La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  It’s not actually worth getting upset over such improbable complications. Tomatis would never say anything, and as far as the wine salesman is concerned, apart from being overly self-confident, there’s really nothing else to fault him for, at least for now—well, one thing, actually, maybe the shameless way he looks at women. Laughing, without opening her eyes, Gabriela shakes her head slowly, summing up, with this gesture, Nula’s essential predictability, possibly some automatic program from his early years that’s unconsciously set in motion every time he sees a chick. With gentle, condescending indolence, she puts Nula aside. She wants it to be after six already so she can call Rosario; Caballito can wait till tomorrow or even till the weekend, because she wants to be sure that she’ll get her father on the phone rather than her mother, if she happens to answer, though she’s usually incapable of even stretching her arm as far as the end table, where the phone is kept, and if her father is far from the house, in the garden for example, he has to run to answer it and usually comes too late. Besides, José Carlos should be the first to know—although he already has two teenage children from his first marriage, Gabriela knows he’ll be happy. They’ve lived together for almost four years, but they’ve known each other since before she went to New Jersey to finish her degree. Actually, it’s been several months since they stopped using protection, and they’d started feeling somewhat disappointed that nothing had happened yet, until finally her period hadn’t come, and when it was almost three weeks late she decided to buy a test at the pharmacy; the result was positive, but to be sure she wanted a lab test, which settled all her doubts. Because Holy Week is coming up, she and Pinocchio decided they’d work till Wednesday with Gutiérrez and Cuello, and she’d go to Rosario to see her doctor—this morning, after getting the test results, she’d called for an appointment—and, if the doctor allowed it, she’d take advantage of the holiday and would spend the weekend in Caballito with José Carlos. When had it happened, Gabriela asks herself, when did she and José Carlos get what they were hoping for? After her last period, over a weekend in Rosario, they’d made love twice, the first time on Saturday morning—she’d arrived late Friday, after having spent the whole week working with Pinocchio, and José Carlos had taken part in a conference on economic planning at the university that had lasted two full days—and then on Saturday night, before going out to eat, and after a quiet day at home and then at a party that had lasted till late, they’d started up again. It must have been the second time, that night, Gabriela decides. They’d been talking and caressing each other for a while, mostly naked—it was still hot then—and she’d been getting turned on gradually as he played his fingers softly through her pubic hair, wrapping and unwrapping them and sliding them every so often along the damp edges of her opening. A reddish shadow covered the room, into which the last light of the afternoon filtered. They were happy, and though they seemed distant from the world, they were unwittingly working in its favor. When José Carlos’s fingers dipped a bit more and pushed open the damp edges, she’d had the sensation, in which pleasure mixes with a slight and luckily passing anguish, of not belonging to herself, of losing herself in a remote, forgotten corner of her own body, where blood and tissue and fluids, the silent life of her organs, steered her toward divergent and external shores. She’d experienced that singular feeling from time to time, but never as intensely as that Saturday night. When she touched his penis, it felt silky and tense and quivering against the tips of her fingers and the palm of her hand, and when he entered her Gabriela thought it felt harder, thicker, longer, hotter, and wetter than usual—she’d thought this later, as she showered, because at that moment the sensations filling every corner of her body didn’t leave much space for thinking—and the drawn out pleasure culminated during her orgasm in a kind of fury that made her muscles ache for days afterward and left José Carlos with his back covered in scratches. Gabriela had felt him finish with a thick burst of semen, and for a while after he’d pulled out she’d been sensitive there, and had liked the feeling of José Carlos’s organ still being inside of her. Yes, Gabriela thinks, it must have been that time, it couldn’t have happened in any other way but in the middle of that pleasure, and she happily abandons herself to that thought for several minutes, though of course she’s aware that for its self-perpetuation that ancient, opportunistic, and single-minded substance could work under any conditions, in vivo or in vitro, and as long as contact happens between the two protagonists who must unite in order to guarantee its persistence it makes no difference whether there’s pleasure or suffering, design or accident, love or indifference, consent or violation. Gabriela lies still, satisfied, smiling to herself, but suddenly, without warning, the smile is erased and a hard expression takes over her face, and when her mouth opens abruptly, as though her lower jaw had unhinged, the hardness is transformed into confusion, irritation, anger: she’s at Gutiérrez’s house, sitting at the table with Pinocchio, and the owner of the house, who has his back to them, is preparing something at the stove, and when he turns around he’s the wine salesman, and as a mean joke he’s serving her a plate of live fish. Opening her eyes and crying out, Gabriela is suddenly awake and sitting up on the bed. The disorientation of the sudden dream gives way, in her recovered thoughts, to amazement: in the fraction of a second that she was asleep, the dream took disparate fragments of experience and constructed a new world as vivid as the empirical one, and whose meaning is as difficult to unravel. At an infinitesimal intersection of time, a tangential episode, endowed with its own time, unfolds into events that, were they put into the order in which they occur in reality, would take hours, days, weeks, months, years, the way a single sentence of a story can gather together centuries of empirical time.

