La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  She hesitates a second.

  —Nula, Nula says, fascinated by Virginia’s promise and her enigmatic smile.

  —Nula, of course, Virginia says. She turns around and walks down another aisle loaded with bottles, and when she reaches the next intersection she turns right and disappears. Nula stands motionless for several seconds, thinking about the promise that has suddenly rubbed Friday night tantalizingly against his imagination, and skipping over the nominal hours that in reality happen in a single block of time, and have done so since the beginning of the world and will continue to do so indefinitely, he leaps over the monotonous sequence of events, arriving at the possibilities invented by his desire, which, though still incorporeal and fantastical, are more intense and gratifying than the uneven and fragmentary pieces of existence. Suddenly, the vivid anticipation that, however immaterial, is capable of triggering more than a few organic regions of his body, is completely erased, and the present moment, the brutal actuality of everything, at once transparent and impenetrable, engulfs him like a thick and hardening liquid into which things around him sediment, and where the things that move, like the hand that Nula lifts without knowing why, seem to decompose into infinite layers that only through an immense effort overcome their medium, a kind of soft glass, for a millionth of a second, before they disappear. Nula’s utterly estranged gaze passes over the illuminated space, and he tells himself, It’s like the bright space in the mind into which our thoughts flow. Even the background music seems to have stopped: its pervasiveness melts into the assemblage, and though it needs movement, change, tempo, its formulaic shape built of predictable developments and melodies, so similar to so many others, seems to pause it, a sonorous binding that halts its advance. It’s like the static nucleus of an atom of the becoming. And then, in accelerating and colliding images, which translated into words would be more or less the following: Otherwise, the clear part of the mind resembles that fragment of the exterior. It’s like a fish tank. At the top, the brightly colored fish move silently through the light, quickly, then disappear, and some, brilliant and insistent, return again and again. But farther down, among the plants and the moss-covered rocks, the water is less transparent, clouded by old sediment, crisscrossed by vague, unrecognizable shadows, sometimes thrashing so violently that the water loses clarity all the way up, muddled by suspended silts that have been furiously agitated. Between the clear zone and the dark zone, between the bright, familiar layer and the unstable, murky depths, there’s no line of demarcation but rather an uncertain, mutable border where both layers blend together and overlap, transforming each other. The lower one forks out and is lost in the depths of the body, seeking in the remote corners of the tissues and the organs the liquid that, decanted, clarifies at the bright surface, populated by the colorful, silent fauna of our waking thoughts.

  Hearing steps approaching, though unsure from where, Nula’s left hand, which had been hanging in the air, drops, and he starts walking slowly back to the front of the hypermarket, without seeing anyone till he’s far from the beverage section. Since he left the warehouse at noon, he’s been planning to buy two cheap salamis, and he knows that near the cheese and cold cut cases there’s a basket full of old, dry sausages in which he’ll find what he’s looking for. Digging through the pile, he picks the driest and, more importantly, the cheapest ones, and after paying for them at one of the registers walks out into the parking lot, having ended up with a plastic bag with an orange W. He senses, most likely in contrast to the air conditioned supercenter, that outside the temperature has gone up considerably, and when he looks up at the sky, he sees that the uniform cloud cover, a bright whitish gray, has begun to dissolve at the highest altitudes, leaving sections of a pale blue sky visible. But the sun, on this indecisive and melancholy afternoon, is nowhere to be seen.

