No World Concerto by A. G. Porta Page B

passport-sized photo, and another of him sitting beside the girl’s mother at some sort of family reunion. The screenwriter leaves his glasses on the desk and lights a cigarette, taking a deep drag as he fixes his gaze on the building across the street. He leans back in the chair and contemplates the unfeasibility of matching up the time it takes to show so many images with the speed at which the girl would tend to flip through the album. In any case, he should have enough time to show the most important ones. Perhaps he need only show a few. His likens his writing process to the way some painters work, marking off areas of the canvas before drawing their preliminary sketches, the figures gradually coming to life as they take on more definite features. He extinguishes his cigarette, puts his glasses back on, and turns toward the typewriter. For some reason, the girl’s convinced there are no such things as coincidences, despite being unable to understand why she keeps running into the man she presumes is her cousin. She goes out to take a hurried look into her mother’s study, ferreting frantically through her correspondence and the agendas she keeps in meticulous order, because the girl feels that the photographs are a testament of the past, reminding her of certain moments in her life, urging her to discover more. It’s possible her cousin doesn’t sign his correspondence with his own name or the pseudonym Dedalus, so she pays close attention to any letter with a sender or addressee she doesn’t recognize. She’s running out of time, so she starts focusing on specific dates. She answers a call on the landline. The chauffeur is getting nervous because they’re going to be late. Some of the letters are quite strange. One is a donation request for an ostensibly noble cause, but the girl thinks it’s probably a scam. But then she’s suddenly taken aback by the following line: “Since our genetic code reveals that all living things have a common ancestry, it might lead one to believe that life on Earth was seeded by extraterrestrial engineers.” She searches in vain for her mother’s response. She gets the impression she’s missing something crucial, but intuits she won’t find anything else pertaining to her cousin, so decides to put an end to the investigation. Before leaving the apartment, she takes out a black dress from the back of a closet. She can’t give a concert in a white T-shirt and jeans. She looks through the mail and listens to a message on the answering machine. Once again, the Principal of the Scholastic Institute wants to speak to the girl’s mother. She erases the message.
    The girl is speaking to her mother on her cell phone while waiting in the airport terminal. Her mother is annoyed, not only because her daughter was late for all her appointments, but her concert performance left a lot to be desired. How do you know? asks the girl. Who do you think they call when you don’t show up on time? Who do you think they come crying to when your performance isn’t up to scratch? The girl mumbles some excuses, saying at first that she went to the apartment to get in some last-minute practice on the piano and also to fetch her dress, but then she ends up admitting her real motive for going was to satisfy her curiosity in her mother’s cousin. She can no longer hide from her the fact she’s run into him. She’s seen him twice already, she tells her mother, who doesn’t believe her in the least. But she doesn’t realize her daughter also went home to get some photographic confirmation. She asks her where and how she ended up seeing him, insisting it couldn’t be their cousin but only someone who bears a passing resemblance. Why doesn’t her mother believe her? In the following scene, she’s back in the neighboring country’s capital, and it will be obvious to the audience a few hours have passed since the girl’s conversation with her mother. It begins in the middle of another conversation