La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Nula’s cell phone, from the bottom of his pocket, announces a call. Lost in thought, he only hears it after the third ring, and, passing the flashlight to his other hand—he only turns it on now when passing cars force them onto the shoulder—he takes it from his pocket and brings it to his ear. Addressing himself to the person on the phone, who calls from some unspecified place, but at the same time to Gutiérrez, who walks beside him silently in the darkness, Nula shouts:

  —Where am I, you say? I’m on the river road, north of Rincón, soaked to the bone under a toy umbrella. It’s raining buckets and for the last three hours I’ve been with a client who decided to tour the landmarks of his far-off youth. Because everyone knows that when it comes to the Amigos del Vino, as the sales manager taught us during the practicum seminar, the customer is always right. Is everything set for tomorrow, both at the same time as today? You’re a genius, Américo. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.

  Nula hangs up the phone and puts it back in his pocket. That was my boss again, he says. He’s perfectly obedient, as you can see.

  —This drenching has earned you a roasted catfish, Gutiérrez says.

  —Are you inviting me over for dinner? Nula says. I accept, if I can bring the wine.

  —Why not? An astonishing country, where everything is free, Gutiérrez says.

  But it is written that tonight they won’t eat together. A light is on in the house when they arrive, and a compact black car is parked next to Nula’s green station wagon. Nula turns on the flashlight and casts the beam over the cars, the front of the house, the trees in the side courtyard, and finally shuts it off.

  —A visitor, Gutiérrez says, and pushes open the gate, the same white gate that, Nula recalls, Gutiérrez locked before they started their hike along the river.

  —Come in, I’ll introduce you, Gutiérrez says.

  —Is it family? Nula says, following obediently, feeling his heartbeat accelerate and trying, simultaneously, to keep his voice steady when he speaks, in such a high-pitched tone that he’s forced to cough in the middle of the sentence in order to recover his usual gravity. But Gutiérrez, who moves toward the door, closing the umbrella, doesn’t seem to hear him.

  —Come in, he says again, even friendlier than before. He’s about to put the key in the lock when the door opens from the inside, so suddenly that Nula jumps, an involuntary, barely audible exclamation escaping from his mouth. But Lucía, smiling, is already standing in the illuminated, rectangular doorway, and, receiving Gutiérrez, gives him a quick, noisy kiss on the cheek. Gutiérrez steps aside, and, with a slightly mysterious half-smile that Nula, stupefied by his emotions, tries unsuccessfully to interpret, assumes the need to offer them an utterly conventional introduction.

  —Do you know each other? Mr. Anoch, enologist and philosopher—but which comes first? Lucía Calcagno.

  Nula is about to stammer something, but Lucía preempts him.

  —No, she says, still smiling, and offers her hand.

  No, Nula thinks, as he holds out his own. She said no.

  —Good to meet you, he says, his voice breaking. They shake hands two or three times and then let go.

  —I had some stuff to do in the city and when I was on my way back to Paraná it occurred to me to come say hi.

  —Great idea, Gutiérrez says, shaking the plastic bag. There’s two catfish here begging for the oven. Come in, come in, he says to Nula again.

  Nula stands frozen in the doorway.

  —No, thank you, I’ll leave you to your family, he says, thinking, constantly, and evermore intensely, as they say, She said no. Another time. Sunday.

