—Are you going to the cookout Sunday? Lucía asks.
—I think so. Either way, I already have the wine I’m planning on taking in the car, Nula says.
—We didn’t see each other today, of course, Lucía says.
—Of course, Nula says. But we should call each other tú; it would be strange for me to use usted with you, Nula says.
Lucía laughs again, the same quick laugh as before, when they’d just come in, but this time Nula senses a hint of resignation, almost bitterness, in it. He presses himself closer to her, wraps his arm over her shoulders, and pulls her in, possibly to compensate for his disappointment but most likely to conceal it, caressing her earnestly, but excessively, because he feels a genuine affection for her. But Lucía seems indifferent to his embrace, already thinking of something else. Nula asks her what, and she answers simply, without any apparent emotion, that she came to Bahía Blanca with her son two years ago, more or less, and she has sporadic encounters with Riera, who comes every so often to see his son, but it’s impossible to live with him all the time. There’s no denying it, Lucía says, he’s a monster. And, curiously, Nula realizes that when she says this, instead of anger, there’s a spark of malicious sympathy in her eyes, which stop for a fraction of a second as they wander over the immaculate ceiling. Nula laughs: I have no doubt about that whatsoever, he says, and Lucía laughs too, in a way that makes Nula think that she’s still in love with him and that, like the complications of their relationship, the separation must have had multiple interpretations and causes, and now Lucía is telling him that he, Riera, likes Nula so much, that he always talked about inviting him to spend a season with them in Benvenuto when they were still together, but she couldn’t take it any longer and it came down to giving in or leaving. Of course, Nula thinks, and the images that provoke this rise in his memory, painful as a burn, but I saw them outside that awful house in Rosario that morning from the taxi.
—It was the right decision, not giving in, he says.
Lucía clears her throat but doesn’t say anything. She thinks.
—I’ve never known anyone like him, Nula says.
Lucía shakes her head. I got what I deserved, she says, but with a trace of contradictory pride in her voice.
She was probably thinking about him when she decided to go to bed with me, and she thought about him the whole time we did it, and maybe—maybe—she thinks, with good cause, that I’m too simple for her, too colorless, odorless, and flavorless compared to Riera, Nula thinks, somewhat surprised, and the idea isn’t altogether displeasing, though most likely because it absolves him from not loving her like before. Apparently, what until today was mythologized has suddenly become instinctual and perverted. But he’s already moved on to a more interesting puzzle, Gutiérrez, her father, and though the question struggles to come out, his tongue and his lips can’t manage to speak it, and it’s Lucía herself who, without warning, begins the story about Doctor Calcagno (my father), about Leonor (my old lady), and about Gutiérrez (Willi), as though she too assumed that explanations were in order. When she was a girl, she loved Doctor Calcagno a lot, but as she grew up, her father’s incomprehensible subservience to Mario Brando, his partner at the law firm and the head of a literary movement that her father was also part of—precisionism, Lucía clarifies, sarcastically—distanced her from him, and by the time she was a teenager she despised him. Calcagno was a Roman Law professor and a talented litigator, much more so than Brando, who hardly did a thing for the firm, dedicating himself instead to literature, to politics, and to his social position—but still, Lucía says, her father obeyed him unconditionally. The firm made a lot of money, and they were the only two partners, but despite having a fifty percent stake, Calcagno was the one who did all the work. Brando, with his literary fame and his political campaigns and his family and social connections—his father had been a big industrialist and he’d married a daughter of General Ponce—clearly inspired confidence in the clients of the firm, which specialized in business, trusts, estates, land acquisitions, and so on. Calcagno ran the firm, and at the same time became a sort of lieutenant to Brando, sometimes even typing up his poems, despite being older and having an international reputation as an expert in Roman Law. (Nula knows that Calcagno wrote a textbook that he often sold when he worked at the kiosk.) But at any hour, day or night, if Brando called, Calcagno dropped what he was doing and immediately did what he was told. Once, Lucía says, just after she’d turned fifteen, Calcagno planned a trip to Europe, but at the last minute Brando demanded that he stay to prepare a book that was supposed to come out in a few weeks. She and her mother were forced to travel alone. It seemed to suit Leonor fine, but she, Lucía, had begun, at that moment, to detest her father. Lucía tells Nula that she cried the entire flight and that her mother, to console her, had said: You shouldn’t hate him, Lucy, he’s a good man. But remember this: A man who’s good all the time is never enough for a real woman.
