For statistical reasons, more so than actual popularity, the Mathematician is every so often obliged to greet, whether with a quick gesture, a nod of his head, or in some terse, conventional way, the acquaintances he passes — statistics that on the one hand are disadvantageous to Leto since he has only lived in the city a short while and knows considerably fewer people than the Mathematician, a constituent ab origine, and that on the other hand, for the last few blocks, considering the gradual and systematic inflation to the number of pedestrians as they approach the city center, increase in the Mathematician’s favor the chances of bumping into an acquaintance. In fact, in only purely quantifiable terms is he favored, because in aesthetic, political, emotional, or psychological terms, so to speak, no? and on moral — as they say, and if you like, and speaking ill and in haste — and existential levels, as I was saying earlier, the Mathematician loathes a good portion of his fellow citizens, especially those of his own class—the bloodlust bourgeoisie—for whom he has cultivated, from the age of eight or nine, a concentrated contempt and inexplicable hatred. In spite of their liberal beliefs, his parents are friendly with political bosses and landowners who, likewise, in deference to their aristocratic name and, more than anything, to the expanse of land surrounding Tostado, tolerate their liberal humanism, the way they would the epileptics or pederasts in their class. His brother, Leandro (because. . no?), several years older than him, for whom, according to the Mathematician, moral reflexes seem nonexistent and money and social status are the a priori principles of his ontology, has been grooming himself as a landowner since childhood, so much so that even his own parents, despite the genuine affection they feel for him, show a certain prudence when he is around. Leandro, for his part, treats his parents like communists and bohemians. And between the Mathematician and his brother, after several grim altercations, relations are limited, when they’re with the family, to an exchange of cold monosyllables thick with innuendo. In spite of this — what a gentleman! — Leandro doesn’t miss a single important family event; he never forgets to call his mother every other day, according to custom; and you had to see him on the tennis court, well-groomed and tanned, fairly conceding each of his opponent’s points only to steamroll him in the second set. And, using him as an example, you could never derive a single generalization about human nature, because it’s difficult to determine if, apart from his real estate and holdings and evenings at the Jockey Club and the Rotary, he possesses a single genuine human trait suitable to motivating a generalization—he said once to Tomatis, with the characteristic humor that likes to feign surprise and false neutrality.
Why did he hate them so much? A psychoanalytic manifestation, Tomatis diagnosed with flippant disinterest. When your parents are perfect, you are compelled to project the hatred you should feel for them to every member of their class. Unlike Washington who, it seems, hated his father so much that the quota of love he should have felt for him he transferred to the rest of humanity.
The Mathematician was shaking his head: Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. . no. Accepting that interpretation would oversimplify things. Casually submitting to the subjective hypothesis means ignoring the valid objective reasons for hating them: for example their enthusiasm and acumen for accumulating wealth and the cruelty they demonstrate in defending it; the egocentric ignorance and compulsive narcissism that isolates them from the rest of the world; and the creepy mimesis they have employed in copying foreign style, first the English and French, later the Americans — one of his uncles, the Mathematician’s, no? had proposed in the thirties that the country transfer power to the English crown; they were poor losers, vindictive, they carried genocide in their blood, bigotry in their souls, and vanity in their hearts, and they were prepared at any moment to annihilate everything they considered heterogeneous to their nature and anything that didn’t reflect, in its features and gestures, the supposed image of what they pretend to be. In a word, the Mathematician always ended up saying after those rhetorical flare-ups, trying to re-establish a balanced and affable tone, in a word, they are uninteresting.
