La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  —I would also like to order some more wine, knowing the habits of some of my guests.

  And so, after carrying the three cases from the station wagon to the kitchen, Nula filled out another order: more white wine, more red, and more local chorizos. When they came out to the front gate, Nula looked at the heavy sky and said:

  —Actually, the walk is tempting, even though it’s definitely going to rain and I have a couple of clients waiting for me.

  In fact, he regretted it the moment he began speaking, but the quickness and frank satisfaction of Gutiérrez’s response immediately erased the fear of having shown his feelings too openly: Gutiérrez’s sincerity neutralized his own. They still didn’t know each other well enough to be spontaneous, and their reciprocal attraction stemmed from what they hadn’t figured out about each other: Gutiérrez’s dubious paternity and, in addition to the sudden emotion he showed when Lucía emerged from the pool, Nula’s singular conversation, blending, sometimes without a clear dividing line, commerce and philosophy.

  When they reach the upper right corner of the rectangle they’ve been crossing at a diagonal, the bright yellow spot and the red one that follows it start up the mountain covered with acacias, at the same pace as before, neither slow nor fast, in a straight line toward the river. There is no path, but the ground is almost pure sand, so not much grass grows among the trees, and the rain, rather than softening the earth and forming puddles or wet layers of mud, had packed it down, and the two men walk on ground so hardened by the water that their footsteps hardly leave a trail. Clumps of pampas grass, gray like everything but the yellow earth, lay across the sandy ground, though when they reach the river, the vegetation of the island, on the opposite shore, some fifty meters away, seems more green, and the sand on the slope more red, a brick-like red that’s almost orange from the sand mixing with the ferrous clay, in contrast to the pervasive grayness: the river, lead-colored and rippled, is darkening with the afternoon at the end of a rainy day that hasn’t once seen the sun.

  —Southeast, Nula says when they reach the shore, pointing at a downward angle toward the leaden water and the waves that crest its surface in the direction opposite the current. His voice, as though it issued from someone else, sounded strange to him, not during its fleeting sonorous existence, but in the soundless vibration it left in his memory as it faded, perhaps caused by the silence that had taken hold after the sound of the scrape of their steps on the sandy earth had disappeared. The soft breeze from the southeast is only perceptible on the water. Or maybe Nula and Gutiérrez can sense it on their faces, but, accustomed to the inclemency, they don’t notice what they feel. Each of them surveys the landscape with the same withdrawn expression he might have assumed had he been alone in this deserted place, the details each observes not coinciding with the other’s, each of them assembling it therefore in his own way, as though it were two distinct places, the island, the sky, the trees, the red slope, the aquatic plants at the riverbank, the water. For several seconds, Nula’s thoughts are absorbed by the leaden, rippled surface, each of the identical, curling waves, continuously in motion, that swell and form an edge which could best be represented not by a curve but rather, more precisely, by an obtuse angle, seeming to attend the visible manifestation of the becoming that, by presenting itself through repetition or a counterfeit stillness, permits the coarse heart the illusion of stability. For Nula, who often catches himself observing the same phenomena that once occupied his Notes, the island ahead, the alluvial formation, is proof of the continuous change of things: the same constant movement that formed it now erodes it, causing it to change size, shape, and place, and the coming and going of the material and of the worlds that it makes and unmakes is nothing more, he thinks, than the flow, without direction or objective or cause, of the time that, invisibly and silently, runs through them.

  —See that? They’re all the same, he says.

  Gutiérrez looks at him, surprised.

  —The waves, Nula says. Each one repeats the same disturbance.

  —Not the same one, no, says Gutiérrez, without even looking at the surface of the water. His gaze passes curiously over the island, the air, the sky, darkening from the fading light and from the mass of clouds, a denser gray, that have been moving in from the east.

  Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to notice that Nula is watching him openly, as though he were concentrating on what he sees less because what surrounds him is particularly interesting than because moving his gaze over the landscape allows him better access to what’s happening inside himself. What little Nula knows about him makes him an enigma, certainly, but with a touch of irony Nula tells himself that ultimately even the things that are familiar to us are unfamiliar, if only because we’ve allowed ourselves to forget the mysterious things about them. Quantitatively, he tells himself, without a single word corresponding to his thoughts, I know as little about him as I do about myself.

