Nula’s cell phone, from the bottom of his pocket, announces a call. Lost in thought, he only hears it after the third ring, and, passing the flashlight to his other hand—he only turns it on now when passing cars force them onto the shoulder—he takes it from his pocket and brings it to his ear. Addressing himself to the person on the phone, who calls from some unspecified place, but at the same time to Gutiérrez, who walks beside him silently in the darkness, Nula shouts:
—Where am I, you say? I’m on the river road, north of Rincón, soaked to the bone under a toy umbrella. It’s raining buckets and for the last three hours I’ve been with a client who decided to tour the landmarks of his far-off youth. Because everyone knows that when it comes to the Amigos del Vino, as the sales manager taught us during the practicum seminar, the customer is always right. Is everything set for tomorrow, both at the same time as today? You’re a genius, Américo. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.
Nula hangs up the phone and puts it back in his pocket. That was my boss again, he says. He’s perfectly obedient, as you can see.
—This drenching has earned you a roasted catfish, Gutiérrez says.
—Are you inviting me over for dinner? Nula says. I accept, if I can bring the wine.
—Why not? An astonishing country, where everything is free, Gutiérrez says.
But it is written that tonight they won’t eat together. A light is on in the house when they arrive, and a compact black car is parked next to Nula’s green station wagon. Nula turns on the flashlight and casts the beam over the cars, the front of the house, the trees in the side courtyard, and finally shuts it off.
—A visitor, Gutiérrez says, and pushes open the gate, the same white gate that, Nula recalls, Gutiérrez locked before they started their hike along the river.
—Come in, I’ll introduce you, Gutiérrez says.
—Is it family? Nula says, following obediently, feeling his heartbeat accelerate and trying, simultaneously, to keep his voice steady when he speaks, in such a high-pitched tone that he’s forced to cough in the middle of the sentence in order to recover his usual gravity. But Gutiérrez, who moves toward the door, closing the umbrella, doesn’t seem to hear him.
—Come in, he says again, even friendlier than before. He’s about to put the key in the lock when the door opens from the inside, so suddenly that Nula jumps, an involuntary, barely audible exclamation escaping from his mouth. But Lucía, smiling, is already standing in the illuminated, rectangular doorway, and, receiving Gutiérrez, gives him a quick, noisy kiss on the cheek. Gutiérrez steps aside, and, with a slightly mysterious half-smile that Nula, stupefied by his emotions, tries unsuccessfully to interpret, assumes the need to offer them an utterly conventional introduction.
—Do you know each other? Mr. Anoch, enologist and philosopher—but which comes first? Lucía Calcagno.
Nula is about to stammer something, but Lucía preempts him.
—No, she says, still smiling, and offers her hand.
No, Nula thinks, as he holds out his own. She said no.
—Good to meet you, he says, his voice breaking. They shake hands two or three times and then let go.
—I had some stuff to do in the city and when I was on my way back to Paraná it occurred to me to come say hi.
—Great idea, Gutiérrez says, shaking the plastic bag. There’s two catfish here begging for the oven. Come in, come in, he says to Nula again.
Nula stands frozen in the doorway.
—No, thank you, I’ll leave you to your family, he says, thinking, constantly, and evermore intensely, as they say, She said no. Another time. Sunday.
After the door closes behind him and he starts to walk toward his car through the rainy darkness, Nula shakes his head in disbelief. She said no, he thinks, and a dry, sarcastic, inward laugh escapes his lips. The headlights, when he turns them on, illuminate the entire facade of the house, the white wooden gate, the white walls, the space that separates the gate from the front door, the trees growing alongside the house, but the image through the windshield, pearled across its surface by droplets of rain, is disintegrated and luminous. The white surfaces, even the white, lacquered wood bars of the gate, seem paradoxically more irregular, and the contours of things more uncertain, lines seemingly drawn by a seismograph, and the lights from the house, or from the headlights bouncing off the white gate, refract in each of the drops stuck to the windshield, a static flicker that the wiper blades, after he starts the engine, take several passes to erase, a pointless exercise, in any case, since after each pass, new drops fall, luminous, from the black heights of the countryside and cover the glass again. He puts the car in reverse, then goes forward, then reverses again, and finally starts down the sandy path toward the paved road. The glimmer disappears, only to reappear each time the headlights of an approaching car reflect off the drops that, despite the ceaseless arcs traced by the wiper blades, their trajectory accompanied by the same resonant sweep, accumulate repeatedly against the glass. Holding the wheel with one hand, Nula takes the cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his camper, moves the pack to the hand resting on the upper portion of the steering wheel, takes out a cigarette, and, after putting it between his teeth and lighting it and releasing a thin cloud of smoke, returns the cigarettes and lighter to the camper pocket. (He wasn’t wrong when he thought he’d be smoking a lot today.) He shifts slightly in his seat to find a comfortable position, grabs the wheel in both hands, and accelerates slightly by applying unconscious pressure to the gas pedal with his foot. With another short, sarcastic laugh, which makes the cigarette quiver, shaking his head back and forth, he mutters, She said no! She said no! He laughs again, and though he thinks he gets the complexity of the situation—he doesn’t realize yet that the situation might be much more complicated than he imagines—there are, undoubtedly, traces of bitterness in the sarcasm.
The enormous hypermarket complex appears to his left, its eight theatres, its parking lot, its coffee shops, its cafeteria, and its restaurant all seemingly deserted despite the grandiose display of lights and colors hovering in the darkness of the countryside. The lights shine off the wet bodywork of the fifteen or twenty cars scattered around the parking lot, none of them near the main entrance. A year before, the land that is now occupied by the hypermarket was just a swamp in the middle of an empty floodplain—constantly under water, even when it was dry everywhere else—between La Guardia, where the road splits toward Paraná, and the branch of the river from which the city rises. Nula hesitates a few seconds, slowing down, deciding whether or not to turn into the complex; on Friday, Amigos del Vino starts a week-long promotion there, and he wants to finalize a couple of details with whomever’s in charge, but immediately he changes his mind and accelerates again. The network of lights and colors passes, then reappears for a few seconds, fragmentary, in the rear-view mirror before it disappears completely. Now the road widens into four lanes, and is lit up by tall, downward-curving poles projecting onto the reflective asphalt. The city lights appear overhead, to the right the straight line of lamps on the waterfront, and, to the left, less regularly, the lights on the port, on the avenues converging toward the river, on the buildings of various heights that stand out from the rest, on the regatta club. The car reaches the bridge. It’s so brightly lit that the city, despite its multiplicity of lights, appears dark on the other side. She said no, Nula says again, and, to underscore his disbelief, shakes his head in such a way that the cigarette, which he hasn’t taken from his lips since lighting it, and which he’s consumed a good portion of by now, vibrates in the air, disturbed by the words he says, by the movement of his lips as he shapes them, and by the negative sign, turning his head from left to right and right to left, several times, in the darkness, that expresses his at once ironic and confused bitterness. The combination of these movements causes the smoke that rises from the lit end of the cigarette and from his lungs, though his nose and mouth, to form a turbulent cloud between Nula’s face and the windshield,