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use the primary local material. In London, it’s always got to be cloudy, and don’t dare forget to fill the Sahara with camels, says Gutiérrez, a quick spark of retrospective disdain in his eyes. And, bringing his hand to his forehead, he rubs at something as he raises his head and looks up at the sky. A drop, he says.
    â€”Two, Nula says, touching his nose while scrutinizing the dark clouds. Looking back down and around himself, he thinks of his red camper, his white pullover, his new shirt, his freshly ironed pants. He looks at his loafers, where a rim of yellow mud has formed along the entire perimeter of their soles and a few stains of the same yellowish substance have stuck to their insteps, and he makes two or three involuntary gestures, at once ambiguous and contradictory.
    Gutiérrez watches him openly, laughing, as if his misfortune amused him, and then, deliberately reaching slowly into an interior pocket of his raincoat, the wide and open kind, like a marsupial pouch, that some of those coats have, he withdraws an umbrella with a short handle, where he presses a metal button, and the canopy of smooth and glowing fabric divided into seven different colored sections unfolds with a sharp sound, sudden and exact, and a perfection that approaches the theatrical. The sections of the canopy represent the color spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, with identical segments, and the composite of the two men and the umbrella form a multicolored blotch that is clear and mobile and that stands out sharply against the graybackground darkened by the double effect of the clouds and the dusk.
    Nula, slightly stupefied, takes in the umbrella’s multicolored apparition, but he doesn’t rush to shelter himself under the canopy’s limited circumference, typical of the shelter offered by collapsible umbrellas, despite their price. Nula’s reticence to seek the protection that placing himself shoulder to shoulder with Gutiérrez would offer has two motives: the first is that for now he’s sensed only a few sparse and scattered drops that couldn’t yet be called an actual rainfall or even a spitting one, and the second is that just as the multicolored canopy is unfolding, giving the impression that the two phenomena had been synchronized deliberately, in one of the pockets of his camper his cell phone has started ringing. Moving a few steps away mysteriously, he puts back the cigarettes and lighter that he’d just taken uselessly from his pocket. (He actually smokes very little, but he tends to carry cigarettes to share with clients, though today, he can’t really tell why, he feels a stronger urge to smoke than usual.) Nula pulls the cell phone from his other pocket, and, with a subtle gesture of apology toward Gutiérrez, turns his back to him as he brings the phone to his left ear and answers the call. Gutiérrez observes him patiently but skeptically, isolated within the imaginary cylinder that the umbrella’s circumference projects toward the sandy ground, forming an illusory refuge for surveillance, and when he moves his arm slightly and the multicolored circle shifts onto an inclined plane the ideal shape to contain him becomes a truncated cylinder.
    Although for a man of almost sixty, however well he keeps himself up, youth tends to seem insolent, and although Nula’s full and virile twenty-nine years, the fastidiousness of his clothes, and his apparent self regard seem overly manifest for his taste, Gutiérrez watches him indulgently, almost with pity, thinking that the energy the young radiate—so stimulating that, subjugated by it, theyconfuse it with the essence of their own singularity—they might not actually deserve. The indulgence is erased when Nula, turning around, raises his voice and makes two or three comical faces in his direction, shaking his free arm as he explains to the person on the other end (later he’ll