La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  They went in. At twenty-four, Gutiérrez was still a virgin. When he reached puberty, he’d masturbated just like everyone else, but in boarding school, where he’d been until he was eighteen, he hadn’t had either the occasion or the stimuli for it, unlike his classmates, who, despite the vigilance of the faculty, never did without it, alone, in groups, in the bedrooms or the bathrooms. In college, he had to work to pay for his classes (in fact, two years passed before he could produce anything, since all the temporary jobs he found didn’t leave him time to study) and after trying to go to bed with a prostitute a few times and failing, he’d stopped trying. The year before, César Rey, unaware of his virginity, had taken him to a brothel, and he was with one of the girls for a while, to no effect. The girl had gone about her work with complete earnestness for almost a full hour, every so often saying, It’s not getting up, honey, no matter how much I suck it and tug it, it won’t get up, and finally they’d given up and just talked until Rey came looking for him. But Gutiérrez knew he wasn’t impotent—prostitutes just didn’t turn him on. A few times he’d been with a friend, dancing or caressing her against a tree, in the shadows of a park, in a dark hallway, and his erection and orgasm had come, but that was at a time when women generally didn’t sleep with their friends or boyfriends, and they all knew that by letting him rub up against her or put his hand up her shirt, and even helping to masturbate him, letting him finish against her thigh, or, what was less risky, in her hand, they would keep him calm and help him to wait for their wedding night. He was a virgin not because he wanted to stay pure or because he was impotent, but only because he’d never been inside a woman. After a few months had passed since he’d gone out with anyone, he started to think, with a sense of defeat, that he’d been denied the vitality that sex incarnated and that could allow him access to what at the time he called normality and real life.

  The opposite was actually happening. That vitality, as he called it, that mythic force that the young seek out, was in fact contained inside him, and had been waiting, with exacting patience, for the chance to manifest itself. That night with Leonor he had five orgasms, the first two without pulling out, he thinks whenever he remembers it—not with a sense of pride or self-satisfaction for his virility, but rather with gratitude for something he hadn’t realized was his, something that, unlike what happens to so many others, could only be manifested by a particular feeling (later, when the thing he’d felt during those months had vanished, he would realize that sympathy, admiration, friendship, and even respect, combined with a certain type of physical beauty, could allow him to periodically cash in his backlogged sexual quotas).

  The availability of naked bodies produced at once a sense of euphoria and a sort of disbelief—it seemed inconceivable that the two wild animals who explored the most hidden parts of the other’s body, not only shamelessly but in fact ecstatically, with ease and dexterity, with their lips, tongues, teeth, hands, fingers, and nails, gladly swallowing and sharing their fluids, who coaxed spasms and agonizing pleasure from each other, who communicated with breaths, murmurs, moans, screams, and insults were the same people who moments before, over a relaxed meal, had described their work, their artistic tastes, their small pleasures, their travels, their childhoods, and who, for months, had barely dared to look at each other, to let their hands touch, allowing themselves, even when they were alone, only polite conversation. Gutiérrez couldn’t have imagined the double revelation that what was happening produced: a forgetting of the self and, paradoxically, the sudden awareness of being someone different from who he’d thought. Even now, as he examines the enlargement of her face, despite all her faults and failures, he has to acknowledge his debt to Leonor. For Gutiérrez, the person who could provoke that flood of ecstasy that at once transforms the person who feels it and the world he lives in, as imperfect as she may be, inevitably takes part in that splendor. Still, his continued devotion is directed less to the person than to the capacity, which, by some intricate design in the matrix of events, she, unaware of being a carrier, may have ignored or at least misinterpreted.

  They copulated from midnight until the next morning, dozing off, half waking and starting up again, rubbing against each other with violence and tenderness. For the rest of his life, he thought about what happened that night. It taught him that love is filtered through desire, its own source, and that the parentheses of ferocity in which it traps its victims, who are also its chosen, are built of the illusion that in the wet embedment of their bodies the sense of solitude, which only increases in the act, is momentary extinguished. And it was this illusion that allowed the universe to seem transformed. When they turned on the light to the room, which was modest but clean and neat, they saw that in the bunk bed, the kind you find in certain family homes, there was a doll lying on the pillow, and, next to the bed, a bicycle against the wall. Before undressing, Leonor took the doll from the bed and placed it carefully on a chair. All night, every time his eyes found the doll, Gutiérrez got the feeling that she was looking back at him, and it seemed like in her frozen and at once vivid gaze there was a strange complicity with what was happening. The bicycle, meanwhile, provided him with what he called, mocking himself, as he often did, his taste of the infinite. In the subsequent decades he would sometimes get the sense, in the minutes that followed a satisfying sexual experience, that he was still in the room with the bicycle, and that a sort of continuity, or unity, rather, had synthesized his life, merging at once innumerable and fragmentary and disparate experiences that he’d for the most part forgotten. A sensory certainty of permanence, of rootedness on the edge of the ceaseless disintegration of things, of an indestructible, unique present, reconciled him, benevolently, with the world.

