by Karla Suárez
Leonardo continued gazing at me, waiting for some comment. I agreed, it was just as he said, and maybe ‘Angelito’ was right: there were two options. Breaking up with him – which I had no intention of doing – or getting my revenge, which had justice on its side; get my revenge by extracting the document from his apartment and giving it to the person who most deserved it. The author smiled, clasping my hands. I could see his eyes behind his glasses and asked if he really did believe that Ángel was sleeping with that other woman just for the sake of the document and a few beers. He nodded. I commented that I’d definitely fallen in love with a piece of shit, but Leo kneeled before me. Ángel isn’t so bad, he asserted. According to Margarita, the greatest defect of Cuban men was their weakness for the sins of the flesh. Ángel liked women too much, but otherwise he was a good sort. He really loved Margarita, but then he’d also been unfaithful. I shouldn’t take it to heart; it was a national defect. Aren’t I right? Leo made me laugh. I put my head close to his and murmured that his novel was going to be perfect. He promised that Ángel would be mine and stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. With a smile, I closed my eyes, thinking about my angel and his naked body, about Barbara’s expression when she uttered the word Cienfuegos, about the first time I met Leonardo. What did you say the national defect was? I asked. And in reply, his tongue entered my mouth. The rain didn’t stop during the whole night.
15
Yes, I slept with Leonardo. I hope you’re not getting the wrong idea about me, because it had nothing to do with love. Love and sex are different things that can be enjoyed in their own ways, and the truth is that we both needed it just then. Do you see? The two of us had been betrayed. That Italian woman had used Leonardo: she’d led him on with promises, possible translations of his work, little gifts of a few dollars, all just to get at the document. Once she’d achieved her objective, she’d had absolutely no scruples about breaking off her deal with him, and heaven knows what she was plotting behind his back. And then there was my darling Ángel, who, as Leo said, was sleeping with Barbara for the proceeds of the sale of the document and a few beers. That sort of behaviour made him a rat; an untrustworthy person with his own interests at heart. But since I knew what he was like, I had only two choices: accept him as he was or not accept him. That was my problem, as it must surely have been Margarita’s, who, it would seem, had put up with her husband’s infidelities for a long time. After having listened to Ángel’s idyllic version of his marriage and his inability to understand why she’d left him, it was a surprise to learn that he’d cheated on her. But Leonardo had known them back then, and if it was true, as Ángel claimed, that Leo had also been interested in Margarita, he’d naturally have been irritated by the situation and that was why he was so willing to tell me. To sum up: Ángel had been in the habit of two-timing his ex-wife, was selfish and, above all, had got his hands on the Meucci document. A real beauty, right?
That night, Leo and I talked long and hard. Making love, or whatever else you want to call it, was a relief, something like loosening a belt that’s too tight or taking your head out of the water after you’ve been snorkelling for a long time. I felt really relaxed, clean, I don’t know what... Lying naked in Leonardo’s bed seemed natural, the right thing, the next step. We’d already spent so much time in conversation that, to tell the truth, the only difference that night was the lack of clothes. I believe that, if it hadn’t been for Ángel, I could have fallen in love with Leo, although I didn’t tell him that, merely commented that I’d never been indifferent, and that was the truth. Leonardo’s words and manner were a source of fascination for me; what’s more, I just couldn’t help it: I’ve always found mixed-race Cuban men attractive. Even before I became aware of their hidden qualities, because after that night... Now that we’re on friendly terms, I can tell you: Leo was the Battleship Potemkin. Hell, if our literary output depended on him, I’d bet my life it would be in wonderful shape. My obsession is a curse. From quite an early age, my scientific spirit led me to explore the whole gamut of masculinity: male bodies, male habits and manias. At university, I even used to amuse myself classifying them; so just as numbers can be categorised as natural, rational, whole and real, for me men also needed some form of classification. The only thing they really have in common is that they are all – every single one of them – naked under their clothes, and based on that I began my search for the properties that grouped them into the same sets. Penises were a key element. There are penises for every taste: they come as big as the Empire State Building or as small as a Disney elephant’s trunk; there are the ones that rise up like hooks, looking up to the sky or down to the earth, others that are always staring aggressively straight ahead, ones with different political leanings, some tending to the left, some to the right; some are as plump as Sancho Panza and others as skinny as Quijote; there are lazy, hyperactive, explorative, conventional penises, some that are as fast as Speedy Gonzalez or as slow as the wise tortoise. And then come all the possible combinations: quixotic Pisas, hooked tortoises, hyperactive lefties, lazy right-wingers, conventional Speedies, Disney-Sancho explorers. Something for every taste and distaste, and I had a great time classifying them. It’s a professional tic; don’t worry, we mathematicians are like that. And while I’m on the subject, do you know why there isn’t a Nobel Prize for mathematics? Well, malicious gossip has it that Alfred Nobel was so busy inventing dynamite, his wife found a mathematician who made her ‘explode’ in bed; the offended husband never forgave them and that’s why we have no prize. So, if that mathematician had resisted the temptation to jump into someone else’s bed, there would be a Nobel for us too. If I’d resisted the temptation, I’d have saved myself other problems, but it was too late by then.
