Lopecito’s voice, with his Rosario accent, murmurs, melancholic and stunned.
We built radios in a little workshop on Calle Rueda. And when people started talking about television, during the second World War, your old man started studying English and ordered technical magazines from North America. You were two or three. Don’t you remember how, on his own dime, he started putting together a television in the garage you had in Arroyito? You should remember because you were older then. You remember? He remembers: he slept in the room next door. Every night, Isabel, in a nightgown, would get up three or four times and bang on the locked door to the garage.
Can’t you answer? Can’t you answer? she would yell. He listened to the same insistent lament every night. Later, when the house was dark and silent, he would hear the garage door open and close, and breathing and footsteps moving, in the darkness, toward the bedroom. Isabel’s whiny, sleepy voice could be heard again, and Leto, holding his breath to hear better, waited for the response that never came:
What can you do, it was a sexual thing, he thinks, his eyes fixed on the bright intersection.
Or something even worse. Lopecito, meanwhile, his eyes full of tears, muting his intensity with that whispered register that’s reserved for wakes:
Don’t you remember before the television came to Rosario we did a demonstration at the Sociedad Rural with a machine he’d built in the garage and there were write ups in La Capital?
He’d order parts from Buenos Aires, from the U.S., and what he couldn’t find he made himself. Isabel would come in from time to time and hug them, crying.
You’ll have to be very good to your mother now, Lopecito said, and, so that Isabel wouldn’t hear, he added in Leto’s ear:
While I’m alive and can use my hands you won’t want for anything, I give you my word. And he was making good. But he, Leto, no?, felt like he was on stage, and not that he didn’t have anything to say, or that Isabel and Lopecito and everyone else hadn’t learned their roles, but they were all acting, on the same stage but in different plays. Once in a while, something they said was so surprising that Leto could only stare, waiting for them to bust out laughing, because he thought they were joking. But the laughter never came. The familiar faces became impenetrable, remote masks, and no matter how much he examined them he got nothing, nothing whatsoever, no?, from anyone. They were like another species, like those invaders in science fiction movies who come from another planet and take on a human form to better facilitate their takeover. His father, for example, whom they had put in a casket, was he really dead, or pretending? And what Isabel and Lopecito said about his person—his father’s, I mean, no?—coincided so little with Leto’s empirical reality that he heard them as formulaic expressions memorized to further some conspiracy. For that good man, for that inventor who had ended up dedicating himself to the sale of electrical goods, Leto felt neither love nor hate, but rather a neutral anticipation, similar to what we feel when, after smashing a housefly with a shoe, we wonder whether it still has the reflexes to keep twitching a little more over its ruined self. There was something in the man’s habits that no one seemed to perceive but which to Leto was the essential and all but singular characteristic that emanated from his person—a kind of sardonic expression that signified something like:
just wait and see, just wait for when I decide to, or when
that, rather,
that which he was on the verge of, and which others seemed to ignore, would be decided. That inner half-smile that, on the contrary, never once escaped Leto, announced to the world an approaching catastrophe whose unmistakable signs its bearer had seen from the beginning.
It couldn’t have been only sexual, Leto thinks, feeling the tree trunk, hard and rough, on his back, through the thin fabric of his shirt.
Even though César Rey argues that, looked at a certain way, even Billiken is a pornographic magazine.
No, it was something separate and distinct from the sexual, he thinks,
a constituent part of himself that stained everything and that poisoned him. All the afternoons, the mornings, the evenings that made up his life had been corroded by that toxic substance he secreted, and which, whatever he did, whether he was still or tried to stifle it, never stopped pouring out and leaving a pestilent smear on everything.
