Nula reaches out his hand, seeking Virginia’s, and he finds it, warm and relaxed, on her thigh; their fingers intertwine again, but without resistance.
— What should we do? he says.
— Whatever you want, if you can imagine that I don’t do this every Friday, Virginia says.
— It wouldn’t matter to me, Nula says.
— But I don’t, she says, and after a pause: I’m paying for the hotel.
Nula, incredulous, shakes his head: And is that typical? he says, with a laugh that sounds like a protest.
— I’m not going to explain it, Virginia says, without laughing.
— Alright, alright, Nula says. I accept.
They go to a motel room on the outskirts of the city, to the north. An employee meets them in the shadows of the entrance. Nula rolls down the window and the man, without leaning out too much, out of discretion for sure, offers them a special room, which he calls the Palais de Glace.
— Why not? Virginia says before Nula has time to consult her. And, giving him a nudge on the arm, holds out a few bills.
— The last garage on the left, the man says, and Nula drives away slowly, in first gear, down a brick gravel path flanked by hedges and surrounded by a series of garages, of which two or three are occupied. Dim lights barely illuminate the garden, and when the car enters the garage, a faintly luminous strip designates the entrance, which they cross without incident thanks to the car’s headlights.
A door in the middle of the wall leads to an almost completely dark passageway in which the man from the entrance is waiting for them. Without turning around — discretion is a house rule — he leads them to a door, opens it, and before disappearing, he murmurs: The light switch is to the left of the entrance.
As soon as they enter, Nula switches it on and closes the door to the passageway. The contrast with the passageway, the garage, the garden, and the turbulent night in the outskirts dazzles and at the same time amuses and fascinates them. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and its illuminated lamps are reflected in an array of mirrors surrounding a large bed, without a headboard, covered in a red bedspread. The back wall, the two side walls, and the ceiling from which the chandelier hangs are covered with mirrors. Standing in the middle of the room, at the foot of the bed, each one of their movements is repeated ad infinitum in the mirrors, sharp and clearly visible in the glaring, multiplied lights. They embrace and kiss, but without the other seeming to notice it, both are less attracted to the carnal experience than to the infinite image of themselves experiencing it, returned to them, simultaneously, by the mirrors. Nula wants to go take a shower, but it’s difficult for him to abandon that embrace, reproduced as far as the eye can see, acquiring a dreamlike quality in which the multiple images of himself carry out the gestures that he imagines, without the sensations that he experiences, ultimately confusing the empirical plane with the countless images that mimic him until he loses his own sense of reality. Eventually, he lets go and walks into the bathroom. He undresses, and when he steps into the shower to wash himself off and cool down, he’s so excited that his penis makes it difficult for him to wash his groin, his thighs, his testicles. Finally, he reemerges, drying himself off as he walks into the room. Virginia is lying on the bed, naked, her forearm resting on her forehead and her eyes narrowed, one leg bent and the other extended across the bed, the black triangle of her pubis half-hidden by a fist resting softly on the pillow of hair. Nula lets the towel fall to the ground and, standing at the foot of the bed, rests his left hand against his own groin to make his penis stand out more, and then, with his fingers, pulls back the foreskin to reveal the reddish head, inflated by the impatient blood, and then, looking sideways, sees his own image multiplied in the side mirrors, then in the one in front of him, and finally in the one that returns his image, inverted, from the roof. But when he looks back toward the image reflected by the side mirrors his eyes meet Virginia’s and he realizes that she isn’t asleep and that in fact, with her eyes narrowed, she’s gazing, lost in thought, at her own naked body in the mirror. Suddenly, she realizes that she’s being watched, and looking at Nula through the mirror, feeling discovered, she starts to laugh, and Nula, removing his hand from his groin, laughs along. For several seconds, countless naked bodies, that of a young woman lying in bed, and that of a man standing at the foot of the same bed, laugh with a curious joy, but the laughter rings out in a single dimension, without it being clear where it comes from, whether from the rough bodies made of blood, of impulses, of thoughts, and of time, or from the ghostly pantomime that, sheltered from contingency, mimics them, seething, in the mirrors. Virginia opens her eyes and moves her arms, which end up alongside her body. Her legs, stretched out across the bed, open slightly, and along the inside edge of the black triangle of her pubis, barely visible, the reddish promise is revealed, the legendary entrance beyond which, inaccessible and remote, in an unknowable space, like the most distant and invisible galaxies, the sensations of the other take shape.
SATURDAY: MARGINS
Before the central market was torn down, the alley behind it was full of cheap restaurants and boarding houses. In one of these, La Giralda, on August 6th, 1945, precisionism was born.
There was no broadside, no Battle of Hernani, no exquisite corpse. Mario Brando, its creator, had his sights elsewhere: precisionism should take its place not among the avant-garde, in opposition to the times, but rather as its most faithful representation. According to Brando, newspapers, radio stations, universities, and large-circulation magazines should be the natural media for the expression and expansion of the movement. Scientific magazines not only weren’t excluded but in fact were, in a certain sense, the immediate precursors of the precisionist aesthetic. A proto-precisionism could be found precisely in the latest scientific treatises and the reviews of these in popular magazines.
At the time, for the writers of the city, it was a sign of good taste to be seen, every so often, at one of the precisionists’ Thursday dinners. Only the post-modernista old guard refused to yield, but it’s important to note that, from Belisario Roldán onward, they’d labeled every new literary movement as wayward, prosaic, and incomprehensible. Anyone still left over in nineteen sixty was still making the same joke about modern art, namely that everything represented by abstract painting was a fried egg.
The rest of the opposition, which is to say the neoclassicists and the regionalists, was much more elastic, if not opportunistic. The regionalists, who met on Fridays at the San Lorenzo grill house, would individually attend the dinners every so often, and would invite this or that precisionist to their cookouts. But they didn’t suffer from any illusions: they knew that Nexos, the official organ of Mario Brando’s movement, would never welcome a regionalist text. The neoclassicists, whose magazine, Espiga, had been published triannualy since 1943, had some official exchanges with the precisionists, inasmuch as Brando and his clique thought that certain neoclassical subjects, like Christian mysticism, for instance, could yield to the precisionist aesthetic. And the neoclassicists, meanwhile, appreciated the precisionist inclination for traditional forms. In private, the regionalists referred to the neoclassicists as sanctimonious Bible thumpers and to the precisionists as outdated futurists and fascists; the neoclassicists said that the regionalists, with every one of their criollo cookouts, were slowly devouring the subjects of their literature, and that the precisionists, with their absurd scientism, were the medical school pages; and the precisionists, who weren’t satisfied with the occasional slander and in fact launched fully clandestine smear campaigns, referred to several members of Espiga’s editorial committee as Curia spies, to their writing as an intentional amalgamation of mysticism and faggotry, and said that the interest of the regionalist group’s leader for the countryside could be explained by the fact that he was actually a horse.