It wasn’t until four or five years later that Lucía started to suspect that Leonor cheated on her husband, and moreover that Calcagno couldn’t not realize it, meaning, if it was true, that he tolerated it. I really love her, but my old lady is the stupidest person I know. She has the maturity of a fourteen-year-old, more or less. All she seems to think about is clothes, jewelry, travel, and men. Old age has made her crazy: she spends a fortune trying to stay young, on creams, tanners, treatments, and surgeries. Since her family was already rich and my father left her a fortune, she never worked or had any responsibilities. When I left Benvenuto, I wanted to support myself, but she set up the shop so I wouldn’t have to go out looking for work. They didn’t teach me a thing. No one even made me study something useful. It was taken for granted that I’d marry a rich man and spend the rest of my life like she had. And I ended up selling clothes.
Because she’d heard that the air in Paraná, on the hillside, was less polluted than in the city, a flat expanse twenty nine meters below sea level, and that pollution damaged the dermis, Leonor sold the house she had in Guadalupe, which Calcagno had built half a block from Brando—on the recommendation of the man himself, who according to Lucía always wanted his slave close by—and moved in to the cottage in Urquiza that she’d inherited from her family. And Lucía came to live with her. At any rate, if you subtracted from the weeks that she wasn’t traveling the time she spent at rejuvenation clinics; her amorous liaisons supposedly always with men her age or slightly older (up till now in any case, Lucía adds), from good families like hers, though she may have more than one going at a time; her seasons at the pied-à-terre she had in Buzios, she barely spends more than two or three weeks at the house in Paraná. Her brother managed her finances from his office in Buenos Aires. If not for the married men who at the last second refused to get a divorce in order to marry her, the airports closed due to bad weather, the decline of Punta del Este, the wrinkles, the aging, the illnesses, and death, and if her daughter, whom she clearly loved, had married someone slightly less repulsive than Oscar Riera, Leonor, in an astonishing correspondence with Leibniz—whom neither she, nor Lucía for that matter, had ever heard of—would have believed that the human species had been given without a doubt the best possible world to live in.
One day, just back from a trip to Europe, she called Lucía in Benvenuto and told her that she had some good news but that she wanted to tell her in person. At that point, Lucía had almost decided to separate from Riera (that’s the word she used) and figured that spending a few days with her mother would help her make the decision, and by the next day she was in Paraná. And, after lunch, while the baby napped—they’d left early that morning from Benvenuto, changed planes in Aeroparque, and by noon they were already in Sauce Viejo, where Leonor had sent a car to bring them to Paraná—Leonor told her that her real father wasn’t Calcagno but another man, the only one she’d ever really loved, and whom she’d found again in Europe, where he’d been living for more than thirty years. He’d left the city seven months before Luc
ía was born and never returned. She’d asked him to leave without telling him that she was pregnant, and he’d made the sacrifice of leaving the city without telling anyone. She’d found him by accident, and they’d started to talk again: they spoke on the phone every week. He lived between Geneva and Rome and he was a screenwriter. Leonor had told him the truth and the man wanted to meet his daughter. His name was Guillermo Gutiérrez, but back then everyone called him Willi.
