Javier Mossen looked out the window of the plane: it was impossible for him to calculate the distance that separated him from the ground, despite the fact that the pilot had repeated it several times, in his lukewarm and deliberately calm speeches. “We are so many feet up.”

What spatial measure did the feet represent? Laura’s foot, for example, when she passed her room, where Mossen pretended to sleep, so as not to return, and then called him, in the same voice of a pilot announcing that everything is fine, that the day is sunny and without clouds, to tell him that he no longer loved him or more exactly, that he did not have the same desire to see him.

Because for some inexplicable reason it was impossible for her to confess that she no longer loved him: she had to disintegrate his heart with an imperceptible poison, not with a chainsaw. The distance that separated him from the floor was no greater than that which separated him from Laura, who was now back. In another voice, in another tone, insinuating, she wanted to see him. M.

Mossen notes in his Rivadavia notebook: three reports are missing to complete his book Fake interviews with real people. I had interviewed Ariel Sharon, the Israeli hero of the Yom Kippur warand Golda Meir, the mythical prime minister of Israel about to resign due to the same conflict, won on the battlefield but lost in the domestic political arena.

Also Zu Enlai, Mao’s eternal lieutenant, and Leopold Trepper, the legendary anti-Nazi spy. A few seats later, on that same flight, was Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, with whom Mossen would close the book of fictitious interviews.

He had finally managed to finish Kissinger’s impossible essay: a restored world. It had been difficult for him to read at first because of his contextual limitations: he had never looked at it, he had never heard of Castlereagh or Metternich, I didn’t even know what the Austro-Hungarian Empire was.

He understood English when it came to a subject he was well versed in, but in that case, apart from the fact that it was written in a style that, compared to other Kissinger journals, I might consider baroque – it was filled as always with double negatives and ironies – his lack of knowledge of the original facts completely ruled it out.

And when he finally managed to compose the place, and took a certain rhythm in his reading, joining the dots like a blind man in an unknown geography and period, arriving at fifty promising pages, Laura had greeted him with that casual enthusiasm of beautiful women: die, wait for me dead, because when I come back we won’t be there anymore.

Mossen he had finished the book against his will, reading like someone who chews cork, mindless and taciturn like an abandoned post. One more book read, like a game, despite everything; And then Laura would come back, she would propose to see him, as if the atomic bomb hadn’t been dropped on her, that Kissinger book she hadn’t tried to read yet: Nuclear weapons and foreign policy.

Why was he hesitating to meet Laura again? In those lonely years he had met a wide variety of women and said yes to all of them. He hadn’t mated or fallen in love with any of them, but … tell him no? How come? Who was he, the Duke of Edinburgh? She had no idea who either, except it wasn’t him.

Still, Laura, whom he considered more beautiful and interesting, proposed a meeting and Mossen hesitated.

This was a good thesis topic for an international politics expert, a secretary of state, the leader of a small country or a large power – they often had to make equally relevant decisions: why should she say no to Laura if she was so beautiful and interesting?

Because of the past he had brought with him, Mossen told himself. But where was that past? And the other women they did not each carry their own pastto whom were you generally indifferent or perhaps even curious?

If he thought of Laura as a stranger … he didn’t even wonder if he would say yes or no. She would have prayed to the god of airplanes to come to him. But there was no law of attraction between men according to their reproductive capacities or according to the perpetuation of the species.

They often fit Nixon’s classic MAD paradigm to subtly promote détente with the Soviet dictatorship: Mutual Assured Destruction.

In love, unlike nuclear war, mutually assured destruction could be accomplished multiple times. The human being, in this sense, was not a world: humanity has survived the amorous misfortunes of individuals. And also people like Mossen: life was more important to them than happiness.

Maybe that was why Laura had left him, and now she was back.

The plane jumped into the air and the pilot tried to reassure them, noting that it was a slight turbulence, just fasten the seat belts. But the stewardess’s face showed some disbelief. That plane, in any case, Mossen thought, could not crash: it was carrying Kissinger.

Only Mossen knew that the first-class passenger in the middle row at the window was Kissinger, camouflaged, disguised as a Coca-Cola executive, on his way to a meeting in Tibet with a Mao envoy. The end of the Vietnam War would most likely depend on that secret bilateral conference.

Mao’s China may be more decisive than North Vietnamese leaders themselves and US military might: a combination of demographic, territorial and political power, not necessarily weapons. What was the power of a woman’s beauty in a man’s hearteven in a heart devastated by the first and second world wars, which had never received the Marshall Plan or a projection of the future?

Mossen took advantage of the stewardess’s confusion and whispered in her ear, in Spanish: “Don’t worry: this plane won’t crash.”

He said it with such conviction, with an unearthly confidence, that the hostess, so beautiful and distant, believed him, as in love with the remaining part of an ex-husband, who guarantees that everything will be fine.

Mossen himself did not know how that aura of certainty, of security, of firmness came out of his soul, always vague and in ruins: do not worry, this plane is not coming down.

The stewardess smiled at him, calmed down, and Mossen took it upon himself, without explanation, to bring the glass of single malt whiskey to the first-class passenger, as a courtesy; strictly speaking, the only chance in his life to ask Henry Kissinger a question.

Eventually, he thought, as he made his way to the curtain separating first class from economy – that curtain wasn’t iron – this plane can fall too. Why not?

He brought him the glass – the Secretary of State looked at him perplexed behind the inscrutable double-thickness glass, which reminded Mossen of his father -; and the journalist, among the dozens of questions pondered on that precise moment on the world stage, could only formulate: – Is there the possibility of a truly horizontal love, without the concurrence of power relations, in the atomic age?

Kissinger sipped his whiskey, discovering in an instant, with his infallible intuition, that this interlocutor was completely harmless; and looking at his turn out the window, convinced that the flight would arrive at its destination, he replied indifferently:

– I do not even know.

* (I do not even know).

wd