The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. Juan José Saer

eyes on the dumpy though still somewhat childlike face, which, with its eyelids lowered, reveals nothing: Can she tell? Does she notice? Is she sounding me out? Is she testing me? The hardest part, regardless, is, at a distance, knowing how to reply. Leto would have been well-disposed and, above all, relieved, to give the response she is waiting for, if, just then, it were possible to know what she is waiting for, but, with a desperate insistence, she seemed to want him to guess it on his own, and does not give him, therefore, any help. Leto searches, hesitates, and then, unsure, though not without a degree of resentment, the way he reacts toward every comment of that kind, does not say anything. A somewhat hard silence follows, uncomfortable for them both, in which there is possibly deception and not even a little relief, and which Isabel breaks by emptying her cup of café con leche in one swallow and chewing, noisily, her last piece of toast, and afterward recur the opaque and customary comments furnished with ambiguity by their intonation alone, though issued from neutral and distracted lips. These comments also come, certainly, from farther away, farther back than the tongue, the vocal chords, the lungs, brain, and breath, from the far side of the depository of named and accumulated experience, from which, blindly groping, though believing to consider carefully, each person withdraws and expels them. In the silence that follows, including when, after brushing his cheek with her lips, closing behind her, softly, two or three doors, she has finally gone, before him, to work, her image, as strange as it is familiar, begins to unglue itself from its representations so as to disseminate itself more easily throughout his body, as though, in its ebb and flow, blood is able to reduce the impalpable to its material tenacity, metabolizing and distributing it to cells, tissue, flesh, bones, muscles. With his second cup of coffee in hand, while he observes the dampness of the morning dew that’s yet to dissolve from the corners of the shade, Leto, though not his body, has now forgotten his mother, and it is this same humid shade persisting now, around ten, on the central avenue, which covers his body like the first invisible layer of the world and is likewise covered by the bright morning, that causes him again to remember her, to project her onto the unstable and inconstant little screen of images where he flashes, momentarily, the tiny spotlight of his attention. Without, as they say, a doubt, the same impulse that moved Isabel to utter her startling and mysterious comment, has caused him, suddenly, to get off the bus, cross the boulevard, buy the cigarettes, and begin walking, for no reason, to the south.

      Every fifteen meters, a tipa tree rises at the edge of the sidewalk, and its branches almost touch those that, at the same height, grow from a tree on the opposite sidewalk. In the spaces between the trim branches, patches of blue sky can be made out, and on the street and the opposite sidewalk the bright stretches outnumber those in shadow. Puerile, in every color, at a constant speed, the cars run in both directions: those coming toward Leto on his side, and those that, likewise, follow his direction, alongside the other sidewalk. Flashes and shadows from leaves and branches alternate fleetingly over the chrome of the bodywork, over the painted molding and the glass, as they travel down the tree-lined street. Other pedestrians—not many, because of the distance from the city center as well as the relatively early hour—walk, alone or in groups, lost in thought or conversation, along the sidewalks. Another thirty meters and Leto will reach the corner.

      It is, as we know, the morning: though it doesn’t make sense to say so, since it is always the same time—once again the sun, since the earth revolves, apparently, has given the illusion of rising, from the direction they call the east, in the blue expanse we call sky, and, little by little, after the dawn, after daybreak, it has reached a spot high enough, halfway in its ascent let’s say, so that, through the intensity of what we call light, we refer, to the state that results, as the morning—a spring morning when, again, though, as we were saying, it is always the same time, the temperature has been rising, the clouds have been dissipating, and the trees which, for some reason, had been losing their leaves bit by bit, have begun to bloom again, to blossom once more, although, as we were saying, it is always the same, the only Time and, so to speak, from equinox to solstice, it’s the same, no? As I was saying, we call it a because it seems like there have been many, because of the changes, which we name and presume to perceive—a dazzling spring morning, forming for three or four days, since the end of the last rains in September or October that wiped clean the final traces of winter from a sky that grew warmer and clearer each day. Leto feels neither good nor bad: he walks oblivious, in the morning, in the center of a material horizon that sends him, in constant waves, sounds, textures, flashes, odors. He is submerged in this horizon and is, at the same time, its center; if, suddenly, he disappeared, the center would change location.

      For this reason, in order to prove that he suffered so much, some three months before she had found a lump in her right breast, like the seed from a paradise tree, and had begun to worry. Charo, the elder cousin who, lacking a boyfriend or husband, had acquired, at forty-five, an approximate understanding of nearly every illness in order to fill the cavity of any other curiosity or sed non satiata, had insisted that she make an appointment with a specialist—an illuminary, his aunt Charo had trilled, dithyrambic, though she was not, in reality, anything more than his second cousin. Leto thinks: It wasn’t wrong to have told Charo either. It’s as if you were to suggest to a madam that you had some spare cash you’d like to spend on an escort. Because of his international conferences, the dinner-conferences at the Rotary, and the rows of the cancerous and its candidates leafing through old magazines in the waiting room of his office, the specialist had only recently seen her, a month after her discovery, and after looking her over, examining her, carefully and skillfully, had told her, with distracted lightheartedness, that, in his modest opinion, there was no reason to worry, and that a more meticulous exam or a biopsy were not justified. The lump, the size of a seed from a paradise tree, according to Isabel, or of an acorn, according to Charo, who, for some obscure and undetermined reason, had also performed an examination, did not reveal itself to the fingers of the specialist, which, though they searched and searched again did not find a single notable hardness in Isabel’s now, on the contrary, somewhat shapeless breasts—not in the right or the left. The specialist sat down at his desk and had begun to fill out a form, and, while she dressed, standing near the bed, Isabel had begun an inquiry full of allusions, to which the specialist would respond with ambiguous monosyllables, whose meaning, like those of the blotches in a psychological test, depended on what pre-existed in the observer. According to Isabel, upon seeing her come in, the specialist had given her significant looks, as she had presented herself with her married name, and her husband’s case, so recent, and so sudden too, as often happens with young people, had probably not been forgotten. Because when she came in they had made her fill out a form where she wrote that she was born in Rosario, and since he would surely have come from Rosario for a consultation, the specialist could not have missed the connection. Of course, because of professional confidentiality—yes, they have that categorical imperative, Charo had confirmed—the specialist could not make it plainly known that he had been to see him during his frequent trips to the city and that, after having examined him, had found that incurable illness, but his responses, deliberately imprecise, were nevertheless significant enough to dismiss any of her leftover doubts. But she’s not too sure she’ll be believed because she insists so much, thinks Leto. That same night she had called Rosario to confirm it with Lopecito who, protective and attentive, had interrupted her revelations with a firm, Don’t waste your money. I’ll call you back, so they hung up and a minute later, when the phone rang from Rosario, she picked up, impatient and satisfied, conveying, in complete detail, the confirmation of her suspicions which, in a discreet but unmistakable way, the specialist had given her. Lopecito, who from the age of twenty-five had begun, in a tacit way, to court her, who had seen her marry his best friend, and who had even been a witness in the civil ceremony, who had seen her have two miscarriages in the second or third month before finally getting pregnant with Leto and bringing him into the light of the world, who had been the impassive confidant for the matrimonial lurch of both man and wife and who, the year before, had finally seen her widowed, being left in the awkward position of eternal pretender and of her husband’s childhood friend whose world was coming up roses—Lopecito, no?—who between his distribution of two or three television brands and his duties as a member of the Rosario Central Festival planning committee, had found enough time to make their leaving Rosario possible without agreeing with the decision, the move, the costs, he had recommended her as a saleswoman