—Mr. Anoch, he says, wine merchant. Doctor Sergio Escalante, attorney.
The overly formal manner of the introduction, in particular the use of their surnames and professions, underscored by his sober tone, suggests to the two men that Gutiérrez’s regard for their persons goes well beyond these superficial details—antithetically, in fact, to these social characteristics—in the quarter of authenticity and courage, of hard-fought individuality, of nerve, of introspection, and of a fierce marginality. Without much emotion, both Nula and Escalante nod their heads, accompanying the movement with a brief and rather conventional smile to show that they’ve discerned, approvingly, the irony of the introduction. When he smiles, Escalante reveals an incomplete set of teeth almost at brown as the skin on his face, and, realizing this, he raises a hand to his lips. The teeth must have been missing for a while, because the gesture seems automatic, and its slight delay could be due to his familiarity with the other players, in whose frequent company he thinks it superfluous—his teeth are no longer a secret to them—but now a reflexive modesty has induced him to conceal his mouth, too late in any case, though Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to have given the matter even the slightest importance.
As the other players resume the game, Escalante starts walking toward the bar, and Gutiérrez follows, but Nula is delayed by a survey of the damages the walk has caused to what he rightly considers a kind of uniform: the loafers (the left one in particular), as well as the cuffs of his pants, are covered in yellow mud, and a few splatters of this watery substance, which have already begun to dry, managed to reach his fly and even the front of the white pullover, two circles with a tortured circumference and a dense center, like a pair of symbolic bellybuttons drawn on the white material for some cryptic, supernatural purpose. And on the red camper—like on his pant legs—some damp stains around the shoulders illustrate that the shelter offered by Gutiérrez’s multicolored umbrella has been less than perfect. But Nula, after assessing the results of the walk, shakes his head with a smile that, for some reason, unknown even to himself, expresses less annoyance than satisfaction, and, with a few decisive steps, joins the others at the bar.
—What’ll you have? Escalante says.
Gutiérrez, apparently uncertain, slowly inspects the shelves. The barman, who has left the towel and the glass he was drying on the table, waits, with a calm expression, neither impatient nor servile, for Gutiérrez to decide.
—A vermouth with bitters and soda, on ice, he says finally.
Escalante asks Nula with his eyes.
—The same, Nula tells the man at the bar.
—Orange for me, Escalante says.
As the barman starts to make their order, Nula watches the two men. They’ve fallen silent, and don’t seem in a hurry to talk. Finally, without a hint of reproach, Escalante says:
—You left so suddenly. Swallowed up by the earth.
—I was in Buenos Aires for a while, and then I crossed the pond, Gutiérrez says.
Escalante shakes his head thoughtfully. He’s taller than Gutiérrez, but his extreme thinness, and possibly his seniority, make him look foreshortened in comparison. With his hawk-like nose, his brown skin, his prominent Adam’s apple, and his dark eyes that despite being evasive (due to some ocular handicap, perhaps) gleam when they settle on something, a person, animal, or object, the cruel epithet vulture that people assign to lawyers seems even more apt to him, not to mention the indifference he projects for things of this world, and the self-control—with the exception of the gesture to hide his teeth, a residual concession to aesthetic considerations—so internalized by now that it seems like his natural state, a false cloak against everything that erodes us, ceaselessly, day after day, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die.
—You did the right thing, not saying goodbye to anyone, Escalante says. And Marcos, have you seen him?
—He was the one who told me you lived in Rincón, as far as anyone could tell, Gutiérrez says.
—I used to run into him at the courthouse. But then he got into politics and I retired. I haven’t seen him for years.
—Well, I came to invite you over on Sunday, Gutiérrez says. You can see him there.
Escalante bursts out laughing, and raises his hand to cover his devastated teeth.
—At Doctor Russo’s house? he says. It’s haunted. They say the doctor’s ghost comes back from hell just to rob the guests.
—He’s not in hell, Nula says. Worse, actually—he’s in Miami.
—Sorry, Gutiérrez says. But I’m out of touch with the local mythology.
—It doesn’t matter, Escalante says. So you’re inviting me over? Will many people be there?
—A mixed bag, Gutiérrez says. But you and the Rosembergs are my guests of honor. The rest—forgive me, Mr. Anoch—comprise the glamorous court I’ve assembled to receive my old friends. The only one missing will be Chiche, but as our young friend would say, El Chiche deserved something better than Miami, and we’d have to fetch him ourselves from the inferno to get him to come.
Escalante’s eyes, gleaming ironically under his eyebrows, arched and gathered around his nose, lock on Gutiérrez’s.
—Did you know, he says, that I’ve been sleeping with my maid since she was thirteen and I was forty?
Gutiérrez, slow to find the appropriate response, puckers his lips into an awkward smile.
—I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, he says finally. Always the good pastor.
Nula watches them curiously. Since the first words they exchanged, and possibly to conceal their emotions, their demeanor has been remote and caustic, but to Nula it seems that rather than express the reticence of alert, disillusioned maturity, that style has something juvenile about it, adolescent even, as though something had been suspended in each of them over the thirty years apart that was automatically put in motion again at their first meeting. Calculating the difference in their ages—when Gutiérrez, without telling anyone, and without a trace, left the city, he still hadn’t been born—Nula experiences the vaguely disorienting feeling that he’s unwittingly crossed an invisible border, and that he’s now moving through the territory of the past, perceiving with his own senses a pre-empirical limbo that preceded his birth. He feels like he’s crossed into a space where nothing is real, only represented, like some character in the movies who, during a scene that takes place in a false airport, pretends to have just disembarked from a plane that carried him from a distant country, and he speaks of that country as though he’d really just come from there, but his words are empty of experience, they’re just simulacra authored by someone else, and when they’re spoken, to describe things that never happened, as interesting as these things might be, they must sound bewildering and strange to the actor. With their lightly evoked juvenile irony, the two older men also seem to have been spirited away, and now float in that parallel universe in which, during their first meeting after a prolonged separation, their lives seem to have paused years and years earlier in the other’s imagination. The empirical decades that have passed while they were apart are surely an impenetrable and reciprocal mystery that—while they might spend the rest of their lives elaborating them for each other—they’ll only manage to recover as a series of vague, irregular fragments. It occurs to Nula that, for now at least, those decades don’t interest them: all they seem to want is to renew the interrupted course of shared experience that time, distance, and the temporarily-overpowered inconstancy of their respective lives had steered into the limbo where for now, exchanging measured, ironic lines that