Though it was still February, in Paris, strangely, the weather had been good, a humid and still cold sun, and they had flown at three thousand feet, allowing, every so often, pale sunlight to stream through the windows. Distracted, the Mathematician glanced out, knowing that now, for a few months, until May at least, he would be away in Uppsala, and just as he was looking toward the windows — he was sitting in the opposite aisle, in a middle seat — the airplane flew into a thick, grayish fog, which was the clouds, which seemed, suddenly, to swallow the monotonous and consequently inconspicuous sound of the engines. If Limbo were somewhere among the clouds, certainly at that instant the airplane was starting to cross it. For the moment, before the final landing maneuvers, it seemed motionless more than anything, but because that motionlessness followed the sudden change of dipping into the thick mass of clouds, the impression was of a motionlessness frozen mid-movement, as though time itself and not just the moving machine had stopped. Equally motionless, resting against the back of his chair, his hands deserted on the tray table, the Mathematician, his eyes fixed on a vague spot somewhere in the enormous empty cabin, was so absent from the airplane that, no doubt as a consequence of the illusory and indistinct stillness of the machine, he seemed like a character from one of those fantastical stories, instantly spirited away to a magical world while the real world he comes from remains stopped and as though frozen through the entire duration of his adventures.
He is on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with Pichón Garay; they have been walking from the Assemblée Nationale toward the Place Maubert. Just then they have reached the Rue du Bac; at the entrance to the Assemblée they had split from the delegation — a group of exiles who have just been received by representatives of the socialist bloc, and who promised them, the bloc, no? to look into the issue, the massacres, the disappearances, the tortures, the assassinations in the middle of the day in the middle of the street, etc., etc., ultimately, as we were saying, from the start, or rather yours truly has been saying — and more or less, no? — every thing. The two forty-somethings, dressed in youthful clothing, have separated from their so-called compatriots and have started walking slowly under the unexpected, cold, and above all humid February sun, as others have written, it’s true, many times, although it’s always the same — as yours truly has been saying from the start — always, like in the beginning all the way to the end, if there were, as they, the knowing, say, a beginning, and if there will be, as they imagine, an end — I was saying, no? the same Time, in the same, no? as I already said several times, in the Same, no matter the city, in Buenos Aires, in Paris, in Uppsala, in Stockholm, and farther away still, still, as I was saying, Place. In a word, essentially, or in two better yet, to be more precise, every thing.
The year before, in May, Washington died of prostate cancer; in June, El Gato and Elisa, who had been living together in Rincón since she and Héctor separated, were kidnapped by the government and had not been heard from since. And around that same time, though it only came out later, Leto, Ángel Leto, no? who for years had been living in hiding, found himself obligated, because of an ambush set up by the police, to finally bite the suicide pill that, for security reasons, the leaders of his movement distribute to the soldiers so that, if they are surprised, as they say, by the enemy, they will not compromise, during their torture, the entire organization. And Leto had bitten the pill. The Mathematician, for his part, is well-informed of these things, given that, though he was often at odds with her opinion, he and his wife had shared, for several years, until they killed her, in 1974, that singular existence.
The marriage of the Mathematician! Tomatis, for whom every example of the female sex whose measurements in the chest, waist, and thighs did not correspond to those of Miss Universe is an indistinct and transparent creature, one night in 1970, sitting with Barco on a bench at the waterfront after a long walk, remarked on the marriage in more or less these terms: The Mathematician was one of the most handsome, intelligent, elegant, rich men he had known; more than once he had seen him remain impervious to the advances of the most beautiful girls in the city. Every time that a woman entered a party where the Mathematician was present you could instantly tell that the eyes of said woman were turning, inevitably, in the Mathematician’s direction. Tomatis was sure that, for a couple of years, Beatriz, who he had tried and failed to seduce, was secretly in love with the Leibnizian rugby-man. And after years of unflustered, mysterious bachelorhood, the Mathematician had taken up conjugals with Edith. Incendiary news! Tomatis says. And just a year later they’re married. Tomatis knows Edith: she is fourteen years older than the Mathematician; she’s short, fat, ugly, Jewish, a feminist, a Trotskyite and widow of a Trotskyite who, clandestinely militant since 1967, died in a brawl with government thugs, at a bar in the great Buenos Aires. His parents (the Mathematician’s, no?) I don’t think objected at all, but Leandro, his brother, and the rest of the family, I can see their faces. He crossed the line. Traitor, said Tomatis, his head shaking with laughter. But he was wrong; consciously at least, as Tomatis himself might say, there had been no premeditation or intention to provoke. The Mathematician felt sincere respect and an egalitarian affection for Edith, and a few years before, when they had been active together in a