I know we slept very little that night, that the rain never stopped and Leo had to get up several times to wring out the cloth under the door. Leo had convinced me that Ángel had the document, and that his only aim in putting the blame on Euclid was to dispel any doubts about his innocence. But I honestly found it hard to understand why he’d invented that whole tale about giving the legacy back to Margarita. Yes, it was a beautiful, tender, romantic tale, and I like a romantic tale, which is why that whole muddle had seemed logical in someone as apparently fragile as he was. I told Leonardo the story, without mentioning my pact with Ángel or that I’d been ready to get the document from Euclid to give to him. If I mentioned all that, I’d have run the risk of losing the author’s trust in me. Do you see? I merely remarked that, according to Ángel, his aim had been to return the legacy to Margarita, but then Euclid had stolen it. In Leonardo’s opinion, the possible restitution of the legacy was just something Ángel had dreamed up to escape suspicion and play the hero of the movie before me. He wanted to kill two birds with one stone, and there was no better way of doing that than by telling a story so logical it left no room for doubt. Ángel definitely didn’t want to hurt me, Leo stressed; he was simply trying to shift my attention from the document onto himself because he needed to be important to me, needed my admiration, to be my knight in shining armour, that sort of stuff. My knight in shining armour. Can you imagine? That brought a smile to my face. Leo burst out laughing and then said that men required admiration. Ángel wasn’t a bad sort, but since the Brazilians had kicked him out of the company, he’d had no job, no money, not even a short-term future. His greatest merit was living alone in an apartment. But we men are like kids being constantly put to the test, we crave applause, Leo said, and I was an intelligent woman who, like Margarita, would end up getting bored if Ángel didn’t do something to prevent it. And given that Ángel was also intelligent, his idea was to win my admiration, to invent cunning ways to become, once and for all, my knight in shining armour.
His words gave me an amazingly warm feeling. I didn’t even want to ask too many questions because I’d just learned that Ángel hadn’t quit his job; he’d been sacked. Poor guy, I almost pitied him, inventing stuff like crazy just to get my attentio
n. Luckily the author’s feet brushed against mine and I came back to the real world. If I was lying naked in that bed, it was because my knight in shining armour was sleeping with someone else. OK? In any case, Leonardo had been right in what he’d said. He’d definitely been right, although I never had the chance to tell him.
That night, it occurred to him that we could utilize Ángel’s lie to distract Barbara. Since a complete, totally coherent version of events was in existence, there was no necessity to invent another. That week, he’d get in touch with her to say he’d contacted the original owner of the document, who had, to his surprise, told him that Ángel didn’t have it; her father did. And what’s more, he could tell her that he had a means of getting at that man. I thought his idea was brilliant, particularly because there was a role for me in it; Leonardo didn’t know Euclid, but he could tell Barbara he had a connection, and that connection was me, the professor’s close friend, a fundamental piece in the jigsaw. During our woman-to-woman conversation, she’d mentioned that she wanted us to be friends.
Well, I’d promised to call, but would wait until Leonardo had had a chance to inform her of my importance in the business. And we could be sure that, having got that far, Barbara would forget about friendship and want to be my sister. Then, with the addition of the spell cast by the author’s words, she’d gradually begin to leave Ángel behind and move closer to me. And I – the pied piper of Hamelin – would slowly lead her towards my former tutor.
It was undoubtedly a magnificent plan, one that might turn out to be fun. The hard part was that, while all that was going on, I’d have to search for the Meucci document in Ángel’s apartment. I initially thought it would be a complicated operation because, while in Euclid’s case the sphere of action was limited to his room, the new scene was a whole apartment, and a large one at that. But, even so, there existed the advantages that my darling lived alone, was not the world’s most organised person and, if the worst came to the worst, I could offer to help him spring clean the place. Obviously, before getting to that point, I’d have to sort out another small detail.
I was – or rather, we were – almost certain that Barbara had mentioned my visit to Ángel; she thought he and I were friends, so there was no reason to hide the information. We didn’t know if she’d told him about the woman-to-woman confession, but in fact that was unimportant. How can I put it? Ángel knew that I’d discovered Barbara in his apartment and that I’d left before he returned, so he must suspect that I’d found the situation odd and hadn’t liked it. Are you with me so far? And given that he knew he was guilty, he’d be worried about what I might think. That would be enough to create conflict between us, a minor problem. My stance, therefore, had to be that of the offended lover, without giving details of the cause of the offence. And when we next saw each other, I should just maintain the pose of the outraged woman and listen to his explanations to see exactly how far he was capable of going. If he didn’t confess to his fall from grace, my anger would be justified by jealousy of Barbara. If, on the other hand, he did confess, that in itself would be the cause. Whatever the case, I’d end up forgiving him. There was no other way: first, because I wanted to continue being with him, and then because I needed to get back into his apartment to search for the document. Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary.
