The Mathematician put on his glasses. In the half-empty cabin his sudden and at the same time slow gesture contrasted with the illusory stillness of the airplane, which floated in a bank of the gray clouds like a fragile object wrapped in cotton packaging. To the external equilibrium corresponded, just then, a kind of internal stillness, lacking any moral or emotive primacy and resulting from a chain of events too long, too complex, and too buried to inspire any analytical interest, but paradoxical enough that, with all the bad news, returning to the dark north and his almost complete isolation for three or four months, that unquestionable internal stillness, in the motionless and illuminated limbo of the airplane among the clouds or their coincidence with it, was not much different from well-being. And all because of the walk with Pichón Garay the day before, leaving the Assemblée Nationale and walking down the Boulevard Saint-Germain toward the Place Maubert! After the meeting with the representatives, the other members of the delegation decided to have lunch together, but without having agreed to beforehand, Pichón and the Mathematician declined the invitation. Apart from ideology they had, to tell the truth, nothing in common with the other members of the delegation, who were certainly very earnest, but who lacked the force of experience or memory. And saying goodbye to the others, they had started to walk.
Without knowing how, they began talking about Washington’s birthday, maybe because that night had inspired the phrase, it’s like Washington’s mosquitos, meaning something was of dubious reality, which Pichón had employed just then in reference to the promises of possible help for the refugees on the part of the French government. The Mathematician knew the expression well, but the accumulated experiences of the last few years had stifled its memory somewhat, and hearing it again, after a period of forgetting, revived, like the periodic cosmos, and re-substantiated, so to speak, clear and intact, large fragments of his former life, and the Mathematician began to recall, without meaning to, memories of experiences that had never happened. No one knew who had first used the expression, or when, but at the time, after the famous night, it began appearing in conversations, and even once, astonishingly, the Mathematician had heard it used by someone who not only didn’t know Washington or any of the guests, but also couldn’t have known the story or even imagined it, and if he had heard it, could not have understood it or been interested at all. Pichón had begun to discourse on the expression after having used it, recalling the party without noticing that the Mathematician, who had been visiting factories in Frankfurt when it took place, was nodding along, still, eighteen years later, feeling a sense of shame and humiliation at not having been there, and only through an exercise of will was he able to transform the nod into a negative shake before declaring, and causing a passing confusion in Pichón’s memories:
I, unfortunately, was not there. Pichón couldn’t remember welclass="underline" It was a story with three mosquitos. . three mosquitos that. . how did it go? He really wasn’t there? Strange, because he clearly remembers seeing him next to the keg, discussing something with Horacio Barco. Wasn’t he, the Mathematician, the one who, in the morning, when Pirulo, slightly tipsy, tried to fight with Miguel Ángel Podio over some political story, had tried to separate them? The Mathematician shook his head as Pichón continued assigning him actions that had never taken place, without realizing that Pichón’s confusion overwhelmed any disadvantage to the absent and that, after so many years, the events were as distant and inaccessible to those who had participated in them as to those who only knew them as hearsay. And Pichón, who resisted evicting him from his memories, and in truth never would, scratching his chin perplexedly, continued: Really? Wasn’t he, the Mathematician, the one who had driven Washington there? Hadn’t it been with him that he, Pichón, had gone to pick frozen mandarins to bring to the table and seeing that one of the trees was shaking violently in the darkness had approached, thinking it was an owl when actually it was Barco and La Chichito whispering and laughing quietly, intertwined and hidden in the leaves? And he could have sworn that the Mathematician was among the group who, early in the morning, when almost everyone had gone to sleep or returned home and only six or seven people were left, huddled together drinking mate around the fireplace in the house — Basso, Barco, Beatriz, Silvia Cohen, him, Pichón, no? — while Washington, refreshed and calm, started comparing, who knows from what tangent off the conversation, the Hatha Yoga mudrā with the Fourierian utopia, arguing that the mudrā, which compel the human body into unnatural positions and psychological states that are, a priori, considered impossible, refute biological fatalism the same way that the society theorized by Fourier, where everything is deliberately constructed in rational opposition to spontaneous liberal self-regulation, once and for all demolishes the social fatalism that supposedly underlies all oppressive human nature. Pichón barely remembered the mosquitos or Noca’s horse, but that conversation, around the fireplace, in the frozen morning, was still with him. And, more than anything, the return to the city. Washington had to do some things before going back to Rincón Norte, cash his pension check or something, Pichón didn’t remember anymore, but what he felt sure of was that they returned in two cars, La Chichito’s and the Mathematician’s, no? And the Mathematician shook his head: Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. . impossible; he, just then, was in Frankfurt, he remembers very well. And Pichón was forced, temporarily, with considerable effort and certainly unconvinced, to remove him from his memory, so fresh, clear, and orderly, as if from the previous day; true or false, it was more or less this: excited by the night’s drinking, by having stayed awake, by the conversations, they went out into the cold morning to discover that, since the temperature had been falling near sunrise, which had made them at some point move from the pavilion to the house, at many points around the yellowish fields, the dew had been settling in frozen white patches that the already rising sun, shining in a pale sky, had not yet been able to thaw. Pichón remembers the clean, icy air, and that, walking out of the house, Silvia Cohen had gone to inspect the first buds of a tree, asking out loud if the frost would kill them. Everyone had started looking at the sky, the air, the trees, the sandy path, trying to guess, with looks that became suddenly uncertain and solemn, the real severity of the frost, determined to pronounce on the possible survival of the buds, until finally, after a decidedly measured deliberation, they agreed, just as they were getting into the cars, that it was a relatively mild frost and the buds, certainly, would resist it. Pichón had begun to laugh so intensely that the Mathematician, infected, laughed too, and for no other reason, since Pichón’s laughter was caused by a memory he had yet to express and would only describe a few seconds later, realizing that if, after inspecting the severity of the frost with their eyes, skin, and lungs, they had agreed on its innocuousness, it wasn’t that they had the least capacity for an objective analysis of the weather conditions, but that after the night they had been through, the drinking and the dawn, the momentary carnal exchanges in the darkened margins of the gathering, the excitement of the conversations, they had come out into the icy morning happy and reconciled, and they wanted — because forgetting this realized their desire — for those benevolent waves rocking them to be verified, incontrovertible, in the external.