— Could be, she says. I talk so much. And with so many people.
— But I have a feeling we were talking intimately, I say.
This has no effect. She makes an ambiguous gesture and shrugs, admitting the possibility. Tomatis stares at me. Just then the guy with the raincoat over his arm comes in holding a glass of whiskey in his free hand. He stops near the door, motionless. He has on these enormous brown shoes with rubber soles so thick that they look like orthopedics.
— Nicolás, you’ve filled your tank I see, Tomatis says cheerfully.
— We can go to the table now, Nicolás says.
So he could talk. It was pretty amazing, considering his striking resemblance to a human being. I thought it possible that he was some plastic android for whom Barco had quickly improvised a mechanism in the kitchen that made it possible for him to formulate the expression, We can go to the table now. Or that Tomatis himself was the one who responded, like a ventriloquist. The girl in green got up and left.
— Don’t rush off, Ángel, Tomatis said. Pupé doesn’t have a cunt. She was born that way. But she’s lots of fun, and useful for conversation. In any case, she doesn’t understand anything about anything.
The dinner was awful. They had opened like fifty cans of peas, boiled them with onions, and ended up with a flavorless, runny stew. I don’t know who convinced Nicolás to leave his raincoat on the back of his chair, but his posture didn’t change much — the whole time his arm stayed in the same position it was in when he’d been holding the coat. Because there weren’t enough chairs, Gloria ate sitting on Barco’s lap, from his plate. Apparently they had gotten quite intimate during the cooking, or most likely they already knew each other before. Gloria had on these very tight black pants, and her hair was in a ponytail. She had a long, thin neck, like a pole, and Barco held her back so she wouldn’t fall. I sat between Tomatis and la Negra — Pupé was sitting next to Tomatis — and noticed that la Negra’s hair even grew behind her ears. I imagined her covered in hair, like a monkey. When he took his first mouthful, Tomatis said that maybe with rotten onions the stew might have come out a little better, but there was still time to dig through the trash for some condiments to add. Then he said a movie producer is easy to recognize right off by the thickness of his cigar, but with a director it’s trickier, because behind the frontal bone of a movie director’s face there’s only air. Then he argued with Barco, who was saying Othello wasn’t a jealous man, that Iago was only presenting him evidence of Desdemona’s deception, and in the end he was just an easily influenced person. What was more apparent, according to Barco, was his masochism, and Shakespeare’s vulgar construction of a tragedy based on the stereotypical idea that all Arabs are jealous and impulsive. From that he starting talking about how the phlegmatism of the English was a product of the intense humidity. Tomatis laughed at Barco’s arguments but admitted that Othello wasn’t a jealous man, agreeing that it was obvious Othello wasn’t jealous because his behavior wasn’t typical for a jealous man, since it’s common knowledge that jealous men don’t beat to death the women who have betrayed them, but rather they dedicate themselves to calculating the dimensions of their banana plantations and examining the path of the shadow cast by the last column in the southeast corridor of their guest house. It’s elementary, Tomatis shouted, punching the table. No jealous man beats his wife to death. That’s cheap psychology. A real jealous man is a maniac for details. And the one time in my life I felt real jealousy, I had the irresistible urge to find a carpenter’s rule and go take the measurements of the queen-size bed where I suspected the deception was being perpetrated.
In my opinion, Tomatis was exaggerating, but the theory was original. Barco responded that it would have been better to use the carpenter’s rule to measure the object for which Tomatis has been substituted. If you have to unfold it the full meter to measure it, he said, then you’ve found the reason for the deception. Then they stopped yelling and it was silent for more than five minutes, and I spent the whole time hitting the edge of my plate with my spoon. When the silence started to bother me, I got up and went to take a piss. I crossed a tiled courtyard that led to a yard full of bare trees — behind their branches I saw a whole lot of clouds moving quickly, opening up for the glow of the moon and a section of starlit sky. But there was no wind in the courtyard, and the black, naked branches stayed motionless. I didn’t even reach the bathroom. I pissed in the courtyard, standing on the strip of concrete between the red tiles and the dirt. When I got back to the kitchen, it felt like they had been talking about me because I noticed something suspicious in the silence, different from what I had left earlier.
— I was changing the olive water, I said when I came in and noticed the silence. Tomatis asked me to go to the front room and get a pack of cigarettes from the desk drawer. I went and opened the drawer and saw there were two packs of North American cigarettes. I pocketed one pack and took the other to Tomatis. When I gave it to him, Tomatis opened it and offered one to everyone, me included. I bit the filter and lit it, blowing a mouthful of smoke over the table. I raised my head and squinted my eyes, the filter stuck tight between my teeth.
Then we all moved to the front room. Gloria and Barco threw themselves on the sofa bed, head-to-toe, and every so often Barco would tell her to get her feet off his face. Nicolás grabbed the edge of a chair and sat there like a corpse, not opening his mouth or even breathing probably. I was about to sit down on the edge of the desk again, but Tomatis stopped me, saying, I don’t like visitors putting their ass where I work, so I sat in a chair and Tomatis leaned up against his book case. La Negra and Pupé sat in two armchairs. Pupé didn’t even bother trying to cover her legs, while la Negra spent the whole time pulling her skirt down over her knees, and my suspicion that she was hairier than a chimp grew stronger each time. Gloria complained over and over that Barco wasn’t giving her any space on the bed and she could fall off any second. Tomatis said that in the hotel where he stayed in Buenos Aires there was a maid so tall that she couldn’t get in the elevator, and once when he was going down to the front desk (because the only time I left the room I went to the front desk to ask them to fix the phone because it was busted, he said) the elevator opened and there she was, crouched in one of the corners. I asked the concierge if it wasn’t disruptive to have such a tall maid, Tomatis said, but the guy said she did a great job cleaning the ceilings and was in bed with the owner, who was crazy for tall women. Pupé asked if he was writing anything, and Tomatis nodded several times, squinting his eyes, and said, Yes, I’m writing something. Pupé asked him what. I’m not sure yet, said Tomatis, I’ve only written about three hundred pages. Pupé asked, But is it a novel or what? And Tomatis said, There’s only one genre — the novel. It took years to discover this. There’s only three things in literature: perception, language, and form. Literature gives form, through language, to specific perceptions. And that’s it. The only possible form is narration, because the substance of perception is time. I applauded. Pupé shook her head two or three times, and Nicolás opened his mouth for the second time all night. According to Valéry, he said, for certain internal states, discourse and dialectics should be reinforced by narration and description. Tomatis said, Exactly — he says this in reference to Swedenborg and the mystic state. Which provides us with a wider field for narration. And further, if the mystic state, the state of ecstasy par excellence, is subject to narration and description, then what happens with fleeting moments of consciousness and jolts to the senses? When discourse and dialectics are no longer scientific or philosophical truths, they transform into a narrative of the error and the perspective of the consciousness that imagined them.