Juan José Saer: The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

While they cross, the Mathematician condescends to re-list, without much conviction, the names that come with fixed and simplified expressions and memories glued to the back: Rome, he imagined it differently; Vienna, all the locals seem to believe in terminal analysis; Florence, they also painted what they saw; Avignon, a murderous heat; Geneva, the paved barnyard; London, a problem finding hotel rooms and some manuscripts in the British Museum. They leave behind the intersection, the cable guardrail, the angled sun, and enter the cool shade of the next block. An old man is opening the shutters of a window on the ground floor. The Mathematician who, in an abrupt way, cut off his story a few seconds before, greets him with a tilt of the head and continues walking, pensively. In spite of the difference in height, Leto and the Mathematician walk at the same pace, neither slow nor fast, so well coordinated that it is impossible to tell if the Mathematician is reducing the length of his strides to match them with Leto’s steps or if, on the contrary, Leto’s skinnier and shorter legs are accommodating, without visible effort, the step of the rugby-man who’s so adept at the scientia recte judicandi . For a few meters, they don’t seem to know what to talk about. We know what was said above, no? — that the Mathematician, fearing that excessive enthusiasm for his European tour will disqualify him somewhat among those who stayed behind, shares his memories reticently. And yet, in the anxiety of those who have been away and fear that reality has been more intense in their absence, he has been holding, since he met up with Leto, the question he does not dare to formulate, so as not to reveal an excessive interest, just like a jealous person who looks for the opportune moment to begin his interrogation by dissembling with a series of disinterested and banal questions. Meanwhile, Leto is thinking: I’ll need to ask Lopecito if he believed it. Still, he’s too meticulous to reject the idea flat out. He has been, for twenty-five years, the ham in the sandwich. And, ever since he died, things have only gotten worse. He could favor mother’s argument, though even then she wouldn’t be sure to get what she expected without overcommitting herself since they played house, but if she accepts it deep down, the way she does publicly, she risks the supposedly incurable patient laughing at her from the other side.

Observing him, discreetly and somewhat shyly, the Mathematician detects Leto’s withdrawn expression and takes the opportunity to say: And around here, how was it all this time? biting the unlit pipe so hard that, instead of speaking, he sputters the question through his clenched teeth and tongue which, inhibited, wraps around the pipe stem and makes it vibrate against the row of teeth. The Mathematician ignores the fact that Leto has more than enough reasons, though he has been around, to feel much more excluded from the bursts of passion that reality might arbitrarily dispense among the circles he frequents: he, to begin with, has only lived in the city a few months and is, therefore, a mere neophyte, a newcomer, and, because he is only twenty-one, is much younger than several of the youngest; he almost never joins a discussion, and if he is invited anywhere it’s only as an appendix to Tomatis; he’s the only other source of income for a widowed mother, and has to work several account books to support her, and something inside him, surely, like a woodworm in furniture, pre-emptively hollows out any possible passion he may have, which somewhat explains his absences and silences — though he would like it, true enough, if once in a while, something were possible. Leto, allowing a quantity of smoke to spill out through his half-opened lips, from which he has just withdrawn, with careful fingers, the cigarette, responds: he has hardly seen anyone; he rarely goes out; he has almost nothing to report from these past three months.

Imagine a gambler who, for some time, has held the card that will let him win the game but which he cannot play for many rounds because none of the other players have given him an opportunity to do so. Round after round the gambler throws down useless, inconsequential cards that have no influence on the course of the game until, suddenly, the combination he needs appears on the table, allowing him to throw down, euphorically and decisively, the winning card. Leto’s timid confession has put the Mathematician in this dominant position.

— What? he says. Weren’t you at Washington’s birthday party?

Leto shakes his head no, while he thinks: And even today, this morning, when she says that he suffered so much it’s less to remind me of that suffering than to control whether I believe her or not. And the Mathematician, observing him without looking, instead looking straight ahead at the sidewalk, but observing him nonetheless with the right side of his body, which is to say, the side that is almost grazing, during the walk, the left side of Leto’s body, the Mathematician, I was saying, no? at the same time, although it is always, as I was saying just now, the same, thinks: He wasn’t invited.

Leto surfaces as though from under water. He has been thinking, remembering his mother, the death of his father, and Lopecito, submerging himself for a few seconds in those thoughts and memories as though into a subterranean canal parallel to the spring air, and in emerging, in surfacing, he finds himself with this good-looking blonde guy, some twenty-seven years old, dressed completely in white, who Tomatis calls the Mathematician, who is just back from Europe and is out to distribute the press release for the Chemical Engineering Students Association to the papers, who has just, also, a few seconds ago, asked him if he was at Washington’s birthday party, and as he, with a shake of his head, has responded no, he now fears that the other, who seems to be observing him, is observing him not with contempt, but with disbelief and something like pity. In the first place, they wouldn’t need to invite me. I could have gone if I had wanted, without needing an invitation. But in any case, I wouldn’t have wanted an invitation because it would have meant that they don’t consider me close enough that it would be a given that I would have to go. But, given that, I have to submit to the facts: I wasn’t invited.

— I couldn’t make it either. That day we were visiting factories in Frankfurt. I couldn’t hop a jet from Frankfurt because they don’t have direct flights to Rincón, says the Mathematician. But I got the full version, a fresh, subtitled, technicolor copy.

Maintaining his lighthearted façade, he squeezes the pipe a bit more with this teeth, compelled by a memory that returns, suddenly, and which still stings him, one of those memories or emotions about which he likes to say, with an ironic wrinkling of his nose, 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.

