—Carlitos, she says, where did you get this chair?
—I inherited it from my grandmother, Tomatis says. He goes over to the statue of a man with a raincoat over his arm and slaps him on the shoulder.
—Don’t just stand there.
The guy obeys and sits down.
—You can go in the kitchen and serve yourselves what you want, Tomatis says. Gloria and la Negra are getting the food ready and Barco is eating it. He’s always hungry. Once he ate a whole cow.
—I don’t believe it, says the girl in green.
—Well, he left the horns and the tail, Tomatis says. He nods toward me. Angelito is a friend of mine from the paper. He writes the weather report. He’s responsible for this incessant rain.
The woman in the white raincoat comes in and starts taking it off. Underneath she had on a sea-blue dress and a sweater of the same color. She finished taking off her raincoat and throws it on the bed. I saw she had hair on her temples, and I wondered if she would be too hairy underneath her clothes.
—We’re eating in ten minutes, she said before going back.
—Negra, said the girl in green, I can help if you need it.
—Barco’s helping, said la Negra, and disappeared.
Even though he was sitting, the guy with glasses still had his raincoat folded over his arm. He was on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, his raincoat folded over his arm and his arm resting on his thigh. Not a single muscle on his face was moving. I thought that if you went up behind him and took out the chair, the guy would stay in the exact same position, floating there. Tomatis was still standing, holding a glass. His beard had grown some since the morning, and his cheeks gave off blue, metallic reflections. His hooked nose was shining at the bridge.
—Where were we? he says.
—That he left the horns and the tail, says the girl in green.
—So we were talking about the devil, Tomatis says.
The girl in green laughs. Tomatis leaves the glass on the table and picks up the pages of the newspaper, arranging and folding them up.
—Tomorrow’s old news, he says, and stands up, his face red from the effort it took to bend over.
Horacio Barco comes in, covering the entire doorway with his body. He’s chewing something and has a glass of wine in his hand.
—Carlos, he says. There’s no salt.
—Impossible, Tomatis says.
But Barco has already disappeared back into the kitchen. Tomatis goes out behind him.
—Are you a writer as well? says the girl in green.
—No, I say.
—What do you do, besides the paper? she says.
—Nothing. Sometimes I do some work for the police, but not often, I say.
—What kind of work? says the girl in green.
—Follow people, shakedowns, I say. Nothing much.
—How exciting, says the girl in green.
—Not really, I say. It’s boring, mostly.
—Yes, I can imagine, says the girl in green, thoughtfully. Everything ends up boring in the long run.
Tomatis comes in just as I’m raising his whiskey to take a drink from it. He waits until I’m done and then takes the glass.
—There are two bottles, in the kitchen, he says.
Then he goes up to the guy with the raincoat folded over his arm, who must have died by then.
—You can serve yourself something in the kitchen, Nicolás, he says.
The guy stands up without saying a word and leaves, taking his raincoat with him. When he disappears I turn to Tomatis:
—Is it sewn to his arm? I ask.
—What? says Tomatis.
—The raincoat, I say.
Tomatis laughs weakly and tells me to go to the kitchen if I want to drink something, and to shout when dinner is ready.
—No, I say. I don’t want to drink anything for now. With dinner, in any case.
—Ángel is a character, Tomatis says.
—So it seems, says the girl in green, looking at me with some curiosity.
I throw the cigarette on the floor and jump off the table, crushing the butt with my shoe. The floor is covered with mud stains, and from the center of the room to the kitchen door there’s a trail of puddles. The girl in green has her legs open, and her gathered dress shows half of her thighs, which are madman. I try every possible way to not look in that direction, but some crazy force makes me turn my head again and again. She doesn’t even notice. I even get the impression that she barely knows I’m there, and the questions she asks come out of her mouth mechanically, as though she has them prepared for whenever she’s with someone whose face isn’t totally familiar. The last look she gave me was the most vivid, but she grazed my face with it so lightly that it ended up annoying me.
—Your face is familiar, I say.
—Could be, she says. In this city, everyone knows everyone.
—No, I say. I have a feeling that we were talking once before.
—Could be, she says. I talk so much. And with so many people.
—But I have a feeling we were talking intimately, I say.
This has no effect. She makes an ambiguous gesture and shrugs, admitting the possibility. Tomatis stares at me. Just then the guy with the raincoat over his arm comes in holding a glass of whiskey in his free hand. He stops near the door, motionless. He has on these enormous brown shoes with rubber soles so thick that they look like orthopedics.
—Nicolás, you’ve filled your tank I see, Tomatis says cheerfully.
—We can go to the table now, Nicolás says.
So he could talk. It was pretty amazing, considering his striking resemblance to a human being. I thought it possible that he was some plastic android for whom Barco had quickly improvised a mechanism in the kitchen that made it possible for him to formulate the expression, We can go to the table now. Or that Tomatis himself was the one who responded, like a ventriloquist. The girl in green got up and left.
—Don’t rush off, Ángel, Tomatis said. Pupé doesn’t have a cunt. She was born that way. But she’s lots of fun, and useful for conversation. In any case, she doesn’t understand anything about anything.
The dinner was awful. They had opened like fifty cans of peas, boiled them with onions, and ended up with a flavorless, runny stew. I don’t know who convinced Nicolás to leave his raincoat on the back of his chair, but his posture didn’t change much—the whole time his arm stayed in the same position it was in when he’d been holding the coat. Because there weren’t enough chairs, Gloria ate sitting on Barco’s lap, from his plate. Apparently they had gotten quite intimate during the cooking, or most likely they already knew each other before. Gloria had on these very tight black pants, and her hair was in a ponytail. She had a long, thin neck, like a pole, and Barco held her back so she wouldn’t fall. I sat between Tomatis and la Negra—Pupé was sitting next to Tomatis—and noticed that la Negra’s hair even grew behind her ears. I imagined her covered in hair, like a monkey. When he took his first mouthful, Tomatis said that maybe with rotten onions the stew might have come out a little better, but there was still time to dig through the trash for some condiments to add. Then he said a movie producer is easy to recognize right off by the thickness of his cigar, but with a director it’s trickier, because behind the frontal bone of a movie director’s face there’s only air.