— Oh yeah? says Leto. Who did you hear it from?
— Botón, says the Mathematician.
Leto nods. That name, or nickname rather, Button, appears every so often in conversation, but to Leto it doesn’t evoke any precise image because he’s never seen its owner. He seems to be from Entre Ríos, to study law, to have been a reformist leader, to be seen a lot at vernissages and conferences, and to be a guitar player. Three or four times he’s heard Tomatis say, speaking to a third person, things like, Last night we ran into Botón falling down at a bar at the arcade, or once, referring to a painter, Botón cleans her pipes. But Leto has never seen him. In fact, when he hears the nickname, the first thing he imagines is an actual button, black with four holes in the center, and only after a quick correction begins to see the image of a person, a guy with straight hair and dark, pockmarked skin, which doesn’t correspond to any experience but which makes up, as a stand in, for the absence of experience. There always has to be something, thinks Leto. If there’s nothing, you think that there’s nothing and that thought is something.
Yes, Botón indeed, the Mathematician has just repeated. Botón who, as it happened, ran into El Gato Garay at the School of Fine Arts and promised to bring his guitar but, since he hadn’t gone back home after the meeting, hadn’t actually brought the guitar and, after running some errands downtown, was the first to arrive in Colastiné, where the party was. He had bought three bottles of white wine. In case they ran out, says the Mathematician. He’s always afraid they’ll run out. According to Botón — and, afterward, according to the Mathematician, no? — since it couldn’t have been later than 5:00 and the sun was still high, and Basso, the owner of the ranch, had just gotten up from his siesta, they had gone behind the house to pick vegetables. According to the Mathematician, Basso has a vegetable garden, raises chickens, and, with some money his maternal grandmother left him, can get by without working. Leto, who doesn’t know either Basso or Botón, nor has he ever been to that house, sees two guys picking at black earth, backlit by the falling sun at the end of a mild winter, in the back of a patio whose image comes, without his realizing, from two or three different ranches he’s visited, in Colastiné and Rincón, since he moved from Rosario. And the spot where that ranch sits, as the name Colastiné includes a physical area that extends beyond his experience, is an approximate point, more or less imagined, which Leto places, without knowing or even asking himself why, in a border region between his experience and the many purely imaginary fragments associated with the word Colastiné, and which he has never seen.