  In the car, before pulling out, he changes the label on the salamis, or actually, he tears the labels off the salamis that he’s just bought, and then, carefully removing the ones from the two local chorizos, originally intended for the political advisor, attaches them to the salamis from the hypermarket, happily noting that they work exceptionally well. He knows that what he’s doing is infantile, possibly unjustified and even unfair, but he refuses to give anything to the governor’s political advisor, who years before was active in the same clandestine group as his father, surviving him by more than fifteen years, and who now, rather than trying to change the world like before, writes policy and edits speeches for a governor whose only merit, according to most people, is that he doesn’t steal, who played in major tennis tournaments, reaching Wimbledon and the Roland Garros once or twice, and who’s friends with a Hollywood actor who shows up in the city every so often to take him fishing upriver, at the north end of the province, for golden dorado and tiger catfish. As long as he’s unsure about how the political advisor is still alive while his father is dead, Nula doesn’t want to give him anything, but less from a mean prejudice than a superstition: while there’s no evidence that the advisor is in any way to blame (he did live for a while abroad), it would feel like an insult to his father, a kind of treason, until he had undeniable proof of his innocence, even if the gift is from the company. The advisor himself had stopped him one day on the street, two or three months before, and when he learned that he sold wine he gave him his card and told him to come by the public offices. He sent his regards, more than once, to his mother, but when Nula relayed them, La India’s sarcasm sparked his mistrust. That guy once wanted to make the revolution with your father, and now he writes limericks for the governor to wrap his caramels in. Nula is aware that sometimes, unfairly, the ones who mourn the dead bear a venomous grudge against everyone with the miserable audacity to go on living when they might have died in their place, but nevertheless he would’ve preferred that the advisor not have taken the political turn he eventually took, in solidarity with the dead, who were also his own. La India didn’t accuse him of anything, apart from being alive maybe, not thinking that her husband, if he’d come out of that nightmarish time unharmed, might have followed the same course. And Nula took his mother’s side, but one day La India herself called him, saying that the political advisor had come to see her and had given her some letters that Nula’s father had written a long time ago, while he was an economics reporter in Rosario, in which he spoke about her, and insisting that she convince Nula to visit him at the public offices. La India had been moved by the advisor’s gesture, which for Nula had come too late. His mother, most likely without hoping to, had passed her suspicion on to him. A few days later, though, he called him and they arranged the meeting that he’d had to postpone yesterday, and which Américo had managed to reschedule for this afternoon, because he’d suddenly ended up in the middle of the countryside, somewhere near Rincón, half-sheltered by Gutiérrez’s multicolored umbrella. Though he didn’t think the words, Nula had the vague sensation that what La India considered a touching gesture was in fact a confession of guilt. In any case, the suspicion belongs to him now, and he’s decided not to give him the two local chorizos. Of course, he could just not bring anything, but he feels a juvenile need to deceive him, from the suspicion that, if the other is trying to do the same to him, his attempt, through his symmetrical deceit, will be momentarily canceled out.

  But first he has to go see his brother’s dentist friend. As the car leaves the bridge and enters the city, a ripple of despair passes over him and immediately vanishes, not giving him time to think about it or even to realize that it’s happened. But in any case his mood changes, and the euphoria provoked by his imagined Friday night dwindles and leaves him feeling neutral, subdued, governed by financial matters, a thin varnish that covers, provisionally and laughably, the thing itself. The city is withered, in ruins. Nula sees its defects before anything else, but what he thinks he sees in the city, though he doesn’t realize it, is actually a projection from inside himself. He arrives at the dentist’s exactly on time. A nurse opens when he rings the bell and takes him to t
he waiting room, where two women and a man are reading old magazines. Five or ten minutes later, the dentist says goodbye to a patient who was in the examining room and gives Nula a friendly gesture to come in. He’s a little older than Chade, but more candid and friendly; he seems more at home in the world than his brother. Maybe his father was also a dentist and died in bed of natural causes, not riddled with bullets in a pizzeria, he thinks, but no matter how much he tries he can’t dislike him. Just the opposite: at some point during the meeting, which doesn’t last more than fifteen minutes, Nula starts to think that the man could have a positive influence on his brother, drawing him from his constant, intense standoff. He, Nula, couldn’t be friends with him: he’s too transparent; he’d be the ideal company for a casual chat in a bar or on the bus to Rosario—Buenos Aires or Córdoba would be too much—for a wine tasting at the Iguazú hotel, or something like that, but not much more. He’s apparently a pre-metaphysical being, without fears or regrets, the lack of the first sheltering him from the second, or, ultimately, Nula thinks, it might be the opposite. That more or less unconsciously open disposition is what’s lacking in his brother. The dentist tells him that he’s bought a wine cellar for his apartment with capacity for a hundred and fifty bottles and that’s he’s giving Nula free rein to stock it, thirty percent with white and seventy percent with red. He tells him the amount he’s willing to invest, a considerable sum, and gives him a ten percent deposit. And as he follows him to the door he tells him that his brother is an excellent dentist, that he’s well-respected by his colleagues and that he’ll go far in the field. He’s a scrupulous professional, and liked by everyone, despite his reserved nature, are his exact words. It’s clear he doesn’t have much time to waste because, Nula realizes, there are now five patients flipping through old magazines in the waiting room.

