According to Tomatis, therefore, the notorious mosquitos had been, for Washington, a pretext — and Tomatis remembers that Washington nodded when Cohen, as Washington finished his story, offered the following suggestion: If Washington had killed one of the mosquitos, the one among the three that had actually let itself be trapped by the first slap, they shouldn’t look for the reason in the mosquito but in Washington. At that suggestion from Cohen, Washington nodded, Tomatis says. And also when someone objected that if one of the mosquitos had landed on his cheek to bite him and let itself be slapped to death, it was for the simple reason that it’s the females and not the males that bite and you could deduce that the one that had tried to bite him was a female and the two that had kept a distance were male; Washington refuted this saying that first off one of the other two mosquitos had tried to land on his cheek or around there several times, and second, and this was, judging from the emphatic tone he used, his primary argument, that on the level he was referring to, gender was not a principal determinant.
Motherfuckers!, Leto thinks. They can’t shut up about their so-called levels. Whatever. Basically, I don’t give a shit. But this isn’t true. In fact, sixteen, seventeen years later he will still remember Washington’s three mosquitos.
So will the Mathematician who, one morning in 1979, aboard an airplane coming from Paris and beginning its descent into Stockholm, while he waits patiently for the landing, takes his wallet out and, from among the bills, the credit cards, the identification, withdraws the sheet folded in fourths that Tomatis gave him at the entrance to the newspaper, the sheet whose folds are now more brown than yellow and so worn that, when opening it over the tray table where the remains of his breakfast have just been cleared by the stewardess, the Mathematician is extremely cautious, fearing that the folds, splitting at points, will separate completely. But the Mathematician doesn’t even read the five typed verses — only glancing at them, now that the sheet, after so many years and so many transfers out of pure habit from one wallet to another, from one jacket to another, from one continent to another, imperfectly sheltered from the years in the Mathematician’s warm pockets, has finally lost its communicative quality and become an object, and, ultimately, a relic, halfway between its material presence and what they call the deep well of memory that sooner or later will notice it; or a fragment, not of Tomatis, actually, who he was discussing just the day before with Pichón Garay as they walked through Saint-Germain-des-Prés, coming from the Assemblée Nationale toward the Place Maubert, no, not of Tomatis, but of the morning when, having just returned from his first trip to Europe, he ran into Leto on the central avenue and they walked south together. The Mathematician looks at the sheet, shakes his head, then carefully folds it again, and after returning it to his wallet and putting the wallet back into the inside pocket of his sport coat, he puts his empty pipe in his mouth and, folding his hands over the tray table, sits in thought. In fact, he first put it in his wallet when he was changing his pants, the evening of the same day Tomatis gave it to him, and was taking everything from his pockets, his handkerchief, his keys, his empty pipe — he packed and smoked it only every so often — a copy of the press release from the Students Association, and because the sheet folded in fourths was among these things, and he was late to a meeting with the Association, he quickly tucked it into his wallet, and for months it sat forgotten in a little compartment until one day, when the wallet was worn out, even, like the sheet, at the folds, and his mother gave him a new one for his twenty-eighth birthday, in switching the papers from one to the other he found it again. He was about to leave it on his desk, to later file it in a drawer with some other papers, but a superstitious hesitation stopped him, and he felt a premonition, certainly unpleasant since it forced him into a kind of servitude, that if he discarded that sheet of paper something awful would happen. With a shake of the head and a brief and skeptical laugh, characteristic of someone allowing themselves a passing weakness that does not correspond with their personality and which they plan to correct as soon as they have time to get to the bottom of the problem, he tucked the sheet into the new wallet and forgot it again for several months. One day when he was reading in his room, he remembered having it and the hesitation that struck him when he tried to let it go, and because he was in a very good mood and felt inwardly clean, organized, and stable, he decided to take it from his wallet in order to jettison, with a decisive act, the unease that his superstitious reaction had left him with, at which point he opened the wardrobe where his jacket hung, took the wallet from his pocket, the sheet from the wallet, returned the wallet to the jacket pocket, closed the wardrobe door, and, opening a desk drawer, prepared himself