that seems to decorate the relief portrait of the vendor, whose gaze, lost in the street, the Mathematician does not manage to meet so as to exchange the greeting he has prepared. But, raising his head again, his eyes meet the second familiar face, and this one, passing alongside Leto, smiles back. It’s only a familiar face, not actually someone you could say, to be more precise, he is familiar with. A familiar face — or rather, no? — a face that occupies a place between the familiar and the unfamiliar, which he can’t match with a name, but which, from having passed so many times across his visual field, has ended up imposing its peculiar characteristics on the Mathematician’s memory, just like the Mathematician’s face has ended up imprinting itself in the other’s memory, so that eventually, when they pass on the street, as proof of their recognition, they say hello. It’s true that, in moments of surprise, familiar faces also become suddenly unfamiliar, but there is a gradation that, beginning with these and moving across familiar people first, then across familiar faces, and then across unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar people, the last bulwark of experience, arrives finally at the dark and viscous horizon of the unknown — the unknown, no? or rather the thing that, beyond the fleeting capacity of the empirical, is background, the persistence we try to force back, unsuccessfully, with those vague signs passing, as though lost, in the day.
Maintaining their identical, regular pace, Leto and the Mathematician step off the sidewalk into the street and start to cross. A slow-moving car intercepts them, and when it slows at the intersection, they move ahead of it, both at the same time, without stopping or varying their pace, without even looking at it, like two robots with a preprogrammed electronic mechanism which makes them automatically avoid obstacles, and when they reach the opposite sidewalk both, simultaneously, bend their left leg and lift it over the cable.
The Next Seven Blocks
We were with Leto and the Mathematician who, one morning, the twenty-third of October in 1961, we had said, just after 10:00, had met on the central avenue, had started walking together to the south, and the Mathematician, who had heard about it from Botón on the upper deck of the ferry to Paraná, the previous Saturday, had started telling Leto about the birthday party for Jorge Washington Noriega, near the end of August, at Basso’s ranch in Colastiné, and after walking a few blocks together, they crossed the street with an identical, regular pace and simultaneously bent their left leg, lifting it over the cable with the intention, more unconscious than calculated, of planting the bottom of their foot on the sidewalk, no? Alright then: they plant their feet. And the Mathematician thinks: If time were like this street, it would be easy to go back and retrace it in every sense, stop where you wanted, like this straight street with a beginning and an end, and where things would give the impression of being aligned, of being rough and clean like those well-furnished weekend houses in residential neighborhoods. But he says:
— Shht! Il terso conchertino dilestro armónico.
The unexpected cocoliche phrase disorients Leto, especially when the Mathematician stops, grabs him by the arm, and assumes a theatrical pose, which consists of turning his head slightly toward Leto, without making eye contact, while his eyes, gazing in the opposite direction and ceasing to see what’s around them, take on an intense expectancy and tender concentration on the index finger of his left hand, which, at the end of his elevated and slightly bent arm, points to a hypothetical point in the space ahead of them where the finger, like the needle on a metal detector, tries to locate the exact source of the music. Almost simultaneously, Leto hears it too, and his several seconds delay in hearing the music seems to be caused less by sensory constituents, specialized or acoustic, than by his submerged distraction in his thoughts. In spite of his delay, both locate the source at the same time: a record store that’s advertising itself by hurling music into the street, its doors open to the sidewalk out front. The morning sounds on the central avenue, vehicles, footsteps, voices, seem like cheap resonance, undisciplined and savage, on which the music is neatly mounted, but to the Mathematician’s subtle and speculative ear, also seem like both a deliberate and inadvertent contrast, where the juxtaposition of the brute noise and the structured sound creates a richer and more complex sonorous space, a space, I was saying, no? where pure noise, betraying the real nature of the music by contrast, assumes a moral role, like in those engravings where the mere presence of a skull reveals the maiden’s true face. After locating the music’s source, the Mathematician’s finger clenches, and his hand begins to make rhythmic undulations in the air, which his head, bobbing, accompanies, followed by, the first half-closed, the second stretching into a mesmerized smile, his eyes and mouth. And when they continue walking, the Mathematician’s body seems pulled, discreetly of course, by a magnetic attraction to the music, to Leto’s surprise, as he can’t distinguish, in the sort of moderate bacchant the Mathematician has become, the affect of sincere enthusiasm. The Mathematician’s raptures pass, almost as they happen, like a slightly histrionic moment of insanity, and when they approach the source of the music, and therefore hear it with greater clarity, the Mathematician recovers his serene, indolent attitude and once again becomes the measured athlete, blonde, tall, dressed completely in white, including his moccasins, with an unlit pipe in his hand, acting out precise, strict, and elegant gestures, uncalculated by that point in his life, ultimately, the Mathematician, no? who, completely forgetting the noise and the music, tells him:
— Botón says that Washington presented the mosquito this way: eight millimeters of pulsing life.