  Even what they know about him in the city is fragmentary. Everyone knows something that doesn’t quite coincide with what everyone else knows. The ones who knew him before he left—Pichón Garay, Tomatis, Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, for example—had lost touch with him for more than thirty years. One day he just disappeared, without a trace, and then, just as suddenly, reappeared. From that group, the first to make contact with him, and completely by accident, had been Pichón Garay. I was on the afternoon flight back to Buenos Aires, and he asked the man sitting next to me to change seats, he wrote to Tomatis a week after returning to Paris. (Pichón had spent a couple of months in the city, liquidating his family’s last holdings, and in mid April Tomatis and Soldi had taken him to the airport, where he caught the afternoon flight to Buenos Aires, which at that time connected with a direct flight to Paris.) Before sitting down, he introduced himself. Willi Gutiérrez, did I remember him? It took me a second to place him, but he remembered everything from thirty years ago—El Gato’s stories more so than mine, actually—and I’m still not sure if he knew which of us he was talking to. He said he saw us with Soldi at the airport, but he couldn’t come over because he was checking a suitcase. He said you looked the same as always. For the fifty minutes the flight lasted he did practically all the talking, spouting off about Europe, and I learned that he’s living between Italy and Geneva, but that he travels all over. His trip to the city lasted a day, of three in the country altogether. The afternoon before, he’d landed in Buenos Aires from Rome, slept at the Plaza that night, and the next morning had skipped up to the city to visit a house in Rincón that he was looking to buy (I didn’t offer mine because it was all but sold), saying that he planned to settle in the area. That night he was staying at the Plaza again, and then back to Italy the next day. Our destinies, as you can see, are contradictory: he’d come back to buy a house, and I was there to sell one.

  According to Tomatis, the first people Gutiérrez had contacted when he moved into the house in Rincón had been the Rosembergs. The first that I know of, he’d clarified, because from what I can tell, he lives in several worlds simultaneously. And Nula, who’d met up with Tomatis for coffee and to sell him some wine, had responded: Just like everybody else. And Tomatis, in a falsely severe tone, said, Don’t get cute, Turk, I’m serious. He lived a double life before he left, one that even his closest friends didn’t know about, and now he’s come back to it. Tomatis’s suggestive tone apparently implied that he might know more than he was saying, and when, about a month later, after his first trip to see Gutiérrez, Soldi, in the Amigos del Vino bar, reluctantly hinted that Gutiérrez might not be lying when he said that Lucía was his daughter, Nula remembered the suggestion, but for now nothing quite makes sense as he stands on the riverbank, watching the leaden, rippled surface of the water, and his hand reaches into the camper’s inside pocket for his cigarettes and lighter.

  The real estate agent (who in fact was representing an agency from Buenos Aires in the transaction), a guy named Moro, was also one of Nula’s clients. His assignment consisted in picking
Gutiérrez up at the airport and taking him to see the house in Rincón, or rather on the outskirts of Rincón, at the north end of town, on the floodplain opposite the highway, where some new money had moved early in the 80s because they hadn’t been able to buy in the residential section of Guadalupe, which other, wealthier people had bought up first and transformed into a kind of fortress, with private security and everything, blocking so many roads that the buses were forced to change routes. Moro figures that Gutiérrez must be very rich. Leaning toward Nula over the desk in his office on San Martín, like he was sharing a secret, a large map of the city hanging on the wall behind him, riddled with different colored pins no doubt distinguishing the current states of the diverse property that his agency administered, Moro, rocking his comfortable swivel chair slightly, looking over his shoulder to check that no one was listening, though there wasn’t anyone but them in the office, narrowing his eyes and lowering his voice, had hissed, admiringly, I figure you’d have to measure it in palos verdes, that is, by the millions.

