Reaching the corner, Leto turns his head back toward the plaza. The Mathematician’s white figure, now separated from its interlocutor, has continued at a diagonal and reached the corner almost at the same time as Leto, one block away. And again almost at the same time as Leto, it crosses onto a parallel street, behind a government building, and disappears. In turn, Leto reaches the opposite sidewalk. Now, apart from the colonial building of the historical museum, with its tile roof, its gallery supported by columns of carved wood, its well — that’s what they call it — painted white, in the patch of rare grass before the entrance, apart from the museum, we were saying — or rather yours truly, as I was saying just now, was, no? — apart from the museum building there are no others, and its front section and its green spaces occupy the whole sidewalk, until the next sidewalk, wide and deserted, beyond which, behind the palo borrachos, the blooming lapachos and timbos, the colonial church can be made out, white like the museum and the well — or so they call it — and also, like the museum, with its tile roof. When he reaches the corner, since he has to wait at the curb for a large bus from Rosario to pass, Leto observes a moment, to the east, of the ethnographic museum, built in a false colonial style that, trying to look like the others, only manages to accentuate its differences. The bus passes, turning south around the park, accelerating after having slowed through the intersection, and Leto manages to see its metallic side painted green and a row of pale, brief faces, a few of which return his gaze through the windows. Protected, restored, exhibited to preserve, contain, even represent and prolong the past, the church and the museums, wrapped in the insidious ubiquity of the morning light, nonetheless fail to escape the anonymous strangeness of the present — which may be, and why not, the name for it — exposed and dispersed in that light, already a museum maybe, or maybe since the beginning, with its perpetual display of objects without specific, or at least arbitrary, use, subject to what you might call the unique, monotonous variation of the fugitive and repetitive rhythm of mineral stability. Seeing the bus move away under the curved row of blooming lapachos, an intense red, bordering the park, Leto crosses, walking slowly, in full sun, stepping on his own shadow as it follows him, continuously smaller, over the large cement slabs, cracking in places and splattered here and there with oil stains scattered around the wide, deserted street that Leto leaves behind at touching, with the sole of his shoe, the cable guardrail.
Advancing along the park sidewalk, he leaves behind the grass and trees that precede the church and starts to parallel, under the first of the lapachos rising from the sidewalk, the lateral gallery of the convent. The sidewalk is covered in red flowers, flattened and rotten or fresh, almost intact, as though they’ve just fallen, and, lifting his head a little, he sees a few red stains that, detaching from the trees, fall through the air and land, softly, on the pavement. The flowered tops of the lapachos, without leaves, composed entirely of blooms, until the curve of the street disappears many dozens of meters ahead, emit a kind of rose-colored luminosity, whose proliferation, overflowing but contained in tops of regular, almost identical shapes that blend together to form a sort of large, curved, cylindrical cloud whose overflowing proliferation, as I was saying, instead of inspiring an aesthetic reaction in him, Leto, produces a kind of hatred, brief of course, that surprises him, that he would like to retain in his consciousness in order to examine it, and which he can guess the cause of, of course with nothing resembling words, beyond the innocence of the trees and the blind servility that makes them, an insignificant speck in the universe, bloom, puerile and repetitive, every year. Abruptly, discharging a short laugh because of his thoughts, he turns from the sidewalk and, taking one of the dirt paths, advances among the trees of the park, toward the lake. Beyond the cool shade that now dominates, the clarity of the morning and the blue sky shine over the open space of the lake. Suddenly, more fragile than its stone, iron, concrete, and plaster objects would have it appear, the city, with its prolific, almost primitive crisscrossing of straight streets and its diffuse clamor, seems to disintegrate behind him, itself likewise entering, with all of its unlikely presences, that anonymous place which the word past, of such fragile pronunciation, seems to denote so well, though without it having, on the reverse of the sounds uttered in speaking it or in the traces of ink left in writing it, any precise image to represent it.
But Leto is not thinking about this. Curious, he lends, as they say, his ear to a specific place — though it’s always the same, no? — in the park, where agitated, sharp screeches are breaking, to put a word to it, the silence. Cutting across one of the flowerbeds, Leto walks toward the screeches, and when he discovers its source, stops, surprised, to look. A number of birds of a species he has never seen, ten or fifteen maybe, very large, black on their back and on their long, thin tail, yellow on their breast, with a long, black beak and a very strange silhouette that were it not for their size would resemble a paper kite, swarm and screech at a precise spot in the park, between the lower branch of a tree, a shrub growing at the edge of an embankment, and the space that opens between the embankment and the edge of the lake, which Leto, from where he is standing, is not able to see. The birds swarm, land, take off again, move away and return, screeching, flapping, gliding, and landing again on the branches of the tree or the bush, or even on the edge of the embankment. Their ridiculous paper kite silhouettes are not without, because of the increasing frenzy that agitates them, a sort of tragedy. Sometimes they plunge toward the water but almost immediately reappear, more frenzied still, closer to panic than to fury, rushing up as though terrified of having dared to graze the apparent cause of their agitation, they move away again, contaminated by its lethal essence or burned by its incandescence. So as not to scare them, Leto approaches slowly along the edge of the embankment, trying to figure out the cause of their flutter. But the birds do not even notice his presence. Observing them closely, he realizes that it’s a foreign species, diverted, who knows why, from its migratory course. Agitation, terror, panic, the incessant, feverish swarming, the short, sharp, almost petrified screeches, and the plunging flight interrupted over and over by an abrupt change in direction, away from the object that impels them — Leto advances and gets so close to the birds that more than once he has to duck so that one doesn’t graze him on its flight or knock him over. Now, from where he is standing, he can finally see the object: it’s a large beach ball, made of yellow plastic, which some child must have left behind the day before and which, abandoned at the edge of the lake, tangled up in aquatic plants, rocks, slowly, with every imperceptible wave that arrives, periodically, to displace it. Between the more and more agitated screeches and the frenetic alarms of the birds, which are indifferent to his presence, Leto scrutinizes the yellow sphere that concentrates or spreads intense radiations, an incontrovertible but simultaneously problematic presence, a yellow concretion less consistent than nothingness and more mysterious than the totality of the existent, and then, with some compassion, seeing the birds’ maddened swarm increasing around him, he, Leto, who is just starting to deconstruct his own, intuits the sense of loss, of awe, of wonder that are absent in a creature unable to raise, in the house of coincidence — which could just as easily be called something else — the sanctuary, in more than one sense superfluous, of what they call, apparently, their gods.