— Set in motion by, says the Mathematician, taking the pipe from his mouth, waving it in the air, and repositioning it between his teeth. As I was telling Leto just now.
Tomatis doesn’t seem to hear him. You’d have to decide, he repeats. Furthermore, he continues forcefully, any interjection from Barco, who was very involved in the first part of the discussion, is seriously dubious because he spent it coming and going from the pavilion, where Cohen was preparing the fire, to the keg he had installed at the entrance to the kitchen, and you had to repeat half of what was said while he disappeared to empty foam because he wouldn’t let anyone touch the tap, worried that the extremely precarious installation he had fashioned for the hose would fall apart. On the other hand, he asks himself, who among them could have been interested in that kind of discussion? Not counting Cohen who, as I just said, likes to present himself publicly as a dialectician while consumed by the complex his wife’s superior intellect caused him; disregarding Basso and his three-by-five irrationality; eliminating El Gato, who during that kind of polemic limits himself to watching the different participants with a sardonic air; Pichón, who isn’t someone who likes a lot of saliva in his conversations; Silvia and Beatriz, who were in the kitchen when the thing started, Washington, who didn’t say anything until after dinner; Marcos Rosemberg, who doesn’t open his mouth since his wife left him for César Rey; and Barco who, as I just said, spent it coming and going from the keg to the pavilion and back. Who else among them could have the slightest idea what they were talking about?
And Tomatis shakes his head, depressed by the number of people at Washington’s birthday who couldn’t keep up with the discussion. But the alert Mathematician is not convinced: among those who, according to Tomatis, would be capable of sustaining a quality dispute he easily recognizes Tomatis’s own best friends, who without the slightest hesitation have been relegated to the mass of humanity in the darkness beyond. And Tomatis? As if guessing the Mathematician’s mental interrogation, Tomatis continues, referring to himself: He didn’t intervene at all — that useless display of supposed dialectics was liable to give him tremendous gas, so he restricted himself to staying silent at the end of the table, calmly eating his perch and enjoying his white wine — which, if the Mathematician believes Botón’s version, is more or less false, given that, according to Botón, Tomatis, whose arteries had already circulated three or four whiskies before he had arrived at the party with Barco and the girls, if in fact he didn’t intervene directly in the discussion, then he spent it tormenting this or that person, ridiculing their comments with third-rate word games and reducing to absurdity, out of sheer volubility, the better part of the arguments. Silent at the end of the table, calmly eating his perch and enjoying his white wine, Tomatis insists again, like the second hammer given for good measure so that the nail sinks totally and completely, vaguely suspecting that his credibility with the Mathematician, and even with Leto, who follows the conversation silently, is not far from dropping to zero. But the menace is stronger than his self-respect: With Washington, he insists, it’s hard to tell when he’s speaking in jest and when he’s serious, and the fact that he stayed silent for so long before intervening makes him suspicious. Maybe his delayed interjection was a snide way of saying he was fed up too. That story about the three mosquitos, one that doesn’t approach, one that approaches and takes off every time he raises his hand to smash it, and one that on the first try lets itself get smashed on his cheek seems, to him, Tomatis, who is close with Washington, no? highly unlikely. Even if the thing had really happened and, beyond any doubt, the three mosquitos had existed, appearing in the aforementioned circumstances and behaving the way Washington described, even then you have to ask whether bringing them up could be anything but an indirect way for Washington to tell Cohen, Barco, and company that if they were deliberating over a horse, why not deliberate over three mosquitos while they were at it, so that, since they were already deliberating, they might deliberate in earnest, not at the expense of a poor horse burdened from the word go with the foolish delirium of the human race, but rather, if they could, and since they liked to deliberate so much, over three mosquitos, gray, minute, and neutral — an elegant way of suggesting that the more ridiculous the object the clearer the dimensions of the delirium. And second, if you accept the possibility that Washington was speaking seriously, you have to bear in mind that he isn’t infallible. Why don’t they analyze a little and see? At this point he, Tomatis, remembers — curiously, it had been almost completely erased: He doesn’t know Botón’s version, but since he knows Botón, that’s more than enough. He therefore discards it. Furthermore he, Tomatis, was present, and though he had not been interested in participating, or maybe for that very reason, he also doesn’t consider himself, ultimately, disqualified to reproduce it. Looked at another way, if there’s anyone who can boast to knowing Washington well and being able to seize on the multiple intentions that can sometimes be discerned in what he says, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest that he, Tomatis, would be that person. Alright then, in his point of view — in his, in Tomatis’s, no? — if it turned out to not be a huge practical joke — Washington’s taste for farce is not as well-known as he is — then Washington’s intrusion would have been a meditation, indirect of course, on the concept of destiny, and not an accelerated course on the obscure features of a marginal entomological branch. To him, Tomatis, Washington, who was divorced twice and therefore does not feel obligated, every time he’s in public, to demonstrate that he’s more intelligent than his wife, is also not so naïve as to believe that when he waxes philosophical about the behavior of three mosquitos, that he is just talking about those three mosquitos and not something else. Because someone who says, about the mosquito, that it’s this or that thing, Tomatis says, doesn’t in fact say, about the mosquito, anything. It’s what he says about himself, Tomatis says, and he repeats this so severely in the bright morning on the central avenue that a woman passing just then raises her head and looks at him in surprise. About himself! About himself!, in the tone, not without passion, of someone who, disclosing a conspiracy piece by piece, finally volunteers the fundamental revelation that will end the masquerade, as they say, definitively.
Even Leto looks at him, astonished, rocking his head back slightly to acknowledge the intensity; Leto who, since the Mathematician saw Tomatis standing at the entrance to the newspaper and started gesticulating in his direction from the opposite sidewalk, feels like he has become invisible because of the excessive attention Tomatis and the Mathematician are lavishing on each other, forming a kind of mutual aura, impalpable and bright, that he feels excluded from. And still, on the previous block, the Mathematician looked at him over Tomatis’s head to form a sort of complicity aimed at neutralizing the arbitrary and compulsive tirades from Tomatis, who cannot stop himself from speaking, without their knowing it, as a result of the tenacious titillations of the menace. The painful exclusion that makes him invisible incites Leto, paradoxically, to smile constantly, maybe to hide his true feelings, but the muscles in his face, which should obey his intentions and form a smile, resist instead, as though his skin were taut and hard, so much so that, from forcing himself to smile or as a result of his overwhelming sense of transparency, he feels a sharp, sporadic pain in his jaw.