When he leaves her at the door to her aunt Ángela’s, Soldi offers to pick her up that night on his way to meet Tomatis at the Amigos del Vino bar, but Gabriela, before closing the passenger door, says she’ll walk or take a bus, and crossing the gray pavement, heads toward the front door. Her aunt Ángela’s house is like a thousand others in the city, with the difference that hers is much better cared for, and was chosen carefully and with a specific purpose, the intention of satisfying a particular aesthetic taste (on the opposite sidewalk, a very similar house from the same period, but practically in ruins, long ago began displaying the ubiquitous sign: ANOTHER MORO PROPERTY FOR SALE). And yet both houses have been in a good location — far from the city center but within the quadrangular perimeter of the main avenues — since the twenties, more or less. Her aunt’s house has a front garden separated from the sidewalk by a metal door and a meter-and-a-half high yellow wall, and beyond the garden, behind a hibiscus heavy with flowers and two rose bushes, the yellow wall of the house itself, with a window and a door with frosted blue and yellow glass that leads to a covered gallery surrounded by four or five rooms. At the back are the bathroom and the kitchen, and behind these a larger courtyard with a medlar tree, a poinsettia, and an enormous magnolia, which has been there since the house was built and which provides good shade in the summer — only the magnolias lose their leaves, and the petals rain down on anyone who sits under its branches to talk on December or January nights. The red tiles in the gallery shine and the yellow walls all look recently painted, as do the gray doors, in front of each of which there’s a multicolored doormat so new-looking that Gabriela feels guilty whenever she steps on them, even when she’s barefoot. The parquet flooring in the dining room, the living room, and the bedrooms also shines, as does the furniture, some of which, like the dishes, antiques inherited after her parents’ death, receive special treatment. Before she retired, her aunt Ángela had taught geography at the technical college, though she could’ve lived without working because both of her sisters, who were married, had renounced their inheritance, which wasn’t enormous, but enough for one person. Because of the free time that being single allowed her, she’d been the one to care for their parents, who’d never wanted to leave the northern town where they’d been born and where they’d wanted to be buried. But her aunt didn’t have the sad, compliant, and dark habits that so many nineteenth-century novels attribute to spinsters. She’d traveled ever since she was young, alone or with friends — she’d hitchhiked across Patagonia with just a backpack; she’d been to Mexico and Europe several times; to California and to Egypt; and, in recent years, when the weather was right, she’d take trips with her friends to the mountains, to the Iguazú falls, or to Brazil. The third sister, Helena, had married a Uruguayan doctor and lived in Montevideo, and Ángela regularly took the morning flight, which left at eight thirty, transferred at Aeroparque, and by noon was having lunch at the Mercado del Puerto. In fact, that afternoon she’d gone to the Córdoba mountains with a couple of friends. On the kitchen table, held down by a glass ashtray, there’s a note:
Gabi dear, they’re coming for me at one thirty, and we get back on Monday afternoon. I left a few things for you in the fridge, the two bottles of white wine and the chicken too, in case José Carlos comes for the weekend. Put it in the freezer if you go to Rosario, and don’t worry, I’ll make it for you Monday night when you get back.
You-know-who called this morning wanting to talk about your work on Brando & Co. He insisted again that his name shouldn’t appear anywhere in the book. He doesn’t mind that you’ve given a copy to Gutiérrez, but the fact that Tomatis has a copy too has him very worried. I tried to reassure him that Carlitos could keep the secret and told him that otherwise you and Pinocchio wouldn’t have given him the manuscript. But he’s afraid that Carlitos, if he thinks about it, will realize who the author is. I reminded him that Tomatis was still playing with blocks when the things he writes about were happening, which calmed him down a little, but, to be honest with you, I think our friend’s fears are perfectly justified. The moment he takes one look at it, Carlitos won’t have any doubt about who the author is. If he insinuates anything, you have to ask him to please be discreet.
Well, I should finish packing so I don’t make the girls wait. Big kiss till Monday from your auntie.
Gabriela stands by the table with the note in her hand, thinking. With a preoccupied air, she takes a glass from the cabinet, pours herself some seltzer from the fridge, and picking up the sheet that she’s just put down on the table, rereads it while she sips the seltzer. Though there’s no one else in the kitchen or in the rest of the house to provoke her level of worry, Gabriela’s expression, consisting of pinching her lips and slowly shaking her head in a vaguely circular way that isn’t negative or affirmative, while she rereads the note and for several seconds afterward, is unmistakably doubtful. She and Pinocchio should have kept Carlitos from knowing who the author of the text was, which means it was without a doubt a mistake to give him a copy. But she doesn’t think that he’d reveal it, and though it’s true that he’s been known to flirt with indiscretion for the sake of a joke, he only does so at the cost of people he considers undeserving of courtesy, Mario Brando for example. He does make cruel jokes about people he knows, but he’s just as capable of making them about his best friends or about himself. Some of his jokes are legendary, like the one about the writer who’d been accepted to the Academy of Letters, and who they said had been a prostitute and who’d gone to sadomasochistic orgies when he’d first moved to Buenos Aires as a kid; Carlitos once said that he personified all three philosophical schools at once, the Academic, the Peripatetic, and the Stoic. But no, there’s no way he would comment publicly on what he knew, given that she and Pinocchio had asked for his discretion. And besides, is there anyone left to listen? Gabriela’s face brightens, her head stops its doubtful movement, and her lips, softening, recover their normal shape. She finishes the last sip of seltzer, leaves the empty glass in the sink, and, taking her aunt’s note, walks to her room, opens a blue cardboard folder, and files the note inside along with several other papers. When she closes the folder, she freezes again and now it’s her forehead that’s pinched: And the wine salesman? Wasn’t it irresponsible of her and Pinocchio to reveal so many details about the fourth informant? Although he doesn’t have (nor will he have) access to the text before it’s published, Nula knows more about its author’s personal life after their conversation this afternoon than Tomatis and Gutiérrez combined, at least relative to what as she and Pinocchio have told them. His friendship with Pinocchio, though not very intimate, does validate the confidence, but his profession, which puts him in contact with many sorts of people over the course of the day, could offer many temptations, simply as a means for bragging — his overblown self-esteem is obvious a mile away — to prove his relationships in intellectual circles, or out of vanity, because those supposed relationships could help him close a sale or even engineer a sexual conquest. Gabriela sees the dark green station wagon again, moving slowly down the sandy road, turning at the intersection and parking some twenty meters ahead, alongside the white bars of the gate. Now she sees Gutiérrez and the wine salesman sitting in the lounge chairs next to the pool, drinking a coffee, and she thinks she hears Nula tactlessly telling Gutiérrez everything that he’s just learned about the anonymous author of the novelized history of precisionism, which creates a double layer of complication, the first relative to the author of the fragment and the second relative to Gutiérrez himself, because they’ve told Nula more about the fourth informant, not because they doubted his judgment but rather because they aren’t close enough to Gutiérrez to discuss certain things. She’s tempted to call Soldi and tell him all of this, but she realizes that he’s probably still not home, and, feeling suddenly more tired than usual — she might be a little hungry, because the two catfish with salad actually turned out somewhat thin for three people — she lets herself fall softly, face up, on the bed, and stretching out contentedly, careful to keep her feet over the edge of the bed, she uses her feet to slide her shoes off at the heels, letting them fall with a loud thud against the lacquered parquet floor. Sliding to the center of the bed, she spreads her legs, stretches her arms alongside her body, and assuming a satisfied expression (like everyone else, Gabriela is in the habit, which by now is unconscious, of displaying her inner life with gestures and expressions, especially when she’s alone), she smiles happily and half closes her eyes.