— He’s mad because you told me he’d asked you to stay last night, he said.
They barely survived that, and only because I wasn’t carrying a.45 pistol and a handful of hollow-points. She started laughing and put down the book and walked over and kissed me on the cheek and told me I was a cute kid. Then she put her hands in her back pockets and went to look at the gray sky through the window. Tomatis was lying in the bed, propped up against the wall with his legs hanging over the edge, and I was standing there like an asshole next to the table, squeezing the cigarette packs in my pockets. To punish Tomatis I told him his theory that the novel was the literary genre par excellence was nonsense (although when he said it, it sounded right) and that actually everything was theater, that theater was the only real genre, and that Discourse on the Method was a long monologue by someone who was playing the role of a philosopher and who spoke in a way that had nothing to do with how he talked in real life, that talking like that he imagined himself a philosopher and was hoping to pass it off on everyone else. But this didn’t bother Tomatis at all, and it actually sounded interesting to him, and he came over and slapped me on the back and told me I was an intelligent guy and I was going places. Then I told him I hadn’t read Discourse on the Method, and he said it didn’t matter, that he had read it and that it was accurate more or less the way I had put it. He finally convinced me. Then Gloria went to make tea, and by the time she brought it steaming to the front room, I wasn’t angry any more.
It got dark and we turned on the lights. The sky was like a metal sheet. The room was full of smoke, but it wasn’t dirty or anything because Gloria kept cleaning the glasses and ashtrays as they got dirty. We sat there a half hour looking at each other, and I got the impression that they wanted me to scram, but since I wasn’t sure I stayed till around eight. I realized that they didn’t have any problem with me staying when Tomatis said I could sleep there again if I wanted, but I told him I would rather go home. Then Tomatis said he was going to lay down a while and Gloria followed him out. For about fifteen minutes I listened to their voices and stifled laughter, and then everything was quiet. I took out the pack I had grabbed the night before and put it back in the desk drawer. Then I shouted from the corridor that I was leaving. Gloria responded that one of these days we’d see each other again, and I left.
I walked something like thirty blocks. It took me ten minutes to get to the avenue, then I turned onto 25 de Mayo, and when I reached the intersection with the Banco Provincial, whose clock read exactly nine, I turned onto San Martín. I drank a cognac in the arcade and then turned off San Martín and came back to it crossing the Plaza de Mayo, where the courthouse stood, hazy and dark like a dense, black mass glued to the black sky. I stayed at Ernesto’s house until well after midnight, and then I went home to sleep.
It was raining the morning of May second, and I stayed in bed late, in a kind of daze, thinking about the double. Since the night of the gin incident with Mamá, I hadn’t thought about him. I had forgotten him completely the last ten days. I first saw him on March fifth, after not having left the house for five days. I got on the bus at around nine in the morning, and when it turned at an intersection with San Martín, I saw someone with a very familiar face coming out of an optician. The face was so familiar. When the bus reached the opposite corner, I jumped up and got off. I had realized it was me.
When I got to the corner there was no sign of him. I went in the optician and stood by the register, waiting for one of the workers to recognize me. One of them came up and asked if I needed anything, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. I said I was picking up some glasses that had been brought in for a new lens, under the name Philip Marlowe, and the guy looked through a pile of envelopes filled with glasses, with the names of the owners on the back, but he didn’t find the one I had asked for. I told him I must have gotten the wrong shop and I left. I walked around the block twice but didn’t see him again. Then I went to the paper.
I saw him a second time two days later, coming out of the courthouse. I was walking down the marble steps at the entrance and I saw a guy in shirtsleeves waiting next to a taxi for someone who just then was paying the driver. The guy in shirtsleeves had his back to me, but there was something familiar about him. I didn’t associate him with the person I had seen coming out of the optician two days before, and when the passenger got out and the guy got in the car, I was looking up at the sky because I still hadn’t done the weather report, and it was crazy hot out. When I looked back down the taxi was accelerating, and I saw the side of the guys face in the back seat, saying something to the driver. It was me. I started shouting, running down the steps, but the only thing that came out was the word taxi. The driver, without slowing down or anything, stuck his head out the window and shouted, Can’t you see I’m occupied, numbnuts? The guy in the back seat gave me a sidelong look (there was something malignant in it), and then I couldn’t see his face, because the car accelerated, turned the corner, and disappeared. I ran to the corner, but when I got there the car was already gone. I stood there, stiff as a board, for like half an hour, staring off in the direction the car had vanished. I don’t know how I kept from passing out. For the weather report that day I entered 46 degrees in the shade, and I wasn’t far off, because the report they gave on the radio had it at 44.8. Then I went back to the paper and found Tomatis on the phone. Do me one favor, he was saying to the guy on the other end of the line. Look at the results and tell me if two forty-five came up. When he hung up he turned toward me, and I must have looked strange because he asked me what was wrong.