—She, who never sacrificed a thing, asked him for the sacrifice, Lucía practically screams, sarcastically. And Nula, to give some visible register of his agreement, and to be polite, shakes his head and offers her a scandalized grin. Lucía’s directness surprises him; but because Calcagno, whom she didn’t respect anymore, had been dead for years, and Lucía was aware of her mother’s diverse and complex love life, it wasn’t altogether difficult to hear the news with a sense of detached surprise and even of curiosity. The revelation, which she was nevertheless skeptical of, and which came at the same moment as she was deciding whether to leave her own husband, promised her a new perspective on her life. Lucía had met Gutiérrez because he was a law student that Calcagno had hired at the firm, most likely so he could pass off the jobs from his partner Mario Brando, whom he didn’t dare confront directly. Gutiérrez was more or less the same age as Leonor, which meant that Calcagno was more than twenty years older than his wife. Putting two and two together, Lucía realized that they were about to run off but at the last minute she, Leonor, had changed her mind, and so at first she didn’t really want to meet him because it occurred to her that he’d accepted leaving, making the sacrifice she’d asked for, possibly letting her mother convince him just as subserviently as Calcagno accepted everything that she and Brando forced on him. But her curiosity was stronger than her suspicion and skepticism, and she agreed to meet him. I’m lucky I did. He’s a wonderful man. I’m not sure he’s my real father, but it’s like he’s the father I never had.
Nula sits up suddenly and emphatically on the pillow, and seeing that Lucía, stretched out naked next to him, doesn’t move, letting her eyes drift calmly, thoughtful more than anything, over the immaculate ceiling, his face takes on an inquisitive and peremptory expression, comical in its exaggerated severity.
—So is Gutiérrez your father or isn’t he? he asks.
With the same calm detachment, slightly unsettling to Nula, Lucía, after reflecting a moment, lists the possibilities: First of all—it may sound cruel, so please don’t repeat this—it would be difficult to prove (and to confirm at present) that Willi was her mother’s only lover, and even if you accepted that Willi was in fact her first lover, it seems absurd to Lucía that Calcagno, if they didn’t have sex, would have accepted Leonor’s pregnancy. So even assuming that at the time she’d only had sex with Willi and Calcagno, there still remained the problem of knowing which of the two was her father. According to Lucía, Leonor herself couldn’t be sure—as with most other things, she had the habit of confusing her desires with reality—though she says that after Calcagno’s death she’d started thinking about Gutiérrez again, and Lucía believes that her mother was actually in love with him, but she didn’t dare run off because she wasn’t prepared to accept the risks it implied. Nula knows that Lucía, for her part, against Leonor’s wishes, didn’t hesitate to marry Riera, who’d just gotten his medical license and didn’t have a penny, so in a way it’s like she’s her own mother’s mother, which is why she describes her as a girl from a rich family married to a rich man, who hadn’t been brought up to run off with a poor law student, a clerk in her husband’s law firm no less. She’d only developed the romantic mythology in retrospect, despite having already admitted to Lucía that she’d had many lovers over the years—Nula remembers Riera one day telling him: Sometimes my mother-in-law goes swimming in the Salado, in Santo Tomé, and even though it’s crowded and isn’t even sandy, people go there because they say the mud rejuvenates the skin and is good for the joints. Anyway, when the water reaches her waist, the temperature in all the surrounding rivers (remember that the Salado empties into the Paraná) goes up by several degrees—and she idealized Willi Gutiérrez, declared him the love of her life, and started to imagine, though it may in fact have been true, that he was the father of her child. It was impossible to know the truth because even Leonor herself didn’t know what it was, and even if she’d been lying she didn’t realize it, so when she said that Willi was her father, she was convinced that it was the truth.
—The truth, Nula says, is incredibly easy to come by.
—No, Lucía says forcefully. No one’s interested in the truth. Mother, though she doesn’t realize it, is terrified of it not being true. And Willi and I have an understanding. He came into my life just when I needed him. And besides, as absurd as it may seem, he really does love my mother, and doesn’t ask anything in return.
