La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  In the tragedy, it is suggested that Laius may not have been the father of Oedipus, that some nymph on Mount Cithaeron, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, what the myth suggests, constantly, is that returns, not to mention “regressions” tend to be catastrophic. All returns contradict the physical laws of the universe, which is always, or almost always, expanding. Swimming against the current, and so on. Call me when you get these notes, to talk them over. Carlitos.

  PS. This Sunday I’m going to a monstrous cookout at Gutiérrez’s. Many ghosts of the past and a few tenuous silhouettes of the present will be in attendance. I’m a hybrid of the two. Kisses to Babette and the kids.

  The next morning he woke up early and, because the weather was nice, sat down to drink some mates while he read on the sunny terrace. The mild, eight-thirty sun announced the return of the summer. Enormous, dispersed white clouds, static, with vast blue spaces between them, decorate the sky. Tomatis’s gaze passes over them gladly, thinking they foretell good weather for the days ahead. The mass is at nine thirty, and the burial is scheduled for eleven, but because it’s for a local person of certain importance, Tomatis knows that there’s no point in rushing, and since he’s decided to go straight to the cemetery, avoiding the church, he still has an hour to kill before he has to get ready. When he arrived at the cemetery, the mourners had only recently set up around the family mausoleum, transferred from the municipal cemetery, too exposed to the floods of the Salado river, which every so often, before joining the Paraná, overflows and inundates the whole western flank of the city. Oasis de Paz, a private business, though it offers its own mausoleums, also accepts transfers, corps et biens, from the families who can pay for it. Concealing his skepticism, Tomatis listened to the eulogies: from an advisor to the governor who’d once been a guerrilla and who after living abroad for a few years had returned to the city, to serve the democratic process, as they say, although since the return of democracy the problems that had supposedly inspired him to take up arms not only persist but are in fact worse than ever; from one of the current publishers of the paper, an heir of the other family of owners; and from one of the editors, a sports writer, who recalled that the publisher had also been president of a soccer club, and that during his presidency the club had played in the first division. Tomatis, out of curiosity, has approached the wreaths and bouquets of flowers to read the violet cards: everyone’s there, the government, the church, the banks, the industrialists, the two main soccer clubs, the television channels, the law school, the charitable organizations, the university. Seeing the crowd around him, analyzing the rhetoric of the eulogies, Tomatis realizes just how long—since his adolescence at least—he’s been living with his back to the city that in turn regards him with considerable suspicion: Without a formal declaration of war, without explicit violence, his disdainful irony toward what the pages of La Región at one time had the habit of calling the life blood of the city had been reciprocated with suspicion and distrust. Nevertheless, when the ceremony finished and the guests began to disperse, a small group of employees and ex-employees of the paper, from editorial and the print shop, called him over as they made their way to the cemetery exit. At first they talked about the publisher, but soon they moved on to other things: dead or retired colleagues, the imminent move of the newsroom and print shop to a new location, modern and larger, in the north end of the city, and finally a discussion about the Clásico that the two local soccer teams would play that Sunday. The sports writer who had given the eulogy offered to drive him downtown, and they distributed themselves into two cars—there were nine of them in all—and Tomatis said goodbye at the cemetery gate to the five who were going in the other car. Tomatis was uneasy about making conversation with his ex-colleagues all the way downtown, but two blocks later the driver and the two in the back had already returned to the discussion of Sunday’s match, analyzing the rosters, the fact that they were playing on such and such a field, and the recent history—trades, wins and losses, physical condition of certain players, and so on—of the two teams. Early on, when he’d just started at the paper, at twenty years old, the sports writers laughed at his affinity for literature, and so Tomatis took his vengeance on them by ridiculing sports and proclaiming, in all sincerity, that he’d never set foot on a soccer field, and now, listening to their heated discussion during the drive, he thinks that he could still make the same claim, but that his situation won’t allow it—what from a twenty-year-old would have sounded like a provocation they’d take, today, as an insult, though it wouldn’t stop them from letting the Sunday match take up the entire conversation, let alone ask themselves if the person they’d invited to travel with them was interested in the topic or not. None of us have changed a bit in all these years, and we won’t change any in the years that we have left to live, Tomatis thought when he got out of the car on the corner of Mendoza and San Martín, at the Siete Colores, the bar where he had a one o’clock date with Violeta. She was working on an urgent project that was due that same afternoon, so they drank a coffee and made another date for seven at the Amigos del Vino, and when Tomatis showed up at seven on the dot, he saw that Violeta, refreshed and calm, was already there, and five minutes later, Soldi arrived. Tomatis had spent part of the afternoon correcting and expanding the letter to Pichón, and before coming to the bar he’d stepped over to the post office to mail it.

  Gabriela, recovering from her indecision, instead of sitting down takes a few steps to the right and approaches the counter, just as Nula, turning his back to the room, has started to prepare something, his posture so similar to the way he looked in the dream that, elbowing Soldi, she whispers:

  —Watch him serve us a live fish, realizing as she says it that Soldi is only laughing to be polite, because, as is to be expected, he hasn’t understood where the joke is in what she’s saying, and much less what she’s alluding to. But Nula doesn’t have a live fish in his hand when he turns around, but rather a dish of green and black olives.

