years.
âWell, I came to invite you over on Sunday, Gutiérrez says. You can see him there.
Escalante bursts out laughing, and raises his hand to cover his devastated teeth.
âAt Doctor Russoâs house? he says. Itâs haunted. They say the doctorâs ghost comes back from hell just to rob the guests.
âHeâs not in hell, Nula says. Worse, actuallyâheâs in Miami.
âSorry, Gutiérrez says. But Iâm out of touch with the local mythology.
âIt doesnât matter, Escalante says. So youâre inviting me over? Will many people be there?
âA mixed bag, Gutiérrez says. But you and the Rosembergs are my guests of honor. The restâforgive me, Mr. Anochâcomprise the glamorous court Iâve assembled to receive my old friends. The only one missing will be Chiche, but as our young friend would say, El Chiche deserved something better than Miami, and weâd have to fetch him ourselves from the inferno to get him to come.
Escalanteâs eyes, gleaming ironically under his eyebrows, arched and gathered around his nose, lock on Gutiérrezâs.
âDid you know, he says, that Iâve been sleeping with my maid since she was thirteen and I was forty?
Gutiérrez, slow to find the appropriate response, puckers his lips into an awkward smile.
âI wouldnât expect anything less from you, he says finally. Always the good pastor.
Nula watches them curiously. Since the first words they exchanged, and possibly to conceal their emotions, their demeanor has been remote and caustic, but to Nula it seems that rather than express the reticence of alert, disillusioned maturity, that style has something juvenile about it, adolescent even, as though somethinghad been suspended in each of them over the thirty years apart that was automatically put in motion again at their first meeting. Calculating the difference in their agesâwhen Gutiérrez, without telling anyone, and without a trace, left the city, he still hadnât been bornâNula experiences the vaguely disorienting feeling that heâs unwittingly crossed an invisible border, and that heâs now moving through the territory of the past, perceiving with his own senses a pre-empirical limbo that preceded his birth. He feels like heâs crossed into a space where nothing is real, only represented, like some character in the movies who, during a scene that takes place in a false airport, pretends to have just disembarked from a plane that carried him from a distant country, and he speaks of that country as though heâd really just come from there, but his words are empty of experience, theyâre just simulacra authored by someone else, and when theyâre spoken, to describe things that never happened, as interesting as these things might be, they must sound bewildering and strange to the actor. With their lightly evoked juvenile irony, the two older men also seem to have been spirited away, and now float in that parallel universe in which, during their first meeting after a prolonged separation, their lives seem to have paused years and years earlier in the otherâs imagination. The empirical decades that have passed while they were apart are surely an impenetrable and reciprocal mystery thatâwhile they might spend the rest of their lives elaborating them for each otherâtheyâll only manage to recover as a series of vague, irregular fragments. It occurs to Nula that, for now at least, those decades donât interest them: all they seem to want is to renew the interrupted course of shared experience that time, distance, and the temporarily-overpowered inconstancy of their respective lives had steered into the limbo where for now, exchanging measured, ironic lines that carry with them authentic pieces of information, putting the external world between parentheses ( where theyâve put me along with it ), they try to reunite.And Nulaâs
âWell, I came to invite you over on Sunday, Gutiérrez says. You can see him there.
Escalante bursts out laughing, and raises his hand to cover his devastated teeth.
âAt Doctor Russoâs house? he says. Itâs haunted. They say the doctorâs ghost comes back from hell just to rob the guests.
âHeâs not in hell, Nula says. Worse, actuallyâheâs in Miami.
âSorry, Gutiérrez says. But Iâm out of touch with the local mythology.
âIt doesnât matter, Escalante says. So youâre inviting me over? Will many people be there?
âA mixed bag, Gutiérrez says. But you and the Rosembergs are my guests of honor. The restâforgive me, Mr. Anochâcomprise the glamorous court Iâve assembled to receive my old friends. The only one missing will be Chiche, but as our young friend would say, El Chiche deserved something better than Miami, and weâd have to fetch him ourselves from the inferno to get him to come.
Escalanteâs eyes, gleaming ironically under his eyebrows, arched and gathered around his nose, lock on Gutiérrezâs.
âDid you know, he says, that Iâve been sleeping with my maid since she was thirteen and I was forty?
Gutiérrez, slow to find the appropriate response, puckers his lips into an awkward smile.
âI wouldnât expect anything less from you, he says finally. Always the good pastor.
Nula watches them curiously. Since the first words they exchanged, and possibly to conceal their emotions, their demeanor has been remote and caustic, but to Nula it seems that rather than express the reticence of alert, disillusioned maturity, that style has something juvenile about it, adolescent even, as though somethinghad been suspended in each of them over the thirty years apart that was automatically put in motion again at their first meeting. Calculating the difference in their agesâwhen Gutiérrez, without telling anyone, and without a trace, left the city, he still hadnât been bornâNula experiences the vaguely disorienting feeling that heâs unwittingly crossed an invisible border, and that heâs now moving through the territory of the past, perceiving with his own senses a pre-empirical limbo that preceded his birth. He feels like heâs crossed into a space where nothing is real, only represented, like some character in the movies who, during a scene that takes place in a false airport, pretends to have just disembarked from a plane that carried him from a distant country, and he speaks of that country as though heâd really just come from there, but his words are empty of experience, theyâre just simulacra authored by someone else, and when theyâre spoken, to describe things that never happened, as interesting as these things might be, they must sound bewildering and strange to the actor. With their lightly evoked juvenile irony, the two older men also seem to have been spirited away, and now float in that parallel universe in which, during their first meeting after a prolonged separation, their lives seem to have paused years and years earlier in the otherâs imagination. The empirical decades that have passed while they were apart are surely an impenetrable and reciprocal mystery thatâwhile they might spend the rest of their lives elaborating them for each otherâtheyâll only manage to recover as a series of vague, irregular fragments. It occurs to Nula that, for now at least, those decades donât interest them: all they seem to want is to renew the interrupted course of shared experience that time, distance, and the temporarily-overpowered inconstancy of their respective lives had steered into the limbo where for now, exchanging measured, ironic lines that carry with them authentic pieces of information, putting the external world between parentheses ( where theyâve put me along with it ), they try to reunite.And Nulaâs
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