Slowly, pensively, Nula slides back down until his body is once again stretched out next to Lucía. The two naked bodes, with their pale regions at similar heights, from their waistline to the tops of their thighs—although when Nula saw her for the first time, coming out of the swimming pool, she had on a fluorescent green one-piece, her large, soft breasts, which are tanned, indicate that the rest of the summer she must have taken the sun topless—are motionless, and their anatomical differences, rather than becoming more apparent through their nakedness, seem to have been blurred by their stillness and moreover the thoughtful expression on their faces, or rather in their eyes, which, like a luminous spring, flows from the two pairs of dark eyes that are more open than usual, and is propelled onto the white ceiling. Suddenly, Nula’s hand, stretched out alongside his body, gropes along Lucía’s forearm until it finds her hand and grasps it. Lucía lets him take her hand to his lips and kiss it softly, but her eyes stay fixed upward. Without letting go of her hand, Nula leans over Lucía’s breast and starts sucking on her nipple. Lucía rubs his head, but then pushes him softly away.
—No, she says. That’s enough for today.
Nula keeps sucking, as if he hadn’t heard her, but he’s relieved and glad that she’s rejected him, although he insists a bit longer before sitting up. The suction sounds strange in the room, reminiscent of an animal, and Nula’s actions, along with the position of their bodies, which have shifted, reestablishes the differences that, a few seconds before, the stillness seemed to erase despite their anatomical differences.
—Are you hungry? Lucía laughs, and Nula exaggerates the suction sound and intensifies his movements, but abruptly he sits up and grabs his watch from the nightstand. And, looking at the time, he lies:
—No. I’m late, he says, and sits up on the edge of the bed. Can I take a shower?
—Does your wife smell you when you come home? Lucía asks, standing up on the other side of the bed.
—Let’s shower together, Nula says.
—If it’s just a shower, Lucía says.
Lucía takes him in the black car to the dark green station wagon, parked a few blocks from the boutique, and stops a few meters away with the engine running.
—You’re my only friend, she says when Nula is about to open the door.
—I hope so, Nula says, pretending not to understand what she means with the word, which has just put up a barrier between them, removing from their relationship, despite the intensity of the statement, any kind of exclusivity. Only when he’s outside the car, watching it drive away, while he looks for his keys in his coat pocket, does he realize that his simulated love, his too sudden relief, his insistence on making her feel more loved than his true feelings would cause him to, are meant for himself, who feeds and expresses them. The months when he suffered most were also the most intense of his life, starting from that September afternoon when, coming out of the Siete Colores, after a student had called out to him, asking about a Public Law textbook, besides many other coincidences that would be tiresome to enumerate, he’d bumped into the girl in red as he stepped out onto the bright sidewalk, and, without know
ing why, drawn by the magnet of fleeting shapes that undulate radiantly in the morning sun, before finally disappearing, he’d started following her, caught in her aura for years without ever managing to have her, until an hour ago more or less, when, at the very moment of possession, the aura, suddenly, disappeared.
The temperature has gone up a lot since noon, though the sky is still gray, a high and even, almost white gray, and it’s stopped raining; what’s more, the hot air has dried the last traces of damp left by the rain the night before, and which, before midday, were still visible on the streets and on the facades of several buildings. He doesn’t yet feel very hot, possibly because of the recent shower—in the end, they showered separately—but the blue jacket, despite being lightweight, begins to weigh on him. Inside the car it’s hot: the body of the car has been heated despite the fact that the rays of the sun have been sifted through a bank of motionless clouds that intercepts them in the atmosphere. Nula hesitates between taking off his coat and turning on the air conditioning, and opts for the latter for two different reasons: first, because when he gets to the hypermarket, where he’ll have to speak to one of the managers after getting something to eat at the cafeteria, he’ll need to put the coat back on; and second, which is naturally the most important, because the air conditioning will protect the cases of wine and the local chorizos that he picked up at the warehouse. But as he leans over to put the key in and turn on the engine, without knowing why, a memory overwhelms him, and he ends up sliding the key into the ignition without turning it over, leans back in the seat, his eyes in empty space, and for several seconds abandons himself to a sudden insight, a new way of remembering a childhood memory, one among many others of the vacations he spent with is grandfather, in the town.
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