La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  In any case, his grandfather had survived that adventure with total certitude of its objective necessity; if he’d had doubts, they were only the practical kind. And when it seemed he’d reached the climax of his ambitions, reality, which often resists an obedience to desire, pulled him, through the conflict with his son, from the legible and linear world he’d made, and submerged him in murky contradictions of an unaccustomed type. What had been clear became tortuous, incomprehensible. The value of sensations and events began to escape him. With the death of his wife, who was younger than him, he’d already intuited that the logic of the world could be cut off or obstructed at times by unexpected clotting; with that of his son, it was the natural order of the universe, which he’d always believed in, that had been disarranged. Over the few years he survived after his son’s death, the world, corroded by his unanswered questions, crumbled little by little into chaotic fragments. Within weeks after the burial, his straight, stiff, black hair and neat black beard, which to strangers marked him as an old criollo, turned completely white. A year later they found several tumors of a cancer that the doctors never managed to pinpoint. They operated in Rosario, and when he recovered after his first treatment his daughters convinced him to go to Damascus to see his mother, who was over ninety years old, but a couple of weeks before the trip he received news that she’d died. He bought a death notice in La Capital, with a photo he’d gotten two or three years before, compensating for his son’s hasty and somewhat shameful burial, and asked the young priest—whom he no longer charged when his servant came by for something—for a mass, which many people attended, of course the Arabs from Rosario and the surrounding towns, many of whom, it goes without saying, were Orthodox or Maronite, the Jewish pharmacist, the Italian and Spanish farmers, clients, friends of his daughters and his son-in-law, Enzo’s family, and, of course, Nula, who was already shaving by then, with his mother and his brother. After the mass, the family received their guests in the courtyard, under the arbor—this was in October—and once the formalized condolences had been carried out, the guests tried to change the conversation and animate their host, but his grandfather, whose lips permanently wore a pained but courteous smile, would not open his mouth. He canceled the trip to Damascus, of course, though he still had his sisters, and his health kept up for a while longer, but eventually it declined again, imperceptibly for those who saw him daily, but alarmingly for those who saw him only once in a while. He no longer went out to the fields or attended the business, and though early in the day he paced the courtyard giving orders to the two boys in charge of the house and the garden, later on, after lunch, which he barely touched, his daughters would make him change clothes, and, washed and well-combed, would sit him in a straw chair in front of the store.

  Across the broad dirt road stood the rail line and its sheds and station house. The villages on the plain liven up a little at the end of the afternoon, most of all on hot days when the sun, from which there isn’t, in the fields, any defense, declines to the west. The sprinkler truck waters the roads and damps down the dust so that when cars pass, or sulkies, or even bicycles or men on horseback, they aren’t forced to suffer a dust cloud. The grandfather, his eyes dim and absent, would watch the passage of the trains, cars, and people who sometimes stopped to greet him. Very infrequently, his eyes would light up, weakly, with a fleeting spark: he’d think he recognized an old friend in the driver’s seat of a passing car, but it would take him so long to raise his arm in greeting that when he managed to wave his hand a little, at a certain height, the car was already two blocks away. A pretty horse at a trot was also pleasurable for him, because he’d always liked horses; and it was also pleasant sometimes to watch the children who, after being washed and scrubbed by their mothers, their older sisters, or their aunts, went out to play, still chewing on enormous chunks of homemade bread slathered with butter, dusted with powdered sugar, and smeared with dulce de leche. But that was it. At first, he’d get up every so often and take a few steps along the uneven brick sidewalk, but toward the end he never moved from the chair. By the next fall, he started refusing food, and since he barely weighed fifty-two kilos, they had to hospitalize him and feed him through a tube. One cold morning he stopped breathing.