  Their nakedness, their exhaustion, but also the summer night, the silence that settled in, and the desire that, though it only surfaces sporadically, is by definition infinite, and, like time, whose essence, in a sense, it shares, works unnoticed on those it transforms, brought them to the daybreak, to the morning, to the warm, empty Sunday. Before dawn, in the dark breathlessness of the twilight, a sparrow sang among the trees in the garden, and, with the first light, the goldfinches came, greeting the sunrise, the new day, with an excited racket that, Gutiérrez now thinks, is as splendid as it is absurd. And he sees himself again, naked in the bed, with Leonor sleeping naked beside him on the white sheet, twisted and soaked in sweat, and he can still hear, thirty-some years later, the clamor of the birds, who’ve once again forgotten that the same incomprehensible fire had come from the east the previous day, and the day before and the one before that, exhausting the sequence in an intangible past, previous even to memory, and who believe that the radiance that reveals the world and dissolves the darkness is meant for them alone and is happening for the first time, just like someone trapped in the magical halo of desire thinks that the feeling he gets from the rough touch of rough flesh is being manifested, finally, for the first time since the world began.

  Of course, Leonor came to his house several times after that night; of course they happily made love again and again; of course they decided to run off to Buenos Aires or Europe or wherever; of course Gutiérrez arranged everything and of course Leonor changed her mind at the last second, choosing to stay with her husband, who heard the portion of the story, described as a strong mutual attraction, that, of course, did not include what they actually did. Of course, when he found out, Gutiérrez, who drank almost no alcohol at the time, got drunk and went looking for a whore to sleep with; of course, as usual, despite the girl’s best efforts, she couldn’t put him in the right condition. He woke up in an alley, lying in mud, his body aching and bruised. The next day he got on a bus to Buenos Aires, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, disappeared from the city for more than thirty years.

  WEDNESDAY

  THE FOUR CORNERS

  FOR THEM TO MEET, SEVERAL THINGS HAD TO COINCIDE, a few of which, for their importance, are worth mentioning: first, that an inconceivable singularity led, b
ecause of the impossible density of a single particle, to an explosion whose shock wave—which, incidentally, continues expanding to this day—dispersed time and igneous matter into the void, and that this matter, cooling slowly and congealing in the process, according to the rotation and displacement caused by the primitive explosion and owing to a complex gravitational phenomenon, formed what for lack of a better word we call the solar system; that a phenomenon which owing to an utter impossibility of definition we simply call life appeared on one of the variously sized orbs that comprise it, that orb we now call the Earth, cooling and hardening as it rotated around a giant star, also a product of said explosion and which we call the Sun; and finally, that one September afternoon Lucía walked past the corner of Mendoza and San Martín—where the Siete Colores bar now occupies the spot that for years belonged to the Gran Doria—at the exact moment when Nula (who, after finishing his coffee, had been detained for a few seconds by a guy who shouted something from his table about a Public Law textbook) walked out onto San Martín and looked up, seeing her, dressed in red, through the crowd on the bright avenue.

  Nula was almost twenty-four. Eighteen months before, the previous March, he’d decided to quit medical school and enroll in a philosophy program, where he studied the pre-Socratics and some classical languages and dabbled in German, intending to read Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, but he felt too isolated in Rosario, where, because he didn’t work, it was extremely difficult to get by, and so he came back to the city often, to his mother’s house (his older brother, a dentist, was already married), where he could get room and board in exchange for occasional work and very little nagging. Medicine, he’d explained to his mother, could only be studied in Rosario, or in Córdoba or Buenos Aires, but with philosophy no particular establishment or diploma were necessary. For a philosopher, any place in the world, however insignificant it might seem, was, according to Nula (and many others before him, in fact), as good as any other.

  La India—that was his mother’s nickname, even though her family was from Calabria and her maiden name was actually Calabrese, because her straight black hair, her high prominent cheekbones, and her dark skin gave her the mysterious features of some exotic creature—narrowing her eyes and shaking her head in mock fury, had muttered, And how much will that bit of insight cost me? before cracking up laughing, signaling that she was already thinking of a compromise, which, in broad strokes, was as follows: lodging and meals while he was in the city and some cash for a few hours work in the bookstore until he finished his classes in Rosario, all on the condition that he came home with a diploma, even if it was just a doctor of philosophy. Nula—the Arabic version of Nicolás, which, because of how it’s pronounced in Arabic should probably be written with two Ls to extend and roll the single L sound—accepted, more so to please his mother rather than to take advantage of her credulity, and kept commuting back and forth between the two cities for the next eighteen months. Chade, his brother, who had just started his practice, would also put some money in his pocket every so often. Chade, who was three years older, had been a brilliant, accelerated student, hoping, possibly, to find an equilibrium with his father’s degenerative instability, blown around like a dry leaf by the winds of change and, after years of absence in the underground, murdered one winter night in 1975, whether by his enemies or by his friends it was unclear, in a pizzeria somewhere in Buenos Aires. Nula, meanwhile, who often wavered between enthusiasm and indecision, and who was prone to drifting (both inwardly and outwardly), routinely wondered whether he was having to occupy, in the unmanageable present, the same ambiguous place that his father had twenty years before.

