La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Soldi is completely oblivious both to Gabriela and to the supposed attractions of the road. He’s recalling, analyzing rather, the morning that they’ve spent with Gutiérrez, first of all the interview, which started inside, continued at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, and was extended by the swimming pool while they drank a glass of white wine before going into the kitchen to eat. With a sort of juvenile haste, he, Soldi, had grabbed the yellow canvas lounge chair, which had caught his eye immediately, and sat down while the others continued standing, because he’d been momentarily stuck by the fear that Gabi or Gutiérrez might take it first, but he’d barely sat down before he felt guilty and stood back up, just as the others were arranging the other two lounge chairs, causing Gutiérrez to look at him quizzically and start back up to his feet, but Soldi, with a cryptic smile, gestured casually for him not to stand up while he pretended to arrange something in his pants pocket, as if he was afraid he’d lost or forgotten something, and sat back down. Of their three principal informants—besides the author of the anonymous text, there are many others, but as sources they’re more fragmentary and weren’t as close to the events—Cuello, Gutiérrez, and Tomatis, Gutiérrez is the most impartial and scrupulous. Cuello knew Brando’s father, who was also a friend of Washington’s, and according to him, and he’s not the only one who’s said this, the head of the precisionist movement was even hated by his own father, but Cuello, despite his efforts at objectivity, has an excessively negative perspective on the subject. And just hearing the name Brando makes Tomatis furious, and he treats the precisionist aesthetic with the same irritated disdain as he does its author. Only Gutiérrez strikes him as impartial, though Soldi can’t suppress a slight doubt that always accompanies that assessment: Maybe too much so. Clearly it’s pleasurable for him to recall that period of his life, for reasons that probably have nothing to do with precisionism. They’d already discussed that issue several times with Tomatis: first off, it concerns his youth, and the distance from which he remembered it over the years had caused him to end up confusing his own feelings with the place he’d come from and he’d idealized that time without realizing that it’s himself and not everything else that he’s remembering, blending space and time and the internal with the external. But neither he nor Tomatis feel completely satisfied with that explanation. There’s a darker side to it, which Gutiérrez can’t talk about openly with people he only knows slightly, and about which he let something slip during Nula’s first visit, surely thinking that he was a simple wine salesman with no personal connection to his friends or acquaintances. It’s hard to tell if Gutiérrez is aware that, besides the two or three friends he’s told, many people he knows already suspect it, and some have even been discussing it, more or less openly, since he came back to the city. But there’s something else about his surprising composure, something embedded inside him, disconnected from the external world, a complete seed that needed no cultivation and that sprouted alone, something he’s probably not even conscious of, and now Soldi realizes that he’d driven off suddenly in the middle of the conversation because, behind the urbane banter that the three of them had passed back and forth between their cars, and which he’d of course enjoyed, he, Soldi, had needed to be alone a while to reconsider the various impressions that Gutiérrez had left him with that morning. Two or three times during their interviews over the past few weeks he’d heard him say, I chose screenwriting because I wanted to disappear better as an artist, because a screenwriter doesn’t have his own existence, and to disappear as an individual, I use a pseudonym that apart from my producer no one knows. That declaration, spoken in a lighthearted, cheerful tone, had intrigued him, and it seems to him to reveal something more than a straightforward professional or private discretion in Gutiérrez, but he can’t tell what. Soldi suspects that Gutiérrez’s generous but exact critiques are in fact the consequence of the sort of tolerance that doesn’t exclude the person who offers them, and if he himself is their first object, he’s also the last one he thinks deserves it. But it’s a cold tolerance, unburdened of the emotions that inspired it, an ultimate calm that sees the whole universe and all its parts, as infinitesimal as they may be, as lost causes from the very moment when, appearing suddenly and incomprehensibly from out of nowhere, as colorful as they are illusory, they bloom.

