When they’d stopped to talk between the cars, the catfish had been their first topic of conversation. You ate the catfish, my catfish? Nula had said in a parody of indignant resentment, hyperbolically emphasizing the possessive and telling them that on Tuesday night, after having walked for hours in the rain with Gutiérrez, just when he was about to be compensated by the baked catfish — the same ones they’d just eaten — an unexpected family visit had spoiled his dinner plans (he, Nula, had already offered to contribute a bottle of white wine from the car). Gabriela thought she sensed, despite the farcical tone, a slight tension in Nula’s reaction, though she was unsure what might have caused it, but decided, finally, that it could be the result of a slight embarrassment, possibly caused by the undeniably pretentious competition between him and Soldi for superiority with regard to their friendship with Gutiérrez, the foreigner who enjoys a manifold prestige thanks to his years in Europe, his apparent wealth, and, especially, his enigmatic life. But the tension in Nula disappears almost immediately, as do the fish from the conversation, when he starts describing his encounter with Tomatis.
The moment they are living in is peaceful, if not benevolent. They’re young, all three are under thirty, they’re all healthy, and they’ve all bracketed out the darker things in life, the way an orator holds back a forceful objection that he’ll have to confront later on. Gabriela thinks that Pinocchio and Nula’s jousting is meant to show the other how at home they are in the world. The autonomous, savage hum that occupies their thoughts when they’re alone seems forgotten in favor of the conversation, where their concentration produces an exchange of words that are vivid and sharp and which, while apparently spontaneous, were carefully elaborated before resonating in the external world and fading away immediately, leaving an immaterial and approximate meaning in each other’s memories. With the impartial disposition of someone who, for the moment, can be indifferent, but also cautiously, Gabriela studies them: Soldi’s dark profile, severe despite the smile that appears through his beard, contrasts with his childhood nickname, Pinocchio, which his mother, no doubt thinking he was the most beautiful little doll in the world, or at least the most helpless, had given him in the first days of his life. The shape of his nose and ears don’t match up at all to his namesake’s, and with regard to his moral qualities, Soldi is incapable of lying, meaning his likeness to the puppet must correspond to feelings that Gabriela attributes to his mother, unless, spinning even more finely, she supposes that, in giving him the puppet’s nickname (if in fact she was the one who gave it to him), the mother, recoiling from the pain of childbirth, from her worry, from the fear for the son who would be with her till she died, had been tempted, unconsciously, to deny her maternity, and had given her son the nickname of the motherless marionette: Unless the opposite is the case, and she thinks of herself as the kind and beautiful fairy who, with a wave of her magic wand, had given life to the wooden doll, Gutiérrez says perfectly clearly somewhere inside herself, and her lips form an involuntary smile that causes Nula to look at her, confused, from the other car, and for Soldi, because of Nula’s expression, to turn his head toward her with an inquisitive smile, more apparent in his eyes than on his lips, barely visible beneath the dark black beard, which is tangled and metallic though he keeps it meticulously trimmed.
— It’s nothing, Gabriela says, so they’ll go back to their cheerful, contented exchange, allowing her to keep observing them. Even more cautiously, Gabriela studies the wine salesman now: his expression is friendly and open, possibly too much so. Should she remind him that he isn’t with two potential clients and doesn’t need to lay on the charm so much? With some reluctance, Gabriela tells herself that she might be judging him too harshly, that this might be his natural way of acting, and besides he’s an old friend of Pinocchio’s, who talks about him often. Clearly he likes to dress well, although that could be a result of the work rather than a personal inclination. His hair is light brown and clean cut, and his forearm, resting on the edge of the open window, is covered with a fleece somewhat darker than his hair, which the summer sun must have bleached slightly. And though he must have shaved carefully this morning, his cheeks and chin and neck are already darkened by specks of beard that sprout abundantly on his healthy, coarse, and masculine skin — that capillary abundance, though controlled, from his head to his beard, his forearm, and, Gabriela is sure, on his chest as well, is the product of his being turco, which is to say, of Arabic descent. When they met a few weeks ago at the Amigos del Vino bar (he may not run it, but he does come and go behind the counter, serving himself and his friends, though he knows to never touch the register and notes down everything he drinks), he seemed really angry with Gutiérrez for telling him that he was with his daughter, whom he, Nula, apparently knew before, and very well, but when Pinocchio told him that it may in fact have been true, he calmed down, though for the rest of the time he was with them he remained uneasy and pensive. But when they saw him again a few days later, he’d already seen Gutiérrez again to sell him the wine, and by then seemed to have recovered his composure and his good humor — if in fact the cheerfulness that he displays now is not a professional but rather an authentic quality. A tractor trailer that she hasn’t seen coming because of the direction she’s facing passes full speed toward the city and startles her, not only from the sound of the engine and the roar that the enormous, heavy mass produces as it moves, but also from the vibrations, so violent that the two cars parked on the slope that leads from the asphalt to the sandy road shake too. The red trailer is covered with a dark canvas, its loose edges flapping because of the speed, and as it passes them, Gabriela can just make out a suggestion printed in black letters on the rear: VISIT HELVECIA, FOR THE GOLDEN DORADO. All three watch it move away, though Nula, with his back to the road, finds it more difficult, because he has to turn almost all the way around to see it shrink and finally disappear toward the city. Nula checks his watch but doesn’t seem ready to leave yet; after a few seconds of silence that follow the truck’s interruption of their conversation, Nula leans back against his seat, searching for her eyes, and asks: