La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  When she says consensus from trustworthy sources, Gabriela is thinking of Tomatis in particular, who, each time he refers to Brando calls him, somewhat affectedly, that miserable fraud, or, more simply, Brando the Swine. And she continues her explanation for Nula, while Soldi, upright against the seat back so as to not interfere in their visual field, also listening extremely carefully, appears to verify, with his eyes, the things Gabriela is saying. For the second period, the second half of the fifties especially, they have the testimony of Gutiérrez himself, in certain respects invaluable, because he worked at Brando and Calcagno’s firm, where Brando was always assigning him work for the magazine. For the first period, they have Cuello, who ran a criollista magazine in the fifties, Copas y bastos, and for the sixties and seventies, they have, among others, Tomatis, who edited the literary supplement to La Región for a long time, where, by the way, he never published a single line of his own work, but which was a platform that Brando often utilized. There are other informants as well, protagonists or witnesses, or both things simultaneously, at one time or another. Then there’re the magazines, El Río, edited by Higinio Gómez in the early thirties; the three eras of Nexos, the official organ of the precisionists; Tabula rasa, an avant-garde magazine that started to come out in the mid fifties; Espiga, published by the neoclassicists of the ’40s generation, who were the most competitive with the precisionists: like them, they mostly wrote sonnets; and, especially in the sixties, Catharsis, published by the Instituto de Letras out of the philosophy department in Rosario. Of course there had been a thousand other magazines published in the region since the turn of the century, representing every national and international tendency in art and literature, and which she and Soldi used for their general study of avant-garde movements, but all the ones she just mentioned had more or less a direct relationship with the precisionists. And then there were the literary supplements and the other sections in local and national papers. And, finally, a singular document, which they’d given Tomatis a copy of, and which they were thinking of publishing as an appendix to their book, but anonymously, because its author, an older man who still lives in the city, and one of their principal informants, doesn’t want to be named because of his connection to the families of several members of the movement. It’s the fragment of a tentative history, more or less novelized, written at the end of the seventies, the decade, in the words of its author, that condemned so many decent people of both sexes to silence, to hiding, to exile, to torture, and to death.

  A familiar sound interrupts Gabriela’s explanatory gloss: a horse approaching at a slow trot, its hooves striking quietly against the sandy ground, which, before she has time to turn around, starts up the embankment, scratching softly against the slightly inclined surface where the loose gravel left behind by the paving mixes with the sand. The horse and rider appear suddenly, very close to the car, so much so that, to see the rider completely, Gabriela has to lean her head out the window. And she doesn’t regret it, because she immediately recognizes, with that fondness particular to city dwellers, a figure typical of the coastal countryside, so magnified by her young imagination, a figure represented thousands of times in oil, in watercolor, or in pencil or ink, or even in wood or in marble, by every kind of plastic artist, painters, sculptors, weavers, and illustrators, or recalled in verse and in prose, in elevated or popular language, rhapsodized in chamarritas and litoraleñas, captured in movement by documentaries or films of touristic or critical stripe: A boy of ten or twelve, with dark skin and hair, barefoot and shabbily dressed, riding bareback on a compliant horse that he urges on by kicking its sides with his heels, or by whipping it briskly on its flanks with a green branch. At the edge of the asphalt the horse stops, uncertain, though it’s crossed the road countless times in its life, and the whips with the branch and the kicks become more vigorous, forcing it to brave the provincial highway, changing the sound its hooves make, now on the hard and resonant pavement. And when he reaches the other side, the opposite edge, where the saddest and dustiest weeds in the world grow, the sound of the hooves disappears, creating a sharp contrast between the proximity of the animal, its movements, and the silence with which it executes them.

  Gutiérrez, according to Gabriela, who’s just put her head back inside the window, noticing, meanwhile, a considerable difference in temperature between the inside and the outside of the car—as unlikely as it may seem, the air is warmer outside—Gutiérrez shows an extreme tolerance for Brando, despite being fully aware, at the same time, of his character traits. He seems to confuse Brando with his own youth, assigning to the former the supposed values of the latter. But he’s a meticulous and scrupulous informant, and when he has some doubt he doesn’t hesitate to consult his library so as to not overlook anything. Between 1956 and 1960, more or less, the years he studied law and worked at the firm, correspond to the third and final era of Nexos, during which three issues were published. Each issue of the magazine had less to do with precisionism and more with Brando’s own literary and political career: though he’d been a cultural attaché in Rome during the first Peronist regime, he eventually withdrew from the government, going so far as to take part in the coup that overthrew it in 1956. Gutiérrez is aware of Brando’s opportunism, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. At first, the precisionists would meet at a bar downtown that they could all get to easily, but when Brando started to have political aspirations he’d choose more discreet locations—according to Tomatis, his goals demanded a group of literary disciples and collaborators, but since most of them had social and economic positions less relevant than his, he compartmentalized his relationships, to one side the rich and powerful philistines, and to the other his disciples, poor but useful for his literary career—Gutiérrez, who doesn’t hesitate to recognize the truth to that statement, doesn’t appear too scandalized by it, as though the years, the actions, and the protagonists of that lost world had lived a kind of mythic existence, drawn with hard lines in immutable roles they were forced to represent, and were therefore resistant to change, to analysis, and, especially, to ethical critique. According to Gutiérrez, around 1959, Brando spent a year working out the problems presented by the translation of a classical sonnet to the language of precisionism, which is true, because there are some examples of this from the last issue, which appeared in 1960. Apart from his remarkable memory and the pleasure he seems to draw from her and Soldi’s incitements to explore it, Gutiérrez offers a number of supplementary qualities as an informant: that he can tell on his own what might interest them, that he’s a talented student of people, an ethnographer almost, at least with regard to that time period. After more than thirty years away he’s able to describe the small world in which the precisionist poets emerged, and where he didn’t belong, with countless unexpected and invaluable details and a curious mix of indulgence and irony. What they’ve heard him say could be summarized and transcribed more or less as follows: The group was an assortment of famous lawyers and public servants, liberals and addicts of the eleven o’clock Mass, philistine patrons and high school teachers, Peronists, conservatives, and radicals, wealthy and poor, led by an ambitious and scrupulous man with a visceral duplicity, and who’d deserve our hatred had his ambitions not been so mean and transparent: to become a minister in the provincial government or land some subaltern post in an embassy and have his name appear every so often in the national press. His most unfortunate trait was his avarice: despite the fact that he’d inherited a fortune from his father, who’d gotten rich from a pasta factory he’d owned in the early part of the century, and had multiplied his assets at the law firm, he always contrived to have his coffee paid for by his disciples, these poor bastards who had meal stipends from the public assistance office or from the national university. But he was a good leader, and when he put aside his darling precisionism he could manage to write a decent sonnet. According to Gutiérrez, his indecent attachment to money had cut short his political career, because in ’56, after the Revolución Libertadora
, they’d given him a post as undersecretary of something, Gutiérrez didn’t quite remember what, but Gabriela and Soldi already knew that it was Undersecretary of Public Works, which he was forced to resign from a year and a half later because he’d taken some liberties with public funds.

  —He resurfaced in the seventies, Soldi says. In ’76, his brother-in-law, General Ponce, the son of the other General Ponce, his father-in-law, tried to get him a ministership, but Brando pulled out and instead wrote a few articles justifying the coup. When Elisa and El Gato disappeared, Tomatis had gone to see him.

  An intense expression appears on Gabriela’s face. Of course, she’d known that story long before she and Soldi started their history of precisionism and the other avant-garde movements in the province. It feels personal to her, and though she never knew either Elisa or Gato Garay, she is aware of how difficult it must’ve been for “Carlitos”—that’s how she’s called him since she learned to talk, sometime before her first birthday—to go see Brando and ask him to intervene for his disappeared friends. That story is part of her family history, she heard it often during those years, whispered by her parents, and much later, after she came back from the U.S., where she’d gone to finish her literature degree, from Tomatis himself, not as a tragedy but rather as a farce whose subject wasn’t his friends’ disappearance but the personality of Mario Brando.

  From the other car, Nula carefully studies Gabriela’s expression, while simultaneously considering her, in a sincerely disinterested way, at least consciously, as a sexual object. Earlier, it seemed that she was studying him in the same way, but he’s learned, especially after his marriage, that when other women undertake a similar appraisal they tend to do it simply out of habit, often without feeling at all implicated by it, and it’s therefore the impression of having been observed by her shortly before that sanctions his own sexual consideration of her. Her face is full and attractive, accentuated by wavy chestnut hair and a vivid and mobile gaze. A slight blush had appeared on her cheeks, darkened by the recent summer, in a sudden concentration that caused her lips to pinch slightly and her eyes to glow and then narrow and her head to freeze, as though she were bracing herself against an old injury. But she recovers herself immediately and, returning to the present, adopts a languid and earthly expression and prepares to continue. Nula compares her to his own wife and finds some points in common, though it’s not really surprising since they are the same age and come from similar backgrounds; Diana, though, seems to control her emotions better. Last night, for example, when he’d gotten home after having been with Lucía in Paraná and visiting two clients in the city, it was obvious that Diana would’ve liked more details about the way that he, Nula, had spent is day, but he knew there was no way she’d ask him, and he couldn’t have given them anyway because on his moral spectrum (an extremely subjective one, in fact), silence is permissible but lying isn’t. After dinner, they’d made a game of repurposing lines from Omar Kayyám for the promotional cards, and what made them laugh the most was how hard it was, because in the Rubaiyat the glorification of wine was always followed by the violent critique of one thing or another, power, religion, conformism, death, themes automatically prohibited from advertising language, and though Américo is a self-proclaimed agnostic, he has enough common sense to know that publicity shouldn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities. And it wasn’t hard for him and Diana to realize that the tone of ecumenical tolerance that dominates official discourse in every corner of the planet has the same characteristics as advertising language. For example, one stanza read, This night, two cups of wine, / will make me rich twice over, which works well as a tagline, but the third verse, although before I must reject reason and religion, were useless as ad copy because they’d offend both the religious pretensions and the religious sentiments of the consumer. Another verse, Without wine it’s impossible to live or to drag this body along, were also useless because the marketing fiction about alcohol pretends that wine is a pure pleasure that produces instant joy without creating any sort of dependence. And they couldn’t pick any stanzas (there were many) in which Kayyám refers to death, because its proximity to mentions of wine would give the product a negative image, so instead they amused themselves by cutting and pasting verses and rearranging them in such a way that none of the counterproductive elements would end up on the cards. They had enjoyed themselves after dinner, and when they went to bed they were about to make love, but at the last minute Diana decided she didn’t want to. Nula went to sleep annoyed, not because he wanted her so badly that night, but rather because he believed, without realizing it, that the sexual act with her would erase the consequences of what had happened that afternoon with Lucía, sweeping it more quickly into the past, a superstition that he suffered from every time he had extramarital relations.

