Observing him, discreetly and somewhat shyly, the Mathematician detects Leto’s withdrawn expression and takes the opportunity to say: And around here, how was it all this time? biting the unlit pipe so hard that, instead of speaking, he sputters the question through his clenched teeth and tongue which, inhibited, wraps around the pipe stem and makes it vibrate against the row of teeth. The Mathematician ignores the fact that Leto has more than enough reasons, though he has been around, to feel much more excluded from the bursts of passion that reality might arbitrarily dispense among the circles he frequents: he, to begin with, has only lived in the city a few months and is, therefore, a mere neophyte, a newcomer, and, because he is only twenty-one, is much younger than several of the youngest; he almost never joins a discussion, and if he is invited anywhere it’s only as an appendix to Tomatis; he’s the only other source of income for a widowed mother, and has to work several account books to support her, and something inside him, surely, like a woodworm in furniture, pre-emptively hollows out any possible passion he may have, which somewhat explains his absences and silences — though he would like it, true enough, if once in a while, something were possible. Leto, allowing a quantity of smoke to spill out through his half-opened lips, from which he has just withdrawn, with careful fingers, the cigarette, responds: he has hardly seen anyone; he rarely goes out; he has almost nothing to report from these past three months.
Imagine a gambler who, for some time, has held the card that will let him win the game but which he cannot play for many rounds because none of the other players have given him an opportunity to do so. Round after round the gambler throws down useless, inconsequential cards that have no influence on the course of the game until, suddenly, the combination he needs appears on the table, allowing him to throw down, euphorically and decisively, the winning card. Leto’s timid confession has put the Mathematician in this dominant position.
— What? he says. Weren’t you at Washington’s birthday party?
Leto shakes his head no, while he thinks: And even today, this morning, when she says that he suffered so much it’s less to remind me of that suffering than to control whether I believe her or not. And the Mathematician, observing him without looking, instead looking straight ahead at the sidewalk, but observing him nonetheless with the right side of his body, which is to say, the side that is almost grazing, during the walk, the left side of Leto’s body, the Mathematician, I was saying, no? at the same time, although it is always, as I was saying just now, the same, thinks: He wasn’t invited.
Leto surfaces as though from under water. He has been thinking, remembering his mother, the death of his father, and Lopecito, submerging himself for a few seconds in those thoughts and memories as though into a subterranean canal parallel to the spring air, and in emerging, in surfacing, he finds himself with this good-looking blonde guy, some twenty-seven years old, dressed completely in white, who Tomatis calls the Mathematician, who is just back from Europe and is out to distribute the press release for the Chemical Engineering Students Association to the papers, who has just, also, a few seconds ago, asked him if he was at Washington’s birthday party, and as he, with a shake of his head, has responded no, he now fears that the other, who seems to be observing him, is observing him not with contempt, but with disbelief and something like pity. In the first place, they wouldn’t need to invite me. I could have gone if I had wanted, without needing an invitation. But in any case, I wouldn’t have wanted an invitation because it would have meant that they don’t consider me close enough that it would be a given that I would have to go. But, given that, I have to submit to the facts: I wasn’t invited.
— I couldn’t make it either. That day we were visiting factories in Frankfurt. I couldn’t hop a jet from Frankfurt because they don’t have direct flights to Rincón, says the Mathematician. But I got the full version, a fresh, subtitled, technicolor copy.
Maintaining his lighthearted façade, he squeezes the pipe a bit more with this teeth, compelled by a memory that returns, suddenly, and which still stings him, one of those memories or emotions about which he likes to say, with an ironic wrinkling of his nose, if they aren’t measurable, at least with our current understanding, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why they couldn’t enter into some general theory or some structure that’s subject to mathematical formulae one of these days.
— You don’t say, he hears Leto say.
— Yes, yes, I heard all about it, he hears himself say in turn.
The memory is like a photograph or a shadowy image stamped into the inside of his head, and the emotions and feelings of humiliation and rage form several black-bordered, jagged holes, as if the image had been punctured at many points of its surface with the ember of a cigarette. Three or four years earlier, a poet from Buenos Aires came to the city to give a conference. The Mathematician, who had been corresponding with him for six or seven months regarding a problem of versification, waited anxiously for his arrival, and had annotated a list of discussion points which, after the conference, he hoped to address in order over dinner with the poet. Shortly before the end of the debate that followed the conference, the Mathematician had left to get the car from his father; he hadn’t been able to loan it to the Mathematician earlier because he didn’t get back from Tostado until 9:00. His father was a little late, and when the Mathematician returned with the car to the lecture hall, it was closed. A guard told him that the lecturer had left with four or five of the organizers to a party, or to eat something — basically he wasn’t sure where. The Mathematician felt the first bolt of rage in that moment because, before leaving to get the car, he had taken the precaution of letting several of the organizers know about his momentary absence, asking them to wait for him, but not feeling very secure because he knew that the organizers belonged to the class of people who kidnap celebrities who come from the capital, and since he didn’t spend much time with them, because he didn’t like to move in semiofficial circles, they wouldn’t go out of their way to consider his requests. The Mathematician, when he learned of the poet’s visit, had begun working hard, for at least a month and a half, on problems of versification. His thesis was that each meter corresponded to a specific emotion and that you could devise a notational system, if you sufficiently diversified the meters whose combinations were not already too subtle, which only applied to the metric use of pure sounds, for the poem to transmit the desired emotions. The Mathematician was probably only twenty-three at the time; he considered himself a simple theoretician and would have liked the poet, who was twenty years older and had acquired a great reputation, to apply his theories, like the geologist who forms a hypothesis about the composition of the lunar surface and sends an astronaut to the moon to verify it. The Mathematician left the conference hall, already partially blinded by rage, and began looking for the poet. He started crisscrossing the city in his father’s car, from one end to the other: he would leave the engine running in front of a restaurant, in front of a bar, would get out to look for them, the poet and the group of organizers, and when he didn’t find them would move on to the next bar and repeat the same routine; he tried to disguise his rage behind a calm and mundane façade, passing his indifferent gaze over the lively tables as if he was looking for an empty one or was simply curious. That he was able to maintain his elegance and indifferent façade is admirable because with every passing minute his fury and indignation multiplied. He started to feel like the inside of his head was boiling. After having fruitlessly visited every open restaurant, he went into a bar, asked for a beer, the phone book, and a fistful of coins and began calling the homes of the organizers, hoping that they were at one of their houses or that someone in their family knew where the hell they had gone. But no one knew anything or, if they did know, did not seem inclined to tell him. The Mathematician sensed the unmistakable echoes of some sort of instruction or collusion in their casual responses. Everyone knew, the whole city knew, and, intentionally, concealed it. After all those useless rounds, he started driving the streets at random, hoping to come across the poet and his retinue, and more than once, because of false alarms, he found himself chasing some car that seemed to belong to one of the organizers at full speed or accosting a startled group of people on a dark street.