  The meeting with the advisor lasts much longer. The governor’s aide doesn’t seem in a hurry to buy wine, as though all he really wanted to do was talk about vague, fragmentary, disconnected things with him. Every so often he mentions Beto—that’s the governor’s nickname, which everyone uses—gesturing with a slight nod toward somewhere on the first floor where his office must be, and once in a while smiles ironically when he refers to him, possibly to demonstrate his familiarity with the supreme leader, as they call him in La Región, or possibly for the opposite reason, to suggest to Nula that even though he holds an eminent post as political advisor to the government, he hasn’t sacrificed his right to critique it. He’s dressed with the conventional elegance of a politician, suit, striped shirt, tie, and has on his desk a stack of printed pages which he was in the middle of correcting, with an expensive pen, when Nula interrupted him. He’s affectionate, candid, and doesn’t appear to give much weight to his current position; he apparently doesn’t even seem to realize the contradiction with his past, much less to be embarrassed by it, and though all his gestures, his words, his actions, and his allusions seem to indicate that his situation is the most natural thing in the world, a damp glow in his eyes, which alternate, in conflict, between steady and evasive, betrays a disharmony, a lack of resolution, a wound that refuses to heal. Wrapped up as he is—and as he always will be—in his family history, Nula is unable to translate everything written in his look. All he sees is an effort to conceal, and implied by this same effort, the shame of still being alive, from the son of his murdered friend. But his father’s execution is only a detail in a larger picture: with neither cynicism nor indifference, he thinks that he’d be able to tolerate the advisor if some ulterior interest had justified it. His look says more than one, two, or a thousand murders could. It says, We thought we were out there to change our lives but it turned out we were seeking death. And the victims forget the taste of oppression when, little by little, and almost without realizing it, they become the executioners. It’s possible that even he himself doesn’t know what he’s thinking. The province of happy mediums in which he now survives, languishes, and drifts aimlessly, is comfortable enough and doesn’t demand the kind of moral bargain that he’s convinced he’d never accept anyway, though he doesn’t deny that his political reversals obey philosophical positions that could be considered relativist, eclectic, and above all realist. But if his interior life were compared to an electrical system, one might say that, although on the surface everything seems to be working fine, in the damp, weak spark in his eyes, the glow too steady or too unstable, to an attentive observer, the constant threat of a short circuit is obvious. But Nula’s suspicions aren’t political, they’re personal, because if the opposite were the case (and Nula is unaware of this), they’d apply to his father too. What’s clear is that, while the advisor continues to feel suspicious, and though he still doesn’t want to give him anything, he no longer wants to deceive him, and probably didn’t even want to before going up to see him, because he’d forgotten the false chorizos that he was planning to give him. At the end of the visit he sells him a small quantity of wine that he’ll deliver to his house next week. Nula packs up his brochures and the deposit check and walks out into the street.

