Leto follows the Mathematician’s story, told without pedagogical concessions and without preciousness, with some difficulty, as it seems to only gather order and sense as the clear and well-constructed sentences accumulate, not only for the listener but also, and to an even greater extent, for the speaker, more attentive to the story’s coherence than the listener, insofar as, concentrating on the formation of his sentences, of his concepts, structuring his memories, his interpretations, his fragments of memories and interpretations, the Mathematician is less vulnerable to sensory interference than Leto, for whom the story the Mathematician seems so submerged in and satisfied with is a heterogeneous composition of vague and opaque words he barely pays attention to, and of transparent passages that allow his imagination, turning on and off intermittently, to construct expressive and fleeting images: there was a feast at the house of someone named Basso, in Colastiné, at the end of August, to celebrate Washington’s birthday, and they had started discussing a horse that had stumbled; the Mathematician — it was Tomatis who gave him the nickname — heard about it from Botón the Saturday before on the Paraná ferry, Botón, a guy he has heard about several times but whom he has not had the pleasure of meeting, and then Washington had said that the horse was not an acceptable example for the problem they were discussing — Leto asks himself darkly, without daring to make the case to the Mathematician out of fear that the Mathematician will look down on him a little, what the hell the so-called problem could be — that the mosquito, if Leto understood correctly, would be a more appropriate creature, by reason of its lack of anthropocentric finality, to use as the object of discussion and in fact he, Washington, no? the summer before, after midnight, while he worked on his four lectures — Location, Lineage, Language, Logic — on the Colastiné Indians, had the opportunity to observe three mosquitos that through their singular behavior acquired paradigmatic value and sufficed, better than the horse, burdened as it is with projections, to clarify the debate, all of this, in Leto’s imagination, illustrated with sporadic and fleeting pictures, Basso and Botón picking vegetables at the back of a vague patio on a calm winter afternoon, Beatriz rolling a cigarette, Marcos Rosemberg’s sky-blue car, arriving, undulating and quiet, in front of the house Leto has never seen, the perch and catfish wrapped up in day-old pages from La Región, dipped in oil, Tomatis and the Garay twins, Barco, someone named Dib, who has a mechanics shop, Silvia Cohen, Cohen, someone named Cuello who they call the Centaur because he is half animal, the slow night under the pavilion, behind the house, the winter night that cools, under the mandarins — they stayed, it seems, until the morning, until dawn even, the last of them, and then they went back, excited and drowsy, to the city, in the first light of the sun and the frozen dew, and he, Leto, no? could have gone if he wanted, and moreover, if he had known, he was too close to Tomatis to need an invitation, it was strange that Tomatis hadn’t said anything, maybe because he considered it impossible that he wouldn’t know and that they were so close that it wasn’t worth making the invitation explicit, but ultimately, he had to submit to the evidence: they didn’t invite him.
Leto raises his arm and points to the next sidewalk, some twenty meters ahead.
— Tomatis, he says.
The Mathematician interrupts himself and looks in the direction Leto just finished pointing, somewhat disoriented at first, as if coming out of a daydream, and when he understands, nods, and a smile starts to appear on his face.
— Indeed. Pane lucrando, he says.
Indeed; and, as the Mathematician would say, pane lucrando. In shirtsleeves, his head turned to the south, on the upper step of the reconstituted granite stairs that lead to the main entrance of La Región, intersecting the door, between the windows that display the two black plush boards where movable white brass letters are arranged into the headlines of the day. Tomatis is lighting a cigarette, with the match cupped between his hands — even though there isn’t the slightest breeze and he could just as easily have exposed the flame to the morning air without any danger of it going out. A tall, well-dressed man carrying a portfolio under his arm, and who Tomatis, occupied with lighting his cigarette, is blocking from leaving the newspaper, gives him a little nudge on the shoulder, so that Tomatis, surprised and serious, turns and at the same time moves a few centimeters away, to let him pass, with considerable ill will, stepping down without dignifying the other man’s passing, purely cordial, thank you, with a response. From the lower step, while he pockets the matches, without taking the cigarette from his lips, he continues to gaze toward the south, indifferent to the turmoil on the street. The cars pass, very slowly, in both directions, intercepting, intermittently, the sidewalk in front of the newspaper, so that Tomatis, standing on the first step of the main entrance, vanishes and reappears, discontinuous and fragmentary, to Leto and the Mathematician. Seems like he’s in a bad mood, says the Mathematician, less as a result of a genuine observation than as a display, for Leto’s benefit, of intimacy with Tomatis; and Leto, for very similar reasons: Seems like it.