— He’s a venomous snake, the Mathematician whispers as they cross, without letting go of his arm. He’s a regular at the intelligence services and the eleven o’clock mass.
Leto discharges a thick mouthful of smoke and starts to laugh, thankful. He, until the year before, went to mass every so often and more and more infrequently, and though he has stopped going without much reservation, for someone to place the eleven o’clock mass among the fundamental credentials of human iniquity serves to confirm, a posteriori, the just nature of his defection. But also, and above all, he feels thankful because he has sensed, in the Mathematician’s somewhat brutal contempt for his distant relative, a gesture of seduction toward himself, which, being unexpected and fleeting, is therefore all the more intense. The dispersed and scattered elements suddenly come together as they cross, through the unmistakable gesture of affection, and the inconstant, fragmentary flickers emerging from the dark depths inside him, where their flashes almost immediately extinguish the tenuous and phosphorescent glow of consciousness, the frayed, mercurial recollections that assault him whenever they like, the tide of regrets, the turns of phrase, the nonsense, the doubts and ghosts, the lonely flux produced by the unaccomplished all come together, as we were saying, or rather yours truly, just now, was saying, and become a solid burst, a translucent, stable whole, almost a real but fragile object, like a smoke ring or a soap bubble, that occupies every corner of his body and radiates a euphoric sense of himself, him—Ángel Leto, no? — clearly defined and distilled among the things that, dispersed across the benign transparency, fill the morning. The force of that feeling is so strong that it suppresses its sporadic or transitory character, and when they reach the opposite sidewalk, as they step over the cable, the somewhat pedantic tone with which the Mathematician, recovering from his intrafamilial vexations, resumes his story, begins to gnaw at the edges of its short-lived stability: As I was saying, with that response he assumed the conversation was finished, says the Mathematician.
— Of course, Leto says. Obviously.
— Washington’s reason for bringing up the mosquitos is explained in his response to Héctor, don’t you think? says the Mathematician, letting go of his arm after seeing the empty pipe in his hand and putting it into his pants pocket, then taking the folded up sheets of the Student Association’s press release from his other pocket to verify that they are still there and putting them away again.
Leto takes advantage of the Mathematician’s distraction to offer, without much enthusiasm, an affirmative response. What makes the whole thing troublesome, as they say, is that he can’t remember just what the pivotal response from Washington had been that, according to the Mathematician, clarified the notorious subject which a while ago, despite their contradicting moods and versions, Tomatis and the Mathematician, without even suspecting his somewhat obfuscated confusion, seemed so in agreement on. However much he tries, Washington’s response does not make what you might call an appearance in his memory — his memory, no? — or rather that maybe slightly concave mirror (or flat, what’s the difference) where certain familiar images, through which the whole universe takes on continuity, are reflected, sometimes clearly and sometimes darkly, in an uncontrollable, fugitive rhythm all their own. And Leto realizes after a moment of frustrated effort, so to speak, that the famous response, the final explication of that string of allusions which from that night toward the end of winter would travel by means of increasingly variable and dubious recollections, that Washington’s circuitous, vernacular sentence, apparently the solution to the riddle, must have been pronounced by the Mathematician, whose source was Botón, when he wasn’t listening, most likely when they were crossing the last street, just before he — Leto, no? — absorbed in his thoughts, stumbled over the cable.
— Washington likes to draw out what he’s thinking little by little, says the Mathematician. But everything is clarified when he reaches his conclusion.
— And that was where he wanted to end up? Leto says, trying out that vague question in order to obtain a better indicator.
— Right there, says the Mathematician.
— Set in motion by, Leto says slowly, in a thoughtful tone that simulates an implicit series of rationalizations.
— No. No. Not at all. Just the opposite, says the Mathematician with a kind of energy that could be of a pedagogical order.
— Right, yes, Leto says. Just another way to put it. More elegant.
— Why say it another way when Washington said it as clearly as possible? says the Mathematician.