  Before getting in the car, he takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and lays it on the back seat. The parking lot of the government offices is hotter than he’d expected. The afternoon has grown spongy and humid, colorless, vague. Despite his two showers, the first in the morning and the second at Lucía’s house in Paraná, he feels greasy and exhausted; something, he’s not sure what, wraps him up with a sense of indecision, of sadness possibly, of oppression. He’d like to go straight home and not come back till tomorrow. He shakes his head slowly, with a long exhale, and gets in the car and turns the key, but for half a minute, give or take, he doesn’t make the decision to move. As the day has progressed, certain regions inside him have grown opaque and confused, spongy like the afternoon light, ambiguous like the day itself, neither overcast nor clear, fall or winter, and finally coming to an end. When night falls, erasing not only the light but also the ambiguity, when he sits within the bright circle under the lamp, after dinner, reading or drafting a clean copy of the hours that have passed since he last woke, he might feel somewhat better, and the agitated sediment that clouds the fish tank will settle, sinking back to the bottom, and above, in the bright layer, the sharply colored, agile, silent fish will flash again. He pulls out slowly from the parking lot and drives around the Parque Sur, moving down a wide, tree-lined street that curves southwest, but two blocks later he turns again, to the north, once again on a straight, broad avenue that leads to the city center. The sidewalks lined with one- and two-story houses are nearly empty, the houses seeming deserted at that hour—the doors and windows are shut and no one is looking out to the sidewalk, maybe because of the indecisive weather, or the hour, or the fact that there’s really nothing interesting to see. Every so often, the first bags of trash appear on the curb. Halfway down the block, three boys, one no more than two or three years old, scruffy and filthy, have opened a bag and are digging through it. Getting a jump on the waste pickers, who’ve made a way of life from the rational exploitation of garbage, the boys rummage through the bags like animals, trying to satisfy some immediate need, hunger or thirst, or in search of some interesting object, a cardboard figurine, a piece of thread, or a shard of mirror, a lost coin without monetary value but which could become something distinct or a fetish or simply a toy, transporting them for a moment, through its imaginary value, or its precarious and recreational use, from the animal immediacy in which they exhaust themselves, to the tenuous, human expectation that poverty, from birth till death, ceaselessly, confiscates from them.

  Two blocks later, he sees a man on the corner, staring south, and when he’s about half a block away, Nula recognizes Carlos Tomatis, with his perennial blue jacket and his light-colored summer pants, but this time he has on a white shirt and a dark tie that, cinched tight around his heck, slightly pinches the tanned skin that hangs below his jaw line. Nula slows down and finally stops next to Tomatis and, rolling down the window closest
to the sidewalk, opposite the driver’s side, he leans toward the opening just as Tomatis’s dark face appears in it.

  —I’m waiting for the bus, Tomatis says, but I had to let a few go by because they weren’t full enough.

  Nula laughs and opens the door.

  —Get in, I’ll give you a lift.

  Tomatis gets in and sits down, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

  —I accept, but your good deed has deprived me of one of life’s most exquisite pleasures.

  Nula laughs again and shakes his head, indicating, with that slow gesture, the legendary incorrigibility of his passenger.

  —So you’re waiting for the bus? Are you heading home? Tomatis says he is, but Nula keeps talking. What brings you to such a remote neighborhood at this hour, and looking so sharp in your white shirt?

  —It may sound like a lie, Tomatis says, but I’m coming from a wake. The ex-publisher of La Región. He retired a long time ago. But he was the one who hired me at the paper and who somehow avoided firing me for years and wouldn’t even let me go when I decided I was finished with all that.

  —He was a good person, then, Nula says.

  —Bearing in mind that he ran a newspaper, there were still a few ounces of decency left in him, so I guess so, yes, Tomatis says, and after thinking it over a few seconds adds, sorrowfully, But he thought that running a newspaper gave him the authority to have opinions about literature.

  —Well, Nula says, I sell wine but I still act like know something about philosophy.

  —It’s different, Tomatis says, and though he seems to consider the reasons for that difference for a second, he apparently doesn’t think it necessary to explain them.

  —You caught me in a good mood, Nula says. I have a present for you.

  With a curious smile, his head turned slightly toward Nula, Tomatis waits for more details about what he’s getting. But Nula, acting mysteriously and moving deliberately slowly in order to prolong the wait and in this way postpone indefinitely the moment of revelation, gestures toward the back seat.