La Grande
Page 1
Praise for
Juan José Saer
“Brilliant. . . . With meticulous prose, rendered by Dolph’s translation into propulsive English, Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington captures the wildness of human experience in all its variety.”—New York Times
“What Saer presents marvelously is the experience of reality, and the characters’ attempts to write their own narratives within its excess.”—Bookforum
“A cerebral explorer of the problems of narrative in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, of Borges, of Rulfo and Arlt, Saer is also a stunning poet of place.”—The Nation
“To say that Juan José Saer is the best Argentinian writer of today is to undervalue his work. It would be better to say that Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language.”—Ricardo Piglia
“Juan José Saer must be added to the list of the best South American writers.”—Le Monde
“The author’s preoccupations are reminiscent of his fellow Argentinians Borges and Cortázar, but his vision is fresh and unique.”—The Independent (London)
Also by
Juan José Saer
in English Translation
The Clouds
The Event
The Investigation
Nobody Nothing Never
The One Before
Scars
The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
The Witness
Copyright © Juan José Saer, 2005
c/o Guillermo Schavelzon & Assoc. Agencia Literaria, info@schavelzon.com
Translation copyright © Steve Dolph, 2014
Afterword copyright © Steve Dolph, 2014
First edition, 2014
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-96-2
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Text set in Bodoni, a serif typeface first designed by Giambattista
Bodoni (1740–1813) in 1798.
Design by N. J. Furl
Wine glass illustration designed by Fabio Meroni / studio Slash
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
For Laurence
Was it I who was returning?
—Juan L. Ortiz
the solid things were gone, and only
what was transient remained.
—Quevedo
e vidi lume in forma di rivera
fulvido di fulgore, intra due rive
dipinte di mirabil primavera.
—Paradiso, XXX 61–63
Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.
—Abbreviated Dictionary of Surrealism
Contents
Tuesday: Water Sounds
Wednesday: The Four Corners
Thursday: The Flooding
Friday: The Wine
Saturday: Margins
Sunday: The Hummingbird
Monday: Downriver
Translator’s Afterword
TUESDAY
WATER SOUNDS
HALF-PAST FIVE, GIVE OR TAKE, ON A RAINY AFTERNOON in early April. Nula and Gutiérrez are approaching, at a diagonal, the corner of an open, nearly rectangular field bordered at one end by a mountain sparsely covered in acacias, and behind which, still invisible to them, the river runs.
The sky, the earth, the air, and the vegetation are gray, not with the metallic shade that the cold in May or June brings them, but rather the greenish, warm porosity of the first autumn rains that, in this region, can’t quite extinguish the insistent, overwhelming summer. Both men, walking neither fast nor slow, a short distance apart, one in front of the other, are still wearing lightweight clothes. Gutiérrez, walking ahead, has on a violently yellow waterproof jacket, and Nula, who hesitates at each step, unsure where to place his foot, a red camper made from a silky material with a slick and shiny texture, that in his family dialect (it was a gift from his mother), they jokingly call parachute cloth. The two bright spots moving through the gray-green space resemble satin paper cutouts collaged on a monochromatic wash, the air the most diluted, and the clouds, the earth, and the trees the most concentrated grays.
Nula, because he’d come on business—to deliver three cases of wine, a viognier, two cabernet sauvignon, and four local chorizos ordered the week before—and planned to visit a few other clients that afternoon, had dressed somewhat carefully, and besides the red camper has on a new shirt, a white, lightweight, short-sleeve sweater, freshly ironed pants, and shiny loafers that explain his cautious advance in contrast to the other’s inattentive, sure step and constant chatter as he carelessly and noisily sets his muddy rubber boots on the saturated patches of grass bordering the narrow, sandy path or in the sporadic puddles that interrupt it.
The gray background lends the red and the yellow an almost extravagant, overwrought brilliance that intensifies their presence to the eye in the empty field while paradoxically, somehow, causing them to lose, to the mind, a good portion of their reality. In the desolate poverty of the landscape, the striking garments, possibly because of their price (the yellow one, although it’s European and more expensive, nevertheless looks more worn-out) produce an obvious contrast, or constitute, rather, an anachronism. The excessive presence of singular objects, though they break up the monotonous succession of things, end up, as with their overabundance, impoverishing them.
Calmly, concentrating on each word, Gutiérrez holds forth with disinterested disdain, half-turning his head over his left shoulder every so often, apparently to remind his company that he’s the one being spoken to, although because of the distance that separates them, the open air, the movements that disperse the sounds he utters and, especially, the forceful sound of the boots against the puddles and submerged weeds, in addition to the concentration demanded by the protection of his loafers and pants, Nula can only fish out loose words and scraps of phrases, but in any case getting the general point, even though it’s only the third time he’s met Gutiérrez and even though their first meeting only lasted two or three minutes. From what he gathered at a previous meeting, as he listened with surprise and curiosity at some length when he brought the first three cases of wine, when Gutiérrez talks, it’s always about the same thing.