to drop the sheet folded in fourths onto some papers that lived, as they say, at the bottom, but at the last second he told himself that doing it that way would be compulsive, and it would be more convenient, instead of hiding it in the desk drawer, to leave it a while, in an ordinary way, on the table, the way he would have done with any other thing. So he left it on the table and sat down to read. Night came. He had been concentrating on his reading a while, stopping only to turn on the lamp, when he realized that it was getting dark, and suddenly he raised his head and saw the rectangle of white paper on the table, shining in the intense lamplight, directed strategically to project a luminous circle over the portion of the table where his hands, the book, and the paper sat, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. But only the paper seemed to be present; seized by another feeling that, as he liked to say,
if they aren’t measurable, at least with our current understanding, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why they would resist, etc., etc., no? seized again by one of those feelings, I was saying, that revealed his frailty, the Mathematician recognized, with the same clarity that he could recognize the energy radiated when combustible material burned, that this paper laying on the table radiated danger, that the sheet folded in fourths had a secret relationship to disparate fragments of the universe, and that if he wanted to protect them from destruction, he should not let go of it for any reason — the Mathematician, no? who after thinking over the above in a calm and clear way, shook his head like the first time and issued the same short, incredulous laugh. He decided to go out, to stop by the bar at the arcade, eat a sandwich or a pizza near the bus terminal, and come back to work until midnight. But after combing his hair a little, adjusting his tie, putting on his jacket, and preparing to leave his room, an impenetrable obstacle, which in spite of having risen, invisible but corporeal, from inside him, seemed to block the doorway and stopped him suddenly at the entrance. It was the danger that, shining from the table, seemed to radiate from the sheet folded in fourths. The intense hesitation made him turn sideways in the doorway, and he was left standing with half his body in the hallway and the other half in the room, his head turned toward the table where the white rectangle reverberated in the harsh light — the white rectangle holding together fragments of the external world, defenseless and anonymous, but already joined to him by secret connections, people maybe, systems, things, he didn’t know, something that he, with such a mundane-seeming decision, might take part in exterminating. He thought that he could not give in and, turning off the light and closing the door behind him, resolved not to give in. He went out into the street resolute, and while he took his first steps on the street — it took him only a few seconds to get there, on account of his speed — he forgot about the paper, but almost immediately he began to slow down until, shaking his head, upset, as they say, more than afraid, he stopped completely. And when he went back for the paper, to neutralize it, and tucked it into his wallet, he told himself he was doing it less out of fear that those fearful connections really existed than because he didn’t want his thoughts to ruin the walk. With the world safe in a compartment of his wallet, he was able to think better, and with a cool head it wasn’t difficult to realize that neither Tomatis nor his verses had anything to do with that species of nefarious energy that had built up in the sheet, but instead, through some coincidence, an encounter had occurred between the paper, up to that point neutral and inscribed on a different network of relationships, and a moment of personal weakness, owing maybe to exhaustion, to a momentary transformation that, in reorganizing the constituent elements of his personality, brought them all to the surface without exception, including the most ancillary and most archaic, in order to form a new synthesis that would definitively relegate the useless parts, the same way that, when he was cleaning his desk, he would withdraw and read all the papers stored in the drawers, the ones he would keep and the ones he had decided to throw out. It was a good explanation, and the Mathematician did not place that passing anomaly in the same hierarchy as The Incident but, although he only thought about it from time to time, and always with the same skeptical and brief internal smile, eighteen years later he still carried the sheet folded in fourths in a compartment of his wallet, and though he had memorized the lines, every once in a while he would take it out and look it over, in a mechanical, unpremeditated way, with the gray and somewhat worn gestures of the customary, like that morning on the tray table which the stewardess had just cleaned of his breakfast when the airplane which, as we were saying, or rather yours truly was saying, just now, had left Paris a few hours before and was beginning to descend into Stockholm.