— Washington’s legendary four lectures on the Indians in Colastiné, says the Mathematician.
Leto has heard about them — in a fragmentary way, of course, like, in a similar way, everything relating to Washington. He has been working on them — Location, Lineage, Language, Logic — for four or five years, in a fragmentary way, no? for example, that Washington, who Leto, before moving from Rosario, had never heard of, in fact, that Washington, for example, has been in prison several times, mostly in the twenties and thirties, and that, at the end of the forties, spent time in an asylum, that he was married twice and both times separated, that his daughter married a doctor and has lived in Córdoba for a few years, that the house in Rincón Norte, the land at least, was inherited from his father, a pharmacist in Emilia, with whom he had not spoken from 1912 until his death (his father’s, no?), that Washington lives on a disability pension they gave him when he left the asylum and on translations, etc., etc. — and a mess of other things he has happened to fish out of conversations, things he has heard him tell to Tomatis, to Barco, to César Rey, to the twins, et cetera.
Assenting without turning to look at the Mathematician, Leto nods his head. They are now even with the record store, on the opposite sidewalk, and when they pass in front they can hear with greater clarity the music that, like them, has been advancing up the straight street, via the melody’s more intricate path, to the momentary encounter. But the Mathematician’s outward indifference toward it is so complete that Leto feels a rapid irritation, a kind of rebellion, as if, with that subtle indifference, the Mathematician defrauds him — which in a sense is true, because when he saw him absorbed in the music, Leto felt a confused and somewhat problematic admiration for him. Unaware of any external error, the Mathematician continues:
— But that’s another story, he says.
The lectures, no? In the calm night in Rincón Norte, in the illuminated, silent study where the smoke of the forgotten cigarette in the notch on the ashtray rises, quiet and regular, toward the lamp, Washington reads, calmly, the book open over the table. And this is when the three mosquitos make their appearance.
Here the Mathematician affects an ostentatious and satisfied pause, jerking his head toward Leto who, to punish him for his flippancy a second ago, decides to not register the effect, abstaining from turning his gaze from the fixed point that he is staring at many meters ahead on the straight sidewalk, and the slightly theatrical smile that had started to stretch across the Mathematician’s face is erased, and an indescribable, paled expression, of panic and sadness, appears instead. But just as the decision is made, for lack of resolve or because he disapproved fundamentally of the pettiness in his attitude, Leto gives up and turns his head, assuming an intrigued expression no less theatrical than the Mathematician’s satisfied pause. The Mathematician revives. Once more the fog of The Incident, in brief, faint, and successive waves, had overcome him, a fog that the pale expression of panic and sadness, which has just passed, unnoticed by Leto, has been only the most external manifestation, like the lamps in Entre Ríos that, they say, seemed to vibrate the night of the San Juan earthquake. The waves retreat, and in the Mathematician’s imagination, Washington, absorbed in his reading, hears the triplicate buzzing much later than when the mosquitos started flying around the room, over his head, somewhere between the table and the ceiling — and this, of course, according to Botón, and according to Botón according to Washington.
Now, almost every door on the street, generally sitting open between two windows, belongs to a business. On the opposite sidewalk, for example, after the record store they’ve just passed, diminishing the music’s intensity, there’s a fabric store, a furniture store, a place selling Lux electrical appliances, the women’s shoe store Chez Juanita. On the sidewalk where they walk, Leto and the Mathematician successively pass an American diner, dark and dingy in spite of its plastic stools and its multicolor formica counter; a flower shop; one selling fancy pastries; a cigarette store where an older man behind the window is putting on his glasses to study, with painstaking sincerity, his lottery ticket. At every business, from the upper part of the façade, between the first and second floors, the neon signs extend over the street, vertically or horizontally, in different directions and, though they are turned off, form, to put a word to it, a sort of canopy that covers, as far as you can see from a certain height, the central avenue, or like a multitude of rigid standards, in a tight formation that, if they belonged to an army, would intimidate the enemy with their immobility, their quantity, and their variety — each one, like the music from the record store, advertising itself tautologically, repeating, a little higher, emblematically, the message already expressed in a direct and precise form on the windows, in the same way that some religions, as if the presence of a creator were not evident in the creation itself, need to make use, to demonstrate his existence, of some sign of his existence that’s separate from the objects he created.