  When he saw him in the coffin, shrunken by death and by his suit and shirt, oversized because of the illness—his uncle Enzo had shaved him and tied on a blue necktie with colored stripes, its bulging knot resting on his Adam’s apple, disproportionately large because of his thinness—Nula was able to observe, for several minutes, the discreet, blue tattoo on the back of his right hand, which covered his left hand, over his abdomen, consisting of three dots arranged in a horizontal line. It had always intrigued him, and though as a boy he’d asked his grandfather what they meant, he’d never gotten a satisfactory response, making it seem like one of those topics that, because of the evasive responses they get, children resignedly consider themselves unfit for. Many of the Arabs who visited his grandfather had similar discreet, blue tattoos on their hand, their wrist, or their forearm. Growing up, Nula had grown so used to seeing them that he ended up not noticing them. But seeing the tattoo on the back of his hand again, he had the confused sense that their location, and whatever reason he’d had for having them imprinted on his flesh, in death, those three blue dots, however enigmatically, betrayed an authentic need. He knew that those three dots were a sign, a message, but he couldn’t tell to whom they were directed. And although two or three years later, when he thought of them, he still believed that they were a custom of another time and place, archaic and mysterious, where ritual and taste favored those marks on the body, by strange mandate or simple habit, it was only much later—he was already married and had abandoned his philosophy studies in Rosario to earn his living selling wine in the city—that he realized what the tattoos signified. One night, he was watching a Monteverdi opera on television, The Return of Ulysses, and at the recognition scene, when Eurycleia, the old nurse, realizes that the beggar, from the scar on his thigh, is Ulysses, who has returned incognito to Ithaca, Nula, hitting the open palm of his left hand on the back of his right hand, shouted so unexpectedly that Diana, concentrating on the music, jumped. Nostoi! he practically screamed. And then, lowering his voice, as though in apology, I’ve been trying to remember that word for so long. They continued listening in silence, and, when the opera finished, Nula went to the library and returned with a copy of the Odyssey opened to the start of Book XIX. “Nostoi” means “the returns” in Greek, he said. They were a series of epics that recounted the return home of the Greek heroes who’d fought in the Trojan war. But almost all of them were lost; only the return of Ulysses survived, and a few loose fragments of the others. I’ve been trying to remember the word for days, because I felt like it had some connection to my grandfather’s life. And now I know why. First of all, because of Ulysses’s scar from a tusk wound he got when he was a boy, when he went boar hunting once with Autolycus, his grandfather, like my brother and I used to hunt with our grandfather Yusef. But it wasn’t just about him, about his childhood memories of his grandfather taking them out to the fields to shoot partridges and wild ducks, but rather about his grandfather, about the recognition of Ulysses by the scar on his thigh, and if he shouted suddenly it was because he finally understood the purpose of those blue tattoos, on their hands, on their wrists, on their forearms, and possibly on other parts of their bodies that weren’t publicly visible: those signs inscribed on their flesh anticipated the nostos, the return, which they assumed would be so far from the moment of departure that their bearer would return to his place of origin so disfigured by inclemency and disillusion, by the silence of distance and the contempt of time, by the frayed rags of experience and of being, their only conquest, that they thought it prudent to mark themselves with an indelible sign so that they could be recognized by those who’d seen them off, and who still awaited their return, patiently, in their homes or in Hades.

  After his grandfather’s death, Nul
a took fewer trips to the town, though later, when he started medical school in Rosario, he would sometimes go up for the weekend. He didn’t need to catch the bus at the terminal, because his apartment was close to school, and the bus, before leaving the city, had to take several loops through the one-way streets near the terminal, and one of those loops passed right by his house. Sometimes he’d run into a family friend who recognized him, and other times he’d travel with his eldest cousin, who was studying to be a veterinarian—his youngest cousin was still at the Jesuit school—and who always told Nula that when they graduated they’d open a joint practice for gauchos: one of them would treat the horse while the other one examined the horseman. But, little by little, without knowing why, they grew apart, and when Nula dropped out of medical school and took up philosophy, they stopped seeing each other altogether.

  What happened at the pizzeria caused a rift in the family that only widened with time. On one side were his aunt Laila, La India, Nula, and his brother, and on the other side his aunt Maria, his uncle Enzo, and their three sons. The more distant family, their friends, and acquaintances fell to one side or the other. Nula, who couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened, and though he wasn’t sure whether or not to approve of his father, possibly because he often felt their resemblance too closely, couldn’t stand it that anyone else, even his father’s own sister, would judge him.

  But there were other reasons for his detachment from the town and his family. He’d drawn a low number in the draft, and because of this escaped military service, which gave him a year advantage at school, a stroke of luck that, from some dark, hidden, machinations inside himself, he refused to take advantage of. It took him more than two years to realize that what interested him wasn’t so much the nomenclature of the individual organs, but rather, as he liked to proclaim every so often, the viscera in general. In fact, it had always depressed him to imagine one day running his own practice, his day filled with actual patients while his thoughts wandered always to their causes, though his perplexed indecision and his erratic imagination never bothered to find a way out of the problem. Around this time, he started seeing his life like an mechanics shop where the cars, the engines, the toolboxes were all in disarray and half-assembled, and though the incessant, fugitive process of becoming never for a single second stopped manipulating them, changing their shape and position, they would always be in that same state of incompletion. The world became contingent, uncertain, and the inextricable threads connecting things, which could be untangled only in certain dark places, began to interest him more than things themselves, simulacra sitting there in plain sight as though that’s all there was to it. The way his uncles and cousins criticized his father bothered him less for its moral or political pretension than for its predictable submission to the world of appearances. After several months of hesitation, of conversations over drinks, of reading, he enrolled in the philosophy program. And, after accepting La India’s conditions—Around here, pal, let he who wants fish dig his own worms—he started commuting between Rosario and the city. When he ran out of money, he’d go back to his mother’s house, and two or three times a week he’d take over for the girl who worked the kiosk at the law school, who, because she was a student, had to close up when she had class or an exam to study for. But Nula didn’t just go back to the city when he was broke. Despite the rude and offhand way that La India treated him, often to parody a threat, Nula knew that, whenever she was close by, though he didn’t quite know the reason, he’d always be protected.

