La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Look at any family, Nula would often think, observing them specifically as a material phenomenon, and you’ll see that they’re just fodder for the Becoming—that everything is constantly moving and changing. And, more or less, the thought would proceed like this: Any member of a family is first of all a shapeless substance, and his existence is only probable and random, and later, when he moves away from the virtual, purely statistical stage, he becomes an embryo, and a fetus, and then he’s born. Once outside he becomes a baby, then an adolescent, an adult, an old man, a corpse, and then just matter again. The skeleton lasts the longest but after a certain period of time, as it fossilizes, it transforms. At this point, all that’s left are a few petrified fragments, for which only the designs of the material world remain. In a family, meanwhile, the different ages are always represented; there are always embryos, fetuses, babies, adolescents, adults, and so on. And if it doesn’t seem that way, if all that’s left are adults and the elderly, it’s because, in this case, only a fragment of the process is available for direct observation. Everything contained there appears and disappears, evolves and changes with time. Not for one second do the members of a family cease to enter and exit the world, transforming, changing in appearance, in size, in weight, the length of their hair or their nails, growing and contracting again, being born, and, each in his own decisive way, leaving the world and disintegrating once again. Everything, at every moment, is in motion, but it’s impossible to know the speed at which things happen. Clocks only follow other clocks; what they measure has nothing to do with time. What is happening passes through a mental scheme they call reality, which is impossible to place either inside or outside of any person. One day, Nula said something to Riera that, in short, would be more or less the following: All of existence is like the ship of Theseus, which, according to Plutarch, was conserved by the Athenians for many centuries as a kind of relic because it had transported the young hostages that the hero had saved from sacrifice in Crete. But over time, as it decayed, they would remove the planks that were too old and replace them with new ones, eventually in its entirety. These repairs were made many times. This is why, when the Athenian philosophers debated the concept of growth, the ship of Theseus was a contested example: some argued that it was still the same ship and others that it no longer was. To which Riera, dismissively, as he often did when the topic didn’t interest him, responded Jerk-offs! But Nula wasn’t even paying attention: he was remembering how, during medical school, he would see the dissected bodies, their organs exposed, listening to his anatomy professor lecture, and wouldn’t be thinking of organs or their function, but of more abstract things, like, for example, the fact that even if two bodies of the same sex had the same organs, each one was still unique, and that what really interested him wasn’t the function or the specific pathology of those organs, but rather the relationship between the general and the particular. So it made sense for him to abandon medicine for philosophy. Since then, in public, one of his provocative claims—like all young people, he had a considerable arsenal—was, I’m only interested in the world in general. And when he was in a good mood, or at a party, feeling playful with someone who could hold his own, as they say, blatantly feigning modesty, would announce: Practicing the ontology of becoming is so simple: you just have to be aware of every part of everything and all the parts of the parts in all their synchronic and diachronic states. And so on.

  As kids, Nula and his brother would always spend their holidays in the village. They each had their own horse, just like their cousins, who their grandfather—maybe because they’d been born a bit later and didn’t have his surname but rather the Italian one of his son-in-law, or maybe because Chade and Nula were a connection to the son he’d lost long before death, decisively, snatched him away—nonetheless seemed to love a little less. Or maybe because the two brothers who came from the city tended to imagine it this way, hoping, ever since they could remember, to make it true, from the time when that sense of shelter, consisting simultaneously of affection and severity, met the recollection of their first sensations of the plains. Tactile sensations, for example: the hot and quivering contact with the body of a sweaty horse; the sudden coolness on summer afternoons when they stepped into a shady corner of the immense courtyard; the slippery tension of a live frog struggling to jump from the hand that gripped it; the warm water in the pond and the contact with the obscure objects—animals or plants, it was unclear—that brushed up against them under the surface; their bare feet sinking into the dust on the street, when, on hot nights, they’d walk back from a dance with their shoes in their hands; the sudden burning on their calves at the moment when, crossing a