Before getting out of the car, Nula takes the copy of the verses by Omar Kayyám from his briefcase and, folding the white pages carefully down the middle, he deposits them in the side pocket of his jacket. As he crosses the parking lot, from the sixth row parallel to the entrance, the sun seems stronger than it did during his siesta, possibly because of the sensation of increased heat from the warm asphalt, over which his obedient shadow, the sharply drawn silhouette that follows him, diminished by the position of the sun in the cloudless sky, is projected. And when he enters the coolness inside the building, the change in climate, which includes, in addition to the air conditioning, a continuous loop of saccharine movie soundtracks in the background—“Love Is A Many Splendored Thing,” just now — contributes, Nula remembers every time he walks in, to the sensation of passing from the air to the water, like when, as a teenager, diving into the river from the floating dock at the regatta club, he’d penetrate the subaquatic medium, completely different from the land above. But immediately, to the left of the entrance, a small crowd, somewhere between passive and unruly, calls his attention: a disorganized line, gathering and dispersing in accordance with the contained agitation of its constituents, mostly men, but also a few women, teenagers, and children, from various social classes, judging by their clothes, causes Nula to wonder what new, magical product can produce that reconciliation of classes, genders, and generations, equalized by the common denominator of appetite. Apparently, certain sporadic irregularities in their behavior, motivated by the impatience and even the anxiety of some of its constituents, produces a momentary disturbance that disrupts the line, eventually reconstituted by the vigorous protests emerging from the crowd. Nula approaches a dark-skinned older man who watches the scene with cold, vaguely disdainful calm.
— What are they selling? Nula says.
— Tickets to the Sunday match, the man says, without even turning his head to look at the face of the person who’s asked him the question, concentrating instead on his observation of the crowd’s behavior, possibly with the intention of making use of his observations to find an advantageous place in line, or simply with the philosophical neutrality of someone corroborating with this scene a specific preconception of the human race. Nula hesitates a moment, observing for himself the people who swarm around the entrance to the small room, and then he takes a few steps away, toward the empty passageway, and taking his cell phone from his pocket, dials a number and waits a few seconds for an answer.
— Good afternoon, he says. This is Mr. Anoch, from Amigos del Vino. Is Ms. Virginia there, please?
— One moment, says a feminine voice. And after a few seconds: She’s in a meeting. Can you wait ten minutes in the cafeteria, please?
— Of course, Nula says.
The voice on the other end says thank you and hangs up. The cafeteria is almost empty just now; the customers seem to prefer, being as they are brighter and more suitable for light fare, the two bars in the hypermarket, one at each end of the building, the farthest one near the phone bank, and the other just before the entrance to the food section, in a wide passageway, along with a car dealership and, across the way, a few meters before the bar-cafeteria, a travel agency and a sporting goods store. Without intending to, or even realizing it, Nula sits down at the same table, in the same seat, and in the same position as Wednesday, on his way back from Paraná. The moment he sits down, a detail that he’d overlooked disorients him for a minute, and while amusing, insistently, though intermittently of course, it torments him: the guttural pigeon-like cooing, increasing in frequency and in amplitude as the paroxysm approached, that at once savage and tender cooing issuing, hoarsely, from Lucía’s chest the night when he decided, crawling on four legs, almost in tears, from their bedroom, to leave their lives forever, the cooing that, as he listened to it for the last time, from the living room, seemed to have transformed into a growl, hadn’t appeared the day before yesterday in Paraná, in fact no sound whatsoever had come from Lucía’s chest. She might have clung to his body somewhat more tightly at the moment when, shuddering, he finished, but the unequivocal signal of pleasure from another, more remote from her own body than the distant stars, the impotent and painful fury of desire reaching its upper limit of incandescence as well as its momentary obliteration, the sonorous evidence rising from the dark jungle of her organs, had remained silent during her calculated and blatant pantomime. And I felt guilty! She acts, thinks, and breathes for him. He commands her from a distance, like a remote-controlled robot. They’re beyond united; they’re a single entity in two separate bodies. He’s assaulted by a tenuous humiliation, and, almost immediately, by a battered, acquiescent relief. Remembering that he’s in a cafeteria, he stands up and, walking toward the passageway, separated from the room by a moveable metal railing a meter high, parallel along the full length of the shelves, refrigerated or otherwise, displaying food and drinks, picks out a carbonated mineral water, and after paying for it and having the cashier open it, he puts several cubes of ice and a slice of lemon, which he picks up with metal tongs from a receptacle, into a tall glass and, arriving at the end of the line, starts to cross the silent room, past the empty tables, toward his table. Halfway to the table, he stops, sprays some mineral water into the glass, shakes it, and takes a sip. And, while he’s drinking, the following idea, like a surge of emotion, strikes him: Everything is real, probably, but if we sometimes see things as unreal it’s because of their transience. Only in dreams are things absolute, when in reality we see things as relative and transitory. And so, while dreaming, we believe more in the reality of the dream than in what we believe while awake in the reality of the world.