  After the door closes behind him and he starts to walk toward his car through the rainy darkness, Nula shakes his head in disbelief. She said no, he thinks, and a dry, sarcastic, inward laugh escapes his lips. The headlights, when he turns them on, illuminate the entire facade of the house, the white wooden gate, the white walls, the space that separates the gate from the front door, the trees growing alongside the house, but the image through the windshield, pearled across its surface by droplets of rain, is disintegrated and luminous. The white surfaces, even the white, lacquered wood bars of the gate, seem paradoxically more irregular, and the contours of things more uncertain, lines seemingly drawn by a seismograph, and the lights from the house, or from the headlights bouncing off the white gate, refract in each of the drops stuck to the windshield, a static flicker that the wiper blades, after he starts the engine, take several passes to erase, a pointless exercise, in any case, since after each pass, new drops fall, luminous, from the black heights of the countryside and cover the glass again. He puts the car in reverse, then goes forward, then reverses again, and finally starts down the sandy path toward the paved road. The glimmer disappears, only to reappear each time the headlights of an approaching car reflect off the drops that, despite the ceaseless arcs traced by the wiper blades, their trajectory accompanied by the same resonant sweep, accumulate repeatedly against the glass. Holding the wheel with one hand, Nula takes the cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his camper, moves the pack to the hand resting on the upper portion of the steering wheel, takes out a cigarette, and, after putting it between his teeth and lighting it and releasing a thin cloud of smoke, returns the cigarettes and lighter to the camper pocket. (He wasn’t wrong when he thought he’d be smoking a lot today.) He shifts slightly in his seat to find a comfortable position, grabs the wheel in both hands, and accelerates slightly by applying unconscious pressure to the gas pedal with his foot. With another short, sarcastic laugh, which makes the cigarette quiver, shaking his head back and forth, he mutters, She said no! She said no! He laughs again, and though he thinks he gets the complexity of the situation—he doesn’t realize yet that the situation might be much more complicated than he imagines—there are, undoubtedly, traces of bitterness in the sarcasm.

  The enormous hypermarket complex appears to his left, its eight theatres, its parking lot, its coffee shops, its cafeteria, and its restaurant all seemingly deserted despite the grandiose display of lights and colors hovering in the darkness of the countryside. The lights shine off the wet bodywork of the fifteen or twenty cars scattered around the parking lot, none of them near the main entrance. A year before, the land that is now occupied by the hypermarket was just a swamp in the middle of an empty floodplain—constantly under water, even when it was dry everywhere else—between La Guardia, where the road splits toward Paraná, and the branch of the river from which the city rises. Nula hesitates a few seconds, slowing down, deciding whether or not to turn into the complex; on Friday, Amigos del Vino starts a week-long promotion there, and he wants to finalize a couple of details with whomever’s in charge, but immediately he changes his mind and accelerates again. The network of lights and colors passes, then reappears for a few seconds, fragmentary, in the rear-view mirror before it disappears completely. Now the road widens into four lanes, and is lit up by tall, downward-curving poles projecting onto the reflective asphalt. The city lights appear overhead, to the right the straight line of lamps on the waterfront, and, to the left, less regularly, the lights on the port, on the avenues converging toward the river, on the buildings of various heights that stand out from the rest, on the regatta club. The car reaches the bridge. It’s so brightly lit that the city, despite its multiplicity of lights, appears dark on the other side. She said no, Nula says again, and, to underscore his disbelief, shakes his head in such a way that the cigarette, which he hasn’t taken from his lips since lighting it, and which he’s consumed a good potion of by now, vibrates in the air, disturbed by the words he says, by the movement of his lips as he shapes them, and by the negative sign, turning his head from left to right and right to left, several times, in the darkness, that expresses his at once ironic and confused bitterness. The combination of these movements causes the smoke that rises from the lit end of the cigarette and from his lungs, though his nose and mouth, to form a turbulent cloud between Nula’s face and the windshield, where t
he rain drops, swept aside by the wiper blades, rematerialize, obstinately, and it’s through this cloud that Nula, leaving the bridge, with another short, dry, and sarcastic laugh, sees the first rain-soaked streets as the car enters the city.

  Gutiérrez also ended up alone early. Lucía didn’t accept his invitation to dinner, and left for Paraná almost immediately after Nula’s sudden departure. And so Gutiérrez has put the fish away in the fridge, and, to counteract any negative effects of the rain, has taken a hot shower, eaten some cheese and grapes he found in the fridge, and settled into what, with self-directed irony, he calls the machine room (satellite television, videocassette player, video camera, computer, printer, modem, radio, compact disc player, telephone, library, record collection, video collection, and so on), trying to work for a while. The millions that he’s unaware of Moro assigning him are in fact imaginary. It’s true he has some savings, and that the sale of a screenplay for Wolf Man two years before secured him his best fees ever for a movie, even though it was never filmed, but there’s nothing in the world that could get him to stop working, and at this moment he’s editing two other screenplays for which he’s already been given an advance, so he couldn’t abandon them even if he wanted to. Though it may be expensive for the area, the riverside house—the people in Buenos Aires who sold it to him never mentioned Doctor Russo, and he only heard the name after he’d moved in—cost him much less than an apartment in Rome or Geneva would have, and actually its location isn’t inconvenient: if he had to make a Thursday afternoon meeting in Rome, for example, he’d simply have to take the Wednesday morning flight at nine fifteen from Sauce Viejo, connect in Ezeiza three hours later, and he’d be at the Piazza de Popolo for lunch by noon on Thursday. Luckily, the Swiss producer, his longtime employer, is also an old friend; he considers Gutiérrez reliable, his principal collaborator on screenplays, and though he never knew Gutiérrez’s reasons for moving to Rincón, and never completely approved of the decision (for personal rather than professional reasons), Gutiérrez knows that he can depend on him, and while the producer’s business continues to operate they’ll continue to work together. Since he’s been in Rincón, he’s already made two trips to Europe, one to Rome and another to Madrid, but a week later he was already anxious to finish his work and return to Doctor Russo’s house. (Everyone calls it that, and one night Marcos pointed out that, wherever he was, in this world or the next, the doctor had once again managed, nominally at least, to hijack another man’s home.)