  The house had belonged to a cardiologist, a Doctor Russo, a public health secretary in the government that followed the military dictatorship. According to Moro, this Doctor Russo, who now lived in Miami, had been implicated in the disappearance of funds allocated to improving hospitals and the Public Assistance program, not to mention a shady story concerning bribes to pharmaceutical labs, and even as a businessman he’d been blemished in the eyes of the law, having served on the board of the Banco Provinicial, where, after his tenure, something like a hundred million dollars turned up missing, and not to mention the fact that the board members had passed around low-interest loans that were meant for poor people to buy a modest house somewhere, but which the board used to build mansions for themselves, some in Mar del Plata, and abroad even, in Punta del Este, in Florida, and in Brazil, north of Río de Janeiro, with the end result, according to Moro, that between the board and their rich friends all the funds for the preferential loans had been spent, and the hundred million dollar discrepancy caused the bank to go under, so none of them had to return the money they’d taken. A judge took an interest in the case, but the investigation went nowhere and anyway the responsible parties were already living in Marbella or Punta del Este or Florida. This had been the case with our Doctor Russo, who’d sold the house in Rincón and a bunch of others around the country, bought, according to Moro, with the money he’d made as a cardiologist and the dividends from his private clinic, and had left for Miami.

  According to Moro, Gutiérrez’s visit to the house didn’t last more than ten or fifteen minutes. He walked through the interior rooms first—the six bedrooms plus the large living room, the bathrooms, the kitchen, practically bigger than the living room, all of it on a single floor—and then, at the same speed, went out to explore the grounds, the grove at the back, the pavilion, the tool shed, and the swimming pool with nothing at the bottom but a puddle of muddy water where several generations of dead leaves were putrefying and in which a copious family of toads had taken residence. Gutiérrez spent the whole trip back to the city interrogating him about painters, about people specializing in cracked swimming pools, about the chances of finding a woman to take care of the cleaning, and a gardener and caretaker, about someone who could fix the thatch roof over the pavilion, and so on, and so on, like the house was already his, and without uttering a single word for or against it—a place which he, Moro, knew hadn’t been signed for in Buenos Aires—Gutiérrez spoke of it as though he owned it. To Moro he’d seemed like a nice enough guy, though slightly off: he was calm, quiet, polite even, and he always had this friendly and somewhat distant smile pasted on his face. Moro said that he ended up feeling slightly uneasy, in any case, because everything he said or did, the usual stuff you do when you’re settling a deal, seemed to confirm something for Gutiérrez, something he’d come searching for, and that ultimately he, Moro, realized that Gutiérrez was looking at him like some kind of museum piece or some exotic fish in an aquarium that he’d traveled thousands of kilometers to see firsthand. Moro told Nula that he’d been told by the Buenos Aires office to take Gutiérrez out to a fancy lunch at a place on Guadalupe where all the celebrities in the city, starting with the mayor, took important visitors, but that Gutiérrez said he didn’t want to take up any more of his time, that he wanted to spend some time alone before the flight and would prefer to be dropped off near the grill house on San Lorenzo, a place that had its fifteen minutes back in the fifties, but which had turned into just another dark neighborhood dive. Nula knew the place well; in his last year at the university he and a group of classmates would go there to learn to get plastered. The place wasn’t actually that bad, just like the fancy place on Guadalupe wasn’t that good. But he stopped himself from saying this because Moro was already saying that he’d seen him again that afternoon. At around four, he’d passed the estate agency without coming in, walking slowly along the shady side of the street, like people from the area did, gazing at the storefronts, the houses, and the people with a discreet look of indulgent satisfaction. According to Moro, he’d seemed happy, and since just then he was walking south out of the agency to visit a property they wanted to put up for sale, and since this was the direction that Gutiérrez was also walking, totally by happenstance and without meaning to he ended up following him for several blocks. Moro said that finally he, Gutiérrez, after looking at his watch, had gone into the arcade—even though there are five or six others, everyone calls it that, the arcade, quintessentially, because it was the first in the city to open, in the late fifties, and all the others, which are more modern, more important, and more luxurious, have to be referred to by their full name—and took a table in the courtyard. Moro sat thinking for a moment. He was just over forty, already pretty bald and with a bit of a paunch, well-dressed and friendly, a spontaneous sort of friendliness that had nothing to do with his business, but which actually came from his private life, because in fact he’d inherited the estate agency, a flourishing family business started by his grandfather and established in the area for over seventy years, meaning that, not having any financial problems of his own, he could lend a personal turn to business matters, reflecting in a disinterested way about people and what they did. There wasn’t a block in the city, or in the neighboring smaller cities and towns, or likewise in the surrounding countryside, where you wouldn’t find the proverbial signboard: ANOTHER (in red letters printed at an angle in the upper left corner of the white rectangle), in the center in larger, black letters MORO PROPERTY, and below that, in red letters again, FOR RENT (or FOR SALE). And so whenever Nula would deliver his wine, the visits would last somewhat longer than with his other clients, although the sale of wine, because of the literary aura that surrounds the product, always overflows, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the person, into the private sphere. Nula was surprised to see him fall into such an introspective moment; from his expression, Nula could tell that he was trying to get his head around some unusual thought, something that he found difficult to put into words. Then he said, While I was following him, I had this weird feeling I’ve never had before, and which, no lie, really bothered me. It was like we were walking down the same street, in the same place, but in different times. It occurred to me that if I walked up and said hello he wouldn’t recognize me despite having spent the whole morning together, or worse yet he wouldn’t even see me because we were moving through different dimensions, like in some sci-fi program.

