The Mathematician looks at him. Like any good rationalist, he distrusts lyrical exaggerations — especially unfamiliar ones — and his look, blatantly scrutinizing, searches Leto’s face for the gravity that’s necessary to lend credibility to the description and for the indifference and absence of hesitation that would certify his rationalist certitude, which, in light of his somewhat indiscreet comparison, and conscious of having hyperbolized his description in order to amplify the importance of his experience, Leto struggles to maintain at all costs. Turning his eyes back to the street, the Mathematician seems to have concluded his inspection, with satisfactory results apparently, if Leto judges by the carefree bonhomie with which he resumes his stream of compact, well-turned phrases, at times elegant and not exempt from a kind of arch excess of precision, a certain refrigerant preciousness in the expression of emotions, and mostly ironic shades in the disdain of his assumptions. Sometimes a general dispersal, sometimes a reunion under the pavilion. They walked through the darkness covered with ponchos and blankets, holding a glass in one hand and a cigarette between the index and middle fingers of the same hand, the glow of red ends of their cigarettes growing slightly in the darkness, among the mandarins, if they took a puff. When they crossed the bands of light projecting from the ranch into the patio and between the trees, you could see the streams of whitish breath they expelled through their half-open lips. Sometimes, from somewhere in the darkness, they could hear a couple whispering, and in some cases, and despite the cold, the whispers sounded more like conclusive shudders than preliminary murmurs—all this, the Mathematician clarifies, according to Botón: branches shaking, voices, laughter and shouts that dispersed and faded in the dark, frozen air under the stars resembling pieces of ice formed yellow, or blue, or red, or green, that in the Mathematician’s imagination are sidereal chemical memories in which each color is just evidence of this or that substance or of thermal relationships where the different colors are just the consequence of varying temperatures. As he speaks, the Mathematician imagines them, lighthearted and happy while he marched around Frankfurt, sees them coming and going across the dark patio under the sky loaded, one might say, with active substance. But these are private images belonging to what is intransmissible in his representations — those apparently arbitrary and senseless images that, nevertheless, were they diagramed, would reveal more of his identity than his fingerprints or the features of his face. According to Botón, says the Mathematician, a few people sat around the table wearing blankets, scarves, hats, gloves — they smoked with the gloves on. Until at some point the cold was so unbearable that the ones who were left, because most people had already gone, were forced to move inside. The cold chased them from the patio to the house, says the Mathematician that Botón had said happened. According to Botón, they had sat around drinking mate and at some point Washington had said that certain ritual positions in tantric yoga were revolutionary. If Botón didn’t hear wrong, which is highly likely, says the Mathematician.
— This Botón’s credibility seems to fluctuate considerably, says Leto, somewhat irritated by the continuous corrections he has to make to his general idea of Botón, and by the nagging feeling of having missed the crux of the Mathematician’s story.
— His heart is big like a house. Unfortunately, its size sometimes seems inversely proportional to his intellectual faculties, says the Mathematician, simultaneously severe and tender.
— Isn’t he also kind of a. .? says Leto.
The Mathematician discharges a short, resigned laugh to show that even on the defensive he is willing to get to the bottom of things.
— A liar? he says.
Making a vague gesture with his lips and his shoulders, half-closing his eyes and adopting an enigmatic, ambiguous expression, Leto declines to respond, so the Mathematician presents his opinion: If the descriptor includes even the slightest hint of moral judgment, he rejects it emphatically and pre-emptively. Otherwise — and here the Mathematician’s timbre turns slightly pitched, a kind tone and singsong rhythm, as they also say — if it implies his inclination toward fantasy, his oversensitivity to bearing the steady bitterness of reality, his well-intentioned descriptions of things from an angle that will be most pleasant, calming, and enlightening to his interlocutor, his lack of, um, education and somewhat, um, limited culture, his malnourished capacity for rational thought, not to mention his intemperate consumption of gin, which don’t exactly contribute to a clarification of his ideas and more than anything don’t allow any certainty as regards the events to which he is an eyewitness or even a protagonist — if you bear all of these criteria in mind, the Mathematician continues, you could say that any statement from Botón, whatever its contents, presents itself a priori as slightly problematic. This said, he — the Mathematician, no? — isn’t the only one who thinks that, among all his traits, his ingenuousness and simplicity are what make Botón so lovable. Consider instead — or along the same lines maybe — the example of Noca, who might be regarded as a virtuoso of every variety or genre, and straightening the fingers on his left hand one by one, to mark his enumeration, the Mathematician intones: exaggeration, omission, perjury, fabulation, contradictory statements — and having used all of his fingers, he folds them back against his palm, except the index, which ticks the sixth variant — slander — of approaches that are contrary to the truth, and then he resumes straightening his fingers one by one: chimeras, systemic distortions for obscure mercantile reasons, flagrant misinterpretations, pseudologia fantastica morbosa, etc., etc., says the Mathematician, circling both hands in the air to indicate the infinite varieties of falsification at Noca’s disposal.