  With the legal bookstore across from the courthouse and a kiosk inside the law school itself, which Nula managed every so often and which suggested the comparison that his mother’s business was as advantageously located as a brothel across from a barracks with an annex in the bunkhouse, La India had confronted their father’s absence and had raised them and educated them both, him and his brother. But what kept them together, silencing their complaints and rebukes, was the fact that, though he was almost always gone, their father had never abandoned them. Every once in a while he would show up suddenly, loaded with presents, stay two or three days without once going out, and then disappear again for several months. After he died—Nula was twelve, more or less, when it happened—he was even more present than when he was alive. La India, pulling him once and for all from the clandestine shadow that politics had cast over him, filled the house with his photographs, his artifacts, traces of him, filling her conversation with her husband’s stories, ideas, and sayings. Her refractory insistence on repeating them just as he’d said them would eventually turn them into genuine oral effigies. Nula knew that deep down his brother disapproved of this, but he was too attached to his mother to reproach her. Nula, meanwhile, who’d unwittingly developed an ironic, offhand manner with his mother—possibly so as to gain special treatment—objected every so often to the appropriateness of that cult with an ostensible indifference that to an expert’s ear would have sounded pedantic and not the least disinterested. But it’s just that before the storm our life was a perfect picnic, La India would sigh, often tending to speak in metaphor, her idiosyncratic way of employing the language ever since she’d begun to use it.

  When they murdered him, Nula’s father was thirty-eight, he had a deep receding hairline, and though misfortune had turned it prematurely gray, a thick beard, as was the fashion in the seventies, possibly to hint at the surplus virility implied by the political inclination of its bearer. And though the awful tempest of that decade had tossed him around like a dry leaf, the late fifties, while he was still young, was when his personality, or whatever you want to call it, had crystallized, and, at least at first, politics occupied a secondary place there. He left home to study architecture in Rosario, but like his youngest son years later (who, in turn, without realizing the symmetry, traded medicine for philosophy) he’d drifted toward economics, from which he declined into journalism. In 1960, he married La India, four months before Chade was born—La India was nineteen then—and they came back to the city. He studied business in high school, and so he ended up taking a job at a bank, but after a year and a half he stopped going. Handling money was nauseating, he said. No one, least of all him, realized that he was having a nervous breakdown. Nula had just been born, and since there were now four mouths to feed, La India realized the time had come to get her hands dirty, so to speak. She started working at a legal bookstore belonging to a friend of her father’s, across the street from the courthouse. Not long afterward, the owner stopped showing up, not even to settle the register at the end of the day. He preferred bocce over commerce, and he was the president of a club called The Golden Pallino in Santo Tomé, and so he ended up making La India a partner, and when he retired she hardly had to do a thing to become the sole owner. Even before his retirement she’d gotten permission from the university to install a kiosk, a sort of wood shack crammed with legal books, in the courtyard outside the law school. A light bulb went off and I brought the horse straight into Troy was her recurrent, self-satisfied metaphor. Yusef, her father-in-law, had helped her buy the bookstore. Though he never said anything to anyone, he believed the responsibilities that his son, in his point of view (which was nothing like La India’s), did not appear capable of managing, should be for him to take on. His two daughters, who both lived in town (the youngest had already married, but the eldest, who never would, still lived at home), tried, solicitously, to console him. But it was pointless: the boy would be the scourge of his old age, and though he outlived him by several years, the ceaseless brooding over his son’s incomprehensible life and death was what drove him to the grave. His grandchildren adored him.

  He’d arrived from Damascus in the late 1920s, to work for one of his uncles in the fields outside Rosario, on the banks of the Carcarañá river. He hadn’t yet turned sixteen. One day, a few months after he’d arrived, his uncle called him to the
back of the courtyard, and, lowering his voice and looking around to make sure they were alone, took a knucklebone from his pocket and explained that there was going to be a game that night and that he was going to throw the knucklebone into the back of the courtyard, in the dark, and that he was going to tell him to go get it, and all he had to do was switch the knucklebones and instead of bringing back the one he’d thrown, bring back the one he was showing him, the one he’d just taken from his pocket. But Yusef, despite sincerely loving his uncle and owing him everything, had said no. It wasn’t that he was scared, he said, and though he would have loved to please him, it just wasn’t something he could do. His uncle seemed to understand his reasons and told him not to worry about it. Something must have happened with the knucklebones that night, Yusef realized, because his uncle was shot eleven times. He didn’t die—he lived to be ninety-three with two bullets in his body that they were never able to remove, and died suddenly during a game of tute—but out of caution he left town and moved to Rosario, the mafia capital at the time. The impulsive criollos who drew their knives at whatever pretext or started shooting over a simple knucklebone switch-out did not correspond with what is commonly known as the proverbial discretion of the Sicilian brotherhood.