  On one of these trips, by chance, he saw the girl in red on the street, just as he was coming out of the Siete Colores bar, on the corner of Mendoza and San Martín, occupied for years by the Gran Doria. As we were saying, it was not only necessary, for the meeting to happen, that an unknown combination of pressure and temperature caused an inconceivably dense point of space and time, which are ultimately the same thing, at a given moment, to explode and scatter, violently, in a stampede; that in certain regions it curdled and stabilized—it’s impossible, we know, for Nula to calculate the velocity of the event with absolute certainty—into the thing we call our solar system, for example, and that on one of those cooling igneous orbs a set of chemical reactions made possible the appearance of something that for lack of a better word we call life, it’s not really clear why, with all the incalculable consequences that brought with it. Not only, as we’ve said, did all that have to happen, in addition to the innumerable series of interconnected events that took place thereafter, these difficult to verify as well, but also, and in addition, as he turned toward the door, when he was just reaching the exit, a student sitting at one of the tables near the windows that faced Mendoza had to shout a question about a specific edition of a Public Law textbook, whether they had it at the main bookstore because they didn’t at the law school kiosk, and by answering him Nula was delayed another thirty seconds, because otherwise, if the student hadn’t called out to him, Lucía wouldn’t have reached the sidewalk yet and he wouldn’t have run into her as he walked out, and might have turned down Mendoza to the west to catch a bus at the Plaza del Soldado, or if, instead, he’d decided to walk back to La India’s house for lunch, he might have turned up San Martín, and since he was more or less thirty seconds ahead of her, would’ve probably walked the twelve or thirteen blocks to his house without once noticing she was there.

  Thanks to all of these coincidences, he’d bumped into Lucía as he walked out. It was just after noon, when the shops close and their employees dissolve into the crowd that comes and goes along the avenue and its cross streets. The buses fill up with people going home for lunch, with high school students, with bankers, with public servants. After one o’clock there’s almost no one left on the street, but around noon, and later in the afternoon, in the city center, the crowds swarm anew, as they say. That bright September afternoon already anticipated that intimate and possibly organic, but also painful euphoria provoked in the species, most likely from its affinity with all other forms of life milling around the biosphere, and also from our consciousness of it, by the arrival of the spring. The fibers and tissues, flesh and organs, feeling the multiple effects of the weather appropriate for the needless, and, you might say, ad nauseam iterations of the same invariable, demented shapes, tense up in self-regard, in the fullness of the present, but memory, not necessarily in a conscious way, can’t ignore that the fullness is temporary. The girl in red, tall like him, and clearly a few years older, with whom he almost collided as he walked out of the bar, surfacing from some preoccupation, looked hard at him, as though she was about to say something, but without opening her mouth she stepped aside and walked past. Without even taking the time to think about it, Nula started to follow her. They walked in the shade, which, despite the hour and thanks to the two-story houses, still covered a good portion of the sidewalk, and after a few meters, as she stepped into the street—they were on the San Martín promenade—Nula did the same, immediately feeling the warmth of the air and the light on his face and head. At first, less than four or five meters separated them, but Nula could see, in her posture and in a few uncertain movements of her head, that she already sensed that she was being followed by a stranger, and so he slowed down, to increase the distance between them, but even when he’d been following her more closely, despite the fact that her red dress hugged the full, firm shapes of her arms, her back, her buttocks, and her thighs, Nula didn’t notice her body, ensnared rather by the memory of the quick, inquisitive look she gave him as she surfaced, momentarily—only to sink again immediately—from her thoughts. Later, a kind of sexual fury, more painful than pleasurable, actually, a transferred and rarely gratified salaciousness, would periodically entrap him, but in that first meeting and in others that followed it, the question of sex, though the immediate reaction of his senses indicated just the opposite, seemed secondary.