— I was about to leave for the office, he says in a soft, affable, and vaguely paternalistic voice. I didn’t think you were going to call.
— Did she already tell you about our meeting? Nula says. Despite the separation, she’s still under your influence.
— First of all, we’re not separated, we’re estranged, Riera says, without losing an ounce of affability despite the severity of Nula’s tone. Secondly, I’ve been planning this trip, to see the baby, for a long time. It’s Holy Week, remember? And finally, it’s such a pleasure to hear from you after so long, and how enchanting your wife is! Why’d you disappear without saying a word, you son of a bitch?
— I didn’t want to bother you. You two seemed so busy, he says, repressing a smile.
— Now I have to ask your permission to fuck my wife? Riera says obscenely. Despite the time that’s passed, Nula recognizes the overtones.
— There are more important things that you don’t. . Nula starts to say, but Riera, cheerfully, deliberately compounding the vulgarity of his previous question, interrupts him:
— Horseshit! he says, raising his voice slightly. I’ve told you a thousand times: what there is is what is there and what it does, no more no less.
— And I’ve told you a thousand times: vulgar empiricism, or worse yet, bourgeois pragmatism, Nula says, laughing. You’re in decline, Oscar.
What there is is what is there, no more no less: that aphorism contained the entirety of Riera’s materialist monism (though he’d never called it that), and Nula had heard him say it over and over back then, as a way to start or finish any discussion, never losing his grave voice or his cheerfulness. A kind of euphoria seems to overcome him when he expresses that conviction, as if everything, reduced to the primitive, unsophisticated tendency of primary material to diversify through countless combinations revealed its essential transparency, its immediate and distant clarity, its mechanical predictability, facilitating not only his way of being on the physical plane, but also, and especially, on the moral one. (Riera’s worldview, at least as or possibly more crude than the world to which he applies it, is, to Nula, his most enviable trait.)
— You can criticize me in person. I’ll be in the city tomorrow at noon, Riera says.
— At noon? Nula says, incredulous.
— I take off from Bahía Blanca at eight thirty, connect in Aeroparque at eleven, and at twelve, more or less, I land in Sauce Viejo, Riera says.
— Should I pick you up? Nula says.
— Lucía will be waiting for me, Riera says. And we’ll see each other Sunday, in any case — your wife is coming I hope — and I stay the rest of the week. I have to run to the office. Ciao.
When the line goes dead, Nula hangs up the cell phone and holds it cupped in his hand, which shakes distractedly, confused by the conversation he’s just had and whose echoes, empirical traces that resonate, more and more uncertain, until they crystallize, or fossilize, like flowers of experience desiccated between the yellowed pages of a book, move to their place in the dark archive of his memory. Nula leaves the phone on the chair and, throwing the towel carelessly on the grass, he stands up, naked, and takes a few indecisive steps across the lawn. The courtyard is a rectangle of green grass, closed at the back and along the sides by an unplastered brick wall tall enough to prevent the neighbors from seeing him walk around naked; a curved, white slab path dives the rectangle of grass in two; on the path an overturned tricycle bakes in the sun; and on the lawn a small plastic truck full of dried avocado leaves seems to wait for someone to push it away; a few trees grow along the wall, a bitterwood, a very tall avocado tree, and a rose laurel. Suddenly, a butterfly appears a meter away, as if, filtering through an invisible fissure in the air, it had fluttered from nothingness into being, from the impossible other world that Riera consigns to inexistence without the slightest hesitation, to the living interior of the material, taking shape, dense and rough; it flutters a while in the daylight, and then, disintegrating, returns, darkly, to the indifference and muddiness of the diurnal.
