La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  On summer afternoons, after the sprinkler truck had passed, or when the sun reappeared the day after it had rained, swarms of yellow butterflies would appear, flying in groups of twenty or thirty, landing briefly in the puddles or the damp zones left over on the dirt roads, and then, all together, lifting off and landing a little farther away. He’d also seen flocks of birds that flew together and changed direction all at once; and, when he was older, watching some television show, he’d be astonished by the schools of colored fish, all identical, that slid through the water with the same movements, so synchronized and exact that they gave the impression of being a single body multiplied many times but controlled by a single mind, or whatever you’d call it, difficult to place either in the individual—fish, bird, or butterfly—or dispersed across the group, unifying it through an invisible current of shared energy. He’d been able to observe the butterflies himself many times, and if as a child the group’s precision didn’t catch his eye—what interested him then was hunting them, not with a net or anything like that, but rather with a branch from a bitterwood that he’d use to leave them battered, their wings broken, torn to pieces and dying in the dirt road—as an adolescent it began to intrigue him and after he stopped visiting the town the memory of those groups of butterflies with their uncanny synchronicity, without his knowing neither how nor why, began to represent the image, and the proof even, of a harmonious, rational universe, and which contradicted his conception of a constant and accidental becoming in which, owing to the perpetual collision of things, in the space-time cocktail, shaken alone and ceaselessly, without the help of any barman, as he often said, every event, in spectacular colors no less fleeting or provisional than the afternoon clouds, happens. To the question, sounding very much like a provocation, that Soldi asked him one morning a few months before, when they were drinking a cortado at the Siete Colores, phrased more or less as follows: What if every event, like this one for example, stirring a cortado with a teaspoon, whether contingent or not, since it’s impossible to know the difference in any case, hasn’t been developing since the beginning of the world? Nula responded that there wasn’t a beginning to the world and that strictly speaking there wasn’t a world, since it hadn’t been created and was always in the making and wasn’t any closer or farther from a beginning or an end and would continue to change shape forever, that’s all there was to it, and the integrity of things was just a question of scale; the cortado that Soldi was stirring, for example, was no longer the same one they’d brought him a few seconds before, nor were the two of them, nor anything else that comprised the infinite present.

  In truth, the collective precision of the flight of butterflies, the way he remembered it from childhood, which some attributed to a supra-individual instinct, didn’t match up very well with his theories. And now, just as he leans forward to put the key in the ignition, it’s unclear from where, and with such intensity that he’s not turned the car on instead leaning back motionless against the seat, he’s had a realization that he’s now trying to form into words, and as which would be more or less the following: It’s the observer, from a deficiency of perspective, who creates the superstition of a total identity in the butterflies’ behavior. In reality, every swarm struggles to move, and the movements only appear harmonious because we’re incapable of seeing in detail each of the individuals that comprise the group. It’s as absurd to believe that all their movements are synchronized as it is to say that all Asians are the same. Our bodies simply aren’t sensitive enough to make out the differences. A flight of butterflies, if we observed it at the appropriate scale, would look like a clumsy, disorganized and frantic attempt at harmony. We’d see that what from a distance appears synchronized is only a set of individual movements, more or less fast or slow, more or less agile or clumsy, more or less exact or flawed relative to their objectives, we’d see that, for example, their position in the air or on the damp earth relative to the edge of the puddle or the direction of their flight when they take off again are not the same, not to mention the variable efforts of each butterfly, the accidents in flight or on the ground—a collision with some insect or a bird, or even with a car that scatters them or crushes them all, or a miscalculated landing in the water or in a patch of mud from which they can’t manage to take off again, ending up there, in agony, their legs or their wings muddy or broken. If we followed the flight of a swarm along the four main blocks of the town, along the railway, it would be interesting to calculate how many escaped and how many reached the end of the street, no doubt what we call a harmonious dance, universally visible evidence of what certain imbeciles call the wonders of nature, is nothing but a sequence of cataclysms and catastrophes in miniature. Nula shakes his head, as though he’s coming out of a dream, and pulls a slim, black oilcloth notebook from his inside jacket pocket, in which every so often he takes notes, but which serves primarily as a place to jot down details on wine, stocks, brands, quantity, and their primary characteristics. After thinking a moment, he writes, Sensory deficiency makes chaos seem like harmony. Flight of butterflies. He puts the notebook and the pen away, and, after turning the engine over, while he steers the car out from between two others that leave him little room to maneuver, he thinks, satisfied: An orgasm—thank you, Lucía darling—though the act may be disappointing—sorry, Lucía darling—always refreshes the mind, forgetting that last night, after having made love in a satisfying way with his wife, he dropped off immediately, without thinking about anything, and slept the rest of the night.

