— Well-turned, Leto finally remarks.
— Do you have a copy? the Mathematician asks.
Tomatis hesitates a second, and then, aloof and ostentatious, gives the Mathematician the paper.
— Official exchange of press releases between the Chemical Engineering Students Association and Carlos Tomatis, he announces.
— A few more years and this is worth millions, says the Mathematician, dropping a reverent gaze at the typed out verses in the middle of the page, then putting it away after giving it a flamboyant kiss and carefully and easily folding it in fourths, following the folds Tomatis had made. And then he says, Should we walk a little?
— A few blocks, Tomatis agrees, reticently.
They start to walk, following the sun, and take up so much of the sidewalk that Leto, who is on the outside, is practically walking over the cable guardrail and every so often is forced to look over his shoulder to make sure that he isn’t about to be grazed by the slowly passing cars. Because Tomatis stayed between them, they form a declining group, from the Mathematician to Leto, not only in terms of their height and weight, but also their age, as Tomatis is a couple of years younger than the Mathematician and three or four older than Leto. But the pressure of the menace, which has surfaced again, distinguishes Tomatis from the other two, in his extremely pale color, his three-day-old beard, his stained and wrinkled clothes, but most of all with his shifty gaze, his ragged expression, the weak shivers of his body, the sudden, rough, and unpredictable movements of his head. Though they pretend not to, Leto and the Mathematician continue to notice it. And after walking a few meters in silence, the Mathematician, in a neutral and indirect way, asks what version he, Tomatis, who was present, can give of Washington’s birthday. Because they, Leto and the Mathematician, no? have Botón’s version, plagued with unverifiable interpretations, subjective assertions, and, he suspects, of anachronisms. He met Botón on the ferry the Saturday before and was just now telling Leto what Botón told him. Only when Tomatis doesn’t respond, merely shaking his head with restrained scorn, does the Mathematician ask, Is there a problem?
The words, Better that I keep my mouth shut, spill over the abject rim of Tomatis’s nervous lips and, proving the inconstancy of the signifying plane triumphant, continue without transition (and more or less): only more or less, Washington’s birthday was a convention of winos, thugs, and showgirls. For example, without going into it too much, Sadi and Miguel Ángel Podio, who present themselves as the vanguard of the working class, eject — at gunpoint — the members of the winning side the moment they lose a syndical election; he, Tomatis, can’t understand how they showed up that night without their bodyguards. And Botón, don’t start: he tried to rape Chichito at the back of the patio; she escaped thanks to her bourgeois reflexes and the fact that Botón was so drunk that not only could he not get it up but his legs barely kept him upright. And the proof that he was drunk is supplied by the fact of having picked Chichito, who is beyond the reach of anyone who hasn’t passed through the National Guard, when there were two or three women present who would gladly have taken a turn around the patio and were frivolous enough that even Botón would have seemed interesting company — they say that Nidia Basso, for example, is a nymphomaniac, and he has heard that Rosario, Pirulo’s wife, who works as a nurse in a clinic, likes to bleed herself with a syringe every once in a while. Hadn’t they seen how pale she was?
Over Tomatis’s head, thrown forward by the force of his disquisitions, Leto and the Mathematician exchange a quick and puzzled look that they use to seal, in that emergency situation, a pact in which their momentary exchange assumes the following precepts as given: 1) this morning, Tomatis seems to be in a special state of mind, 2) their efforts to bring him back to a relatively normalized relational system have up to this point failed, 3) the special state of mind this morning is making Tomatis describe the events surrounding Washington’s birthday in a distorted way, flagrantly resorting to caricature and even to slander in his references to the events, and 4) the parties are mutually impelled, via the present pact, to take Tomatis’s version with a grain of salt. Yes, thinks Leto, who still has some pangs of loyalty to Tomatis, and turns his head: But where there’s smoke there’s fire. The Mathematician, meanwhile: It’s impossible for him not to react. And Tomatis, under the cascade of malevolent words he would like to stop but which the pressure of the menace forces out:. . the universe is going to. . is going to. . and I’m going to. . Ultimately, in short, and once again, though it’s always the Same, as I was saying just now, every thing.
Oblivious to the pact just made over his head and unable to perceive any show of reproach or skepticism or discomfort in the discreet and somewhat embarrassed silence that meets his words, Tomatis continues: to top it off, after dinner, sometime around midnight, Héctor and Elisa, who are constantly brawling, passed out, as did Rita Fonesca, the painter who Botón, among others, makes time with, and who tries to show everyone her tits when she’s drunk. And finally, at four in the morning, Gabriel Giménez had come, not having slept for three nights and trying at all cost to get Washington to snort a little packet of coke. The taxi waiting for him at the entrance, according to Tomatis, had been hired the morning before.
The Mathematician has already heard this story from Botón, the previous Saturday, on the bench at the stern, and even from such a dubious source that version had seemed more plausible, or in any case more elegant, than Tomatis’s: according to Botón, as we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, just now, according to Botón, I was saying, no? Gabriel Giménez had in fact arrived in a taxi at four in the morning, animated no doubt by the little packets of coke, and according to Botón, according to Giménez himself, after three consecutive nights without sleep — a frequent thing in the case of Giménez, of Botón, and above all, in the case of Tomatis and, in Tomatis’s case, oftentimes in the company of Giménez himself, who never leaves his side — which means, the Mathematician thinks, that Tomatis should observe some basic rules, for example abstaining from scorning others for something that he treats so indulgently in himself. And, according to Botón, Giménez not only hadn’t disturbed the party with his condition, but rather had added, with his innate delicacy and sincere love for Washington, that in normal circumstances Tomatis would be the first to acknowledge, a pinch of salt to the event: to stay with Botón, Gabriel approached Washington and, undertaking a series of slow and genteel genuflections, in which all present could recognize a superior manner, and employing a gesture resembling the offering of the Eucharist, presented Washington with the little packet of coke, a kind of oblong, precious host that Washington, flattered by the distinction that the offer implied, declined with a polite smile and a quick pat on Giménez’s cheek, contending to not hold communion with that sect but at the same time declaring himself a supporter of religious tolerance.