— Is it raining again? I ask.
— A little, says the girl in the green dress.
The guy with glasses stares but doesn’t say a thing. After a second, I gesture to the bed and the chairs and say:
— Should we sit?
The girl in the green dress shrugs and sits in a chair, without letting go of the umbrella or the handbag or the scarf. The guy with glasses stands there as if he was made out of stone. I sit down on the edge of the bed. I take out my cigarette pack and offer, but no one accepts. So I light a cigarette for myself and put the pack away. I bite the filter, my lips apart and head back slightly so the smoke doesn’t get in my eyes. If they don’t have a filter to chew on, cigarettes don’t interest me. What I really like is chewing the filter, not smoking. The girl in the green dress looks at me with her eyes wide open. I’m sitting on the edge of the table, my legs stretched out, my hands in the pockets of my raincoat, chewing the cigarette filter. My eyes are half shut and my head is back. The other guy is still standing there, not moving, and I’m tempted to go over and shake him to see if he’s dead or not. Just then Tomatis comes in, holding a glass.
— Make yourselves comfortable, he says, looking at me. I would prefer it if your ass didn’t touch the table.
The girl starts laughing.
— Carlitos, she says, where did you get this chair?
— I inherited it from my grandmother, Tomatis says. He goes over to the statue of a man with a raincoat over his arm and slaps him on the shoulder.
— Don’t just stand there.
The guy obeys and sits down.
— You can go in the kitchen and serve yourselves what you want, Tomatis says. Gloria and la Negra are getting the food ready and Barco is eating it. He’s always hungry. Once he ate a whole cow.
— I don’t believe it, says the girl in green.
— Well, he left the horns and the tail, Tomatis says. He nods toward me. Angelito is a friend of mine from the paper. He writes the weather report. He’s responsible for this incessant rain.
The woman in the white raincoat comes in and starts taking it off. Underneath she had on a sea-blue dress and a sweater of the same color. She finished taking off her raincoat and throws it on the bed. I saw she had hair on her temples, and I wondered if she would be too hairy underneath her clothes.
— We’re eating in ten minutes, she said before going back.
— Negra, said the girl in green, I can help if you need it.
— Barco’s helping, said la Negra, and disappeared.
Even though he was sitting, the guy with glasses still had his raincoat folded over his arm. He was on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, his raincoat folded over his arm and his arm resting on his thigh. Not a single muscle on his face was moving. I thought that if you went up behind him and took out the chair, the guy would stay in the exact same position, floating there. Tomatis was still standing, holding a glass. His beard had grown some since the morning, and his cheeks gave off blue, metallic reflections. His hooked nose was shining at the bridge.
— Where were we? he says.
— That he left the horns and the tail, says the girl in green.
— So we were talking about the devil, Tomatis says.
The girl in green laughs. Tomatis leaves the glass on the table and picks up the pages of the newspaper, arranging and folding them up.
— Tomorrow’s old news, he says, and stands up, his face red from the effort it took to bend over.
Horacio Barco comes in, covering the entire doorway with his body. He’s chewing something and has a glass of wine in his hand.
— Carlos, he says. There’s no salt.
— Impossible, Tomatis says.
But Barco has already disappeared back into the kitchen. Tomatis goes out behind him.
— Are you a writer as well? says the girl in green.
— No, I say.
— What do you do, besides the paper? she says.
— Nothing. Sometimes I do some work for the police, but not often, I say.
— What kind of work? says the girl in green.
— Follow people, shakedowns, I say. Nothing much.
— How exciting, says the girl in green.
— Not really, I say. It’s boring, mostly.
— Yes, I can imagine, says the girl in green, thoughtfully. Everything ends up boring in the long run.
Tomatis comes in just as I’m raising his whiskey to take a drink from it. He waits until I’m done and then takes the glass.
— There are two bottles, in the kitchen, he says.
Then he goes up to the guy with the raincoat folded over his arm, who must have died by then.
— You can serve yourself something in the kitchen, Nicolás, he says.
The guy stands up without saying a word and leaves, taking his raincoat with him. When he disappears I turn to Tomatis:
— Is it sewn to his arm? I ask.
— What? says Tomatis.
— The raincoat, I say.
Tomatis laughs weakly and tells me to go to the kitchen if I want to drink something, and to shout when dinner is ready.
— No, I say. I don’t want to drink anything for now. With dinner, in any case.
—Ángel is a character, Tomatis says.
— So it seems, says the girl in green, looking at me with some curiosity.
I throw the cigarette on the floor and jump off the table, crushing the butt with my shoe. The floor is covered with mud stains, and from the center of the room to the kitchen door there’s a trail of puddles. The girl in green has her legs open, and her gathered dress shows half of her thighs, which are madman. I try every possible way to not look in that direction, but some crazy force makes me turn my head again and again. She doesn’t even notice. I even get the impression that she barely knows I’m there, and the questions she asks come out of her mouth mechanically, as though she has them prepared for whenever she’s with someone whose face isn’t totally familiar. The last look she gave me was the most vivid, but she grazed my face with it so lightly that it ended up annoying me.
— Your face is familiar, I say.
— Could be, she says. In this city, everyone knows everyone.
— No, I say. I have a feeling that we were talking once before.