  —You got here in time for the first bottle, Nula says.

  —I was thinking a while this afternoon about the question of becoming, Gabriela says point-blank. What does this sentence mean to you? What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is?

  —Timaeus 27, Nula says. An important but easily refutable moment of the dialogue on the topic.

  —It suddenly smells like school in here, Tomatis says.

  —Yeah, Diana jumps in. Finishing school.

  —Key moment? Gabriela ventures. Obviously it’s just a riddle to please an old fag whose corruptive political fancies forced him to flee Syracuse dressed as a woman, like some vulgar tranny.

  Given the value of the joke, which has been told at Plato’s expense a thousand times in similar or different ways since the third century before Christ, her listeners respond with a moderate smile, surprised at Gabriela’s mysterious peals of laughter, unaware that what makes her laugh so much isn’t the joke itself but rather the fact that she’d previously attributed it to Nula during an inexplicably hostile daydream, not realizing, when she did so, that it was not Nula but rather she herself that had made it.

  —Pass those glasses to the table, Nula says to Gabriela and Soldi, who pick up three each, each glass destined to one of the six friends, and distribute them around the six seats that are either occupied or empty. Gabriela sits down to the left of Tomatis and Soldi, who also brings the dish of olives and places it in the middle of the table and then sits down next to Gabriela, across from Diana. Nula, who has been delayed a few seconds writing two or three quick symbols on a white receipt pad, arrives after them with the bottle and shows it to the group.

  —In the arid lands at the base of the mountains, a chardonnay will become ponderous and will lose its fruit and lightness. A slightly more acidic grape holds up better. Ladies and gentlemen, he says, raising the bottle, Sauvignon Blanc from Mendoza! On the house.

  And he starts to serve, expertly, carefully, a s
mall amount of wine in each glass. Violeta reaches for the olives and Nula stops short and shouts:

  —No! Wait till after you’ve tried the wine.

  And when he finishes serving, before he sits down at the end of the table opposite to Tomatis, he raises a glass and gestures for a toast. The rest make a similar gesture, and Nula tries the wine, concentrating on the flavor so as to get the best description.

  —White flowers, Diana says.

  —And grapefruit, Violeta says.

  —The summer sun wasn’t able to over-sweeten it, Nula says. Clover. It’s my favorite.

  He sits down. Gabriela and Tomatis are taking a second sip, holding the wine on the tips of their tongues. Tomatis purses his lips and his mouth takes on a wrinkled and circular shape resembling a chicken’s asshole. Satisfied, with his glass elevated, Nula looks around at the group, and then, leaning toward his wife, passes the back of his free hand over her cheek. Gabriela, for whom all that rhetoric (not without irony in the present case, of course) is slightly nauseating, notices Nula’s gesture and is pleasantly surprised: she didn’t expect that kind of spontaneous expression from the person whom, after the conversation they had between their cars this afternoon, and because of certain unmistakable looks that betrayed excessive confidence in his seductive powers, she considers the world champion of pretension. The (incredibly beautiful) Diana, meanwhile, having inspired immediate sympathy in Gabriela, seems to improve, transitively she supposes, her image of Nula, and even Nula himself. And in fact, all rhetoric aside, the wine is exquisite, and when she sees Violeta pick up an olive with a toothpick, she thinks that Nula’s insistence that she not eat one before tasting the wine wasn’t completely impertinent. Gabriela is hungry, and as she waits for something more substantial—this place serves, among other things, some delicious cheese empanadas and a very good prosciutto—she thinks a few olives wouldn’t be a bad idea. But how to begin, with the green or the black ones? Violeta took a green one, left the pit in the ashtray, and now she’s taking a black one. For Gabriela, the mixture of green and black olives in the dish constitutes a chaotic situation, and it befits a rational being to introduce order among the chaos: this is what Violeta appears to have done, unless she was choosing randomly with the toothpick. What’s more likely is that she has some reason for choosing as she did. Before serving herself, Gabriela decides to wait for Violeta to pick a third olive—it’s a green one—and decides to do likewise, rationalizing her selection in this way: the black ones tend to be stronger than the green ones, which means that it makes sense to eat a green one first, in order to taste it better, followed by a black one, whose stronger flavor will saturate the palate. The problem comes with alternating back for the second green olive, whose flavor would be neutralized by the persistence of the black one’s much stronger flavor. Maybe, Gabriela thinks, plucking a green olive and bringing it to her mouth, the proper method consists of eating three or four green ones in a row and then switching to black. And when she bites into the smooth pulp of the green olive, she decides that this is the method she’ll use from here on out.

  Suddenly, raising a glass and holding it motionless in the air, in a parodically solemn voice, Tomatis recites:

  If the drug called Day is the one you turn to

  know that the people you’ll buy from here

  forget to mention the thing to fear

  which, in the end, is that it’s sure to kill you

  The others laugh, nodding their heads, and Violeta, leaning toward him, congratulates him with a kiss on the cheek.

