History Museum is rather a poor affair, especially compared with those one finds in England, but I used to take my young nieces and nephews there sometimes so that they could see and get to know the static animals in their glass display cases, and I then acquired a taste for going there on my own from time to time, mingling with – but invisible to – the groups of junior- and secondary-school students and their exasperated or patient teachers and with a few bewildered tourists with too much time on their hands, who probably learned of the museum’s existence from some overly punctilious and exhaustive guide to the city: for apart from the large number of museum attendants, most of whom are Latin Americans now, these tend to be the only living beings in the place, which has the unreal, superfluous, fantastical air of all natural history museums.
I was studying a scale model of the vast gaping jaws of a crocodile – I always used to think how easily I would fit inside them and how lucky I was not to live in a place inhabited by such reptiles – when I heard someone say my name and was so taken aback that I spun round, feeling slightly alarmed: when you’re in that half-empty museum, you have the almost absolute, comforting certainty that no one has the least idea where you are at that precise moment.
I recognized him at once, with his feminine lips and his falsely cleft chin, his calm smile and that expression, at once attentive and discreet. He asked me what I was doing there, and I replied: ‘I like to come here now and then. It’s full of tame wild beasts you can get right up close to.’ And as soon as I said this, I thought that, actually, there were very few wild beasts there and that what I had said was just plain silly, and I realized, too, that I had merely been trying to make myself seem interesting, doubtless with dire results. ‘And it’s a nice quiet place,’ I added lamely. I, in turn, asked him what was he doing there, and he answered: ‘I like to come here sometimes too,’ and I waited for him to add some silly comment of his own, but, alas, I waited in vain. Díaz-Varela had no desire to impress me. ‘I live quite near. When I go out for a walk, my feet occasionally lead me here.’ That bit about his feet leading him there seemed slightly literary and twee and gave me some hope. ‘I sit out on the terrace for a while and then I go home. Anyway, let me buy you a drink, unless you want to continue studying those crocodile teeth or visit one of the other rooms.’ Outside, on the hill, beneath the shade of the trees, opposite the college, there’s a refreshment kiosk with tables and chairs.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I know these teeth by heart. I was just considering going to see the absurd Adam and Eve they’ve got downstairs.’ He didn’t react, he didn’t say ‘Oh, right’ or anything, as I would have expected from someone who was a regular visitor to the museum: in the basement, there’s a vertical display case, not that big, made by an American or an English woman, Rosemary Something-or-other, which contains a highly eccentric representation of the Garden of Eden. All the animals surrounding the original couple are supposedly alive and either in motion or alert, monkeys, hares, turkeys, cranes, badgers, perhaps a toucan and even the snake, which is peering out with an all-too-human expression from among the vivid green leaves of the apple tree. By contrast, Adam and Eve, standing side by side, are mere skeletons, and the only way of telling them apart, to the uneducated eye at least, is that one of them is holding an apple in its right hand. I’ve probably read the explanatory notice at some point, but I don’t think it provided me with a satisfactory explanation. If it was a matter of illustrating the differences between the bones of a man and those of a woman, then why make them into our first parents, as the Catholic faith used to call them, and place them in that particular setting; and if it was intended to show Paradise and its rather sparse fauna, then why the skeletons when all the other animals are complete with their flesh and their fur or feathers? It’s one