— Aren’t you worried about having deprived your daughter of a father?
— Yes, very, Virginia says without hesitating, but she doesn’t elaborate on her response.
Nula doesn’t insist, though he thinks again about his mother, his brother, his murdered father. Still, he doesn’t really want to discuss the topic, first of all because it’s too intimate and painful to describe immediately to someone who’s practically a stranger, but especially because he prefers to avoid disclosures, not out of caution or discretion, but rather because he doesn’t want them to become too human; he’d rather avoid opening the fissure through which shame and compassion might pass, the first being confused for the second in a swamp of relativity, removing them from that limbo of exteriority where their desire, sheltered from shame and reluctance, moving with ease, irrational, makes pleasure from ghostly stereotypes. Thus the meal passes with the kind of polite and expectant formality where each of them — at least this is how Nula imagines it — tries to discern, analyzing, in transit, the other’s intentions. They try the red wine and say some things about it, attempting to describe with everyday images the incommunicable depths of the experience, and when they coincide in some detail they reveal an excessive, childish enthusiasm that in Nula is not simulated in the least, though its excessiveness may come from the anticipated pleasure of what, though it hasn’t been named once all night — maybe they’ve both decided it without they themselves deliberating it, each of them possibly unaware of their own decision — inexorably, approaches. Every time that Nula thinks of the possibility, a violent emotion overwhelms him, and he has to concentrate so intensely to keep it from manifesting outwardly that, from time to time, he loses the thread of the conversation and can only respond with vague monosyllables and slow, indistinct nods, projecting into the immediate future the intense disorder, impenetrable to the words that Virginia, concentrating on the thoughts that those words attempt to translate, speaks in the present. Though she protests energetically, Nula pays the bill, and when they finish their last sip of wine, he gets up, says he’ll be right back, and starts walking toward the bathrooms. Because it’s Friday night, the restaurant is packed, and Nula sidesteps the tables with an unhurried, distracted agility. Two large tables of older women who get together, without their husbands, on Fridays, exude a singular energy, an overblown joy, possibly because they’ve freed themselves, for a few hours or forever, from the protection, tender or despotic, it makes no difference, of the men who, for decades, imagined that they possessed them. And a few meters beyond them, in a discreet corner in the back of the room, where the waiter, because of his experience, though he was ignorant to Nula’s private custom — hiding in plain sight — offered to seat them when he came in with Virginia, sits Gutiérrez in the company of a woman of a certain age, older than him — or at least that’s the impression that Nula gets as he approaches.
Gutiérrez has seen him approach, and because he’s also seen Nula notice him, he waits for him smiling, half-standing. When he sees him, Nula thinks that if there were a restaurant that Gutiérrez, having returned to the city after more than thirty years away, would definitely pick, it would have to be the Hotel Palace, which already existed, very similar to how it is now, before his mysterious departure. Gutiérrez might be unaware that, like the tumultuous history of the country and the city, the restaurant, so similar to how he left it, suffered many setbacks, changes of fortune, decline, death and rebirth, successive closures and triumphant but ephemeral reopenings, periods when it was even a ruins and a house of ill repute, until a few years ago an international consortium of hotels bought and restored it, improved by the prestige that age inexplicably endows, to the same look it had the day it first opened in the mid forties. I’d bet my life that he couldn’t have paid for it back then, but the real reason he’s here tonight is that he’d wanted to be here during those years, doing the things that he imagined that the ones who were here kept doing, as though he’d never left, as though nothing had happened in all that time, and the Hotel Palace, with its most recent and umpteenth inauguration, must shore up that illusion, given its attachment, according to everyone who knows him better than I do, to that same world that was his until the day he left, Nula thinks, constantly smiling, as he approaches the table, holding out his hand to Gutiérrez, who waits with his own extended.
— How are you? Gutiérrez says. Mr. Anoch, wine seller. Mrs. Leonor Calcagno.
Nula is about to hold out his hand to her, but something in her posture, neither suspicious nor aggressive, but rather absent behind a vague smile, either her typical grimace or the involuntary side effect of repeated plastic surgery, tells him that she will not change position, and so he chooses instead a subtle, stiff, but friendly bow.
— Good to met you, he says, and she responds with an imperceptible movement of her head.
— I saw you when I came in, but you didn’t see me. Your wife, I take it, Gutiérrez says, nodding more or less in the direction of Nula’s table.
Thinking that Virginia is my wife is as far from the truth as taking Lucía for his daughter, Nula thinks with unjustified cruelty, but instead he responds in the most neutral tone he can muster: Not at all. She’s a colleague from the supercenter; a typical business dinner.
— Of course, Gutiérrez says. Now that you mention it, it’s obvious a mile away. I hadn’t looked closely.
And he looks, quickly and just as vaguely, at the approximate place in the dining room where Virginia must be sitting at the table, though both he and Nula know, of course, that it’s impossible for him to see her from where he’s standing.
— The other day I tried the viognier with Gabriela and Soldi. Thanks for the recommendation, it’s excellent, Gutiérrez says.