  That attitude seems to be confirmed by his sense that as soon as anything appears in the world, whatever the reason, a catastrophe immediately gets to work on it, dizzyingly slow but sure to destroy it, with himself as the clearest example of that process. Clearly he treats the things around him—the house, the furniture, the garden, the countryside, the city, the world—and especially those that belong to him, as though they were foreign, with a gentle indifference, without suspicion or pretension, seeing only their use value, and he, Soldi, when he’s visiting the house, often gets the feeling of possessing them more than their owner, in any case of using them more carefully, as though it were he and not their owner who was aware of their true value. The only possession that he seems to claim is the precise memory of his years in the city, starting when his grandmother, who was his only family, had sent him from their insignificant, remote village, to parochial school, hoping that he’d finish high school so she could rest in peace, and what happened afterward, the law school, the three somewhat older and richer classmates—though anyone would’ve been—Rey, Escalante, and Marcos Rosemberg, the Roman Law professor who noticed his poverty and took him on as a clerk in his firm, the harsh conscription as occasional secretary to Brando and the precisionist movement, and the final days in the city, events so closely linked and so obscurely experienced that for a long time afterward they produced suspicions, inquiries, and conjectures among his friends until finally they forgot about him, and which caused him one fine day to disappear from the city without saying goodbye to anyone and then reappear and move in just as suddenly almost thirty-four years later. In his memory those years are inexhaustible, and if every memory, like every event, as insignificant as it might seem, is by definition infinite, then Soldi wonders if the interviews with him and Gabi allow Gutiérrez to relive them over and over, with meticulous tenacity, drawing to the clarity of his present consciousness a multiplicity of details that he might have considered disappeared forever, and which he finds still surprisingly fresh and vivid in some lost corner inside himself. His total lack of hope regarding the possibility of recovering the vividness of his past experience down to the minor details, among which one might have to include precisionism, is what produces that calm tolerance, that lucid indulgence of even the most malicious acts and the most sordid gossip. It’s as though he were telling his interviewers, They’re the only years I was really alive, so I have to take them as a whole because they were so few that I don’t have the luxury of rejecting any part of them. And Soldi thinks that Gutiérrez has a point: With the stories we were told as children, before going to sleep, which we wanted to hear over and over, always exactly the same way, we wouldn’t have let the narrator censor the sad or violent parts, or the ones that, because of the accumulation of details, delayed the advance of the plot or the arrival of the climax. All those elements of the story, happy or dramatic, moral or immoral, enjoyable or painful, had the same value, formed a part of it, were the whole story and not just its parts, and the most intense sections wouldn’t have had any meaning or the capacity to touch us if the transitions that sometimes may have seemed superfluous hadn’t held them together.

  Soldi imagines that Gutiérrez is aware of the base acts, but simply observes them from a distance or glosses them unemotionally, not as though they made no difference to him, but rather as though he’d exhausted all his supplies of anger and outrage a long time ago. During lunch, for example, his customary monologue about them, the inhabitants of the European countries he’s lived in for over thirty years, which he never names, never calls them the Italians, the Swiss, the French, the British, etc., and not even them in fact, unless the construction of the sentence f
orces him to use the pronoun, that monologue which at times becomes a soliloquy, as though he were articulating thoughts that aren’t even directed to the people present, isn’t spoken either with gravity or violence but rather with a calm and ironic, almost delicate tone, as if he were referring to a hopeless case that doesn’t deserve more than a distant and dispassionate description, possibly thinking that even the most atrocious crimes, repeated ad nauseam, become monotonous and comical: Society there is as chaotic as a natural phenomenon, and just like someone with a roof over their head tolerates the rain, they get along by trading their workdays for extravagance, which, like the air they breathe, they can’t do without, allowing themselves to be treated like slaves, not realizing that even if they could take a step in any direction it would make them an accomplice in the most atrocious crimes. And because the glut has temporarily dulled their instincts, they’ve traded ethics for a guilty conscience, and if because of that same excess the rest of the world declines, deprived of everything basic, they’ll let twelve-year-olds in other parts of the world work fourteen-hour days when they’re not getting raped by the perverts on vacation in those places or worse yet buy newborns and adopt them as their children when they can’t have them any other way, all so that their own children are well-fed and well-dressed and get what they consider to be a decent education. The ruins of the places they’ve sacked, pyramids, temples, devastated jungles, empty savannahs, ravaged geological layers, fossils that they lay claim to by giving them ridiculous names, all serving as decoration, as a mirror to what they insist are their souls, which they insist are fabulous, rational, and profound. And they’ve transformed the few livable places left in those wasted lands into kitschy destinations for their so-called holidays, the so-called setting for their supposedly unforgettable so-called pleasures. Their bestial sensualism isn’t a product of their own desires, which have become incomprehensible to them because of their philistinism and the constant, ubiquitous brainwashing, bombarded as they are by political and commercial propaganda, rather they’re the byproduct of generic stereotypes and secondhand needs inculcated by that very same propaganda. They refer to themselves as individualists and yet whenever they open their mouths all that comes out are clichés so fashionable that they end up being interchangeable with anything that their worst enemies, who pretend to be different, might have on hand. The religions they practice don’t commit them to anything, nothing more than following a soccer team, and their obedience is certainly less stringent than to their weekly magazine subscriptions or to the guidebooks that dictate their mindless travels. Even though they wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago, they pretend they’re still shaped by the precepts dictated by their gods, which according to them sanction their commerce and their genocides as long as every once in a while they donate their old clothes and unwanted food, their table scraps in a word, though it’s well-known that the god they adored kept them on their knees or treated them like rabid dogs or forced them to wash their bodies before they asked it for anything—always the same irrational fantasies, of course—and the others, the ones they all feel proud to have descended from, pretended to live in a brotherhood of rational and benevolent deities when in fact, and for no other reason than their thoughtlessness, jealousy, resentment, and cruelty, they would descend from Olympus to betray them in battle, demand the sacrifice of what they held most dear, rape their mothers and wives and daughters and transform them into rocks or animals. Evil was already engraved by fire in the natural order before they multiplied it insanely with science, technology, commerce, and religion, their avarice causing them to speak of it euphemistically and, when they couldn’t control it any more, infecting every corner of the world with it. But they’re happy as long as they’re well-educated and can condescend to foreigners, and even though everything they pretend to know they’ve read in newspapers or heard on the radio, they’re ashamed when they have to put their pets on diets so they don’t lose their figure.