If Nula imagined himself summarizing those monologues in a few words to a third person, they would be more or less the following: They—people from the rich countries he lived in for more than thirty years—have completely lost touch with reality and now slither around in a miserable sensualism and, as a moral consequence, content themselves with the sporadic exercise of beneficence and the contrite formulation of instructive aphorisms. He refers to the rich as the fifth column and the foreign party, and the rest, the masses, he argues, would be willing to trade in their twelve-year-old daughter to a Turkish brothel for a new car. Any government lie suits them fine as long as they don’t have to give up their credit cards or do without superfluous possessions. The rich purchase their solutions to everything, as do the poor, but with debt. They are obsessed with convincing themselves that their way of life is the only rational one and, consequently, they are continuously indignant at the individual or collective crimes they commit or tolerate, looking to justify with pedantic shyster sophisms the acts of cowardice that obligate them to shamelessly defend the prison of excessive comfort they’ve built for themselves, and so on, and so on.
The vitriol in the sentiment contrasts with the composure of his face each time he looks over his left shoulder, with the calm vigor of his movements, and with the monotone neutrality of a voice that seems to be reciting, no
t a violent diatribe, but rather, in a friendly, paternal way, a set of practical recommendations for a traveler preparing to confront an unfamiliar continent. His words aren’t hastened or marred by anger, not cut off by interjections or indignant outbursts; instead, they pass easily and evenly across his lips, interspersed here and there with a Gallicism or Latinism, and if they sometimes stop or hesitate for a few seconds it’s because in the three decades living abroad, one of them, relegated by disuse to some dark corner of the basement deep inside himself where he stores the incalculable repertory that constitutes his native tongue, is now slow to rise through the intricate branches of memory to the tip of the tongue that, like the elastic surface of a trampoline, will launch it into the light of day. His discourse is at once ironic and severe, spoken with a distracted intonation, difficult to peg as either authentic or simulated, or if the almost sixty-year-old man who uses it does so to communicate either a contained hatred or rather as a solipsistic and somewhat abstruse humorous exercise.
With regard to their ages, Nula is in fact twenty-nine and Gutiérrez exactly twice that, which is to say that one is just entering maturity while the other, meanwhile, will soon leave it behind entirely, along with everything else. And although they speak as equals, and even with some ease, they refrain from the familiar tú form, the older man possibly because he left the country before its general use came into fashion in the seventies, and Nula because, as a commercial tactic, he prefers not to use the tú form with clients he didn’t know personally before trying to sell them wine. Their use of usted and the difference in their ages doesn’t diminish their mutual curiosity, and even though it’s only the third time they’ve met, and though they’ve yet to reach a real intimacy, their conversation takes place in a decidedly extra-commercial sphere. The curiosity that attracts them isn’t spontaneous or inexplicable: to Gutiérrez, although he’s as yet unaware of the exact reasons for Nula’s interest, the vintner’s responses the day they first met seemed unusual for a simple trader, and his parodic attitude when they met again, as he mimed the typical gestures and discourse of a merchant, interspersed with discreet allusions to Aristotle’s Problem XXX.1 on poetry, wine, and melancholy, enabled him to glimpse the possibility of a truly neutral conversation, which would be confirmed immediately following the commercial transactions of that second visit.
The first meeting didn’t last more than two or three minutes. Dripping wet, Gutiérrez emerged from his swimming pool and walked toward him across the neat lawn with the same indifference to where he placed his bare feet, Nula recalls, as he shows now, the rubber boots stepping through puddles that interrupt the path, or onto the wet weeds that border it. Nula had been recommended by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and had spoken to him, Gutiérrez, on the phone the day before to set up the meeting for eleven thirty. Because this took place a few weeks before, in March, it was still summer. In the harsh, radiant morning sun, Nula watched Gutiérrez advance toward him from the white rectangle of the pool, itself framed by a wide rectangle of white slabs on which sat three wood and canvas lounge chairs—one green, one red-and-white striped, and one yellow—all inscribed on a smooth, green landscape bordered at the rear by a dense grove, and flanked, beyond a stretch of green earth, by the white house on the left and on the right by a pavilion with its obligatory grill and a shed that likely contained tools, bicycles, a wheelbarrow, a lawnmower, and so on. I don’t know if it was actually Gutiérrez, but whoever built it must’ve been inspired by those California houses that, from what I’ve learned on television, are made for people who’ve succeeded in life thanks to some righteous or dark arts, suggested Tomatis the day he recommended Gutiérrez as a client. It actually wasn’t such a luxurious house, but in any case it was definitely the most expensive in the area around Rincón, and even though Nula had never been to California he’d seen a lot of the same shows growing up, and so as he took in the assemblage as Gutiérrez, dripping wet, approached him, he realized that, as usual, and possibly for purely rhetorical purposes, Tomatis had exaggerated.