And, Lopecito was saying,
your old man was . . . he was a genius with . . . I owe him . . . etc. Leto remembers that in the garage where his father shut himself up there was a kind of large table, made of pine, bolted to the wall, and a giant heap of casings to radios, full, empty, or with the insides half out and spilling from the back, bulbs, tubes, pins, knobs, loose plugs, colored cables, copper wire, technical books and magazines, pliers, screwdrivers, and even when he didn’t take part in the permanent squabble that pitted Isabel against his father, that his father, although somewhat distant, was more or less friendly or indifferent, and that all of those mysterious and colorful things intertwined on the table in the garage never lost their appeal, though he never touched them, not out of fear of his father, who would have no doubt been pleased by his son’s interest, but fear of that fluid that, possibly without realizing, his father secreted, and whose signs Leto could detect on everything, the way the earth shows, through indistinct but definitive markers, the clear trail of a snake or scorpion. Leto imagined him bent over the table, under lamp light, working a tiny screwdriver and, for some unknown reason, not responding when Isabel banged on the door each night.
Open the door. I said open it, Isabel would say, her tone desperate, until, surrendering, she’d finally go to bed, not without whimpering a while before falling asleep, and, still, the next morning she would wake up radiant, and sing while she made breakfast, straightened up the house, or walked to the market. That sudden change intrigued Leto: Was it faked, or was it the nightly desperation and the whimpering in bed that she faked, or was it all faked, or none of it?
And this morning when, turning from the glowing blue rings on the stove, she said that unexpected, He suffered so much, Leto thinks,
And I started pointlessly scrutinizing her face, its impenetrability came, precisely, from the absence of artifice. She‘s not faking when she sings or when she talks or when she shuts up or even when she insists that she’s doing one thing when in fact she’s doing the opposite. She lives a plain life, in a single dimension—the dimension of her desire, the desire for nothing, or rather for the contradiction to not exist. And Lopecito, no?, the night of the wake, as soon as they were alone:
Everything came out right for him. When he started in sales he had so much work he called me to offer the whole north part of the province if I wanted it. Nothing would have stopped us from expanding, but he preferred freedom and, more than anything else, shutting himself up in the garage every night to work. He was in love with technology. He was so enthusiastic. Leto listened, silently, telling himself over and over that even poor Lopecito had been sucked into that masquerade, and with a conviction that exceeded every expectation. That plain universe which, for mysterious reasons, and without their suspecting it, Leto had been excluded from, in a way that made the generalized vacuousness of their actions immediately recognizable, seemed impregnable less because of its solidity than because of its inconsistency—diffuse, irregular, and ubiquitous.
Absorbed, as we’re in the habit of saying, by his thoughts or, if you prefer, as always, by his memories, Leto steps away from the tree, walking slowly toward the intersection. He has just forgotten about the Mathematician. Like the stage actor who does a pirouette and then disappears into the darkness off stage or, better yet, like those sea creatures who, ignorant of the sun that makes them flash, reveal, periodically, a glistening spine that sinks and reappears at regular intervals, a few images, sharp and well-formed, approach and move off. Distracted, he crosses the street and arrives at the opposite sidewalk—and his distraction is also what makes him go through with the paradoxical act of stopping on the bright sidewalk and turning back toward the corner he has just left, knowing unconsciously that he is waiting for someone or something, but not knowing exactly who or what, or better yet, and strictly speaking, his body is what turns and stops to wait—Leto’s body, no?—that unique and completely external thing that, independent from what, inside, yields control and continuity, now casts, over the gray pavement, a shadow slightly shorter than him—his body, I mean—plump and young, standing in the morning, on the central avenue, giving the world the illusion, or the abusive proof, maybe, of his existence.
In a hurry, the Mathematician walks out of the newspaper office. Seeing him, Leto, for a fraction of a second, thinks, What a coincidence, the Mathematician, until he remembers that they have been walking together for several blocks and that he’s been waiting for him on the sidewalk for a few minutes now. The Mathematician walks straight to the middle of the sidewalk and, noticing Leto’s absence, stops suddenly, disconcerted, but, turning his head, spots him across the street and, resuming a normal stride