  Gabriela gets out of bed, yawning, waking up. She turns on the light, opens the doors to her dresser, quickly examines the clothes hanging there, and finally takes out a lightweight tan suit and an ivory silk blouse. Holding up the hangers in front of each other, she studies the combination of tones, and then, holding the two hangers away from her, the blouse on top of the tan coat, to see them better, she decides that the contrast works and that she’s happy with the outfit. But when she lays the clothes on the bed, she realizes that the third, and most-visible, button on the silk blouse, which would fall in the middle of her chest, hangs by a thread, so she goes to the dining room and takes her aunt Ángela’s sewing kit, an old red and black pastry tin, from the bottom drawer of the chest in the dining room. Her delicate yet agile fingers explore the contents of the box, scissors, thimbles, variously colored spools of thread, loose or packaged buttons of different material, shape, and color, a short piece of tailor’s chalk wrapped in a rubber band, transparent boxes full of safety pins and tacks, two green pin cushions from which many different-sized heads emerge, and, at the bottom, several worn-out, greasy coins from past decades, worthless for years because of inflation, currency switches, or political instability. Gabriela sets the box on the table and takes out two or three spools of thread whose colors more or less correspond to the blouse, one white, another a flat yellow, and a third beige, but deciding that she’ll have to choose among these for the one that most matches the blouse itself and especially the thread used to stitch the other buttons, she puts everything back in the red and black tin and takes it to her room. Sitting carefully on the edge of the bed so as not to wrinkle the clothes that she’s laid out, she leans over the blouse and carefully examines the button, an iridescent mother-of-pearl circle with two holes in the center, and in particular the thread from which it hangs, a beige-like color, lighter than the one from the spool she’s just chosen. Leaning closer, she concentrates on the thread, comparing it to the one that holds up the other buttons, which come stitched from the factory, and, in her memory, to the ones in the box. To resolve her doubt, she opens the tin and takes out the beige spool—too dark. The flat yellow, with a vaguely greenish-gray tint, seems better, and the white one clearly won’t work. Yes, the yellow one will match the others b
est, and even though Gabriela knows that no one will be able to tell the difference, the detail doesn’t seem at all superfluous, despite the fact that more than one person might laugh at her—she thinks of the wine salesman and his ridiculous joke, serving her a live fish, an idea that seemed plausible for him, even though it was from a dream—she could remind that person that distinguishing the differences in little things is good training for seeing them in bigger ones, like an ontology of becoming, for example. And Gabriela remembers the philosophy class in which they studied Plato, and the question from the Timaeus that she’d memorized, and which had helped her get a really good grade on the final exam: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? Gabriela imagines herself asking him this question, hoping to crush him—Gutiérrez, Pinocchio, Carlitos, and Violeta are there, and the scene takes place that Sunday, at the cookout, by the swimming pool—but Nula, smiling benevolently, though never losing his theatrical disdain, would respond, Are we actually going to discuss becoming or are we just making riddles to humor an old fag who fled Syracuse disguised as a woman, like some vulgar tranny? Laughing softly at his response without realizing that in fact it’s her own and not Nula’s, Gabriela loses interest in the becoming, and, putting the beige spool back in the tin, sifts though its contents until she finds the yellow one. Between the two, she chooses the green pin cushion that seems to have the thinnest needles, and leaving the needles and thread on the bed, passes her hand delicately under the silk cloth so as not to wrinkle or tear the blouse and then gently rips away the button, which comes off easily, though it leaves a piece of thread hanging from the end, which she’s loosened but which she won’t be able to remove herself despite the delicacy and dexterity of her free finger samples, as José Carlos likes to call them in jest, because of their tiny size, which means that she’ll have to use the scissors to do it. There’s one with a curved tip, and another one that’s much larger, so she picks up the smaller one: she inserts the tip between the cloth and the thread and carefully pries the thread away so that in the end, when the thread is loose, she can pull it away with her fingers. When it’s ready—the tip of the scissors enters farther as the thread loosens—she removes the scissors and finishes the job with her fingers. So as not to lose it, she’s left the mother-of-pearl button on the lapel of the tan jacket, where it contrasts more against the dark background, rather than on the light bed spread, on which it would disappear and be difficult to find. Picking it up, she starts pulling out the thinnest needles from the pin cushion one at a time, trying them in the holes without managing to get any to fit, and then sticking them back on the pin cushion after the failure. Eventually, with the fifth needle—without realizing it, she’s trying a needle that she’d already tried before, so for her it’s the sixth, counting the needle she’d tried twice—it works, which is only partially gratifying for Gabriela because the needle that fits the iridescent button is so thin that she doubts whether the yellow thread would pass through the eye and then through the holes on the button, easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, Gabriela thinks, laughing aloud, where the ruling classes control the gates.

