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And then he falls, as they say, silent, and lets his arms drop to his sides. Two boys sitting in a doorway, seven or eight years old, gaze at a spot somewhere on the opposite sidewalk so intently that Leto looks toward it, not seeing anything, as does the Mathematician, who has not seen the boys yet but, intrigued by Leto’s curious look, passes his over the same spot without seeing anything but the one- or two-story houses and the gray pavement covered with bright morning light. They are so abstracted, Leto observes, that they don’t even see them approach or notice when anyone else walking down the sidewalk passes them, though the proximity to the government district generates a slight increase in movement along the streets. Just then the Mathematician recognizes — and is recognized by — two young men coming toward them on the opposite sidewalk, and they exchange, across the street where just then two cars are crossing, a quick greeting that consists in raising a hand, shaking their head a little, and smiling vaguely, a passing acknowledgment that dissolves in the bright air as quickly as it forms, so fast that Leto, because no verbal exchange follows, doesn’t even notice it, intrigued as he is by the boys’ indistinct but nevertheless attentive gaze. But as they pass alongside them and leave them behind, and he hears their conversation—I spy, I spy. What. A thing. What. Shiny. What color. — he suddenly understands the boys’ extreme attention. He would have liked to hear the thing’s color too, in order to find, somewhere in the spot, what they were talking about, but they’ve gone too far from the boys, and the one who was supposed to give the color stalls, possibly on purpose, in order to conceal the direction, disorienting the one who has to find the object and drawing out the game a little more. I spy, I spy. What. A thing. What. Shiny. What color, Leto thinks and, with somewhat childish disenchantment, can’t stop himself from looking again toward the opposite sidewalk, motivating another pointless look from the Mathematician who, because he was distracted by his greeting didn’t pay attention to the conversation, ends up slightly annoyed. Deliberately, Leto doesn’t provide an explanation. Washington’s notorious sentence, which the Mathematician must have referred to just before he stumbled over the guardrail, supposing that the allusions shared by the Mathematician and Tomatis were engineered to exclude him from the sphere where they moved effortlessly between the trivium and the quadrivium, as the Mathematician would say, the famous sentence that Leto continues to suspect was never spoken by Washington, sanctions his lack of explanation for his insistent interest in looking at the vague spot somewhere on the opposite sidewalk, prompted, so to speak, by a childish whim born, it’s not clear why, in the fissures of his soul — a problematic object if there ever was one, as they say, and which yours truly — just now, no? — was saying seems not translucent but murky. And in that climate of what you might call tenuous opposition, they reach the corner.

The landscape, to put a word to it, has changed completely. The small, private houses with their bronze nameplates and balconies over the sidewalk give way, as they say, to the Plaza de Mayo, bordered, on its four sides, by the cathedral, the courts, the Jesuit college, the capitol. From the long, three- or four-story buildings surrounding the plaza, suppliers of law, power, justice, and religion enter and exit with folders, briefcases, papers, alone or in small groups, men and women, the litigators, the faithful, and the public servants. Several pass, most likely on an errand from the curia to the courts, from the courts to the seat of government. Many cross, in different directions, the red brick paths of the plaza between the green flowerbeds bordered by bitter orange trees, rubber trees, or palms. The sky, bright blue, without a single cloud, spreads, you could say, over the plaza. The Mathematician slows down.

— This is my stop, he says.

Surprised, Leto looks at him, searching his expression for any resentment of his recent behavior. But the Mathematician’s wide smile, and the sincere look that meets his, calm him.

— I have to drop the press release off over there, he says, vaguely pointing somewhere in the city beyond the plaza, the capitol, and the courts. And then, satirizing himself and the Students Association: It’s not enough to travel through Europe. You’ve got to publish it too.

— I’m going straight, says Leto.

— Shame we missed the party, no? says the Mathematician.

— They didn’t invite me, says Leto.

— It must have slipped their minds. Or probably they thought they didn’t have to, says the Mathematician.

— So strange, giving him a ham, says Leto.

— It’s Washington’s favorite, says the Mathematician. But not to worry. In a couple of visits Tomatis will leave him with just the bone.

