Now then: the moment they stepped into the street, as though the contact between the soles of their shoes and the asphalt had triggered a complex mechanism of sonorant activation, the numerous motionless cars, relatively silent up until then, in protest of some signal from the attendant, or in gregarious imitation, or for the plain voluptuousness of existing in a slightly more intense manner through the repetitive, musical declaration of the so-called self, have begun, almost in unison, to fill the innocent, bright morning with the sound of their horns. The surrounding space breaks down into sonorant planes whose different tones and intensities mark the limits, perimeter, distance, and location relative to Leto and the Mathematician who, at the center of the horizon of artificial sounds seem to move in a medium more resistant than the air, judging by the undertones, you might say, of effort and displeasure that accompany them, like the same sauce on different dishes at a banquet or a passing contingency as subspecies of eternity, the sequence of emotions that the crossing’s misadventures cause them. At last they find a space between two bumpers wide enough to cross, but they are forced to stop and wait because the group from the opposite sidewalk — led by a grey-haired man in shirt-sleeves carrying a briefcase, almost certainly a lawyer coming from Tribunales or a high-ranking government official on his way to do business at a bank downtown — found the path before them and has started crossing it single file. The grey-haired man passes between the bumpers with his head down, lost in thought, with a solid lead on the procession, but the woman behind him, a housekeeper who has gone out to run errands and holds the family wallet, with a piece of currency sticking out, to her chest, gives them a look that Leto, unlike the Mathematician, cut off from any social commerce, takes up with a knowing gesture, to calm her, because he thinks he has noticed in the look from the woman, fifty-something and plump, of very modest origin, as they say, a kind of excessive culpability for the fact that she, a simple señora de barrio, was presumptuous enough to cross before two educated-looking, well-bred young men. Leto’s look attempts to express, to no effect because the woman would never admit it, the common origin of humanity, starting from the so-called collateral branch of certain primates, as they call them, in west Africa, some seventy million years ago, give or take, on top of the idea espoused by more than a few religions, according to which all people are equal before God, added to his personal conviction that the best form of social organization would be an egalitarian order, with a rotation of roles, minimal government, and a socialization of the means of production, but only a fraction of a second after their eyes meet, the requisite lapse to express her culpability to the two young scholars, the woman lowers her eyes, somewhat ashamed for having dared to look, confused by the knowing look returned by one of them, full of intimations that she cannot nor does she care to unravel. The third in line the Mathematician cannot ignore: it’s someone he knows, the engineer Gamarra, an Organic Chemistry adjunct, who he liked to play ping-pong with at the student center. Sixty-something and well-dressed, he passes while stroking the end of his tie, which is striped with oblique, wide, yellow and green lines, and greets him with an inclination of the head and a short monosyllable that Leto, observing impartially nearby, attributes to the embarrassment of the situation. And finally a young woman, dressed in a little flowery outfit, whose crocodile skin wallet hangs from her arm and rubs against the hood of a car as she passes without even looking at them. The passage itself, more narrow than the first, and which forced the people crossing in the opposite direction to turn their body slightly and continue sideways, presents a greater obstacle, as having to cross sideways puts both pant legs in danger at the same time, and when they set off, the car horns whose sound you could say they’ve been swimming through, go silent all at once. Only one protests, one more time, somewhere along the central avenue, but doesn’t start up again. After they cross the bumpers, Leto, without stopping, turns east and without much trouble locates the passage found by the people coming in the opposite direction — wide, flat, open, with the cable guardrail at the other end, so easy to cross that, without turning, Leto knows that the Mathematician, behind him, is already recovering his personality, and that when they step onto the next sidewalk and start walking side-by-side, he will once again be the tall, elegant, tanned young man, dressed completely in white, including his moccasins, worn without socks and which unbeknownst to him were bought the month before in Florence — the Mathematician, a perfect, poster boy specimen who speaks slowly and clearly and who has gone out this morning to distribute the press release from the Chemical Engineering Students Association, about the trip to Europe recently taken by its recent and imminent graduates, to the newspapers.
But he’s wrong. When they reach the sidewalk the Mathematician is still struggling with himself — or so it seems to Leto who, when he comes up alongside him, on the side closest to the wall, continues to notice his dumb bewilderment while he processes the humiliation of having been, for several moments, hostage to his own pants, and Leto, relieved, senses the surfacing, in the Mathematician’s silence, of a sincere remorse, a resolve to be better in the future, a sense of certainty that he won’t ever again be swallowed up by the penumbra he just now escaped, and the conviction that those weaknesses are just momentary, knee-jerk reactions that a sensible person discards with the help of a liberating intellect, or so Leto assumes the Mathematician is thinking, in his ascendant evolution. They reach the corner. They turn. And when they have resumed their path on the central avenue, to the south — as I was saying just now, no? — the Mathematician, having reconstructed himself after his compulsive eclipse, clearing his throat two or three times, reemerges into the morning sun. But Leto is thinking: They would give humanity everything, just not their pants. They can accept anything but a stain on their pants. They’re gentle as lambs except when their pants are in danger. They are not to be trusted, even when they’ve given up everything and claim that they’ve kept only their pants. Using the plural he assigns the Mathematician to a vast, enemy horde, to the legion that, entrenched in a blind, vain defense of its own pants, constitutes a perpetual threat to the rest of the world. But the Mathematician’s voice, slightly pitched at first because of his contrite throat clearing, recovers its impartial tone, its calculated preciousness and — Leto has to admit — its pleasant sound.