— That’s true, Leto says. And, disappointed, he takes a last drag from his cigarette and flicks it to the sidewalk.
Considering the issue resolved, the Mathematician says that, according to Botón, right after dinner they had given Washington his gifts: Basso, Nidia, and Barco had put them all in a big cardboard box, and Basso’s girls, before going to bed, had taken out and given them one by one to Washington, who unwrapped them slowly to everyone’s anticipation: Beatriz, a belt; the Bassos, a box of darjeeling tea; Marcos Rosemberg, a mechanical sprinkler for the garden; Cuello, a mate gourd with a silver top and base; Silvia Cohen, a book by Paul Radin; Tomatis, an album of erotic Japanese etchings from the eighteenth century; Dib had a case of wine from Salta in his car; and later on Héctor, Elisa, and Rita Fonesca brought him a super-expensive illustrated history of modern art. The rest the Mathematician doesn’t remember — ah, yes, Barco, a checked shirt of the kind Washington likes, and the twins a ham.
— A ham? Leto asks, less out of genuine surprise than out of a faked curiosity, which is aimed at distracting the Mathematician while he tries to remember, or in any case decipher from the Mathematician’s words, the clarification of the story of the mosquitos that the whole world, except him in particular, seems to understand through lateral allusions and fragmentary, cursory precisions as conclusive and decisive evidence. But the Mathematician only responds with a quick, distracted nod, concentrating on what he means to say and not disposed to letting a secondary problem, the ham the twins gave Washington, disturb his mnemonic and rhetorical efforts. The sincerity with which the Mathematician seems to consider his full comprehension of the real meaning of Washington’s words, as a result admitting him into an exclusive circle, produces ambiguous feelings in Leto, a mix of pride and guilt, as though he were slightly fraudulent, but the Mathematician, unaware of his contradictory states of mind, takes for granted his admission to a circle of people who are intelligent and well-intentioned, as they say, correctly situated in their politics and so, offering the first results of his internal elaboration, goes on: All the gifts, according to Botón, Marcos Rosemberg planned to take to Rincón Norte the next day. Washington was very happy with them. In fact, as they say, despite how mild the winter had been, as the night wore on it got increasingly colder and those who stayed outside, under the pavilion or simply out on the patio, had to cover themselves as much as possible in order to bear it, and on top of sweaters, overcoats, hats, scarves, gloves, and cloaks, the Bassos started bringing out ponchos and blankets to distribute among the guests who, sitting around the table, or coming and going from the pavilion to the house, or walking in clusters through the trees at the back, started wrapping themselves up and releasing streams of air that turned to vapor each time they opened their mouth to say something or just to breathe. According to Botón, says the Mathematician, at some point they went looking for mandarins at the back, the last of the year, from the trees where even in the morning darkness they could sense the appearance of the first shoots that signaled the end of winter, and the mandarins were so cold that biting them would hurt their teeth, until Sadi, the unionist, suggested heating them up around the last coals and ashes that were still warm, the way he did when he was a kid with oranges in a barbecue. And so they had put them in the ashes and embers for a while and had eaten them warm — and the Mathematician can’t imagine how good those mandarins must have been. I can’t imagine what that’s like. Ever since Botón told me about it Saturday on the ferry I’ve been tempted to recreate the experience. Which is satisfying to Leto because he, on the contrary, as far back as his memory goes, can remember the warm mandarins and oranges they would take from the grill on winter nights, when he spent July vacations in his grandparents’ town, and this is the first time since the Mathematician started relating the circumstances of the party that he feels ownership of one of the details of the events of that night last winter at Basso’s ranch in Colastiné, which he’s never been to and has had to piece together, as they say, from assorted images of various ranches, half real and half imagined. Like two towns on the river coast, the warm mandarin juice connects, one might say, his own life to the images evoked (if the expression fits) by the Mathematician’s words: Ah, the warm mandarins. Because they’re always last, at the end of winter they’re the sweetest. They’re so full of juice that when you warm them in the ashes they taste like honey.