  After working a while, almost till midnight, proofreading an Italian screenplay, Gutiérrez gets up and goes to the kitchen for a cold glass of water. Still on the table are the three cases of wine Nula brought for him and, in a plastic bag, the local chorizos. Gutiérrez stops in front of the wooden cases and scrutinizes them for a moment, as though he were trying to guess what they contain, then he opens the fridge, eats two or three grapes from a plate, and, after pouring a glass of water, takes it to his office and leaves it on his desk. He takes a few sips, and then, from a metal box in the second drawer, he pulls out a black and white photograph.

  It’s an enlargement of a photograph of Leonor Calcagno, from the late fifties, when she was twenty-three or twenty-four. It was taken by a street photographer in front of the suspension bridge, the major tourist attraction in the city—along with the Franciscan convent, built by the natives in the seventeenth century—since 1924, the year it was built, until 1983, when the flood knocked it down. In the desk drawer, in the same tin box from which he’s just taken the enlargement, Gutiérrez has the original photo, in which he, in a light summer suit, is standing next to Leonor. The enlargement shows the blurry edge of his left shoulder, against Leonor’s, covered by her flower-patterned dress. Gutiérrez knows every detail of the photo from memory, and every time he would look at it, during his first years in Europe, he would concentrate on Leonor’s face, its features, its gaze, its expression. The idea for the enlargement came from thinking that, in the original photo, everything surrounding Leonor’s face was superfluous, and the enlargement, ultimately, was a way of fixing, optically and chemically, on a specific point, not the image itself but rather the unstable attention of the viewer, the enlargement, at once benign and insistent, presenting the brilliance of a detail cleansed of the useless detritus of the surroundings. A photo of Lucía sits in a glass frame on the desk. Gutiérrez holds the photo of the mother up to the one of the daughter and compares them. Their similarity is apparent, but they’re also very different. Lucía’s features remind him of someone he knew or still knows, though altered, but despite how hard he tries he can’t figure out who it is. He concentrates on the photo of Leonor again. It was the summer of 1958/59 and nothing had happened between them yet. They’d go for walks sometimes, pretty much out in the open. At the end of that summer, Calcagno, her husband, had gone on a trip.

  Even though Calcagno was partners with Mario Brando, and was probably richer, and enjoyed a greater reputation as a lawyer, and was at least ten years older (and at least twenty years older than his wife), his admiration for Brando as a literary figure had practically enslaved him, something that happened with every other member of Brando’s precisionist movement. Despite having been a cultural attaché in Rome during the first Peronist government, Brando had shifted to the opposition in 1953, and after the Revolución Libertadora he began occupying official posts in the provincial government. But it was his literary reputation, which overflowed the borders of the province—validated by his regular publications in La Nación and in various magazines in Córdoba, Chile, Lima, and Montevideo—that ultimately subjugated Calcagno, an expert in Roman law, an excellent litigator, and the one who did practically all the work for the firm. To his followers, the founder of precisionism was simply charismatic; to his enemies, he was an autocratic tyrant who demanded selfless devotion to the precisionist ideals, not to mention complete obedience to the leader of the movement. According to César Rey, who once threw a glass of wine in his face—this was sometime around 1957, when he was drunk at a dinner party—Brando was a talentless puppet who used his alleged literary gifts to charm the rich into giving him legal work or official posts regardless of who was in power. But there were many people who believed the opposite, and the precisionist movement and its leader enjoyed a considerable reputation. To Gutiérrez, Brando was a good writer of sonnets who tried to pass himself off as avant-garde. What bothered him was when Brando would give him work that had nothing to do with the firm, which fed a certain ambiguity that made people think that Gutiérrez, who was still very young and too financially dependent on him to protest, was one of his disciples. What at the time made him uncomfortable seemed useful in retrospect, since thanks to his work at the firm he made connections with the literary scene. Gutiérrez valued Calcagno, not only because he’d been a good professor or because he’d found work for him, but also because he was intelligent and sincere. But, along with other personal reasons, his strange devotion to Brando, who was inferior to him in every way, ultimately brought out Gutiérrez’s contempt for him.