Trotskyite group, he had been a little in love with her. In any case, they didn’t see each other much, and although the Mathematician did not completely approve of an armed rebellion, and they calmly and often discussed these things, they blindly trusted each other and, every once in a while, felt an intense desire to meet again, him to be with someone who deserved the quota of admiration and respect he could not live without and which, as he got older, very few people inspired in him, her because she trusted his intelligence and his loyalty and because he provided her, through his uncompromising critiques, a criteria for reality that action obscured. As soon as they met, despite his being twenty and she a little over thirty, they were like an old couple, connected by a kind of desperate tenacity that made them, because of their differences, marvel at having met, both convinced, for distinct reasons of course, that nothing was possible, but constantly acting as though anything were. They hadn’t seen each other for years, the intractable activist and the good son, condemned to join their lives with the common component that luck had granted them, their moral conscience, which, after so much error, insanity, and violence that certainly neither was entirely innocent of, made them react with the same intransigence. They had a shared, official apartment in Buenos Aires and a little house in the Córdoba mountains no one knew about, which they called the phalanstère for security reasons, and where in difficult moments they met in secret. She would be at the typewriter constantly and would give him what she called the material, reports, political analyses, statements, that the Mathematician read carefully, shaking his head, negatively most of the time, marking the individual themes with different colored pens — he had gone to work in the chemical industry in Buenos Aires and then had become a professor at the university, and he always retained the habit of marking industrial reports, notes, and his students’ homework with colored pens or pencils. Finally, in 1974, they killed her. Everything happened quickly, and the Mathematician’s initial fear that, because they saw each other sporadically, and she would disappear again and again in an unsystematic way, she would be killed and he would never know it was ultimately unwarranted, because one evening in July an anonymous telephone call informed him that they had killed her that morning and he should disappear because any second the police would be raiding his apartment. Calmly but quickly he packed a suitcase with clothes, books, and papers and caught the bus to Córdoba, hoping that the news was false and that she would be waiting for him at the phalanstère, but despite traces of a recent occupation in the house, she never came. He didn’t fool himself: the telephone call could have come from one of Edith’s fellow soldiers, to whom she had expressed at some point her desire to have her death communicated to him, but it — the call, no? — could have come from the same people who had killed her, given that, although his brother wasn’t yet in the government, where he would be in ’76, he nevertheless had sufficient influence and intimacy among the security forces to protect him. If the latter was what had really occurred, he still didn’t fool himself much: with Leandro more than ten years had passed, since their father’s funeral, without their meeting or speaking, and if they passed on the street they ignored each other, so if Leandro had protected him it was to protect the family name, as he might say, and, above all, his own political career — with excellent results, actually, having emerged unscathed from massacres, combat, assassinations, shootings, tortures, concentration camps, bombings, and overthrown governments, he had become a minister in the provincial government in ’76, without once losing his tanned, healthy, calm, and elegant appearance, and without having missed a single eleven o’clock Sunday mass or a call to his mother at 8:00 sharp every other day for twenty years. The day after he left for Córdoba, a group of armed men raided his apartment in Buenos Aires and, not before removing every valuable object, tore it to pieces. He had no illusions about this either: if Leandro had been the one to inform him about the raid on his apartment, he must also have been the one responsible for its destruction, in order to teach him a lesson about deviating from the norms that governed the life of his tribe—the bloodlust bourgeoisie—like the time when he was undersecretary in another de facto government and had ordered him taken prisoner for several days. He was safe in Córdoba for a few months — only he and Edith knew about the house — but because his sudden appearance in the town, his isolation, and his excessively long stay might awaken the neighbors’ suspicions, he returned to Buenos Aires. A Swedish friend put him up in his apartment and found him work at the University of Uppsala. Early in November he landed in Stockholm for the first time. The black and terrible winter waiting ahead disoriented him a little, but in the spring he started walking around, warmly dressed and with his unlit pipe in his mouth, among the houses and gardens of the university, and on Sunday afternoons he would watch televised sports programs. The rest of the time he read his timeless philosophers and the newspaper clippings he received, prepared his courses, and, when the holidays came, traveled south, to Paris, where Pichón Garay lived, to Madrid or Rome, and every once in a while he would stop off in Copenhagen, which he continued to like despite, as he liked to say, its smooth and well-swept streets which seemed to be more influenced by Andersen than Kierkegaard or the Interpretation.