  Gabriela unrolls a piece of thread from the spool, some thirty centimeters more or less, brings the spool to her mouth, cuts the thread with her teeth, and, taking advantage of the movement, puts the end of the thread she’s just cut into her mouth and moistens it on the tip of her tongue. Dropping the spool back into the tin, she prepares to thread the needle. The end she’s just moistened is rigid and ends with an extremely thin filament that could easily pass through the eye, but the eye is so narrow that the filament bends as it touches the metal, without passing through the hole, and Gabriela has to bring it to her mouth and moisten it again. Like the first, the second attempt also fails, the filament colliding against the metal without sliding through, and Gabriela, remaining patient, once again moistens the end of the thread and attempts to pass it through a third time. Now, the filament passes through the eye, but it’s so thin that even Gabriela’s free sample fingers can’t grasp it; her index finger and thumb, on several occasions, think they’ve gripped it, but when they pull at the rest of the thread the fingers come away empty, as if the filament, which is clearly visible on the other side of the eye, were an immaterial object, a mirage, or an illusion; the tips of her fingers appear to grasp it, though no sensation is transferred to them, and nevertheless the extremely delicate and in fact all but invisible tip of the thread has changed, twisted, coiled in on itself, as if the incursion of her fingers had produced a tiny catastrophe of a single miniscule point. Finally, on the fourth attempt, she grasps it, but when she pulls—now she can really feel the thread, dampened because she’s put it back in her mouth in order to straighten and sharpen the point—the rest of the thread, rather than passing through, gathers at the entrance to the eye, because of an infinitesimal accident, but enough, in the present situation, to block its passage. The filament has undone the thread, unraveling it, and only this single filament of the thread’s braid has passed through the eye, and the rest of the thread, come apart, furrowed and compressed at the eye, increasing its diameter, now wider than the eye of the needle and slightly undone, gathers at the entrance. Gabriela makes an irritated face, its exaggeration diverging profoundly from her calm interior (she’s content, actually, and the difficulty of threading the needle, rather than annoying her, is in fact amusing), and she pulls out the thread, and deciding to change ends—the former has clearly suffered irreparable damage in the previous attempts—she moistens it carefully, rolling it several times over her tongue to infuse it thoroughly with saliva, and, concentrating, performs the same movement, slowly, carefully, but fails again. She has to try twice more, and on the third attempt, finally, she succeeds: the end that has crossed the eye is solid against her fingertips, and seeing and feeling how the thread passes cleanly through the eye of the needle produces a pleasure that is at once physical and mental. The yellowish thread ends up distributed across the needle in two unequal parts; Gabriela makes a knot in the longest end, the one that was undone by the failed attempts to pass it through the eye, picks up the mother-of-pearl button, puts it in place, and pierces the fabric from the back to the front, passing the needle through one of the holes of the button, which ends up hanging in the air, suspended along the thread that tenses as Gabriela expertly and gently pulls the needle outward until the knot at the back of the fabric hits it, and in doing so begins the first turn of the stitch; placing the button again, Gabriela passes the needle through, in the opposite direction, from the outside in, with the thread following and tightening the button against the fabric, and then passes the needle through the first hole again, inside out; after repeating this maneuver twice more in both directions she checks that the button is firmly stitched, and, removing the needle, vigorously wraps the end of the thread between the button and the cloth to ensure that there’s enough space between the button and the fabric to allow it to pass through the buttonhole without wrinkling the fabric; finally, Gabriela ties off the end and, lifting the blouse, snips the thread with her teeth, and checking that she’s done this almost at the edge of the knot, decides she’s satisfied and carefully lays out the blouse on the tan suit again.