for a moment between the illuminated windows and which eventually, after a few seconds, disappeared. The Mathematician stood motionless, with his gaze fixed on some dark point of sky between the entrance gate and the multiplied blackness of the pines, sensing on the back of his neck the satisfied look of the guard, whose instinctive act of blocking his entrance had just been validated by the fleeting visit of the honoree. Then he turned around, walked away without a word, and, taking his car key from his pocket, stopped again after a few meters, holding the key in the air, positioned to enter the lock, shaking his head from time to time, as if debating with himself. In reality, the poet’s unexpected attitude had left him incapable of a reaction, as if his internal life ran on electricity and, two or three minutes before, someone had stepped out of the darkness and unplugged him. But really it wasn’t more than an obstruction, or a cooling, the kind that happens to certain motors that, as arbitrarily as they have stopped, start up again: when he resumed walking, his steps were no longer distracted but furious; he slammed the car door shut and, after starting the engine, drove away, but not before swerving around the club’s entrance with a lot of noise from the motor, brakes, and tires. He drove, deafened by his indignant and tumultuous thoughts, which went in and out, colliding in his head as if, as opposed to a few moments before, the motor was now overheating and about to explode. He went straight to his house and, since at that time he still lived with his family, crossed the entryway almost without stopping and shut himself in his room. Now, that is to say in the now following the now when he had turned on the car and the now when he had driven home, no?, in that now, I mean to say, he tried to stay calm, to find the details in the situation that would allow him to transform his fury into disdain and his disdain into self-satisfaction. But he couldn’t pull it off—just the opposite, little by little, and only after getting undressed and throwing himself into bed, he began asking himself if he wasn’t misjudging the poet when he’d clearly given him proof of his trust and friendship by coming to the gate to explain the awkward situation he was in and making a date for later, and if he wasn’t making a mistake by standing him up instead of waiting for him at the bar like they agreed. The time they’d planned to meet was approaching and, like someone in love, the Mathematician could not figure out what to do, changing his mind every fifteen or twenty seconds, pulled this way and that like a dry leaf in the afternoon wind by those emotions and feelings that,
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. Finally, after having decided with solid arguments that he would not go, he jumped up from the bed, got dressed and left for the meeting at the bar. He arrived fifteen minutes early, glancing quickly and discreetly from the car, before going to park, to see if the poet had already arrived. The Mathematician sat down at the bar to wait. To kill time, he took out the text of the
Fourteen Points and started editing it here and there so that, when the time came to discuss it, every possible objection would be foreseen and pre-empted. For some twenty minutes, the Mathematician, thanks to his complete concentration on the text of the
Fourteen Points, kept
those emotions and feelings which, if they aren’t etc., etc., no?, in the darkness outside the crystalline and well-illuminated cube that occupied the complete space of his mind. But as time passed, the polished and transparent surfaces began to fissure, leaking in, little by little, the indistinct and viscous outside world that, for some twenty minutes, he had seemed to overpower. Since it was now past midnight, the bar filled with people who were leaving the theaters and coming in to drink their last coffee before going to bed, commenting on the movie, discussing hopeless snoops, or making plans for the next day, but around one the bar started to empty again, until at one-thirty the only people left were the Mathematician, a couple fighting in whispers in a corner, and a belligerent drunk at the counter. Finally the drunk was gently driven out by the bartender, and the woman, in a burst of rage, stood up and walked out so that the man with her had no choice but to pay quickly at the register and run after her, and the Mathematician, who was on his second cup of coffee, was left alone in the bar where, discreetly but firmly, they had begun to set the chairs, upside down, on the tables, and to mop the floor. After a while, since it was now two in the morning and the poet had said
eleven forty-five or twelve, and since the table where he sat was the only narrow islet surrounded by a sea of upside down chairs on tables and the floor where his feet were placed the only fragment, two meters square, where the floor did not shine, ready for the opening the following day, the Mathematician folded the
Fourteen Points in fourths, picked up his unlit pipe, paid for his two coffees, and went out into the street. A new feeling was mixing with his humiliation and rage: the desperation we feel when we realize that the external world’s plans do not bear our desires in mind, no matter their intensity. The moment he left, the lights in the bar went out behind him. If not for the traffic lights and, from time to time, for the fleeting headlights of a passing car, he could have sworn that, in the whole universe, the only illuminated light hung inside his head and that something, in passing, had given it a shake and now lights and shadows shook violently in that too-narrow ring where thoughts, memories, emotions, fast and uncontrollable, exploded and disappeared like flares or grenades. He parked in front of his house. He closed the car door and stood for a moment on the dark sidewalk. For a while now time had been running backward, and just like a traveler, who begins to see an unexpected landscape through the window, in a moment of panic, understands that he’s on the wrong train, the Mathematician began to sense the person he’d thought he was being dismantled piece by piece, and replaced by floating loose fragments and splinters of an unknown self, fragments that have their own familiar quality, but seem in their ideas, emotions, and habitual feelings, archaic and excessive. He tiptoed through the dark house, went into his room, and, without turning on the light, undressed and went to bed. Every so often, sparks of tranquility made him say to himself,
Come on, come on, it’s not worth getting bent out of shape over a slight or, even, over a series of unfortunate circumstances that no one’s to blame for, but because they were fleeting, they entered the whirlwind and were transformed into the archaic kind, tormenting him, so that, unable to sleep, as the dawn paled the bedroom through the skylight and the blinds, he lost his sense of reality, and the few ties binding him to the known world were loosed. Laying in the dark bed, he understood for the first time in his life, and at his own expense, that with enough pressure, like physical suffering, the spirit can also start to fissure at some unnamable and empty point, practically abstract, and what you could at one time call shame, guilt, humiliation, transforms, multiplied and approaching bottomless, into pins and needles, thumping, agitation, stabbing pain, shudders. For hours he tossed in bed, his eyes wide open, run through by sparking, incessant fragments that burned him from the inside and caused him so much suffering that, much later, when in spite of every effort to suppress them, he recalled them, a singular and recurrent image appeared to him: a human face that someone was slicing to pieces, slowly and deliberately, with glass from a broken bottle. Finally, around 11:00 in the morning, he fell asleep. As he had the habit of spending whole nights studying in his room, no one bothered him during the day, so that around 6:00, little by little, he woke up, thinking that he was surfacing on a different world or that he, in any case, wasn’t the same, and for a long time, whenever he ran into one of the conference organizers he tried to hide or, if he couldn’t, assumed an attitude of exaggerated jauntiness, without allowing the least bit of reproach to show in his face, to the point that, for some months, his greatest preoccupation was not to fundamentally interrogate himself about what had happened, but to avoid at all cost anyone noticing. And it worked. That burning, which for weeks had transformed his insides into an open wound and that, until it scarred, had been the complete opposite of the clean, tranquil, and well-proportioned external self that proffered smiling, precise statements—that kind of burn, I was saying, no?—which, bearing in mind the insignificance of the spark that started it, seemed to have been generated spontaneously, had gone unnoticed, just like the pain of the memory, to the rest of the world. And he, secretly, to himself, when he measured it from a distance, referred to those days, ironically, and particularly, as The Incident.
—Oh yeah? says Leto. Who did you hear it from?
—Botón, says the Mathematician.
Leto nods. That name, or nickname rather, Button, appears every so often in conversation, but to Leto it doesn’t evoke any precise image because he’s never seen its owner. He seems to be from Entre Ríos, to study law, to have been