— So I heard. I ran into them when they were coming back from there, happy as anything, after eating my catfish, Nula says, and Gutiérrez receives this allusion with a cackle.
— La forza del destino, he says. And in a kindly threatening tone, he says, Be sure to bring your swimsuit on Sunday. I read that the weather is supposed to be excellent. I already called the others; you were the only ones left.
— I’m sure it’ll be great, Nula says, but, for several seconds, he finds it impossible to turn his thoughts or his eyes from Leonor Calcagno: from between those legs, probably, though he can’t see them under the table, as thin and feeble as her blackened arms, at one point, Lucía Riera had emerged, irritated and bloody, wailing in shock and terror, from the placid lethargy in which she’d been vegetating for nine months, possibly sowed by the very man he’s just spoken to; suddenly, time has started to run backward, and the first cause of his encounter with that attractive, firm body, swaying, dressed in red, across that spring afternoon, attracting him like a magnet, or, better yet, like a promise, is now in front of him, the clandestine hours when in cheap hotels or in some apartment far from the city center, with fury and tenderness, they copulated — if, after all, it’s true that Gutiérrez, and not the author of the still-usable Roman Law Course, is the real father, although the refusal, by all the parties in question, to verify it categorically, something which would be so easy to do, tends to suggest the opposite. Maybe it seems dishonorable to Gutiérrez to believe DNA more than Leonor; in any case, if that demented pact between the mother, the daughter, and the supposed father is inexplicable, it’s no more so than the apparent devotion that Gutiérrez demonstrates for the wreckage he’s taken out to dinner at the Palace restaurant tonight: clearly she has the cerebrum of a bird, and not just its cerebrum, actually. If she was beautiful once, she no longer conserves even the faintest shadow of that beauty; she can’t weigh more than forty kilos; her dark skin, devastated by constant exposure to the sun, or worse yet, to artificial tanning lamps, along with the creams, the diet regimes, the face lifts and skin grafts, the hair transplants and dye jobs, the silicone breast implants and lip fillers, supposedly to make them more sensual, have eroded whatever beauty she ever may have had; her arms, which extend like two dry twigs from the short sleeves of her dark blouse (perhaps following the precept that dark colors are thinning), loaded with bracelets, just like her gaunt fingers with rings, are wrinkled, and a thick layer of makeup disguises the wrinkles on her face, but no face lift could hide the skin on her neck that, as blackened as the rest, collapses into irrecoverable folds, which the two or three necklaces that lay on her flat and bony chest cannot manage to conceal. And now, to top it off, she opens her purse and, removing a makeup case, opens it, looks at herself in the interior mirror, and starts to retouch parts of her face with a small brush. Her skin is so dark, her body so withered, that her eyes, which are large and brilliant and yet inexpressive, look like two artificial lights occupying the place where her eyes should be, shining through their respective orifices in a dark, crumpled, and lifeless cardboard mask. When he turns his head away, Nula’s eyes meet Gutiérrez’s; his eyes are serene, and glow with a lucid and benevolent irony: I know what you’re thinking. But to understand what this is you’d have to live through the entire life of someone else; my experience is untranslatable, so it’s useless for you to waste your time wondering why I ran back to this rotten city after she and I met in Europe and she told me I was the father of her daughter. What do I care if it’s true or not? No matter what, the external always takes your place, the world, with its capricious, impenetrable laws, will always take you wherever it wants. You can’t imagine how beautiful she was, and so different from your associate tonight, and even though she couldn’t follow through to the end, she had more than enough courage for the enormous risk of giving herself to me, a nobody, for several weeks. Wouldn’t it seem terrible to you if I left her now that she’s alone, exhausted from her battle with age, after she’d given me, at the exact moment when I most needed it, what none of the gigolos who have exploited her would ever have? It doesn’t matter to me that she’s gone to bed with a thousand men; frankly I don’t think she gave a single one of them the gift the she gave me and that she herself is probably unaware that she possessed, or in any case that, from the effect that she continues to this day to have on my life, was only meant for me. In fact, Nula can’t tell with any certainty if these are the words hidden in the look that Gutiérrez has just given him, or if it’s he himself who attributes them to him, connecting the fragmentary histories in circulation and projecting onto Gutiérrez what, without knowing it till that moment, he’s thought of him since he first met him. Several curious and even absurd things, if taken separately, acquire a certain sense, not entirely clear of course, but totally coherent: for instance, his insistent declaration that he became a screenwriter and took on a pseudonym in order to disappear better, or on Tuesday, at the fish and game club, when he took out his false teeth, causing him as much surprise and even discomfort as to the man tending the bar, but which nevertheless seemed strangely reasonable to Escalante, so much so that he rewarded him with two live catfish, which, as an immediate consequence, restored the bartender’s respect. Many things escape him, and while there’s nothing actually disconcerting about Gutiérrez, just the opposite in fact, some aspects of his personality seem, in the end, not exactly absurd, but rather enigmatic.