  From his privileged position, having had erotic contact with two beautiful young women the day before, Nula congratulates himself on his impartial and disinterested assessment of Gabriela Barco as a sexual object. It doesn’t occur to him to think that Gabriela experiences something similar, and that she might have even more compelling reasons to consider herself authorized to it: having achieved the principal object of all amorous practice, she’s momentarily indifferent to its secondary benefits, and the countless number of men who could have provided them to her are clumped together in an asexual mass, not counting José Carlos, her partner, an economist in Rosario who at one point in the two or three thorough and affectionate embraces the month before had managed to plant the seed of what, this morning, once she had the results from the second test, has begun to enchant and fascinate her, enveloping her for the duration of the process that has been initiated, a transitory and autonomous system inaccessible to others from several different points of view. The recollection of this fact flushes her tea-colored irises with a glow so different from the introspective fury that just now inflamed them that Nula, disconcerted, turns his eyes from Soldi to look at her, while Soldi himself, having been watching Nula, tries to look at Gabriela from the corner of his eye without surrendering his perpendicular position, his back upright against the seat so as to not block their visual field, without being able to see anything in particular in her face. And when Nula finally meets her eyes, from which, by now, any trace of emotion has disappeared, Gabriela continues. According to Gutiérrez, she says, Calcagno had given him the job at the law firm to help him with his own work, but less than a month into the job, Brando was already giving him work that had to do with the precisionist movement generally, and with his own career in particular, and so often that he soon became a sort of private secretary. Not only did he edit the magazine and set up meetings and arrange the movement’s activities, but he also typed out its leader’s poems and articles and sometimes even wrote his personal correspondence. Gutiérrez claims that Brando wrote lots of poems that had nothing to do with the precisionist aesthetic and which were better, as far as he could tell, than the ones he published, but she and Soldi hadn’t been able to confirm this because the family—his wife was still alive and his two daughters, who’d both married naval officers, had moved to the south—refused to collaborate with them or even to see them, and except for a few pre-precisionist poems written during his adolescence and published in La Región’s Sunday literary page and in some student magazines, there was no trace left of his traditional poetry. Every so often, Gutiérrez would quote the first line of an alexandrine sonnet that, according to him (and he seems to be the only one who read it), was called “To a pear,” and which went, Gabriela says, concentrating a second to remember the exact phrasing of the line she’s about to quote: Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate. When he hears the line, Soldi, relaxing and turning toward Nula, as though he’d just woken from a dream, filled with a light and emphatic euphoria, interrupting Gabriela Barco without taking the trouble to ask, in a voice raised a bit too much by his sudden excitement, interjects: Gutiérrez also remembers the first hendecasyllable of a precisionist sonnet—he practical
ly shouts, in the tone of someone proffering a revelation—that apparently he never published or even finished. The line, according to Gutiérrez, Pinocchio says, goes, The scalpel scratches the epithelium. And shaking her head and laughing, not at all put off by Solid’s sudden interruption, Gabriela repeats, The scalpel scratches the epithelium. With a short, almost inaudible sarcastic laugh, Soldi flattens himself against the seat again and falls silent.

  For Carlitos—Nula, who knows him less intimately than his interlocutors, after an infinitesimal hesitation deep inside himself, translates his name to Tomatis—Gutiérrez’s claim that Brando, despite his intransigent declarations and his authoritarian manifestos, wrote non-precisionist poems in secret is plausible enough, first of all because a duplicitous discourse was innate to him, and also because if the ship of precisionism capsized, overburdened by all the neophytes that the movement had attracted, he’d have his lifeboat of traditional poetry ready. As Tomatis sees it, Brando was the most dubious experimentalist anyway, because despite his professed renovation of poetics through scientific discourse (first theoretical postulate of precisionism), he spent all his time denigrating free verse and insisting that traditional meter and rhyme should be the principal instruments of precisionism because, like music, they comprised a synthesis of harmony and mathematics. Tomatis says that the precisionists were the only avant-garde poets in the whole world, and probably in the whole solar system and even in the known universe, he’d sometimes add with a vague and disoriented look around him, who between 1949 and 1960 claimed that the renovation of the sonnet was the fundamental task of any literary revolution. He’d often laugh at them, saying that their canonical texts were Popular Science and the rhyming dictionary. And even today he refuses to take Brando or his followers seriously, and even though he doesn’t admit it, allowing himself a momentary concession that could be interpreted as a veiled critique of the intellectual champion of precisionism, “Carlitos” Tomatis is incredibly annoyed that Pinocchio and I are giving the movement so much space in our book.