field, they got tangled up in a cluster of nettles; the velvety skins of unripe peaches or the sticky feeling from the sap of the fig trees. Or olfactory: the smell of the bitterwood, honeysuckle, and privet in bloom; of the outhouse at the back of the courtyard; of the alfalfa and the corrals; of the fires, woody at first and eventually combined with the meat cooking on the grill; of a kind of edible sawdust called zatar that arrived every so often from Damascus and was eaten little by little, making a small pile on a slice of bread and drizzling it with olive oil; of some chemical substance they couldn’t pinpoint and of wet burlap in the village ice house; of the abandoned nests, a mixture of dry twigs, feathers, and excrement. Or taste: the flavor of a drink made with very acidic green grapes, mashed at the bottom of a jar and mixed with sugar, water, and ice; of the cigarettes made of dried corn husks and corn silk and later the real cigarettes and the first beers taken secretly from the store during the siesta and which they took to smoke and drink in a vacant lot behind the house; of the green, sweet stems they’d pull from the ground near the station and chew for a long time; of the rainwater that aunt Laila kept in a jar to wash her hair; of the mandarins and oranges that on winter nights they’d put to warm on the coals of the fire; of the Syrian food, mint, squash, lemon, eggplant, wheat germ with raw steak and onion, and, in the summer, stuffed with ice flakes; of the mate brewed with milk and sugar for breakfast. Aural: the black space of the night that would erupt into a multiplicity of planes when, for some reason, the dogs in the village started calling and responding in the darkness; the whistles of the trains that passed full speed through the village, or the clattering of the endless freight trains that, also without stopping, passed through slowly; in the fields, the sound of the livestock, the snapping of the grasses or the shivering of the corn when they pulled an ear off to eat it and put the silk to dry; the subterranean knocking of the tuco-tucos, the cries of the lapwings and the crested screamers at the water, and the cooing of the doves at midday in the summers; the hooves of the horses crossing town at a walk or a trot and so rarely at a gallop that when it happened people would come out to the street to see if something was wrong; a complicated, rhythmic sound, the creaking of leather, wood, and metal of the sulkies, wheelbarrows, and pick-ups; the conversations in Arabic between his grandfather and other Syrians or the family members who lived in town or who’d come to visit him from the surrounding villages or even from Rosario or Buenos Aires and once even from Colombia; the unsettling sound of the windmills at the bends in the Carcarañá when the wind picked up; the clatter of the bocce balls in the court behind the store; the Sunday mornings, the radio they’d take outside if the weather was nice to listen to The Syrio-Lebanese Hour on the Rosario station, the mournful voice of Oum Kalthoum filling the sunny courtyard, the house, the orchard, and garden, under the arcades covered with vines or enormous wisteria; the Arabic words: bab (door), khubz (bread), haliib (milk), habibi (darling), badinjan (eggplant), watan (homeland), and so on. And visual too: the empty horizon on the plain, always the same wherever you were; the swarms of yellow butterflies that would land on the damp parts of the street after the sprinkler passed and take off all at once and land in another puddle father off; the planters blooming with dahlias, snapdragons, daisies, and pansies; the outskirts of the village, which already were and also weren’t the countryside;
the horse-drawn carts that passed at a short trot and whose driver, without even turning his head to see if there was anyone there, would direct a greeting that consisted of slowly lifting the hand that held the reins toward the corner where the store was located; the signal that dropped suddenly when a train was approaching the village, and the people waiting for it running from their houses and crossing the tracks in order to reach the station before the train; the dirt roads, sloped and dusty on dry days and covered with black mud and mess the rainy days, and always, always, straight, endless, and deserted; the owls perched on the posts of the barbed wire fences, motionless and rigid, as though they were effigies of themselves painted on the wood; the guinea pigs with metallic blue tufts crossing the road slowly when a vehicle or a rider on horseback was passing; the rabbits running full speed from the undergrowth and the whistling ducks flying high, slowly, stretched out, forming an angle; or the motionless dust kicked up by cars and which on still days hung over the road for a long time; the dogs that copulated during the siesta, the male balancing precariously, trembling slightly, over the female; or the foal and the mare that once, at a distance, Nula had been watching, and saw that, as they caressed, stroking each other’s necks and muzzles, the foal’s penis was slowly engorging. (Each time he remembered one of these sensations, Nula put it down in his notebook.)

