The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. Juan José Saer

in the same way that, periodically, in spite of the variations and supplements, sooner or later the same names reappear in the memory of the Mathematician, who makes them sound to Leto’s ears as though they came from an instrument: La Baule, even though it was the middle of summer the sea was frigid; Prague, a great portion of Kafka’s work makes sense when you get there; Bruges, they painted what they saw; Paris, an unexpected rainstorm. Suddenly the Mathematician, who is walking closest to the wall, jumps sideways, pushing aside Leto who, staggering, stumbles a little but keeps walking: as they arrived at the corner, the Mathematician, concentrating on his story, was startled to see appear, abruptly, although always maintaining his placid and undulating pedaling, the kid on the bicycle who, in the time it took them to walk to the corner, has gone around the block. A furious, somewhat ostentatious silence interrupts, after the scare, the chain of recollections from the Mathematician, who stops and turns and sees move away, on the gray sidewalk, under the trees, the slow bicycle with its metallic, discrete, and complicated sounds. Leto, who has kept walking, gains a few steps on him and stops to wait, just beyond the oblique border of the shade of the houses. The Mathematician reaches him, smiling and shaking his head. If he’d run you over, says Leto, he’d have stained your pants.

      —I’d kick him to pieces, says the Mathematician, showing with his playful tone that there’s no way he would. He seems less like a flesh and bone person than one of those archetypes you see on billboards, those for whom every contingency inherent to humanity has disappeared. His physical appearance, perfected by his European tan and the whiteness of his clothing, is nothing but the consequence of his biographical perfections: in spite of having been a star on the university’s rugby club, he has, as Tomatis puts it, something slightly more dense filling his head than usually fills up a rugby ball. Though more than a few hectares in the north of the province, near Tostado, belong to him, the Mathematician’s father, a scrupulous yrigoyenista, abhors oligarchs and soldiers and is one of the old liberal lawyers whose name appears at the bottom of the habeas corpus appeals of almost all of the political prisoners in the city, and the Mathematician, unlike his older brother, who is also a lawyer but who has accepted official posts in almost every government—the Mathematician, I was saying, no?—has not only followed the liberal tradition of his father and his maternal grandfather but also, at some point, four or five years back, was a founding member of one of the Trotskyite or socialist reform groups that, after 1955, began to proliferate. But the Mathematician is a thinker and not an activist, a scrutinizer, not an organizer, and not a practician but a theoretician. He likes treatises more than gatherings and prefers futurist manifestos to the builders of the future. His engineering studies are, no doubt, the result of some familial strategy aimed at confronting, with the corresponding diploma, the national development that will one day obligate the heirs to move from passive ownership of the land to industrial investment. They can be as liberal as you want, Tomatis likes to say, malevolently, but they don’t do anything without a motive. The Mathematician, who possibly intuits skepticism or mistrust in Tomatis’s wit, continues impassively in the role he’s assigned himself: the supplier—without, in reality, it ever having been lost since no one noted its absence—of a logical rigor and an exactitude in information that, because of his insistence, makes him annoying to argue with. Actually what Tomatis faults the Mathematician for is his literalness. If, for example, in the middle of a discussion Tomatis cites a German philosopher, by the following week the Mathematician has read all of his work, and he comes back with the intention of returning to the point where the discussion left off the week before. Tomatis has cited this philosopher offhandedly, not because he considers wasting your youth and frying your eyelashes reading his treatises essential, but he is too vain to sidestep the argument. Because of his credulity, the Mathematician is more informed than the rest of them, since all it takes is hearing someone mention an author for him to read their complete works and reappear fifteen days later, refreshed and calm, to have a conversation about them. To be fair, there isn’t much to fault him for, thinks Leto. Because he isn’t even someone who wants to win an argument at any cost; he is kind, modest, and generous. Except, thinks Leto, except when he resorts, without being aware of it, I’m sure, to his magnificent axioms, postulates, and definitions. Then he starts acting like the Werewolf during a full moon, or Jack the Ripper in the company of hookers.

      While they cross, the Mathematician condescends to re-list, without much conviction, the names that come with fixed and simplified expressions and memories glued to the back: Rome, he imagined it differently; Vienna, all the locals seem to believe in terminal analysis; Florence, they also painted what they saw; Avignon, a murderous heat; Geneva, the paved barnyard; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum. They leave behind the intersection, the cable guardrail, the angled sun, and enter the cool shade of the next block. An old man is opening the shutters of a window on the ground floor. The Mathematician who, in an abrupt way, cut off his story a few seconds before, greets him with a tilt of the head and continues walking, pensively. In spite of the difference in height, Leto and the Mathematician walk at the same pace, neither slow nor fast, so well coordinated that it is impossible to tell if the Mathematician is reducing the length of his strides to match them with Leto’s steps or if, on the contrary, Leto’s skinnier and shorter legs are accommodating, without visible effort, the step of the rugby-man who’s so adept at the scientia recte judicandi. For a few meters, they don’t seem to know what to talk about. We know what was said above, no?—that the Mathematician, fearing that excessive enthusiasm for his European tour will disqualify him somewhat among those who stayed behind, shares his memories reticently. And yet, in the anxiety of those who have been away and fear that reality has been more intense in their absence, he has been holding, since he met up with Leto, the question he does not dare to formulate, so as not to reveal an excessive interest, just like a jealous person who looks for the opportune moment to begin his interrogation by dissembling with a series of disinterested and banal questions. Meanwhile, Leto is thinking: I’ll need to ask Lopecito if he believed it. Still, he’s too meticulous to reject the idea flat out. He has been, for twenty-five years, the ham in the sandwich. And, ever since he died, things have only gotten worse. He could favor mother’s argument, though even then she wouldn’t be sure to get what she expected without overcommitting herself since they played house, but if she accepts it deep down, the way she does publicly, she risks the supposedly incurable patient laughing at her from the other side.

      Observing him, discreetly and somewhat shyly, the Mathematician detects Leto’s withdrawn expression and takes the opportunity to say: And around here, how was it all this time? biting the unlit pipe so hard that, instead of speaking, he sputters the question through his clenched teeth and tongue which, inhibited, wraps around the pipe stem and makes it vibrate against the row of teeth. The Mathematician ignores the fact that Leto has more than enough reasons, though he has been around, to feel much more excluded from the bursts of passion that reality might arbitrarily dispense among the circles he frequents: he, to begin with, has only lived in the city a few months and is, therefore, a mere neophyte, a newcomer, and, because he is only twenty-one, is much younger than several of the youngest; he almost never joins a discussion, and if he is invited anywhere it’s only as an appendix to Tomatis; he’s the only other source of income for a widowed mother, and has to work several account books to support her, and something inside him, surely, like a woodworm in furniture, pre-emptively hollows out any possible passion he may have, which somewhat explains his absences and silences—though he would like it, true enough, if once in a while, something were possible. Leto, allowing a quantity of smoke to spill out through his half-opened lips, from which he has just withdrawn, with careful fingers, the cigarette, responds: he has hardly seen anyone; he rarely goes out; he has almost nothing to report from these past three months.

      Imagine a gambler who, for some time, has held the card that will let him win the game but which he cannot play for many rounds because none of the other players have given him an opportunity to do so. Round after round the gambler throws down useless, inconsequential cards that have no influence on the course of the game until, suddenly, the combination he needs appears on the table, allowing him to throw down, euphorically and decisively, the winning card. Leto’s timid confession has put the Mathematician in this dominant position.

      —What? he says. Weren’t you at Washington’s birthday party?

      Leto