  At an open bend in the park, on the hillside, he parks the car a few minutes with the engine running and looks at the river. A long island, stretched along the same direction of the current that formed it, divides the broad channel, several kilometers wide, into two nearly identical branches. The water is a milky gray, a reflection of the sky, and owing to the invisible sun whose rays nonetheless pierce the motionless clouds, appears to be coated in a brilliant varnish. For anyone who knows its violent rhythms, its treacherous pools, its tides, the brutal countercurrents at its mouth, its unpredictable depths, its droughts, its aggressive fauna, in spite of its deceitful smoothness, as it flows to the south, is more indifferent than calm. Born of ancient, prehuman convulsions, it nevertheless has much in common with humanity, who think they’ve domesticated it, and like a sleeping beast it tolerates them on its back until one fine day, rearing up unexpectedly, swallows them up, and then, a week later, or often never, vomits up the unrecognizable rags that are left behind. The year before, Nula had the opportunity to see it from Diamante, some fifty kilometers to the south of Paraná. It was a bright October morning, around eleven—that hour on sunny mornings when, as he realized when a cold forced him to stay home from school, the silence of empty places increases to an uncanny level. Although Diamante wasn’t in his sales region, Américo had asked him to go see a client who wanted to put in a big order, which had to be taken care of immediately, because the salesman who was in charge of it was in Corrientes. He’d left the city around eight, and by crossing to Entre Ríos on the bridge over the Colastiné and then through the underwater tunnel, not driving into Paraná but instead turning directly onto the highway by the outer streets, he’d arrived in Diamante before ten and by quarter of eleven the sale had been finalized. The day seemed so beautiful as he left the client that morning that he’d been overcome with the desire, without apparent cause in the species, to check out the river before returning to the city. And following the crude signs that pointed the way to the coast, he left the city center and turned onto a dirt road that, after passing a few scattered ranches, ended at a kind of peninsula, at the top of the slope. He got out of the car and walked to the edge; he was surrounded by some sparse grass, and though the slope wasn’t very high, the peninsula projected outward, and the shrubs and short trees that grew along the coast, some almost horizontally because their roots dipped into the vertical riverbank or the steep slope above, not quite reaching the end of the peninsula, allowed an unobstructed view
to the north, upriver, where great quantities of water seemed to flow out of the horizon. The opposite shore, somewhere near Coronda, was not visible, of course, though in the flatlands that end suddenly at the river it would have been visible from that relative height if it had been any closer. Nula knew that the shore was several kilometers in that direction, to the west, but from where he was standing its presence was purely imaginary. The river dropped from the north, its vast breadth fractured here and there by green alluvial islands, by banks of sand, by floats of water hyacinths that came from the tropics, or possibly from Paraguay or from Brazil, and ran aground among the islands in the delta. Having carved through colored earth, the water was red, though in some patches the surface, mixing with the clear blue of the sky, it turned a bluish rose. The reddish opacity of the surface was rough in the distance, most likely owing to the current that turned the water and made waves across the heavy masses on the surface, on which, here and there, foamy edges formed. But what struck him were the contradictory impressions it provoked: it obviously advanced, but it appeared static, and though the morning was bright, the surface was not reflective, and though it flowed to the south in silence, the ear, possibly due to the heavy rocking of the surface, seemed to hear a distant roar.

  Nula looks for his cell phone in the side pocket of his jacket as he steers the car through the park, toward the tunnel, but when he accelerates downhill, he decides to call Diana after he gets out of the tunnel, so he leaves the phone on the seat. He feels like a cigarette, though since he started selling wine he’s been smoking somewhat less so as not to distort its taste and smell, as they recommended during the mandatory wine-tasting courses, but, because of the air conditioning, he doesn’t light one. Ten minutes later he’s crossing the tunnel behind an interurban bus, and after the toll on the opposite side he passes it. On the island highway he doesn’t see a single other car, but on the bridge over the Colastiné he passes a truck and two cars that follow it toward the tunnel. While he’s crossing the bridge—the river is smooth, the same pale gray as the Paraná, in fact the source of its waters—he calls home, but Diana’s voice picks up on the answering machine. It’s me. How are you? I’m just about at the hypermarket. Kisses. Talk to you soon, Nula says and hangs up, relieved not to have to speak to Diana, since it makes him uncomfortable to lie when the adventure is still recent, which some nights forces him to wander around in the car or sit in a bar for a while before going home, to make sure that Diana will already be asleep when he gets there. At the exit for La Guardia he turns toward the city, and as he reaches the hypermarket, before pulling in to the parking lot, where there are a few more cars than in the morning, he can just make out the old waterfront clustered across the opposite shore of the lagoon, with its chic cottages whose tile roofs emerge sporadically from between the foliage. He gets out of the car, noting that the afternoon is hotter but unsure whether to attribute it to the climactic differences between the cities, one at altitude, the other on the plain, or to the contrast with the air conditioning, but as he enters the hypermarket its own air conditioning returns the sense of coolness to him.

