Suddenly, raising a glass and holding it motionless in the air, in a parodically solemn voice, Tomatis recites:
If the drug called Day is the one you turn to
know that the people you’ll buy from here
forget to mention the thing to fear
which, in the end, is that it’s sure to kill you
The others laugh, nodding their heads, and Violeta, leaning toward him, congratulates him with a kiss on the cheek.
— Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate, Soldi quotes with a smile, as though they were in an improvised musical dialogue, looking sidelong at Tomatis to see what his reaction will be. And, bringing the glass of wine to his lips, he takes a long, meditative sip.
— The idea is copied, and ruined, by the way, from the thirteenth sonnet to Orpheus, Tomatis says, discarding, expeditiously, Mario Brando’s verse, and with an air of having countered, many times, in the same way, Soldi’s typical provocations. And after having simulated gratification (the former) and categorical triumph (the latter) the two look at each other conspiratorially, celebrating what technically speaking would be called an inside joke.
In fact, Soldi is trying, in a very direct way, to provoke Tomatis into talking about Mario Brando. Soldi knows that the subject is unpleasant for him, and Tomatis avoids it if possible or simply, with impatient skepticism or even ostentatious disdain, rejects it altogether. But in general even a minor incident, a phrase that might contradict his intransigent opinion of the person and craft of Brando, an aesthetic or moral judgment, a poorly told anecdote or an ambiguous estimation of the man, and so on, would be enough, notwithstanding his sworn silence and indifference, meant to ignore him into disappearance from the universe of opinion, to set Tomatis off on an interminable monologue from which Soldi, who’s already heard it several times, draws fresh pleasure every time he hears it, not to mention the fact that new information which could be useful to the investigation always comes up. But Tomatis, with a satisfied smile, declares:
— The second bottle is on me, along with the appetizers that, I hope, will add to the experience. Speaking of which, Turk, the salamis — beautiful! My sister couldn’t believe how good they were.
— Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature, Nula says.
— Now your Phoenician soul is coming out. I was thinking your joke was designed to brighten our passage, but it turns out that it was just a publicity ruse meant to exploit me as a sandwich board, Tomatis says.
— What joke, che, what joke? Violeta says.
— I found him standing on a corner, so I offered to take him downtown, Nula tries to say, but Violeta interrupts him.
— Don’t tell me he made that joke about the bus that was too full, she says. He told me that one day when I was still engaged to my first husband and started following me around everywhere expecting me to sleep with him.
— I had to wait years for it, Tomatis says.
— And the one about Propp, did he ever tell you that? Violeta says.
— Yes, Gabriela and Soldi say in unison, but Diana and Nula, with inquisitive expressions, wait for someone to tell them.
— Vladimir Propp invented the structural analysis of folk tales. Every plot element, shared among the stories, he argued, could be reduced to their function, starting from an initial situation (for instance, a king and his three daughters), which is represented with the Greek letter alpha, a sequence of variations follow, each of which represents a function: for instance, the daughters go out for a walk (function β3) and they stay longer than they should in the garden (∂1); a dragon kidnaps them (A1); the king calls for help (B1) and three heroes depart in search of them (C↑, to indicate the departure); combat with and death of the dragon (M1—Y1); liberation of the girls (K1); return (↓); and compensation (W3), Soldi recites, pretending to be exhausted when he finishes. The limited variable set, he continues, allows us to abbreviate every combination to an abstract scheme. Tomatis says that in Germany, where modern life is incredibly hectic and time is money, parents are too busy to read their children a story before putting them to bed, so they recite one of Propp’s formulas instead. And the German children, who are very intelligent, like them a lot. Nula, don’t forget this one tonight: alpha beta three capital A, A to the first B to the first up-arrow. H to the first dash Y one K four down-arrow W cubed. Your kids will love it.
— Fantastic, Diana says. Like a numbered joke.
— Propp may have been inspired by them, Tomatis says. And, standing up, he adds, Before the next bottle arrives, I beg your leave to relieve myself of the first.
He makes a gesture to the waiter, who is behind the register, that consists of pointing at the table and spinning his finger, and then, passing behind Nula, opens a door and turns on a light in the next room, illuminating the abandoned cinema whose bar Amigos del Vino rents out to use as their promotional location. The glass doors that lead to the street are shut, as are those that would lead him to the theater itself, and the staircase that once led to the mezzanine is blocked by several rows of stacked-up chairs. On the opposite wall stands the ticket window, intact, but the ceiling lights, which Tomatis has just turned on, don’t allow him to see what’s behind the glass. The bathrooms are to the right of the door, contiguous with the bar. Sometimes, during the intermission, when he was a teenager, Tomatis remembers, when he went to the bathroom to piss, if he was alone, he’d try to listen to the conversations and the sounds that came from the women’s room, convinced that, because they came from an intimate place, they were sure to be exciting. After pissing, and after looking around to make sure no one is coming in to catch him enjoying that humiliating pleasure, he farts, and then goes back out to the hall, but rather than returning to the bar he approaches the theater doors and, through the circular window, like the eye of an ox, in the center of the upholstered surface — in the fifties, when it opened, it was a luxury theater — he tries to see, through the dust that covers it, the dark interior of the large theater, hoping to hear or perhaps see, lingering in the darkness, the oversized, magnetic ghosts, black and white or in color, the simulacra of life that, night after night, were turned on and shuffled for a couple of hours across the bright screen, and then suddenly turned off, deposited in a circular metal container until someone decided to pull them out again to resume their repetitive, mechanical lives.