Instead, what surprised him was Gutiérrez’s physical appearance. He’d expected someone elderly, but this was a vigorous man, with a flat stomach, with proportioned angles, tanned by the sun, and whose gray hair, as neatly cropped as the lawn surrounding the swimming pool, and abundant rusty gray body hair, which must have been black in his youth, sticking, because of the water, to his chest and shoulders, arms and legs, increased rather than diminished the impression of physical vigor, so much so that, considering the contradictory situation—less luxurious house than anticipated and younger owner than imagined—Nula thought for a few seconds that he’d come to the wrong address. The contracted and somewhat deformed shadow that, owing to the height of the sun, gathered at the feet of the approaching man could have indicated, in an indirect way, a somewhat more complex inner life than his appearance and the conventional tranquility of the setting it moved through suggested.
—I didn’t know how to let you know that I couldn’t meet you today, after all, Gutiérrez had said. And Nula:
—Clearly it’s the time for taking the water and not the wine.
Gutiérrez had laughed, shaking his head toward the pool.
—Not at all, he said. What happened is I received an unexpected visit this morning.
Just then Nula realized that although Gutiérrez had left the pool the water sounds continued: someone, invisible from where he stood, was still splashing and swimming around. At that moment, in a fluorescent green one-piece, its shoulders bent, with that same abstracted, preoccupied manner, tanned and maybe slightly more solid than five or six years before, the body of Lucía Riera, which Nula had come to know so well, was emerging up the metal ladder from the side of the pool closest to the house. Without even looking at them, Lucía had thrown herself onto the green canvas chair next to the pool. Gutiérrez had followed Nula’s surprised expression somewhat worriedly, and a shadow there seemed to suggest that an explanation of some kind was called for.
—Don’t imagine anything irregular, he said. She’s my daughter.
The customer is always right, I get it, Nula had said later that same night to Gabriela Barco and Soldi at the Amigos de Vino bar, where he’d run into them—they changed bars frequently for what they called their “work dates”—it comes with the territory and, thanks to my stoic indifference, costs me nothing. But I actually know Lucía Riera, married to the doctor Oscar Riera and separated for some time I believe. It’s true that I lost touch with her for several years up until this morning, but I know perfectly well who her parents are, though I never met them. A man named Calcagno, a lawyer, was her father—he died several years ago—but her mother, barring evidence to the contrary, is still alive. It took effort not to punch Gutiérrez in the teeth when he told me she was his daughter, and I wasn’t just furious but stunned too, because I couldn’t believe he’d lie so blatantly, and I was even a little embarrassed that he’d dare do that to me. He must have sensed something like that in my face because he got serious and polite and solemn and said he’d walk me out. We left it that I would call him to set up another visit, something that, obviously, I don’t intend to do. Nula stopped, satisfied he’d conveyed his indignation, but when he looked up he saw that Soldi was avoiding his gaze. After a few seconds, Soldi looked him straight in the eyes and, somewhat sheepishly, said, And yet there are those who say that it might be or at least could be true. You should probably look for something else to get indignant over.
And so, out of curiosity, Nula had called Gutiérrez again the following week, and they set a day and time for the second meeting. In a sense, the practically imperceptible incident, which didn’t quite mean anything in particular for either, but drew them both for a few seconds from the neutral and conventional territory where mercantile transactions are understood to take place, had made them mutually interesting and enigmatic in their own way, something that both took silent note of during the short telephone conversation when they set up the second me
eting, and which they took pains to conceal when, several days later, they were once again face to face. The wine sale took place quickly—a case (six per) of viognier and two of cabernet sauvignon to start, plus four local chorizos—and once it was settled, the bill and the check signed and the receipt in Gutiérrez’s hands, they took up a conversation that lasted more than two hours, on various topics that had little or nothing to do with wine, and during which, every so often, Gutiérrez elaborated his serene, disinterested soliloquies about them, the inhabitants, referred to with ironic disdain, of the rich countries he had lived in for over thirty years. They had sat down on a bench at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, after touring the property inside and out, though its details, if they sparked Nula’s interest from time to time, seemed invisible to their owner. Their respective biographical details, which certainly interested them, did not form part of the conversation, at least in a chronological way, although every so often some personal element cropped up or was taken into consideration, like for example the medical and philosophical studies that Nula abandoned in succession, and his project, before selling wine, of writing his Notes toward an ontology of becoming, or the reasons (never clarified, and cited as a means of formulating an aphorism rather than an actual confidence) that had propelled Gutiérrez abroad: I left in search of three chimeras: worldwide revolution, sexual liberation, and auteur cinema.
Finally, at around four thirty today, without calling, Nula had brought the wine. He parked the dark green station wagon in front of the white gate at the main entrance, just as Gutiérrez, coming out of the house, was preparing to lock the front door.
—I have the order, Nula said as he stepped from the car. Were you heading out?
—On an expedition in the area, replied Gutiérrez. Looking for an old friend. Escalante. Do you know him?
He’d never heard of him. According to Marcos Rosemberg, he lives in Rincón, on the outskirts of the town, but on the city side, about three miles away, and Gutiérrez had decided to invite him to a party he was planning to throw on Sunday and to which he was thinking he, Nula, might come too. Nula looked at the greenish sky and the dark horizon and, without saying anything, had laughed sarcastically.