  His grandfather was one of those assimilated “Turks” who, if he dressed like a farmer or a horseman and didn’t open his mouth, with his straight black hair, his tightly clipped beard, and his skin toasted by life in the open air, could pass, among strangers, as a gaucho or a farm hand from the area, or one of those santiagueños who, in the thirties and forties, came en masse from the villages on the plain to harvest corn. And even when he spoke he didn’t have much of a foreign accent: he’d learned Spanish well, with the exception of four or five hitches that his vocal organs probably couldn’t adapt to, and which betrayed his origins. He was anticonservative, a yrigoyenista, and a bitter antiperonist (that was the epithet he used), and he liked to recall how, during the coup in 1930, a drunk gaucho had ridden horseback into the store, and he’d taken his revolver from the counter drawer and unhooked his riding crop from the wall, and hitting the horse with the crop, had backed him into the middle of the street. And yet he read La Nación and La Capital, and every month received Selections from Reader’s Digest. He dressed in three different ways to fulfill his three main roles: for his work in the fields, where he had a few cows; for his general store, where he sold everything from yerba mate to freezers and at one point even cars, and of course clothes, fabric, paint, and what have you; and finally for his trips to Rosario, for business, family matters, or social occasions like weddings, baptisms, wakes, or parties at the Syrio-Lebanese club. In the sixties, he had a truck for the fields and around town, and a car for longer trips. Nula remembered hearing, without understanding completely because he was still too young and his parents only hinted at it, that after he was widowed he’d taken up with a mysterious lover in Rosario. Laila and Maria, his two daughters, wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of behavior in the village. When Nula was older, La India told him that his father had spotted Yusef once in Rosario, and that his grandfather, who was with his lover, had pretended not to see him, but in any case the relationship between the father and the son had already fallen apart by then. In terms of religion, his grandfather considered himself a fervent Apostolic Roman Catholic, which might have been an implicit way of underscoring his superiority, not over the Jews, of whom he seemed unaware (although, when he played truco he always teamed up with Feldman, the pharmacist, who was one), nor over the Muslims, whom he loathed, but rather over the Maronites and the Orthodoxists, who seemed more skittish than true heretics to him, preferring those extravagant variants despite having recourse to the Roman Church. He attended mass every Sunday and took communion every so often, and if the priest came by for something for himself or for one of the poor people in the village, he didn’t charge him, but he didn’t like knowing he played cards on Saturday night and would keep from going to those games so he wouldn’t have to see it.

  They brought his son back to the village to bury, near his mother and an older brother who’d only lived a couple of weeks and who, as was the custom then, had the same name. At first, La India had objected, because she’d planned to cremate him and scatter the ashes, but then she thought it would be better to leave him near his father, to see if the proximity, after the incommensurable separation, could reconcile them. She was left with, as she would often say to her sons in her colorful way, the perfect picnic before the storm. They had killed him in a pizzeria in Boulogne, near the Pan-American highway, and La India passed through the village to drop off the boys and pick up their grandfather on her way to Buenos Aires. The police interrogated them for a full day before releasing the corpse, and at the end of the interrogation a clerk read them the section of the report that referred to the event itself. He’d apparently set a meeting one night, for nine o’clock, but he’d arrived well before that and had changed tables twice. According to witnesses, at ten of nine a car parked outside the door. Three men were inside; the one who was sitting in the passenger seat got out and stood on the sidewalk, leaning against the open door to the car, which was still running. The waiter at the pizzeria said that when his father saw them he stood up too, reaching his hand into his jacket to get his gun ready, not looking away, but the man who took the shot had already been in the pizzeria for a while, drinking a beer at a table behind him and pretending to watch a sports program on the television, waiting for the car that would pick him up after the execution; he shot him four times in the back, shot him again where he’d fallen, and, according to the waiter, ran out and got in the back seat of the car, where someone had already opened the door from the inside, while the guy who’d gotten out of the car sat down again next to the driver, who’d pulled away at full speed, barely giving the others time to close their doors. After La India and her father-in-law were given permission to take the body from the hospital and had seen it to the funeral home’s van to take back to the village, they decided to pass by the pizzeria. It was a winter dusk; an icy rose stained the sky opposite the west, where the sun had almost disappeared behind a bank of clouds darkened by their own shadows, projected by the back light. In the empty pizzeria, the lights and the television were already on. They spoke with the waiter and the owner; when he realized who they were, the cook, who’d been kneading dough near the oven, put down his work, and without opening his mouth once, approached to listen. The owner didn’t seem too happy that they’d come—he must have thought the visit could be compromising—but the waiter, who’d tried to help him, and who seemed truly affected by what had happened, showed them the spot where he’d fallen and tried to console them by saying that he’d died immediately, almost without realizing what was happening. He followed them to the door. Before they left, the grandfather put a few bills in his hand, which he ended up accepting after a brief but sincere resistance. They went back out to the street, onto that anonymous corner of the tortuous outskirts of Buenos Aires, with its little houses of unplastered brick, its cheapjack markets, its narrow, musty courtyards, its small shops and supermarkets, its loud furniture, its gardens, its shanty towns, its warehouses and its factories, its toothless girls, its old mestizos loaded with plastic bags, its vendors from Santa Fe, selling pills and candy, newspapers and soft drinks, at the bus terminals to Córdoba, to Rosario, to Resistencia, to Catamarca, to Paso de los Libres, or to Asunción. In the infinite solitude of the icy dusk the otherness of the world turned more oppressive and enigmatic among the masses that seemed to dissolve, lost, into the darkness.