  The day after his walk along the coast with Gutiérrez, Nula will see Tomatis at the southern end of the city, around six in the afternoon, behind the capitol building, and, stopping his car, will invite him in. I accept, Tomatis will say. I’m waiting for the bus, but one that’s full enough hasn’t come along yet. After exchanging some pleasantries, they’ll end up talking about Gutiérrez, whose return to the city has, in fact, ended up causing something of a stir. Tomatis will tell him that, through his sister, he knows the couple—Amalia and Faustino—who work for Gutiér
rez. The wife takes care of the house, the shopping, and the meals, and the husband the courtyard, the landscaping, the pavilion, the pool, and the garden. His sister relays the gossip from another woman, a sister-in-law of the first, who comes two or three times a week to help out around the house. Little things, purely circumstantial details (the couple is too earnest, according to Tomatis, to commit any sort of indiscretion) that Tomatis nevertheless interprets methodically and thus forms a general picture of the situation. What I remember from thirty-some years back is that Gutiérrez left the city suddenly, that he stayed in Buenos Aires for a year, and that in the end the earth swallowed him whole. With other people who’d gone to Europe, to the States, to Cuba, to Israel, or even to India, we heard reports every so often, but with him nothing, not a single thing. It was like he’d died, gone missing, disintegrated, evaporated, or dissolved into the impenetrable, innumerable world. Although . . . now that I think about it . . . hold on, let’s see . . . yeah, one night, many years later, in Paris, Pichón took me to a party where I met this Italian girl who, when she heard where we came from, Pichón and I, told me she knew a Gutiérrez who was from the same city and who lived between Italy and Switzerland and wrote screenplays under a pseudonym. His name was Guillermo Gutiérrez, but she didn’t know what pseudonym he used for the screenplays. I’d forgotten that detail almost as soon as I heard it, and now, suddenly, it came back to me. Actually, the Italian girl was wrong, Gutiérrez wasn’t from the city. He came from someplace north of Tostado called El Nochero. His grandmother, who was dirt poor, had saved up some money with the help of the church to send him to school in the city. He went to a Catholic high school, and, the moment he graduated, his grandmother died—it was like she’d been staying alive just to make sure her grandson was on the right track. He enrolled at the law school, where he met Escalante, Marcos Rosemberg, and César Rey, and they became inseparable. The four of them formed a sort of political-literary avant-garde that didn’t last long—besides their youth and their friendship they didn’t have anything in common, not even politics or literature. Since he didn’t have a penny, unlike the other three, who despite being older still had school paid for by their families, Gutiérrez started working, a little bit of everything, until his Roman Law professor, who liked him, took him on as a clerk in his office, where he was partners with Doctor Mario Brando, a poet and head of the precisionist movement, as far as I know the most hateful fraud ever produced by the literary circles in this fucking city. But on that count I suggest you consult with Soldi and Gabriela Barco, who are researching a history of the avant-garde in the province. I’ll get off at the corner. Thanks for the ride. And Nula will answer, Not a problem. But what was it you were telling me about the couple that works for him? And Tomatis, with a studied gesture of indifference, will downplay its importance, while letting slip—unintentionally, of course—two or three melodramatic and mysterious little details: This and that. Nothing really important. But if push came to shove I believe we’d find that those two, although they haven’t known him long, would sacrifice their lives for their new boss. And then, before getting out, he’ll discuss the weather and other mundane things.