Leto imagines it: Botón, Washington, the mosquito. According to the Mathematician, Washington, one night the previous summer, had a casual encounter with three mosquitos, whose behavior, according the Mathematician, and always according to Botón, yielded a series of unexpected results, of a similar order, it seemed (to Washington, no?), to those that the distinguished gathering just now derived in regards to Noca’s horse. The previous summer, Washington was working on his four lectures — Location, Lineage, Language, Logic — about the Colastiné Indians, which are only known, for the time being, in their titles: immersed in historical and anthropological treatises, he was forced to work at night because of the heat — unbearable in January and February. Leto, who has gone a couple of times with Tomatis to Washington’s place in Rincón Norte, has no difficulty imagining him at his work table, in front of the window that faces the side patio where, protected by shade from eucalyptus and paradise trees, rows of snapdragons, carnations, daisies, and geraniums extend between paths of sandy earth. Leto remembers two or three rose laurels, a wisteria, a lapacho, a timbo and, at the very back of the garden, like a leftover from the pre-farmed land, five or six yellow mimosa. In the back patio he saw a large, well-tended garden, fruit trees, a corral, and even a rabbit hutch. During the siege of Athens, he once heard Washington say, Epicurus and his friends survived thanks to a self-sufficient economy. I defend myself from the Liberal-Catholic conspiracy by any means necessary. So, the summer night, no? in the middle of the countryside, after a dry and dusty day and the fever of the twilight, the silent but much cooler dawn, and the man on the threshold of old age who, protected from the outside world by the white walls and metal screens, reads, taking quick, abbreviated notes in a journal from time to time. He has spent the day coming and going around the house, avoiding the bright places in the orchard and the garden, alone after his daughter married a doctor and moved to Córdoba — he had separated with his second wife in 1950—accustomed now in his sixty-fourth year to life and death, having left behind periods of impotence, of torpor, and of insanity, but still possessing enough strength to observe, serenely, the summer afternoon from the shade of the paradise trees and wait for nightfall in order to begin to work, which he will do until the next morning. And his story, according to what’s left of Botón’s story in the Mathematician’s, is more or less this: a calm night the previous summer, after midnight. After a light dinner, Washington, with a pitcher of cold water and a dish of plums, has taken up to his study to read, taking notes from time to time, a facsimile edition of Father Quesada’s An account of the adventures of a child lost to the world, which Marcos Rosemberg had brought back from Madrid for him. Little by little the day’s heat diminished, and the internal humming that spans the illuminated section of his mind, monotonously, with its train of apparitions, has been sectioned off by the clear point of his attention that, like the edge of a diamond, has been opening a path that relegates, with successive adjustments, the layers of darkness. Eventually, after several forceful efforts, the layers retract and the faces of the diamond, emerging from the darkness, concentrate on the transparent point that stabilizes and fixes itself, in order to later be perfected at its disappearance, disseminated in its own transparency, so that not only the humming, which is time, flesh, and savagery, but also the book and the reader disappear with it, clearing a place where the eternal and the intangible, no less real than putrefaction and the hours, unfold victoriously. Every so often, his left hand, independent from the rest of the body, slides toward the dish of plums, picks one up and carries it, without possible error, to the half-open mouth that’s ready to receive, masticate, and spit out, after a few moments, into his hand, which has come up again, the pit, without a trace of pulp, which his tongue and teeth, on their own accord, have separated with precision and ease, in order to return it to the outside world. The book, resting on others that had been stacked horizontally, oblique, like a bible on a lectern, does not make a sound — except the one from the reader’s fingers as they seize, with an index finger previously moistened on the tip of his tongue, the lower right corner of the page in order to turn it — but nevertheless a silent turmoil fills Washington’s head. Space and time, swirling around the motionless reader, are powerless to either dissolve or circulate the turmoil and slide around the intangible borders of his body, unable to penetrate the intangible nucleus that is its corollary.