In fact, Leto and the Mathematician, after walking backward through the intersection, have slowed down suddenly, and instead of continuing down the middle of the street have returned to the sidewalk and to a regular walk, not slow or fast or somber or blissful, just slightly below the midway point between pain and pleasure maybe, on the same side of the street where the shade line, because the sun is now closer to 11:00 than 10:00, approaches the wall. The Mathematician, for example, after his exultant equation — or so he thinks to himself — is absorbed, for a few seconds, by the ancient murmur, so ingrained in the species that even when it is ignored completely, no one, no matter how shallow, when their mind clears, or even on the dark reverse side of their other thoughts, ever stops mulling over: Where did the world come from? Is there a single object or many? What is. .? no? etc., etc. — and after a few seconds of wandering and brooding, noticing that Leto, while he walks, is gazing distractedly at the illuminated signs extending above them down the street, decides to refute Tomatis’s assertions point by point in order to put things back where they belong. He also suspects that Leto, without daring to acknowledge it, agrees with most if not all of those assertions. His withdrawn attitude could be a form of mistrust, a reticence that, out of discretion or maybe even out of hypocrisy, is not manifested. He is about to open his mouth when Leto beats him to it.
— Tomatis’s dementia is out of control, he says. That kind of sequential slander doesn’t do him credit. It was coming out his ass. Why does he have to attack Rosemberg? And what did the twins do to him? Not even Washington got off.
— I know. Not even Washington.
And, you have to admit, in a completely underhanded way, adds the Mathematician. But Carlitos is like that. There’s nothing you can do about it. Capable of the monstrous and the sublime. How a guy like him can slump so low is beyond me. Some days you can’t control him. And I think stress affects him too much, and instead of trying to resolve a problem like every other mother’s son, he can’t think of anything better than to take a shit on the people around him, the Mathematician explains insistently, stimulated by Leto’s unforeseen confederacy, having thought him on Tomatis’s side, and the discovery of their relative correspondence in certain moral assessments seems to allow him to objectify, you might say, his own critique. He, the Mathematician, no? he, for example, knows the story about Washington in ’49, when the government locked him in an asylum because he wanted, as he said, to dissolve the Duma and the party and organize the country into soviets. He knows what happened because it’s well established among the left-wing groups he has belonged to for a long time. Washington came from the anarchist, socialist, and communist sets, and in 1946, a break with his group lead him to a passing, reactionary association with the Peronists. The left wing had filled the city with leaflets with his mug shot, his full name, and the words FASCIST TRAITOR in large red letters. The Mathematician had the chance to see one of those leaflets — an old Trotskyite militant, who had been collecting documents for a history of the working class in the province, showed it to him. According to the old man, at that time Washington thought that the working class would be represented by the Peronists and that the men on the left should move toward them and not farther off, and that Peronism, as it was a new movement, could be open to any change. The Peronists gave him a provincial seat. Just a few months into the new government, Washington represented the leftist opposition in the party. And knowing him, you can imagine what this meant: two-thirds of the parliamentary sessions ended in fistfights. Ultimately, Washington, who was receiving death threats every day, carried a gun to the capitol. The left wing treated him like a fascist and the Peronists were saying that he was on Moscow’s payroll—him, who since 1915 at least had more than once exchanged gunfire with the nationalist groups and who had declared war on revisionism ever since Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union. The fact is that between ’47 and ’49—on this he, the Mathematician, has a first-hand account — things deteriorated so much that Washington, fearing an assassination, didn’t sleep two consecutive nights in the same house, and every time he went to the capitol he was surrounded by a group of armed men, all members of his faction, whom he trusted completely. One night they put a bomb in his house; later, when he was coming out of a pizzeria, they machine-gunned him from a car — he came out unharmed, but one of his bodyguards died in the shooting and another took a bullet in his spine and ended up paralyzed. The more others tried to silence him, the more enraged he became. And according to two or three people who were close to him at the time, the Mathematician says, Washington, as stubborn as he was, ended up coming