Okay. Time to say goodbye and finish it, Leto thinks, but as if he had guessed his thoughts, the Mathematician is already extending his hand. Leto holds out his. The look they exchange when they say goodbye, brief and polite, expresses many things that both perceive and register carefully, discreetly, and intuitively. Leto’s look says more or less the following: Frankly, when you whistled at me back there, I didn’t have a single ounce of interest in having someone pester me for fifteen blocks, especially since I only knew you through Tomatis’s patently unenthusiastic references, and your physical appearance and style of dress don’t favor you much with the poor mortals you happen upon. But after our walk I have to admit that your personality, although not without its pedantries, is more or less pleasant, and things haven’t gone badly. Furthermore, at some point I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart, but don’t worry, to me, it’s like the thing with the pants never happened. And the Mathematician’s — more or less as well, no? — and as we’ve said, without a trace of words: I’m aware of your reticence. I’ll try to understand it. And I’m aware of Tomatis’s too. But that doesn’t matter to me. The two of you, because I was born among uninteresting people, perceive uninteresting things in me, which is the cause, I’m sure, of that reticence. Let’s take the pants, for example. I know I shouldn’t let them be so important. But the feeling is stronger than me. At any point, if my white pants are in danger, my whole being feels in danger, because my whole being — who knows why, probably because of the uninteresting things that persist in me despite my efforts to eradicate them — though it seems strange, is concentrated in my pants. But I could offer some objections too, if I wanted. Tomatis, for example, wasn’t so brilliant. And in your case, I’m not sure you’ve understood everything with so much patience, detail, and scrupulous respect for the truth I’ve been trying to tell you. More than once I caught you thinking of something else, and at one point I wondered if you were taking advantage of the thing with the pants. But why bother with all this — they’re details that belong to the category of the uninteresting. Don’t you think there are more important things for the time we’ve been given? De rerum natura or Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, or the debate over the EPR paradox.

And so on. When they let go their hands, the Mathematician, taking advantage of a favorable stoplight, crosses the street at a diagonal, toward the plaza, while Leto, hesitant, undecided whether to continue, watches with an inexpressive, almost inert gaze. The Mathematician’s tanned, athletic, tall, and blonde-haired body, dressed in a white shirt, the blinding white pants that inspired a momentary enslavement in their owner, the white moccasins which Leto does not know were bought the month before in Florence and are worn sock-less with an excess of affected simplicity, the combination so stereotypical of the decade’s aesthetic ideal that a rational advertiser would have rejected him from a billboard for fear that his exaggerated perfection, producing a refusal effect, would lower sales of the products he was meant to sell, the Mathematician — in a word, no? — or in two, to be more precise, leaves the street behind, and stepping into the plaza, and always at a diagonal, moves away from the corner on the red brick path between the green flowerbeds where, juxtaposed against the cloudless blue sky and a landscape of block-long public buildings three or four stories tall, grow bitter orange trees, rubber trees, palo borrachos, and palms. Leto’s gaze follows him, more indolent than attentive and, unconsciously, at the level of thought that under layers of archaic rumination and delirium is always yoked to the essential, insolubly glued, so to speak, to the profound illusion of the external, watches as he is lost to the unreality of the morning, the translucent stuff of space and time that, with every step, swallows and returns him, over and over, with an impalpable rhythm, an absurd yet stable cluster of gradually diminishing radiation, less distinct as he moves away, a dense flux revealed and immediately erased again by the daylight. But when he reaches the center of the plaza, an acquaintance, coming in the opposite direction, intercepts him and they start to talk. From a distance Leto thinks he can imagine the conversation of which he catches only a few gestures and two or three head movements. He imagines hearing again the list of cities and the images associated with each — Paris, an unexpected rainstorm; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum; Warsaw, there was nothing left; Brussels, for The Census at Bethlehem; La Rochelle, sparkling white; etc., etc. — and, satisfied with the fresh rendering of the white image that had been losing its reality, recovering, through an illusory, conventional conversation, a somewhat more familiar humanity, he starts to cross the intersection.