  Although he almost never buys anything, except on the days when he and Diana are stocking up (but even then she’s the one who actually does the shopping), he likes to wander through supermarkets, possibly because it once occurred to him that they represent a grotesque version of his grandfather’s general store. The principles are the same, like the water vapor that on a small scale agitates the lid of a kettle when the water boils, and on a large scale moves a locomotive. As a child he believed that it was the abundance and variety that attracted him to his grandfather’s store, but as an adult, wandering through supermarkets, he realized that what affected him was actually the repetition. The stacks of cigarette packs, all the same brand, the rows of vermouth or gin bottles, all the same shape, their contents the same color as the glass, with the same black label, filling an entire shelf, or the pyramids of cans in the center of the store, which his aunt or his grandfather had built, patiently and meticulously, the night before, after dinner, produced a visual effect that he confused with abundance, not realizing that what attracted him to the jars filled with orange jellies wrapped in transparent cellophane, all the approximate shape and color of an orange slice, was the cumulative effect, further enhanced by their loose disorder inside the glass jar, which in itself had both a decorative and philosophical aspect, though as a child he was still too young to realize this, because the repetition, even of manufactured objects, is the thing that’s most familiar and at the same time the most enigmatic: Abundance can be oppressive or sublime, but repetition is always aesthetic, and its effect always mysterious, he sometimes thinks. In the hypermarket, even the background music that most reasonable people are sensible enough to loathe seems necessary to him because it underscores the environmental shift that’s produced when one passes from the disarticulated and contingent external world to the internal one, a change as stark as the one we feel when, as we dive in the river, we cease to hear the sounds of the surface world and move, half-blind, through the underwater silence. Nula thinks of the excessive lighting inside the hypermarket—and all artificial light, for that matter—as a prosthesis of our visual organs, and that even the building’s construction obeys the same principles that combine abundance, variety, and repetition, because the complex, manifested spontaneously from the primordial swamp, contains not one but eight movie theaters. At the self-serve cafeteria, meanwhile, the repetition is sustained: the carefully-arranged, small round plates filled with mixed salad, tongue in vinaigrette, hearts of palm with ham, chicken salad, are displayed in sets of three, and the white rim of the plate frames in each instance an approximate design whose individual elements are arranged more or less in the same way. Nula picks out a chicken salad, a mixed salad, and at the hot section asks for a milanesa with egg and fries, and after serving himself a piece of bread, a carbonated mineral water, and some packets of mustard, salt, and pepper from alongside the register, he pays and sits down at a table near the window that faces the stream, beside which the Warden hypermarket, which everyone calls the supercenter, in such contrast to the swampy, impoverished landscape that surrounds it, seems like a magical illusion, a colorful mirage in a desolate, gray desert.

  The thing that hadn’t happened five years before, now, only recently, because she thought it would repay a debt to him, suddenly, still perplexingly, and so different from what he’d always imagined, and so unexpected, had happened. If he’d pushed up his trip to Paraná in order to see her sooner it was merely out of curiosity, rooted in what had happened the night before at Gutiérrez’s, and he hadn’t even been sure, if he found her, that Lucía would speak to him. The coincidence of seeing her there had unexpected consequences, as it did five years before, when despite his best efforts, after the first time he met her, to see her again, he only saw her by accident one afternoon, at the corner of his block, not the one with the ice cream shop but the next one, where his street met the street with the house she’d gone into (her own house, in fact), locking the door from the inside while Nula, from the sidewalk, listened to the metallic sound of the key turning. Because he was still dazzled by the red dress vibrating intensely in the midday sun, he couldn’t imagine her dressed any other way, and so he always searched the neighborhood, or in the crowd downtown, for the bright red blur, the vigorous cluster of organs, skin, and muscles, enclosed like an organic capsule by its meaty and velvety skin, splitting the balmy September air. Since they first met, he’d passed her house more than twenty times and had taken an unreasonable number of walks around the block, posting himself for hours on the four corners in order to see if the girl dressed in red who he still didn’t know was named Lucía would reappear, not only at the one that he rightly assumed must’ve been her house, but also at the three other symmetrical points that he’d seen her examine, including La India’s apartment, along the four streets that formed the block. Any red dress, seen from a distance, startled him and t
riggered his approach with the hope of seeing her again, but it was never her. And so when one afternoon, on his way back to his house after having watched the kiosk at the law school all day, he bumped into her again, he was so absorbed in thinking about her that at first he didn’t recognize her because she was dressed in white. She had on an immaculate linen suit, stiff and recently pressed, and her hair was pulled up, stretched tight at her temples and the base of her neck and spilling out at the crown of her head above the dark ribbon that held it together. She looked calm, freshly bathed. From the opposite sidewalk, he watched her cross the street at a diagonal, enter the pastry shop, and sit down at one of the tables facing the window, at the corner farthest from the door. Just like the first time when he started following her without knowing why, not thinking about it even for a fraction of a second he crossed the street at a diagonal, veering off from the straight line that was taking him to his house, and went into the shop. There were several empty tables, but without hesitating even to discuss it with himself he took the few steps that brought him to a stop in front of her. She looked at him a moment, without surprise or curiosity, like an actress during the first reading of a play, waiting for the actor next to her to finish reading his lines before giving hers.