The Mathematician’s bitter, almost rancid hatred for his own class, excepting its expression in the occasional confidence, was almost never displayed in his words or actions, not because he meant to conceal them, but rather from a kind of fatalism — it wasn’t worth wasting time on them, they were not interesting, so why bother spitting in their face when you could spend a lifetime studying Spinoza’s Ethics or the EPR paradox. Nevertheless, some of that hatred occasionally came to the surface, because the Mathematician, who was attentive, polite, respectful, in some cases to the point of affectation, according to Tomatis, when faced with a patrician, with any sort of tycoon, with the nephew of a bishop, or a minister, or a general’s son, could not suppress an ironic genuflection toward what he considered, preemptively and without appeal, the other’s ineptitude. If the encounter took place in the presence of a witness, or someone he respected or admired, that irony was not without cruelty, as though by using it he was trying to differentiate himself from his interlocutor as much as possible. The Mathematician, no? How he’d been marked by the very objects of his distaste! Just look at him, on the central avenue, dressed completely in white, including the moccasins he bought in Florence, with an even tan, tall, blonde, insulated from the imperfection and eventuality of those, like Leto, who observe him from the outside, so much so that his mere presence, his exacting and measured expressions, the apparent culmination of his positive traits, further reinforce Leto’s feeling of exclusion, of awkwardness, of being, not the whim, but the hopeless mistake of Everything.
But they’ve reached the corner, that right angle which, in Hippodamus’s summary calculations, suddenly interrupting the sidewalk and introducing an evident pause for drivers and pedestrians and facilitating orientation, movement, and visibility — describing, as they say, a space that, in fact, has no shape or name — set a conventional order to the mornings in Peiraeus. Shade, gray pavement, the angled sun, cable, cobblestones, cable, gray pavement, angled sun, shade: there they go, without incident or much modification of rhythm or speed, or trajectory moreover, walking down the next sidewalk. The Mathematician says that Washington lifts his head when he hears the triplicate buzzing, somewhat bewildered, and sees the three mosquitos swirling not far from the lamp. Bewildered because the previous summer it had been too dry for the larvae, and later the nymphs, as they call them, of the so-called diptera, to have increased their offspring, or rather, as they say, proliferate. Mosquitos are in fact not uncommon in the area, and if in winter they hit the proverbial road and disappear, later, in the first weeks of November when the heat gets oppressive, if it has rained enough for the larvae and later the nymphs to flourish, the air turns black in the evening and the warm-blooded animals are forced to go around swatting themselves in the head through tenacious, rapacious, and buzzing clouds. People — man, no? human beings, who altogether compose what they call humanity, or rather the sum of individuals since the appearance of the species, as they call it, in, it would seem, east Africa, through a qualitative jump across adjoining evolutionary branches, and the specific attributes they attribute to themselves — man, we were saying, or rather yours truly, the author, was saying, has given it that diminutive or pejorative name for mosca, or fly in Spanish, no doubt following an anatomic classification by size, imprecise enough in any case, but ultimately, in any case, imprecise or not, there’s nothing for it, the naming has to happen. All of this, of course, according to the Mathematician, more or less and always according to Botón, and, according to Botón, I was saying, according to Washington. Thinking about it, no one says this mosquito, everyone says the mosquito, as if it were always the same one and as if, with that synecdoche, as it’s called, we were trying to conceal or, maybe, on the contrary, to suggest, the fundamental problem: one or many? Is it always the same mosquito that attacks every summer night, reincarnated over and over after getting smashed against a white wall, or do new hordes of individuals, pristine and just as transient, avidly sprout up every day, in the swamps, in search of the blood they need, only to, after having been a larva, nymph, an airborne buzzing speck, if they’ve managed to escape the assassin’s hand, propagate, decline, and perish? Is it included among the ones who, definitively, are born and die, or do interchangeable and biodegradable mechanisms successively occupy an eight millimeter entity that bites and buzzes, an invariable essence without contingency or destiny, outside the spatiotemporal melodrama, lacking individual differentiation? Is its function to be someone in life or some anonymous palpitation, absorbed as quickly as it appears by a brilliant, immutable, everlasting, and — even when there are no more little gray bodies to devour — insatiable reality? And prior to that, some say, extrafactually, postemprically, ultramaterially, etc., etc. — ultimately, more or less, according to the Mathematician, definitely not according to Botón, but for sure, he thinks, by way of Botón, according to Washington.