  That summer, Calcagno and Brando had gone to a poetry festival in Necochea, and that trip had given them, him and Leonor, some space. They could see each other at any time of day without their time being limited, as it tended to be otherwise. They were at a point in their relationship when, no matter the subject, their opinions always coincided, something which they noticed every so often, euphorically, always with a renewed sense of astonishment. Gutiérrez still hadn’t expressed his feelings in any straightforward way, but the increasing precautions they took not to be seen together revealed, though they didn’t seem to realize it, the nature of their intentions.

  They went out to a restaurant, a secluded place near the waterfront whose owner Gutiérrez knew. Since it was summer, there was hardly anyone there; if they weren’t on vacation, most people still preferred to eat outdoors, at grill houses or beer gardens, to escape the suffocation of the hot nights. The owner sat them in an annex at the back th
at only fit a handful of tables, all empty but for theirs. When they were alone, their hands caressed on the table, unselfconscious, almost distractedly, and at one point Gutiérrez had stood and stepped around the table, leaning over to kiss her, just when the owner, who, because he knew him, was serving them himself, came in unexpectedly with something, and pretended not to have seen anything. Soon after that, when Gutiérrez got up to go the bathroom, the owner called him over and told him there was a room behind the restaurant that could be rented by the hour, but that he could have for the whole night and even the next day if he wanted, since it was Sunday and the restaurant would be closed, and that he could stay as long as he wanted since the room was actually separate from the restaurant and had its own entrance through the courtyard, and that he could return the key on Monday morning.

  When he returned to the table, Gutiérrez already had the key in his pocket, but he waited a while before asking Leonor to the back room. He was afraid that she’d be angry and that the night would be cut short. He was sure she wouldn’t accept, and he’d already decided that if she said no he wouldn’t insist—he couldn’t bear the idea that Leonor would be offended and stop seeing him—but when he finally suggested it, he was surprised by the open and straightforward way she considered the idea, interrogating him at length about the owner’s discretion and not about the intentions that a young law student might have regarding the wife of the professor who’d given him a job as a clerk in his firm. Actually, it was like Leonor hadn’t understood that the point of going to the back room was to make love, and simply wanted to clarify the owner’s ethics and his discretion, first of all, along with his sense of honor, his habits, and his family history. After discussing all of these points with Gutiérrez, Leonor seemed satisfied and accepted but said that they should wait until the patrons and two or three employees in the front of the restaurant had left. She would only go to the back room when, with exception of the owner, who would lead them through the dark courtyard and disappear, no one was left in the place but them. So they went on talking as before. About an hour passed, more or less, and the conversation was so animated that for a while Gutiérrez forgot that eventually they’d be going to the back room, and he was almost sorry when the owner interrupted them, around midnight, to lead them first through an old tiled courtyard with a large refrigerator, a covered balcony, and two or three half-open doors, then through a kind of storage room where, in the weak light, wine racks, sacks of flour, several folded chairs and tables, a soda machine, and two or three dozen bottles stacked around it were just visible, and then through another courtyard, with trees and brick path through flowerpots and vegetable beds. Finally, after opening the door to a small room attached to the back wall of the garden, whispering, The switch is to the left when you go in, and discreetly taking the money Gutiérrez had already prepared to give him when they reached the room, he disappeared silently into the dark courtyard that they’d just crossed, where the only thing that caught the weak light was the brick gravel path that had led them there.