The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. Juan José Saer
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in the city center, he had administered, through his relationships downtown, as he liked to say, her late husband’s pension, and would come to visit them from Rosario every fifteen days, sleeping in a hotel so it would be clear to everyone that they wouldn’t soil the memory of a loved one, likewise feeling enough devotion to Isabel to accept, despite representing in the eyes of the world the voice of moderation, each of her points of view, her discrete extravagance, her constant struggle to deny the obvious, her repeated interpretations among which the theory of an incurable illness isn’t even, Leto thinks as he reaches the corner, the least bit preposterous.
The corner, where the two lines of cars driving on San Martín in both directions slow down, is particular in this way: because the cross street runs east to west, the shade of the row of houses disappears, and as there is nothing to intercept the rays of the sun shining above the street, the street and sidewalk are now filled with light, so as to make Leto’s shadow, which has appeared in a sudden way, only slightly shorter than his body, project itself onto the gray pavement and fall to the west. When Leto is about to step off the gray sidewalk into the cobbled street, his shadow is broken by the cable guardrail and continues to be projected onto the even cobblestones of the street. The shadow moves forward, slightly oblique to the body, breaks again at the cable guardrail on the opposite sidewalk and when Leto’s shoes touch the opposite pavement, continues to slide across the sidewalk until Leto enters the shade of the row of houses and his own shadow disappears. The square is deserted—not abandoned, but deserted—empty, without the presence of people (apart from Leto) who, like him, are also the center of a horizon that, as they move, moves with them. After walking a few meters under the trees, he sees appear, suddenly, on the next corner, a boy on a bicycle who has turned the corner of the cross street, advancing toward him on the sidewalk. It proceeds with that kind of undulation bicycles have when they are not moving very quickly, and whose equilibrium, which the cyclist recovers with every pedal stroke, is not the principal consequence but the transient and fragile phase of a more ample and more complete movement. The cyclist, no more than nine or ten years old, his legs barely able to reach the pedals when they are at the lowest point of their circular path, moves, in spite of his slowness, much more quickly than Leto, whose pace, neither slow nor fast, has not varied since he crossed the boulevard and began walking down San Martín. As he approaches—his velocity, while constant, is increased by Leto’s opposite movement—Leto can hear, each time more clearly, the complex sounds issuing from the bicycle, metallic squeaking, the hum of rubber against the pavement, the stretching and creaking of leather, pedals, spokes, cables in an invariable sequence that repeats periodically because of the regularity of the movement. The bicycle passes between Leto and the row of houses, and the series of sounds, which had reached, arriving next to Leto, its maximum intensity, begins to diminish behind him until finally it is no longer heard. Leto does not even turn and, strictly speaking—as they say, no?—they have barely seen each other, moving in opposite directions and each taking his own horizon with him.
When he hears the second whistle, Leto realizes that, despite his distraction, he had also heard the first, and turns around. The thick arms, slightly elevated from the body, are buoyed in the air, and the head, which thinks itself elegant, and which certainly is, bobs a little, now that the Mathematician, in the stooped shoulders moving several meters ahead of him, has recognized Leto and begun to whistle so he’ll stop and wait for him. At the moment he recognizes him, Leto thinks: If he has just turned the corner, which is probably the case, since he lives on that street, he should have just passed the bicycle since, because it’s out of sight, the cyclist must also have turned the corner. The Mathematician, a head taller than him, arrives and holds out his hand. What’s up? he says. Without looking him in the eye, Leto responds vaguely. Well, he says, we’re walking along.
The Mathematician lets a hesitant smile linger. To Leto, his white moccasins, like his tan, seem premature, but the Mathematician knows that he just returned from Europe, where he spent three months touring factories, beaches, museums, and monuments with the annual Chemical Engineering alumni group. They’re out of control since they saw La Dolce Vita, he heard Tomatis say, with distracted disdain, the week before. And it was Tomatis, meanwhile, or so Leto heard him tell someone, who began calling him the Mathematician. He’s really not a bad guy, he often says, kind of a snob at worst, but, frankly, I don’t know what kind of sick satisfaction he gets from the physical sciences. Haven’t you noticed his tone when he talks to you about relativity theory? Because of his height he already has a tendency to look down on the world, but I’m just saying maybe it’s not our fault that multiplying the mass of a body with the speed of light squared equals the energy needed for the complete disintegration of that body? For a few seconds, the two young men, one tanned, blonde, tall, muscular, and handsome, dressed completely in white, including the moccasins he is wearing, sock-less, the other thinner, wearing glasses, with thick brown, well-combed hair, whose clothes are from first glance cheaper than the other’s, fifty centimeters apart, they remain silent, without animosity but without much to say either, each of them lost in his own thoughts, an internal swamp that stands in sharp contrast to the bright exterior, from which it was costing them an indescribable effort to emerge and where, because of the tendency to perceive the foreign with a rose tint, as they say, they simultaneously think that other would never be trapped. Without noticing, Leto, who, not knowing what to do, reaches his hand into his shirt pocket to remove the cigarettes, thinks that, for some reason, he is excluded from many of the worlds the Mathematician frequents, that the Mathematician is a species of astral being who belongs to a galaxy where everything is precise and luminous and that he, on the other hand, slogs through a viscous and darkened zone, which he is seldom able to leave, while the Mathematician, in spite of his elegant head, which is full of recent and colorful memories of Vienna, Amsterdam, Cannes, Málaga, and Spoleto, feels like he has been floating in the stratosphere for three months and that Leto, Tomatis, Barco, the Garay twins, and everyone else has taken advantage of his absence to live it up in the city. Finally, and concentrating on the act of opening his pack of cigarettes, in order not to be obligated to raise his head, Leo murmurs: And Europe, how was it?
—I hate resorting to a platitude, says the Mathematician offhandedly, but she’s a decadent old madam.
Leto does not suspect that, beneath the apparent disinterest and the generous estimation of those who have not traveled, the Mathematician fears that an over-admiring appreciation will disqualify him. And he hears him add: Just now, I’m off to distribute the press release from the Association to the papers. Goes without saying that whorehouses don’t figure in the expense report. Without realizing that the Mathematician is holding his unlit pipe by the stem, in his right hand, which is hanging against the seam of his pants, and that because of this, with a wave of his free hand, he rejects his offer, Leto, after tapping the bottom of the cigarette pack to remove three or four from the opening he has made in the top edge, holds out the pack toward the Mathematician, offering him one. So that the reason for his rejection is clear, the Mathematician brings the pipe to his mouth and holds it pressed between his ultra-white and even teeth. To stay so tan and so healthy, thinks Leto, he probably went rowing the day after he got back. While Leto lights the cigarette, the Mathematician, taking advantage of his distraction, induces him, by taking a few steps himself, to keep walking. They continue—or they pass—thanks to the faculty they possess, who knows why, from one point to another in space, gaining ground, so to speak, although the points between those they cross are all, with the two of them between, in each of the points, and in all of them at once, in the same place. No, seriously though, says the Mathematician, it’s an experience one should have—and what he calls experience are those memories that, although fresh and colorful, are no more accessible to himself than a packet of postcards of Amsterdam, of Vienna, of Capri, of Cadaqués, of San Gimignano. Siena is a rosy mirage, floating in the warm fog of the afternoon; Paris, an unexpected rainstorm; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum. While he listens, Leto puts images to the names that echo in the warm morning, and these images, which he forms with assorted memories that have been rescued from disparate experiences and have no real connection to the names he hears, are neither more nor less pertinent or relevant than the Mathematician’s memories, which are unable to render the thing more accessible even when they come from what the Mathematician could call his experience. The names of