  They arrived in the village at dawn, almost at the same time as the van. They held the wake without even opening the casket, and buried him that same afternoon. Many people came to the cemetery, friends and acquaintances from the village or from neighboring towns: Italian or Spanish farmers who were clients at the store, old Arabs who owned or had
owned stores in the surrounding towns, childhood friends of the deceased who’d gone with him to primary school and who’d stopped at that level, staying in the village, because the others, the ones who’d pursued higher studies, with the exception of the notary and the veterinarian maybe, were scattered around the world. The grandfather’s priest friend had been dead for some time, so a young priest gave the mass. La India was about to object to a religious ceremony, but then thought that, having decided to return him to his father, she had to abide by the rules implicit in that choice, and that, in the end, death, which erased so many superfluous things, did so with disputes over religion too, but mostly because while for most of his life the dead man had thought he’d freed himself from it, at his burial, apart from her and his two sons, who were in a sense the only foreigners there, it was clear that the small world he’d escaped was now reclaiming him. His death had wiped away the inconstancy of the inextricable external world, and it was the unyielding procession of his childhood that now accompanied him to the tomb. The turmoil he’d submerged himself into, intending to give it a new order and sense, ended up forcing his return to that preconscious place where, in the shelter of history, in the territory of emotional and sensory immediacy, things were as they seemed despite this or that resistant opacity, which his adult years, with absolute certainty, would reveal. For the grandfather, however, the opposite occurred: his naïveté when he’d left his neighborhood in Damascus at fifteen to conquer the world had allowed him to face, lucidly, everything he’d found himself entangled in, making, at each opportunity, the decisions that seemed most just and which no doubt were, because their succession had brought him steadily closer to what he was seeking. He’d left his family—the mother and sisters with whom he still corresponded regularly at that time, exchanging gifts, like the edible sawdust zatar, and the brothers who’d moved to Colombia and Mexico—had left the oldest city in the world, as he liked to say, with childish pride, when referring to Damascus, and then had crossed the ocean and a good portion of the plains in order to settle in a little village on the banks of the Carcarañá, and, with the little his uncle left him when he left for Rosario after the shooting, had started a family and managed to make a small fortune, nothing exceptional, but enough for himself and for each of the millions of poor bastards who crossed the ocean from Genoa, from Galicia, from Marseille, and even from Dakar and from Tripoli; who came from Spain and from Italy, from Syria and from Lebanon, but also from Portugal, from Morocco, from central Europe, from Serbia or Belarus, from Ireland or from Japan, fleeing from oppression, from war, from pogroms, from the Ottoman Empire, from the secret police, from political or religious persecution, from hunger, from poverty, from their destiny. They scattered across the plains, where new ravages awaited them—violence, xenophobia, exploitation, mysterious illnesses, an early grave in a foreign land—and ended up gathering together on land parsed out by the government, eight square blocks that bordered the railroad, which they called a town and named after the first person to arrive, or whatever name he chose, often the name of a woman, thus marking the end of their epic wandering and the start of their sedentary, agrarian life. Yusef, his grandfather, was among these millions of men, and it hadn’t gone too poorly for him, owing to a few personality traits that popular magazines call ambition, tenacity, rational self-interest, intuition, cunning, perseverance, and so on, and so on, and which they use to explain a posteriori the unfathomable crisscrossing of accidents that determine, from the forms that the fugitive—and by chance purely imaginary—evidence assumes in the dark matrix of any event, the thing they call destiny.