  Soldi laughs, and Gabriela turns toward him and, intrigued when she sees his bearded profile, smiles too.

  —Gutiérrez, Soldi says. The things he said at lunch about Europeans.

  Gabriela’s smile widens.

  —He has a talent for description, she says. It must come in handy for his screenplays.

  Soldi makes a vague movement with his head and shoulders, and once again serious, returns to his thoughts. Gabriela, staring abstractedly through the windshield at a random point on the pavement that shifts and changes as the car moves—only the distance between herself and the car remaining constant—“sees” the dark green station wagon again as it moves down the sandy road, turns to the right, and stops next to the white bars of the gate. Now she sees Nula getting out of the car, pushing the half-open gate, stopping at the white front door, and hesitating a few seconds before deciding to ring the bell. His walk through the garden with Gutiérrez, as she sees it, is halting and fragmentary. Maybe, as with herself and Pinocchio before lunch, they sit down in the lounge chairs next to the pool, or maybe they sit down at the bank of trunks under the trees at the back (eucalyptus, acacias) where she and Pinocchio had once sat while they waited for Gutiérrez, who’d stepped out, to the city, leaving a message telling them to wait so they could resume their interviews. But now they’re inside, standing next to the round kitchen table, inspecting some wine bottles they take from the cardboard cases. They might have a cup of coffee, or Nula might simply drop off the order, take his check, and return to the city. Gabriela looks back at the road they’ve been leaving behind, and which gets more and more narrow as the car advances, first through the side view mirror and then through the rear window: no short, dark green station wagon appears on the straight and empty pavement. No, he must still be there, trying to make another sale, or reporting, in his ironic, juvenile way, the conversation they’d just had, between their cars, on the embankment that descends from the highway to the sandy road. Maybe they’ve settled their business and have moved on to what Pinocchio referred to earlier as the ontology of becoming, Nula, with that provincial womanizer attitude, being of course, alongside Pinocchio, a real expert. But he doesn’t really have the fingernails of a guitarist, Gabriela tells herself, using an expression so conclusive and circular, smoothed and polished by its infinite iterations in popular speech, that for a fraction of a second it displaces the images that had occupied her, the words that comprise the expression imprinted on the bright stage of her mind like a neon sign switching on and off periodically against the black background of a dark, obscure city. But she’s not sure that he doesn’t have those fingernails: simply put, he shouldn’t act so sure of himself. Now she sees him again in the lounge chair by the pool, drinking coffee and discussing philosophy, exhausting the declensions of the verb to be. And Gabriela recalls a story that her father told her once: he and Tomatis were leaning over the railings of the suspension bridge, watching the water, and it occurred to Barco to ask, Carlitos, in your opinion, what is a novel? And without hesitating even for a second or looking up from the water swirling around the pillars of the bridge several meters below, Carlitos had answered, The decomposition of continuous movement.

  Now she’s the one who laughs, and Soldi, intrigued, looks sidelong at her.

  —Carlitos, Gabriela says. One day my old man asked him for a definition of the novel and he answered, The decomposition of continuous movement.

  —The decomposition of continuous movement, Soldi repeats, nodding slowly. And after thinking it over a second, says, Of course, in the sense of representing, through an analytic and static form what in fact is synthetic and dynamic.

  —That’s more or less it, Gabriela says, except with fewer -ic adjectives.

  —Cheeky! Soldi says. Let’s stop by the Piedras Blancas beach before we head back to the city, even though there’re no rocks, and much less white ones, for six hundred kilometers in any direction.