After shaving for the second time that day, Nula’s mind, clouded by the sun, awakens under a warm shower, where he remains a long time, and before stepping out he finishes with a thick burst of cold water; his muscles tense up, and as he dries himself, he feels energetic, compact, hard, and he rubs his body vigorously, opening the bathroom door and causing the steam from the warm shower, which fogs the mirror, to dissipate. It’s somewhat cooler outside the bathroom, so he walks to the bedroom, naked, to dress, constantly rubbing his body with the towel to dry the wetness, which he can no longer distinguish as water or sweat. In the bedroom, which, in darkness, is actually cold, he senses, with pleasure, that his skin is drying, and after rubbing deodorant on his armpits he starts to get dressed with the kind of special attention that has nothing to do with the inauguration of the promotion for Amigos del Vino but rather with the expectation of another kind that the night has in store for him. He puts on a lightweight tan suit over a cream-colored short-sleeve polo shirt, without a tie, and a pair of shiny brown loafers, without socks. The local criteria for elegance, more or less valid for the previous forty years, and suited to a middle class man whose work does not preclude him from certain touches of bohemia, which includes the selective commerce of wine and other gastronomical products, are followed scrupulously by Nula, but his age, twenty-nine, the last symbolic barrier from entering the adult world forever, allows him certain touches of studied negligence, exhibited to the world in general, but especially for certain people, at night, and in secret. When he’s ready he picks up his keys, his pen, his wallet and credit cards, a few coins from the night stand, his cell phone, his notebook, and a clean handkerchief that he puts in the right rear pocket of his pants, and turning toward his desk he switches the computer on, looking for the lines by Omar Kayyám that, last night, after he and Diana got back from the Amigos del Vino bar, where they were having drinks with Gabriela Barco, Tomatis, Soldi, and Violeta, and, around midnight, after taking home the girl who’d stayed late to watch the kids, he’d finished polishing and typing out on the computer, expurgated of all allusions contrary to the aseptic postulates of publicity technique, of marketing strategy, and of the porous and drowsy understanding of the consumers. If the ideas on this topic, which he’s been turning over in his head for a long time, could be expressed in a more or less organized way, they would develop as follows: Inebriation, the primary function of wine consumption, cannot be mentioned, though by definition it’s the very reason for its existence; and inebriation begins with the first glass, which means that only a hypocrite could pretend that drinking in moderation is possible. The feeling produced by the first sip of wine and the ultimate drunken black-out are only separated by degrees. After the first glass, the other, an other — the otherness — that we’re seeking begins to bloom from within the only place where it could rationally be found, that is to say, within ourselves. Wine transforms both the drinker and the world around him. The sensorial shift provokes a momentary forgetting of the abyss, allowing, almost immediately, joy, wit, and energy to take its place; it doesn’t matter that later, with the second or third bottle, distress, anguish, confusion, and fury return, taking possession of the body and the mind. Inebriation is an easy gift: the ability to finally be oneself. Sobriety expels us from our true inner life, and inebriation restores it to us. That is the only purpose of wine, and because of this alcohol is sacred in every civilization but ours, where, like everything else, it’s been transformed into merchandise. It must have something to do with Christianity, because in The Thousand and One Nights the wine sellers are always Christian. Rather than attempt to excise inebriation from the consumption of wine, it’s necessary to admit that in fact inebriation without wine also exists, and that seeking it through wine constitutes a search for the self, which sobriety, in general, refuses. It stands to reason that in order not to find one’s self it’s necessary to practice a ritualized sobriety. Natural inebriation, without the aid of toxins like wine or other drugs is also looked down upon. Insanity, for instance, can be considered a kind of inebriation caused by a combination of internal and external agents. Mysticism is another: that’s why the mystics, drunk on divinity, are shunned by every religion. But there’s a passing, non-toxic inebriation that can suddenly assault the individual, allowing an internal transformation and, for a few moments, an inward sight along with a different vision of the world that is estranged, in transition, where the banal is exalted, the familiar is uncanny, and the unknown, familiar. That autonomous inebriation, which can cause exaltation or panic, puts one into contact with the otherness sought through wine, and is therefore as suspect as the other, which wine produces. The earnest search for that otherness from the self, which is within the self, and within the world, can be considered an exercise in practical metaphysics. And the contact with that otherness, exultant or painful, like a passing mystical experience, shouldn’t be worried over. Nula takes the notebook from his pocket, opens it on the desk, and, with a black pen removed from a jar, after drawing a line, a squiggle, and then another line in order to separate the new note from the previous one, thinks for a few seconds and then writes: A dialectical materialism conceived from multiple and contradictory viewpoints, in a single individual or in severaclass="underline" the otherness of the self, like the front and back of a thin disc, which, when spun, reverses front and back, each occupying the place of the other. One transforming, continuously, into the other. But as he writes he’s assaulted by a doubt: what if his fear of having been betrayed by Lucía is what’s inspired his revenge on the ridiculous conspiracy that adjudicates Riera and Lucía. He leaves the pen in the jar, closes the notebook, puts it in the inside pocket of his coat, and, after picking up the briefcase, passing through the bedroom to take one last look at himself in the mirror, he turns off the light and, crossing the living room and the cool, shaded front hall, opens the door and goes out onto the bright sidewalk.