  —Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate, Soldi quotes with a smile, as though they were in an improvised musical dialogue, looking sidelong at Tomatis to see what his reaction will be. And, bringing the glass of wine to his lips, he takes a long, meditative sip.

  —The idea is copied, and ruined, by the way, from the thirteenth sonnet to Orpheus, Tomatis says, discarding, expeditiously, Mario Brando’s verse, and with an air of having countered, many times, in the same way, Soldi’s typical provocations. And after having simulated gratification (the former) and categorical triumph (the latter) the two look at each other conspiratorially, celebrating what technically speaking would be called an inside joke.

  In fact, Soldi is trying, in a very direct way, to provoke Tomatis into talking about Mario Brando. Soldi knows that the subject is unpleasant for him, and Tomatis avoids it if possible or simply, with impatient skepticism or even ostentatious disdain, rejects it altogether. But in general even a minor incident, a phrase that might contradict his intransigent opinion of the person and craft of Brando, an aesthetic or moral judgment, a poorly told anecdote or an ambiguous estimation of the man, and so on, would be enough, notwithstanding his sworn silence and indifference, meant to ignore him into disappearance from the universe of opinion, to set Tomatis off on an interminable monologue from which Soldi, who’s already heard it several times, draws fresh pleasure every time he hears it, not to mention the fact that new information which could be useful to the investigation always comes up. But Tomatis, with a satisfied smile, declares:

  —The second bottle is on me, along with the appetizers that, I hope, will add to the experience. Speaking of which, Turk, the salamis—beautiful! My sister couldn’t believe how good they were.

  —Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature, Nula says.

  —Now your Phoenician soul is coming out. I was thinking your joke was designed to brighten our passage, but it turns out that it was just a publicity ruse meant to exploit me as a sandwich board, Tomatis says.

  —What joke, che, what joke? Violeta says.

  —I found him standing on a corner, so I offered to take him downtown, Nula tries to say, but Violeta interrupts him.

  —Don’t tell me he made that joke about the bus that was too full, she says. He told me that one day when I was still engaged to my first husband and started following me around everywhere expecting me to sleep with him.

  —I had to wait years for it, Tomatis says.

  —And the one about Propp, did he ever tell you that? Violeta says.

  —Yes, Gabriela and Soldi say in unison, but Diana and Nula, with inquisitive expressions, wait for someone to tell them.

  —Vladimir Propp invented the structural analysis of folk tales. Every plot element, shared among the stories, he argued, could be reduced to their function, starting from an initial situation (for instance, a king and his three daughters), which is represented with the Greek letter alpha, a sequence of variations follow, each of which represents a function: for instance, the daughters go out for a walk (function β3) and they stay longer than they should in the garden (∂1); a dragon kidnaps them (A1); the king calls for help (B1) and three heroes depart in search of them (C↑, to indicate the departure); combat with and death of the dragon (M1–Y1); liberation of the girls (K1); return (↓); and compensation (W3), Soldi recites, pretending to be exhausted when he finishes. The limited variable set, he continues, allows us to abbreviate every combination to an abstract scheme. Tomatis says that in Germany, where modern life is incredibly hectic and time is money, parents are too busy to read their children a story before putting them to bed, so they recite one of Propp’s formulas instead. And the German children, who are very intelligent, like them a lot. Nula, don’t forget this one tonight: alpha beta three capital A, A to the first B to the first up-arrow. H to the first dash Y one K four down-arrow W cubed. Your kids will love it.

  —Fantastic, Diana says. Like a numbered joke.

  —Propp may have been inspired by them, Tomatis says. And, standing up, he adds, Before the next bottle arrives, I beg your leave to relieve myself of the first.

  He makes a gesture to the waiter, who is behind the register, that consists of pointing at the table and spinning his finger, and then, passing behind Nula, opens a door and turns on a light in the next room, illuminating the abandoned cinema whose bar Amigos del Vino rents out to use as their promotional location. The glass doors that le
ad to the street are shut, as are those that would lead him to the theater itself, and the staircase that once led to the mezzanine is blocked by several rows of stacked-up chairs. On the opposite wall stands the ticket window, intact, but the ceiling lights, which Tomatis has just turned on, don’t allow him to see what’s behind the glass. The bathrooms are to the right of the door, contiguous with the bar. Sometimes, during the intermission, when he was a teenager, Tomatis remembers, when he went to the bathroom to piss, if he was alone, he’d try to listen to the conversations and the sounds that came from the women’s room, convinced that, because they came from an intimate place, they were sure to be exciting. After pissing, and after looking around to make sure no one is coming in to catch him enjoying that humiliating pleasure, he farts, and then goes back out to the hall, but rather than returning to the bar he approaches the theater doors and, through the circular window, like the eye of an ox, in the center of the upholstered surface—in the fifties, when it opened, it was a luxury theater—he tries to see, through the dust that covers it, the dark interior of the large theater, hoping to hear or perhaps see, lingering in the darkness, the oversized, magnetic ghosts, black and white or in color, the simulacra of life that, night after night, were turned on and shuffled for a couple of hours across the bright screen, and then suddenly turned off, deposited in a circular metal container until someone decided to pull them out again to resume their repetitive, mechanical lives.