La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  But Tomatis will only tell him these things tomorrow, at around the same time, after another cloudy day that, as it ends, will nonetheless allow fragments of pale blue, faintly red from the last rays of an already disappeared sun, though still clean and luminous, to shine through the breaks in the gray clouds that high winds will begin to disperse. For now, though, as he takes a cigarette from the pack and brings it to his lips, the air and the rippled surface of the river, both an even, leaden gray from the double effect of the dusk and the increasingly low, dark clouds, remain in shadow. Two meters away, Gutiérrez, his silhouette sharply outlined against the darkness, over which his bright yellow waterproof jacket glows with an attenuated splendor, seems absorbed by an intense memory or thought, so much so that his arms, separated slightly from his body, have stopped in the middle of a forgotten movement. Less than a minute has passed since they stopped at the edge of the water, but because they’ve been silent, separated from each other by their thoughts, time appears to have stretched out, seeming to pass not only on the horizontal plane that their instincts recognize, but also on a vertical one, to an inconceivable depth, suggesting that even the present, despite its familiar brevity, and even along its unstable, gossamer border, might actually be infinite. Gutiérrez, apparently remembering that Nula is with him, returns to his open, slightly urbane manner, and smiles.

  —I was time traveling, he says.

  —And I was riding the present, trying not get bucked off that wild bronco, Nula says.

  —Which luckily can sometimes be a gentle mare, says Gutiérrez.

  —If we keep developing the metaphor, we’re going to end up in the zoo.

  —Screenwriters are contractually obligated to use the primary local material. In London, it’s always got to be cloudy, and don’t dare forget to fill the Sahara with camels, says Gutiérrez, a quick spark of retrospective disdain in his eyes. And, bringing his hand to his forehead, he rubs at something as he raises his head and looks up at the sky. A drop, he says.

  —Two, Nula says, touching his nose while scrutinizing the dark clouds. Looking back down and around himself, he thinks of his red camper, his white pullover, his new shirt, his freshly ironed pants. He looks at his loafers, where a rim of yellow mud has formed along the entire perimeter of their soles and a few stains of the same yellowish substance have stuck to their insteps, and he makes two or three involuntary gestures, at once ambiguous and contradictory.

  Gutiérrez watches him openly, laughing, as if his misfortune amused him, and then, deliberately reaching slowly into an interior pocket of his raincoat, the wide and open kind, like a marsupial pouch, that some of those coats have, he withdraws an umbrella with a short handle, where he presses a metal button, and the canopy of smooth and glowing fabric divided into seven different colored sections unfolds with a sharp sound, sudden and exact, and a perfection that approaches the theatrical. The sections of the canopy represent the color spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, with identical segments, and the composite of the two men and the umbrella form a multicolored blotch that is clear and mobile and that stands out sharply against the gray background darkened by the double effect of the clouds and the dusk.

  Nula, slightly stupefied, takes in the umbrella’s multicolored apparition, but he doesn’t rush to shelter himself under the canopy’s limited circumference, typical of the shelter offered by collapsible umbrellas, despite their price. Nula’s reticence to seek the protection that placing himself shoulder to shoulder with Gutiérrez would offer has two motives: the first is that for now he’s sensed only a few sparse and scattered drops that couldn’t yet be called an actual rainfall or even a spitting one, and the second is that just as the multicolored canopy is unfolding, giving the impression that the two phenomena had been synchronized deliberately, in one of the pockets of his camper his cell phone has started ringing. Moving a few steps away mysteriously, he puts back the cigarettes and lighter that he’d just taken uselessly from his pocket. (He actually smokes very little, but he tends to carry cigarettes to share with clients, though today, he can’t really tell why, he feels a stronger urge to smoke than usual.) Nula pulls the cell phone from his other pocket, and, with a subtle gesture of apology toward Gutiérrez, turns his back to him as he brings the phone to his left ear and answers the call. Gutiérrez observes him patiently but skeptically, isolated within the imaginary cylinder that the umbrella’s circumference projects toward the sandy ground, forming an illusory refuge for surveillance, and when he moves his arm slightly and the multicolored circle shifts onto an inclined plane the ideal shape to contain him becomes a truncated cylinder.

  Although for a man of almost sixty, however well he keeps himself up, youth tends to seem insolent, and although Nula’s full and virile twenty-nine years, the fastidiousness of his clothes, and his apparent self regard seem overly manifest for his taste, Gutiérrez watches him indulgently, almost with pity, thinking that the energy the young radiate—so stimulating that, subjugated by it, they confuse it with the essence of their own singularity—they might not actually deserve. The indulgence is erased when Nula, turning around, raises his voice and makes two or three comical faces in his direction, shaking his free arm as he explains to the person on the other end (later he’ll explain that it was his boss) that, because he’s with an important client (and he extends his arm and wags his index finger at Gutiérrez with an exaggerated and complicit smile) he has to cancel the two appointments he has for later in the afternoon. Apparently, the person on the other end of the line lets himself be easily convinced, and from the things he says, Gutiérrez realizes that Nula, without having to insist much, but by the sheer effect of his communicative euphoria, has induced his boss to call the clients and reschedule their appointments for the same time tomorrow. Nula shuts off the apparatus and, stowing it in his pocket, takes two or three decisive steps toward Gutiérrez.

