The Mathematician strikes a balance, as they say, between Botón’s virtues and defects, to the considerable annoyance of Leto, who has to correct the rather summary image he has been putting together. To Leto he was a pimple-faced, dark-skinned kid from Entre Ríos, a law student with more affection for wine and guitars than for the Civil code, a rape enthusiast in his free time, with a more or less conventional taste in books, and a somewhat obtuse intelligence, but now it turns out that he’s an exemplary young man, protector of the avant-garde, a kind of saint who’s capable of the greatest sacrifice (staying sober) if a higher end — this is the expression used in these cases — demands it. A doubt starts to take hold, as they say, of Leto, and he wonders if the Mathematician, in setting himself in radical opposition to Tomatis, has lost his critical faculty and is overstating the case, or worse still, Leto’s sensitive intuition tells him — though with nothing resembling words — or worse still, I was saying, if the Mathematician, having tasted the bitterness of human misery, life reduced to trying to keep a pair of pants from getting stained, only to rediscover, you could say, the ambrosia of life, the good in all things, sees virtues even in Botón. But these thoughts pass quickly, like silent sparks or dark flashes in the back of his mind, which is concentrating instead on the unforeseen lunge his body has to make, alongside the Mathematician’s, to step into the street, and a driver, seeing them, brakes slowly, and leaning toward them slightly to look at them through the windshield, makes a friendly gesture indicating that they can cross, which they do then and there, as they say, hurrying with an ostentation that, actually, doesn’t speed things up but instead lets them respond to the driver’s friendliness with their entire bodies, an ostentatious hurrying that more or less signifies,
we’re hurrying as much as we can, so much that we don’t have the luxury of responding to your friendly gesture, but in fact our own friendliness consists in hurrying and which, ultimately, though it doesn’t speed things up very much since what has increased is their ostentation and not their velocity, still transfers them, like it or not, to the opposite sidewalk.