We enjoyed that night of making plans. For Leonardo, I reasoned like a novelist; for me, however, my reasoning was mathematical. We burst out laughing and agreed that they were two sides of the same coin. In early human history, art and science were a single entity, and it was only later that they branched out into separate specialities, but they had a common origin. In Leo’s view, I did with numbers what he did with words. Numbers are mental constructions that mathematicians use in an attempt to define the properties of and relationships between everything in the universe. Authors did something similar, but with words. Reality is all around us, it exists, even though it can’t always be touched; a mathematician has intuitions about its nature, observes it and then proceeds to describe or codify it. And that’s also what an author does: transform our attitudes and feelings into a common code, so that, for instance, the word ‘love’, which is basically just four letters, carries a wealth of meanings. Leo and I were doing the same thing, the only difference was that our languages used different symbols: mine was made up of numbers, his of words.
I’m not sure if it was due to the physical activity or the rain, but that night sleep evaded us, and I suddenly realised that we were sitting up in bed absorbed in a litero-mathematical or mathemo-literary conversation. Whenever I had the chance to talk to Leo, I learned so much. For example, that Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of a maths lecturer who, long before the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, had written widely on his chosen profession. The Argentinean writer Ernesto Sábato had graduated in physics and mathematics and had continued his scientific career until he decided to resign his university post to write. And there were many more like them, such as the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And to top it all, there was the Oulipo group, founded in the 1960s by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, which brought together mathematicians who loved literature and writers like Italo Calvino who were attracted by mathematical ideas. Wow! All of a sudden, I felt enormous pride in my profession. I had no intention of embarking on a literary career, of course, but it was good to know that world literature was being nourished by people like me. Leonardo told me that the members of the Oulipo group used to define themselves as ‘rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape’. I said that it was more or less what he was doing, building the labyrinth of his novel and then, on his own, finding a way out, and he smiled and assured me that the labyrinth was already built; all that was needed now was a helping hand from me to keep it standing. And that hand reached out to pull him close and kiss him, after which I leaned back and demanded more stories. I was definitely becoming addicted to Leonardo’s words.
The author rose to his feet, saying that it was going to be hard to get any work done the next day, but the damage was already done. What with the rain and the good company, there was no point in trying to sleep. All that was lacking was a bottle of red wine and an attic, nothing more, as long as they were both in Paris. But since we had only lemongrass tea and a garage, we’d have to settle for Havana. He added that he had no complaints about the company, quite the reverse. He’d been to Paris, it was beautiful, but he could tell me about it another time; that night his interests lay elsewhere.
Leonardo wrung out the cloth yet again; it was so thoroughly soaked that a puddle of water was forming under the door. Then he put water on for another round of tea and went to the bathroom. When he returned, he extracted a book from beneath a pile of papers on the table, pressed the play button on the tape deck and sat down at my side. Frank Delgado began to sing very quietly. Leo opened the book, took out a sheet of paper and showed it to me, asking if I’d ever seen Antonio Meucci’s face. I straightened up. Before my eyes was a monochrome photo of a man with a thick white beard and moustache. He was wearing a dark suit and looking gravely to his left. What could Antonio have been gazing at? Impossible to say, but it seemed extraordinary that I was able to see him. Leo grinned at my surprise; his Italian friend had sent him that copy, he said, and he was obsessed with it. He felt that Meucci might turn his head to greet him if he looked at the photo long enough. When we get the document, I’m going to need one more little bit of help from you, he added.
Leo had seen the paper and explained that it consisted of three diagrams. One was a floor plan of the Meuccis’ suite in the Teatro Tacón. In it were two small figures: a man in the laboratory and another in one of the rooms, connected by a cable that ran through the whole suite. It was like a snapshot-for-dummies of the moment when the experiment had been carried out. The problem was that the other two diagrams explained the technical details of the connec
tion; that is to say, designs of the electrical circuitry, something, Leonardo confessed, he knew little about. As I was a scientific woman, I’d surely be able to interpret them, and that was the favour he had to ask: to decode the diagrams into simple language that he could understand and then recode into literary language. Euclid’s suspicions had been right: the author had no idea what the designs represented; he only understood their significance. I agreed to undertake that task, although I had to stress that electrical circuitry wasn’t my speciality and, as I hadn’t seen the document, I didn’t know what they might contain. He shouldn’t get his hopes up. Leonardo smiled, said I had all the signs of being a Grade A student, and he was sure those designs wouldn’t present any problems for me. Leonardo certainly knew how to praise intelligence. And I liked that. Not that I needed praise to feel good about myself. No. It was merely part of a game that he played well. We were quits, that’s all.
Accompanied by the chill of the rainy night and the warmth of the lemongrass tea, the author continued the story of Meucci’s life. We’d got as far as the closure of the Telettrofono Company, right? Well, in the following years, our tireless inventor continued to address a variety of problems. During his months of convalescence following the ferry accident, he’d faithfully stuck to the diet ordered by the doctors, which included a great deal of fruit and plenty of liquids. And since he had an inherently restless mind, he began experimenting on a fruit-based fizzy drink, which he eventually patented. There was also a ‘sauce for food’, domestic utensils like coffee and tea filters and even an instrument for testing the purity of milk. In addition, he began to analyse the possibility of creating a special steam-powered boat for navigating canals, and designed a prototype telephone with a waterproof capsule that could be used underwater for communication between divers and a ship. What a genius that man was!