  —Free as the wind until tomorrow morning at eleven, he says when he reaches Gutiérrez’s side. And he turns his head sharply upward again because suddenly and silently a dense rain has started to fall. With two hops he reaches Gutiérrez, claiming for himself, in a tacit way, a portion of the meager protection offered by the umbrella.

  Without really knowing why, Gutiérrez, who likes every kind of rain, prefers that silent kind, without storm or wind or thunder or lightning, and which forms gradually, almost surreptitiously, of low, dark clouds, so loaded with water that, from this excess, they split, suddenly, and empty themselves upon the world. In general, it will fall in the afternoon, and, often, after the warm spell of a wet day. Indifferent to Nula’s somewhat ostentatious irritation (he’s almost pasted to him, and, shuffling his feet impatiently, seems to want to incite him to keep walking), Gutiérrez watches it, not in the sky, which has brightened a bit and where the drops, despite their size, are invisible, but rather on the plants, on the yellowish ground, on the river, where, as they collide, after an incorporeal flight in which they seem to cross an extrasensory void, they rematerialize. Gutiérrez’s senses perceive the rain across the deserted expanse that surrounds them, while his imagination projects it over the contiguous and distant spaces they have crossed and that, despite their imaginary provenance, are complemented by and confused with the empirical plane that surrounds them. What he perceives from the point in the verdant space where they find themselves, his imagination likewise assigns to the entire region, where, for the past year or so, after more than thirty years away, he has been living. And he thinks he can see, in the leaves that shudder silently as the drops fall, in their impacts with the yellow earth, and, especially, in the agitation that the drops cause as they cover the rippled surface of the river over an infinite number of simultaneous points, the intimate cipher of the empirical world, each fragment, as distant and distinct from the present as it might seem—the most distant star, for example—having the exact value as this, the one he occupies, and that if he could disentangle himself from the grasp of this apparently insignifica
nt present, the rest of the universe—time, space, inert or living matter—would reveal all its secrets. Gutiérrez senses that Nula has guessed his thoughts, or has inferred them from his demeanor, and so has suppressed his annoyed gestures, opting instead for what appears to be sincere patience and calm. He allows himself a few seconds more, and then, giving Nula a gentle push on the elbow, urges him on.

  They advance in silence, a bit faster than before, but, from their demeanor, they don’t seem worried by the effects of the rain on the expensive clothes they’re wearing, and Nula especially, thinks Gutiérrez, after having postponed the mercantile obligations for that afternoon, no longer seems interested in the state of his shoes or the pulchritude of his red camper. Actually, because the multicolored umbrella is too small to cover them both completely, the rain now soaks not only the lower parts of their bodies, depending on their position and according to the rhythm of their stride as they hike over the rough terrain (from which the path has disappeared), but also cascades over the edges of the canopy onto their shoulders. The bright and mobile blotch that travels along the riverbank is startling, because of this very brightness, against the uniform gray of the landscape.

  This is the exact impression that comes across, fifteen minutes later, to the inhabitants of the first ranches that, on its outskirts, a dispossessed stretch of land they seem exiled to, nonetheless marks the edge of the town. Many surprised faces mark their arrival under the rain from the sleepy and utter misery of the settlement, the only variation from the tedious and inescapable exclusion where poverty relegates them. Ten or fifteen shacks of straw, branches, cans, bags, and cardboard—refuse from the nearby dump—half falling apart or possibly never completed or more likely repaired and reappointed every so often with the haphazard and heterogeneous material offered by that same trash heap, constantly at the edge of collapse and in any case inadequate for living or even dying in, crowded together in a barren field among four of five sparse trees so ragged that they seem infected by the poverty, and where a mess of knickknacks, busted chairs, dismantled wardrobes, rusted grates, broken toilets crumbling among the weeds, paper and plastic bags twisted and half-buried in the mud, trunks, animal and human excrement, leather, bones, and dead branches litter the narrow space between the structures, and where three or four chickens and a dozen dogs, all of them rawboned and afflicted, wander around. At the back of a plot of untilled ground, two thin horses, indifferent to the rain, nibble at the yellowed grass. The filthiness of the ground stretches over the fifteen or twenty meters to the water. The smell of rotten fish, of sewage, and of carrion rises from the riverbank, and the earth is covered with dirty paper, cardboard disintegrating in the rain, broken bottles and rusted cans, ashes clumped together by the humidity, and even the carcass of a dog, hardened and dried despite the rain soaking it, a carcass whose owner, in the previous weeks, had managed to suffer, die, rot, and dry out again, so that, at its death, what it left behind will end up as dust, returned to the earth, or as bone forever.