slightly unhinged. He must have known that what he was trying was impossible, and if he didn’t realize that it wasn’t possible, so much the worse. The fact is he was constantly agitated — he barely slept and was always on street corners gesticulating with two or three of his comrades, interrupting official meetings with savage outbursts, distributing leaflets on the streets and to unions, organizing demonstrations with small groups of dissident factions from the worker class. If they tried to arrest him, he used his legislative immunity. The truth is, most of the workers in the party looked at him like a strange bird when he told them they needed to take power, and once he was even shitcanned from a union hall because they thought he was a communist. Maybe his desperation had made him lose his sense of reality, and the proof that he had hit bottom this time was that shortly thereafter, after a period of depression when he was released from the asylum, he, who had been in the fray every day for thirty-five years, abandoned politics forever. Finally, in ’49, even the people in his own faction distanced themselves from him — some abandoned the party, others, their principles; he was the only one, out of pride or blindness maybe, who still wanted to make the two coincide. He didn’t carry a weapon to the capitol anymore, and he slept in the same place every night. Meanwhile, the others, the ones who had bombed his house and machine-gunned him outside the pizzeria, were in no hurry to subdue him; it was such an easy job that, letting themselves get carried away by an artistic impulse, and to show off and prove themselves professionals, they were looking for an opportunity that would present a real challenge. And just then, enter Cuello the Centaur.
No, according to the Mathematician, Tomatis does not have the right to suggest that Cuello plotted against Washington in ’49—in fact it was just the opposite. Cuello comes from the same town as Washington, and even though Washington is twenty years older, they’ve known each other for decades. Since, meanwhile, a general consensus credits Cuello with only moderate intelligence, the Mathematician thinks that you have to look for the source of their friendship on a different plane. And, according to the Mathematician, that level would be the gratitude Washington feels toward Cuello, owing, precisely, to Cuello’s actions in ’49, which were, the Mathematician says, more or less the following: Cuello, who belonged to the party youth, did not completely disapprove of Washington’s positions, and agreed with him in a vague and confused way, as his political consciousness was decidedly precarious — nonexistent, actually — apart from a generalized sympathy for populism based on his affection for folklore. If his consciousness improved somewhat in the fifties it was no doubt through the influence of Washington who, for reasons that were difficult to untangle, he admired to the point of idolatry. Washington has been a guru to many variously loyal and renegade people, but none of his disciples (naturally, he did not consider them disciples, and they would not have dared to proclaim themselves as such) had been more devoted. Ever since Washington joined the party, Cuello had gotten close to him and never left his side again. Whenever you bumped into Cuello, wherever you were, you knew that Washington was somewhere nearby. And, inversely, you could be sure that anywhere Washington was the center of attention, Cuello would be hanging around, attentive and silent, on the periphery. No one noticed him, but everyone took his presence for granted. It was mystifying, if you considered everything that separated them — what was holy to Cuello was hateful to Washington, though of course he never pointed this out. It was hard to tell if Cuello ignored people’s bewilderment at his intimacy with Washington or if, perfectly aware, and stoically intensifying his devotion for that reason, he withstood it. Of course, if anyone might tactlessly call him the Centaur to his face, no one would have dared to use the name in front of Washington. It was normal to get to Washington’s place in the afternoon and find them both under a tree, sitting in low chairs drinking mate and sporadically exchanging laconic phrases so full of allusion that it was hard to tell what they were talking about. Maybe, since they came from the same town, mutual and purely material experiences — things, people, places — facilitated their conversation, but, according to the Mathematician, there must have been something else, since more often than not the opposite happens with people who come from the same place — they actually avoid one another when they meet outside of their place of origin, as though the fact of knowing each other before made them lose some of their consistency. No, according to the Mathematician, that loyalty comes from the end of the forties, when Washington was locked in the asylum. And it was based, reveals the Mathematician, raising his voice to a lightly conceited and defiant pitch, incited by