it is absurd. And he sees himself again, naked in the bed, with Leonor sleeping naked beside him on the white sheet, twisted and soaked in sweat, and he can still hear, thirty-some years later, the clamor of the birds, whoâve once again forgotten that the same incomprehensible fire had come from the east the previous day, and the day before and the one before that, exhausting the sequence in an intangible past, previous even to memory, and who believe that the radiance that reveals the world and dissolves the darkness is meant for them alone and is happening for the first time, just like someone trapped in the magical halo of desire thinks that the feeling he gets from the rough touch of rough flesh is being manifested, finally, for the first time since the world began.
Of course, Leonor came to his house several times after that night; of course they happily made love again and again; of course they decided to run off to Buenos Aires or Europe or wherever; of course Gutiérrez arranged everything and of course Leonor changed her mind at the last second, choosing to stay with her husband, who heard the portion of the story, described as a strong mutual attraction, that, of course, did not include what they actually did. Of course, when he found out, Gutiérrez, who drank almost no alcohol at the time, got drunk and went looking for a whore to sleep with; of course, as usual, despite the girlâs best efforts, she couldnât put him in the right condition. He woke up in an alley, lying in mud, his body aching and bruised. The next day he got on a bus to Buenos Aires, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, disappeared from the city for more than thirty years.
FOR THEM TO MEET, SEVERAL THINGS HAD TO COINCIDE, a few of which, for their importance, are worth mentioning: first, that an inconceivable singularity led, because of the impossible density of a single particle, to an explosion whose shock waveâwhich, incidentally, continues expanding to this dayâdispersed time and igneous matter into the void, and that this matter, cooling slowly and congealing in the process, according to the rotation and displacement caused by the primitive explosion and owing to a complex gravitational phenomenon, formed what for lack of a better word we call the solar system ; that a phenomenon which owing to an utter impossibility of definition we simply call life appeared on one of the variously sized orbs that comprise it, that orb we now call the Earth , cooling and hardening as it rotated around a giant star, also a product of said explosion and which we call the Sun ; and finally, that one September afternoon LucÃa walked past the corner of Mendoza and San MartÃnâwhere the Siete Colores bar nowoccupies the spot that for years belonged to the Gran Doriaâat the exact moment when Nula (who, after finishing his coffee, had been detained for a few seconds by a guy who shouted something from his table about a Public Law textbook) walked out onto San MartÃn and looked up, seeing her, dressed in red, through the crowd on the bright avenue.
Nula was almost twenty-four. Eighteen months before, the previous March, heâd decided to quit medical school and enroll in a philosophy program, where he studied the pre-Socratics and some classical languages and dabbled in German, intending to read Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, but he felt too isolated in Rosario, where, because he didnât work, it was extremely difficult to get by, and so he came back to the city often, to his motherâs house (his older brother, a dentist, was already married), where he could get room and board in exchange for occasional work and very little nagging. Medicine, heâd explained to his mother, could only be studied in Rosario, or in Córdoba or Buenos Aires, but with philosophy no particular establishment or diploma were necessary. For a philosopher, any place in the world, however insignificant it might seem, was,
Of course, Leonor came to his house several times after that night; of course they happily made love again and again; of course they decided to run off to Buenos Aires or Europe or wherever; of course Gutiérrez arranged everything and of course Leonor changed her mind at the last second, choosing to stay with her husband, who heard the portion of the story, described as a strong mutual attraction, that, of course, did not include what they actually did. Of course, when he found out, Gutiérrez, who drank almost no alcohol at the time, got drunk and went looking for a whore to sleep with; of course, as usual, despite the girlâs best efforts, she couldnât put him in the right condition. He woke up in an alley, lying in mud, his body aching and bruised. The next day he got on a bus to Buenos Aires, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, disappeared from the city for more than thirty years.
FOR THEM TO MEET, SEVERAL THINGS HAD TO COINCIDE, a few of which, for their importance, are worth mentioning: first, that an inconceivable singularity led, because of the impossible density of a single particle, to an explosion whose shock waveâwhich, incidentally, continues expanding to this dayâdispersed time and igneous matter into the void, and that this matter, cooling slowly and congealing in the process, according to the rotation and displacement caused by the primitive explosion and owing to a complex gravitational phenomenon, formed what for lack of a better word we call the solar system ; that a phenomenon which owing to an utter impossibility of definition we simply call life appeared on one of the variously sized orbs that comprise it, that orb we now call the Earth , cooling and hardening as it rotated around a giant star, also a product of said explosion and which we call the Sun ; and finally, that one September afternoon LucÃa walked past the corner of Mendoza and San MartÃnâwhere the Siete Colores bar nowoccupies the spot that for years belonged to the Gran Doriaâat the exact moment when Nula (who, after finishing his coffee, had been detained for a few seconds by a guy who shouted something from his table about a Public Law textbook) walked out onto San MartÃn and looked up, seeing her, dressed in red, through the crowd on the bright avenue.
Nula was almost twenty-four. Eighteen months before, the previous March, heâd decided to quit medical school and enroll in a philosophy program, where he studied the pre-Socratics and some classical languages and dabbled in German, intending to read Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, but he felt too isolated in Rosario, where, because he didnât work, it was extremely difficult to get by, and so he came back to the city often, to his motherâs house (his older brother, a dentist, was already married), where he could get room and board in exchange for occasional work and very little nagging. Medicine, heâd explained to his mother, could only be studied in Rosario, or in Córdoba or Buenos Aires, but with philosophy no particular establishment or diploma were necessary. For a philosopher, any place in the world, however insignificant it might seem, was,
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