The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. Juan José Saer

morning, when she says that he suffered so much it’s less to remind me of that suffering than to control whether I believe her or not. And the Mathematician, observing him without looking, instead looking straight ahead at the sidewalk, but observing him nonetheless with the right side of his body, which is to say, the side that is almost grazing, during the walk, the left side of Leto’s body, the Mathematician, I was saying, no?, at the same time, although it is always, as I was saying just now, the same, thinks: He wasn’t invited.

      Leto surfaces as though from under water. He has been thinking, remembering his mother, the death of his father, and Lopecito, submerging himself for a few seconds in those thoughts and memories as though into a subterranean canal parallel to the spring air, and in emerging, in surfacing, he finds himself with this good-looking blonde guy, some twenty-seven years old, dressed completely in white, who Tomatis calls the Mathematician, who is just back from Europe and is out to distribute the press release for the Chemical Engineering Students Association to the papers, who has just, also, a few seconds ago, asked him if he was at Washington’s birthday party, and as he, with a shake of his head, has responded no, he now fears that the other, who seems to be observing him, is observing him not with contempt, but with disbelief and something like pity. In the first place, they wouldn’t need to invite me. I could have gone if I had wanted, without needing an invitation. But in any case, I wouldn’t have wanted an invitation because it would have meant that they don’t consider me close enough that it would be a given that I would have to go. But, given that, I have to submit to the facts: I wasn’t invited.

      —I couldn’t make it either. That day we were visiting factories in Frankfurt. I couldn’t hop a jet from Frankfurt because they don’t have direct flights to Rincón, says the Mathematician. But I got the full version, a fresh, subtitled, technicolor copy.

      Maintaining his lighthearted façade, he squeezes the pipe a bit more with this teeth, compelled by a memory that returns, suddenly, and which still stings him, one of those memories or emotions about which he likes to say, with an ironic wrinkling of his nose, if they aren’t measurable, at least with our current understanding, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why they couldn’t enter into some general theory or some structure that’s subject to mathematical formulae one of these days.

      —You don’t say, he hears Leto say.

      —Yes, yes, I heard all about it, he hears himself say in turn.

      The memory is like a photograph or a shadowy image stamped into the inside of his head, and the emotions and feelings of humiliation and rage form several black-bordered, jagged holes, as if the image had been punctured at many points of its surface with the ember of a cigarette. Three or four years earlier, a poet from Buenos Aires came to the city to give a conference. The Mathematician, who had been corresponding with him for six or seven months regarding a problem of versification, waited anxiously for his arrival, and had annotated a list of discussion points which, after the conference, he hoped to address in order over dinner with the poet. Shortly before the end of the debate that followed the conference, the Mathematician had left to get the car from his father; he hadn’t been able to loan it to the Mathematician earlier because he didn’t get back from Tostado until 9:00. His father was a little late, and when the Mathematician returned with the car to the lecture hall, it was closed. A guard told him that the lecturer had left with four or five of the organizers to a party, or to eat something—basically he wasn’t sure where. The Mathematician felt the first bolt of rage in that moment because, before leaving to get the car, he had taken the precaution of letting several of the organizers know about his momentary absence, asking them to wait for him, but not feeling very secure because he knew that the organizers belonged to the class of people who kidnap celebrities who come from the capital, and since he didn’t spend much time with them, because he didn’t like to move in semiofficial circles, they wouldn’t go out of their way to consider his requests. The Mathematician, when he learned of the poet’s visit, had begun working hard, for at least a month and a half, on problems of versification. His thesis was that each meter corresponded to a specific emotion and that you could devise a notational system, if you sufficiently diversified the meters whose combinations were not already too subtle, which only applied to the metric use of pure sounds, for the poem to transmit the desired emotions. The Mathematician was probably only twenty-three at the time; he considered himself a simple theoretician and would have liked the poet, who was twenty years older and had acquired a great reputation, to apply his theories, like the geologist who forms a hypothesis about the composition of the lunar surface and sends an astronaut to the moon to verify it. The Mathematician left the conference hall, already partially blinded by rage, and began looking for the poet. He started crisscrossing the city in his father’s car, from one end to the other: he would leave the engine running in front of a restaurant, in front of a bar, would get out to look for them, the poet and the group of organizers, and when he didn’t find them would move on to the next bar and repeat the same routine; he tried to disguise his rage behind a calm and mundane façade, passing his indifferent gaze over the lively tables as if he was looking for an empty one or was simply curious. That he was able to maintain his elegance and indifferent façade is admirable because with every passing minute his fury and indignation multiplied. He started to feel like the inside of his head was boiling. After having fruitlessly visited every open restaurant, he went into a bar, asked for a beer, the phone book, and a fistful of coins and began calling the homes of the organizers, hoping that they were at one of their houses or that someone in their family knew where the hell they had gone. But no one knew anything or, if they did know, did not seem inclined to tell him. The Mathematician sensed the unmistakable echoes of some sort of instruction or collusion in their casual responses. Everyone knew, the whole city knew, and, intentionally, concealed it. After all those useless rounds, he started driving the streets at random, hoping to come across the poet and his retinue, and more than once, because of false alarms, he found himself chasing some car that seemed to belong to one of the organizers at full speed or accosting a startled group of people on a dark street. The Fourteen Points Toward All Future Meter, which he had taken the trouble to elaborate and type out over the preceding weeks, were just then nothing more than a sheet folded in fourths, lost in one of the compartments of his wallet at the bottom of the interior pocket of his coat. He had lost all subjectivity and had become a purely external being who, no longer reasoning or applying any agency to reality, was instead the passive object of a fixed system that diverted him from his self in the same way that the wind diverts the ping pong ball from its trajectory despite the force and accuracy of the player’s shot. Finally, in one of his comings and goings down the dark streets, down the illuminated avenues, after passing the same places for the hundredth time, he remembered that, before the conference, one of the organizers, speaking to another, had mentioned a tennis club where his—the Mathematician’s—brother the lawyer was a member, but that he, from disdain for the bloodlust bourgeoisie, as he liked, not without reason, to call them, had not joined. A guard stopped him at the entrance and forced him to wait. The Mathematician stood at the gate to the darkened and deserted tennis courts, beyond which he could see, behind a stand of pines, the illuminated windows of the buildings. A yellow rectangle, taller and wider than the windows, formed in the darkness, behind the pines, when the poet, followed by the guard, opened the door to the facilities and approached the entrance gate, crossing the darkness in the pines and the reddish half-light reflected off the clay-covered surface of the tennis courts. He was eating a chicken thigh as he came, and his free hand must have been covered in grease, judging by the way he kept it stiff and far from his body, the fingers straight and separated, so as to not stain his pants. The Mathematician thought he was coming to meet him and bring him to the dinner where, for a while, they could discuss the Fourteen Points, and so he waited with an understanding and relieved smile, but in reality the poet was coming to explain that it had been impossible to wait for him, that the dinner was very boring though there was nothing for it but to stay to the end and that maybe later, in some bar, when he had unburdened himself of the group, they might be able to have a drink and, in his words, bring into the world, together, the highly anticipated definitive text on the theory of versification. Before the Mathematician could offer an objection, the poet had already disappeared, after offering the name of a bar through a mouth full of chicken, skirting the tennis courts with a sure step, erasing himself for a moment under the black mass of the pines, his silhouette