— You don’t say, he hears Leto say.

— Yes, yes, I heard all about it, he hears himself say in turn.

The memory is like a photograph or a shadowy image stamped into the inside of his head, and the emotions and feelings of humiliation and rage form several black-bordered, jagged holes, as if the image had been punctured at many points of its surface with the ember of a cigarette. Three or four years earlier, a poet from Buenos Aires came to the city to give a conference. The Mathematician, who had been corresponding with him for six or seven months regarding a problem of versification, waited anxiously for his arrival, and had annotated a list of discussion points which, after the conference, he hoped to address in order over dinner with the poet. Shortly before the end of the debate that followed the conference, the Mathematician had left to get the car from his father; he hadn’t been able to loan it to the Mathematician earlier because he didn’t get back from Tostado until 9:00. His father was a little late, and when the Mathematician returned with the car to the lecture hall, it was closed. A guard told him that the lecturer had left with four or five of the organizers to a party, or to eat something — basically he wasn’t sure where. The Mathematician felt the first bolt of rage in that moment because, before leaving to get the car, he had taken the precaution of letting several of the organizers know about his momentary absence, asking them to wait for him, but not feeling very secure because he knew that the organizers belonged to the class of people who kidnap celebrities who come from the capital, and since he didn’t spend much time with them, because he didn’t like to move in semiofficial circles, they wouldn’t go out of their way to consider his requests. The Mathematician, when he learned of the poet’s visit, had begun working hard, for at least a month and a half, on problems of versification. His thesis was that each meter corresponded to a specific emotion and that you could devise a notational system, if you sufficiently diversified the meters whose combinations were not already too subtle, which only applied to the metric use of pure sounds, for the poem to transmit the desired emotions. The Mathematician was probably only twenty-three at the time; he considered himself a simple theoretician and would have liked the poet, who was twenty years older and had acquired a great reputation, to apply his theories, like the geologist who forms a hypothesis about the composition of the lunar surface and sends an astronaut to the moon to verify it. The Mathematician left the conference hall, already partially blinded by rage, and began looking for the poet. He started crisscrossing the city in his father’s car, from one end to the other: he would leave the engine running in front of a restaurant, in front of a bar, would get out to look for them, the poet and the group of organizers, and when he didn’t find them would move on to the next bar and repeat the same routine; he tried to disguise his rage behind a calm and mundane façade, passing his indifferent gaze over the lively tables as if he was looking for an empty one or was simply curious. That he was able to maintain his elegance and indifferent façade is admirable because with every passing minute his fury and indignation multiplied. He started to feel like the inside of his head was boiling. After having fruitlessly visited every open restaurant, he went into a bar, asked for a beer, the phone book, and a fistful of coins and began calling the homes of the organizers, hoping that they were at one of their houses or that someone in their family knew where the hell they had gone. But no one knew anything or, if they did know, did not seem inclined to tell him. The Mathematician sensed the unmistakable echoes of some sort of instruction or collusion in their casual responses. Everyone knew, the whole city knew, and, intentionally, concealed it. After all those useless rounds, he started driving the streets at random, hoping to come across the poet and his retinue, and more than once, because of false alarms, he found himself chasing some car that seemed to belong to one of the organizers at full speed or accosting a startled group of people on a dark street. The Fourteen Points Toward All Future Meter , which he had taken the trouble to elaborate and type out over the preceding weeks, were just then nothing more than a sheet folded in fourths, lost in one of the compartments of his wallet at the bottom of the interior pocket of his coat. He had lost all subjectivity and had become a purely external being who, no longer reasoning or applying any agency to reality, was instead the passive object of a fixed system that diverted him from his self in the same way that the wind diverts the ping pong ball from its trajectory despite the force and accuracy of the player’s shot. Finally, in one of his comings and goings down the dark streets, down the illuminated avenues, after passing the same places for the hundredth time, he remembered that, before the conference, one of the organizers, speaking to another, had mentioned a tennis club where his — the Mathematician’s — brother the lawyer was a member, but that he, from disdain for the bloodlust bourgeoisie , as he liked, not without reason, to call them, had not joined. A guard stopped him at the entrance and forced him to wait. The Mathematician stood at the gate to the darkened and deserted tennis courts, beyond which he could see, behind a stand of pines, the illuminated windows of the buildings. A yellow rectangle, taller and wider than the windows, formed in the darkness, behind the pines, when the poet, followed by the guard, opened the door to the facilities and approached the entrance gate, crossing the darkness in the pines and the reddish half-light reflected off the clay-covered surface of the tennis courts. He was eating a chicken thigh as he came, and his free hand must have been covered in grease, judging by the way he kept it stiff and far from his body, the fingers straight and separated, so as to not stain his pants. The Mathematician thought he was coming to meet him and bring him to the dinner where, for a while, they could discuss the Fourteen Points , and so he waited with an understanding and relieved smile, but in reality the poet was coming to explain that it had been impossible to wait for him, that the dinner was very boring though there was nothing for it but to stay to the end and that maybe later, in some bar, when he had unburdened himself of the group, they might be able to have a drink and, in his words, bring into the world, together, the highly anticipated definitive text on the theory of versification. Before the Mathematician could offer an objection, the poet had already disappeared, after offering the name of a bar through a mouth full of chicken, skirting the tennis courts with a sure step, erasing himself for a moment under the black mass of the pines, his silhouette reappearing in the yellow rectangle that formed again 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.