The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. Juan José Saer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ assumed an attitude of exaggerated jauntiness, without allowing the least bit of reproach to show in his face, to the point that, for some months, his greatest preoccupation was not to fundamentally interrogate himself about what had happened, but to avoid at all cost anyone noticing. And it worked. That burning, which for weeks had transformed his insides into an open wound and that, until it scarred, had been the complete opposite of the clean, tranquil, and well-proportioned external self that proffered smiling, precise statements—that kind of burn, I was saying, no?—which, bearing in mind the insignificance of the spark that started it, seemed to have been generated spontaneously, had gone unnoticed, just like the pain of the memory, to the rest of the world. And he, secretly, to himself, when he measured it from a distance, referred to those days, ironically, and particularly, as The Incident.

      —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.

      But soon enough, the Mathematician says, the others began to arrive: the Garay twins, who had wanted to use their house in Rincón but weren’t able to at the last minute because their mother had decided to fumigate that week, and Cuello, the writer. Cuello, like a neck? says Leto. Cuello, neck, that’s right. The Centaur, Cuello the Centaur, says the Mathematician. The Centaur? repeats Leto, intrigued. The Mathematician starts laughing. Yeah. The Centaur. Because he’s half man, half beast. Leto laughs too, shaking his head. The laughter, expelled by human throats and which, at the same time, sparks in human eyes, spreads to the morning air outside. A pedestrian, passing them, a man in shirtsleeves carrying a portfolio under his arm, a chubby and all but bald forty-something, laughs too, without their noticing, infected by the burst of sudden laughter he has just heard. And the Mathematician continues: Cuello had come early, according to Botón (who had heard it from El Gato at Fine Arts) in case Noca, a fisherman, who was supposed to bring a load of catfish and perch, failed at the last minute, in which case, since he worked at the Butcher’s Co-op, he—Cuello, no?—would be able to get some leftover steaks in a pinch. But Noca did not fail; almost at the same moment as Cuello, but coming from the coast and not the city, he’d arrived with two baskets full of perch and catfish which, after having caught, he’d taken the trouble to clean and gut in the river water. Judging by how the Mathematician tells it, Botón reported Noca’s arrival in a manner resembling a Greek chorus. But as he relays it, the Mathematician, applying a rigorous protocol, dismantles his informant’s version: Botón, a gringo, assumes a country style whenever he feels like it; he has an excessive taste for the barbarous; the real litmus test is his patent inability to dance a single step of the local folk dances, neither the rasguido doble nor the chamarrita. He knows Noca: instead of going to fish himself, he spends the day at the disco; he buys his catch from the real fishermen and resells them to the locals. He’s going to end up a fruit wholesaler. Still, Botón’s version, despite the Mathematician’s categorical yet disinterested sociological objections, is the one Leto adopts and retains: the mythic Noca, hunting in the savage river, with timeless skill, for the last perch, prevails despite the collective displacement caused by the social mobility that produces incremental urbanization in the coastal region. But for the Mathematician, were he to notice, Leto’s reticence would be neither here nor there: in reality, just as no art critic would think to disparage a portrait by asserting that the pictured model is ugly, or old, or a man or woman, and instead would attack the painter’s technique, the Mathematician couldn’t give two shits about the object Noca in its objective objectivity, he says, speaking poorly and in haste, but not so the description made by Botón, composed, according to the Mathematician, of stereotypical apriorisms and not of real empirical data. Pure radiotelephonic material, says the Mathematician.

      Leto doesn’t laugh now. The word radiotelephonic carries, as though pasted to its reverse side, the image of his father: but sadness isn’t what has erased the smile from his face, but rather that somewhat mechanical gravity we assume when, with its insistent call, a thought or memory lures us toward the internal. For a few seconds, the Mathematician’s narration, intense and highly detailed, becomes, little by little, loose words, sound without meaning, a distant murmur, as if, despite the identical rhythm of their walk and of their almost grazing arms, they are walking in dissociate spaces, proving how much a memory can separate two people until, finally, the call dissipates, not without leaving a vague pit inside him, like a stain on a white wall whose source you ignore, and eventually Leto smiles and becomes attentive again, and the words of the Mathematician who, as I was saying, no?, is telling Leto about Washington Noriega’s birthday, emerge from the horizon of sound and continue filling his head with not always adequate images. And the twins . . . says the Mathematician. They leave the sidewalk; a car stops at the corner, waiting to turn off San Martín; they hesitate, move around it, cross the intersection, which unlike the previous ones is paved and not cobblestone, and reach the opposite corner. They leave behind the sunlit street and continue under the shade of the trees. Since stepping into the street the Mathematician has been quiet, postponing what he was about to say and assuming a vigilant expression at seeing the car approach, an air of ostentatious hesitance when the car, stopping at the corner, blocks their path, and when they leave the car behind his hesitant air gives way to a distracted and reproachful shake of the head, which stops when they reach the opposite sidewalk. The Garay twins, Leto goes on thinking. The twins, continues the Mathematician when they enter the shade, had gotten a hose to install a keg of import. In the hypothetical courtyard, situated in a fantastical place, the human figures, simplified by Leto’s imagination, disperse and scatter, active, outlined against the twilight: the Centaur, Basso’s wife and their girls, Botón and Basso picking vegetables at the back, the twins installing, at the door to the kitchen, the keg, covering the hose with ice, and Noca’s carriage leaving for the coast by a sandy road that Leto and Barco СКАЧАТЬ