Tomatis’s unjustified innuendo, that loyalty was based (he knows from a reliable source) in the fact that Cuello, leader of the youth movement at the time, arranged for Washington to get locked in the asylum and receive a disability pension, in this way averting his assassination. According to the Mathematician’s sources, Washington’s disappearance was imminent, and Cuello’s people, citing his overly erratic recent behavior and a few of his peculiarities, had convinced the parties to Washington’s forthcoming execution that he was insane and that they would take responsibility for removing him from circulation. Naturally, a few of Washington’s old friends accused Cuello of hatching a conspiracy, as they say, and two or three times covered him with red paint and tar outside his house, threatening to kill him, but when Washington began receiving visitors to the asylum — at first they had him in a straitjacket and everything — the only person in the party who he allowed to visit was Cuello. In any case, Cuello visited every week, bringing him food, clothes, books — he even, the Mathematician insists, had tact enough to stop the party from publicly accusing the left wing of having pushed Washington to insanity. According to the Mathematician, Tomatis’s insinuations signified a lack of respect not only for Cuello but, above all, for Washington, who in those hard times probably relied on Cuello not just as political or emotional support, but as a measure of reality when not only the others but also his own reason seemed to be deserting him. Cuello became his last reference point, his last bridge to the outside world, and a year later, when he left the asylum and fell into a depression that lasted until the end of ’51, Cuello was the only person who was willing to see him. Cuello would spend whole days in Rincón Norte sitting with Washington, who didn’t say a word and would shake his head every so often, releasing a long sigh. Several months passed before the terrible, stupefying silence, little by little, was replaced with the laconic, allusive, and sporadic exchanges that made up their conversation, exchanges whose meaning was for the most part difficult to guess because, when a third person arrived, without masquerade or haste, but rather in a plain and natural way, they stopped. Around other people, Cuello ceased to exist and Washington himself only spoke to him every so often, as though taking note of his presence or giving him life for a few moments with his words — interrogative, respectful, and not without a remote and ironic complicity: Would you agree, Cuello? — Washington never used the familiar form with anyone and no one with him, except his daughter—There you are, Cuello, just like I said, isn’t it? to which Cuello would not even respond, restricting himself to existing, to gathering density and volume from the external world, the same way a sorcerer conjures, in empty space, to the senses of the audience, a being that until that moment had been invisible, and whose presence lasts only as long as the incantation. Since he worked as a secretary in the Butcher’s Co-op — his wife was a music teacher at the normal school — he never showed up at Rincón Norte without a strip steak, which Washington would cook after they had talked a while, and which they ate standing next to the grill, without plates or anything, cutting bites from the same steak on a little board. According to the Mathematician, Washington had stashed Cuello at his house for a while because the Comandos Civiles were looking for him, until the hardest months passed and he was able to come out of hiding. It was strange to see them, so different and so close at once. Every so often Cuello would publish a collection of folk stories in papers and magazines that Washington considered the height of absurdity and even of shame, but it was normal to see one of Cuello’s books on his desk, with its corresponding dedication and a bookmark sticking out among the pages, proving that Washington read them. Sometimes the Mathematician thought that, when lots of people were around, Washington’s expression sharpened if he sensed any irony toward Cuello among the company — so much so that even the slightest irony was immediately repressed because of the tension that began to settle on the group — and only when that shadow disappeared completely would Washington’s expression soften again. It had been said that, more conscious of the other’s weaknesses than of their own, steadfast and alert to those only, they watched over one another tacitly. If anything refuted Tomatis’s insinuations, according to the Mathematician, it was Washington’s consideration for Cuello — according to the Mathematician, no? who, in addition to dismantling Tomatis’s assertions in regards to Cuello, took advantage of the opportunity to refute the ones that, in his opinion, Tomatis was gallant enough to smear on La Chichito: He would prefer it if she were a virgin. That would ease the rejection. The only girls he wouldn’t take to his room are either hysterical or bourgeois.