  Some of the shacks are shaded near their doorways by a kind of eave propped up on a pair of twisted poles and under which a rickety chair, old crates, or a stack of two or three trunks serve as seats. Outside one of the shacks, a double car seat, on the ground, leans against the partition that frames up the entrance. The poles of an abandoned garden, in the open ground where the settlement ends, point, in parallel lines, toward the gray sky. Both adults and children watch them as they pass. Some come out of their shacks and stare openly, but, apparently, without interest. The multicolored anachronism they comprise—contrasting with the immense gray-brown blotch of the settlement, which also stains the vegetation, the animals, and the people—seems to activate slow, rusted sensory mechanisms in the inhabitants, consigned to some remote corner of their mind by lack of use. Gutiérrez, raising his free hand, offers a generalized greeting as they pass that the others fail to acknowledge, or acknowledge only later, behind the curtain of rain, when they have already passed and can no longer register it, not from suspicion or timidity, and much less so from aggression, but rather from stupor, from indecision, from indifference.

  —I feel like a sideshow freak, Gutiérrez murmurs. I wish I’d never been born.

  —It’s not so bad, Nula says, also in a low voice, prefaced by the same short, dry laugh that, as he emits it, he realizes he uses only with Gutiérrez, meant perhaps to display a self-control that, in fact, is far from authentic. But I know what you mean, he adds. My father was convinced that the real problem with the world isn’t poverty, but wealth, and that’s why he had to die.

  Turning his head suddenly, Gutiérrez observes him carefully, but all he finds is Nula’s profile, because Nula, as though he hadn’t noticed anything, continues looking ahead, into the rainy space that separates them from a crop of saturated trees.

  —Someone over there traded in his car, and so your father had to get murdered, mutters Gutiérrez, turning back toward the trees that obliterate the horizon at the end of the landscape. And, after a short pause, the litany, which Nula could see coming, starts up again: who’ve ransacked the planet and now seem determined to do the same thing to the whole solar system, all so that they don’t have to resole their shoes and instead buy themselves a new pair every month; who build luxury resorts in the poorest areas so they can water ski and scuba dive and get a tan in the middle of winter and stay in bungalows that simulate a primitive existence but where they serve all-you-can-eat breakfasts and lunches that Roman orgy-goers would be embarrassed by, and especially at night when they go clubbing and swap wives and then complain when the locals kidnap a handful of them that they never hear from again, they, who would ravage everything to see their privileges maintained or amplified and are inclined to do the same over the ruins of the whole universe simply from the voluptuousness their dominion arouses. And Nula, with resigned irony, thinks, Yeah, but he bought himself Doctor Russo’s mansion, two kilometers from a shantytown, and, according to Moro, you’d have to calculate his fortune by the millions.

  Though they walk downstream, the direction the river runs is not indicated by anything on the surface but the tension created there by the many rough and parallel waves, riddled with the projectiles of rain that pierce them as, pushed by the southwest wind, they encounter the resistance of the current. This tension is so uniform and the fall of the drops so regular that the rippled surface of the water seems less like a medium whose impulse is renewed continuously by the opposing forces that push it in contradictory directions than like a fixed, gelatinous substance that, because of some hidden tremor, trembles and vibrates constantly, and the drops that strike it, despite being always new, seem always the same, captured for a gray but distinct instant.

  When they reach the grove and start to cross it, the tall crowns of the eucalyptus planted in rows parallel to the river—they have to turn away from the riverbank slightly as they approach the center of the town—shelter them from the rain, but at the same time the rain seems more real among the trees than in the open; the bark of the trees seems lacquered by the damp, and the ochre trunks, dark and shining where they’re not covered with bark, soaked in water, make it more distinct, as do the drops that cascade from the branches, and the odor of eucalyptus that the water amplifies, and the soft but numerous sound that the drops, continuous and polyphonic, produce against the branches and the trunks, against the leaf bed rotting on the ground, against the earth. At their arrival, two or three toads, motionless at the foot of a tree, stiffen and puff up from anxiety, from anger, or from fear, and then immediately flee with ineffective and clumsy jumps in various directions, while in the treetops a tumult of leaves and wings produced by invisible birds—of considerable size judging by the sound’s intensity—indicates that the presence of Gutiérrez and Nula has not gone unnoticed. As they leave the grove they are able to make out, beyond a narrow ditch so choked with weeds that it’s impossible to tell if there’s water at the bottom, the first houses, on the first streets, which apparently follo
w the straight line that the municipality assigned them, but, lacking sidewalks or gutters or even trees to mark the boundaries between street and sidewalk, are not yet fully streets; there are only a few isolated houses, built of unplastered brick or adobe, two or three per block, constructed along the outer perimeter of the rectangular territories that delimit the blocks, as in so many other towns, whose outskirts, though included within the urban space by the geometric design that demarcated them before the town was chartered, before materializing into houses, streets, life—an abstract idea of the town, diagramed with a ruler, in the same imagination of those who projected it—are confused with the countryside. Where the sidewalks should be there are weeds that, in some cases, extend from the sandy street all the way to the edges of the houses; sometimes, because the inhabitants have pulled them up, but almost always because their simple coming and going has eliminated the weeds, a thin path of bare earth has been opened from the fence (when there is a fence) to the middle of the street.