La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Rather than going straight to his seat when he enters the bar, Tomatis leans in toward Soldi and resting his hands on his shoulders informs him, in a weary and patient tone:

  —By August of 1945, Brando was an avant-garde poet, but in April of that same year, as you can verify in the archives of La Región, he was still imitating Amado Nervo.

  And because the waiter is standing with the bottle, waiting for him to taste it, he gestures for him to pour a drink, then lifts the glass and drinks it, holding it a while in his mouth and pursing his lips into a wrinkled circle again, and after a few seconds declares:

  —Perfect.

  Violeta and Soldi exchange a quick smile: they can already see that the bird will enter the cage. The waiter serves another round of wine and puts the bottle in a bucket of ice—the bucket, which sits on the counter and can hold two more bottles, was a promotional gift from a champagne brand—and then picks up a small plate of salami, one of prosciutto, and another of bread slices, all of which were waiting next to the bucket, and distributes them around the table. The place is so narrow that, standing next to Tomatis, he can pick things up from the bar and place them on the table without moving his legs, leaning to the left and to the right with professional elasticity in order to carry out the task. When his eyes meet the waiter’s, Nula, tapping his index finger and thumb, indicating a certain size—which is to say, of the cheese empanadas—he asks the waiter, with a mundane look of course, to bring some, to which the waiter responds with a nod.

  —Mario Brando, the biggest fraud ever produced by this fucking city, Tomatis announces with a sententious air, after which he grabs a piece of prosciutto with a toothpick and brings it to his mouth. And not only when it came to literature, he continues. Even his own father, who was a friend of Washington’s, detested him. He was so cheap that when he organized the dinners for the precisionists he’d arrange beforehand with the owner of the restaurant not to charge him his share, arguing, rightly, that thanks to him every Thursday night there was a table with fifteen or twenty people there. And he was the one who profited, despite the fact that many of his disciples were dirt poor. And even though he was a millionaire, in ’56, during the Revolución Libertadora, they forced him out of the government because he was a crook. Gutiérrez should know about that. One thing to note: there were no communists or open homosexuals or Jews among the precisionists. You, Turk, wouldn’t have been accepted, he says to Nula.

  —Me neither, Diana says, but for different reasons.

  —I wouldn’t join a literary movement that would have me as a member, Nula says, adapting the quote to the circumstances.

  —And on top of that, Tomatis says, he was a dictator. He terrorized his disciples, humiliated them in public, and treated them like servants, and anyone who tried to leave the movement he’d prevent, by any means necessary, from publishing in the papers and magazines where he had influence, and on several occasions he got someone fired from their job. His literary talent was mediocre, though, I admit, he had genius for machination, too much, possibly, relative to his pedestrian motives: money, though he’d already inherited plenty from his father, social status, and minor literary recognition. Despite his time as a cultural attaché in Rome and his travels through Europe, he was a bumpkin. Dante was his principal reference, and, because he came from Italians, he thought he had exclusive rights to him. He once wrote an article called “Dante and the little country”—it was published in the literary supplement—where he described Dante’s relationship to Florence, and which in reality was just a comparison to himself, and as such lowered Dante to the level of a noteworthy provincial. According to Washington, when he retired from the pasta factory the elder Brando started writing literary essays about realism that were a thousand times more interesting than his son’s articles.

  —That’s all true, but he does have some good sonnets, Soldi says.

  Tomatis’s eyes burn for a fraction of a second, but immediately an ironic smile forms on his lips, his eyelids narrow, and his head shakes slightly.

  —You’re trying to get me going, Pinocchio, he says, with a solemn and threatening voice.

  —He already did, Violeta says.

  And everyone sitting around the table, including Tomatis, starts laughing and takes advantage of the moment to take a drink of wine and grab a piece of meat or an olive (Gabriela now opts for two green ones followed by a black one). Putting his glass back on the table, Tomatis thinks for a moment before he continues. And, finally, he says:

  —Yes, maybe he had two or three sonnets that weren’t completely terrible. But none of those were precisionist. When he wrote more or less decently it was in the style of his worst enemies, the neoclassical poets gathered around the magazine Espiga. Brando insulted them publicly while he secretly imitated them, and meanwhile he imposed his ridiculous aesthetic, precisionism, on his disciples, who weren’t allowed to publish a word without his say so.

  Brando called himself an experimentalist, Tomatis continues, but was a plain-faced bourgeoisie. According to Tomatis, he lived and thought like a bourgeoisie. He married the daughter of an ultra-Catholic conservative general, as opportunistic as himself, who changed his political position with every changing government or circumstance. Brando claimed he had combined poetry and science, but his values and his lifestyle were as traditionally bourgeois as they get: he raised his daughters Catholic, and when they grew up he married them off to navy officers. According to Tomatis, he never went to church more than his social obligations demanded, but his wife and daughter attended the fashionable eleven o’clock mass every Sunday. His brother-in-law, according to Tomatis, was also in the military, and, like his father, gained the rank of general. Starting in the sixties, he’d often visit North American instructors in Panama, in Washington, at the School of the Americas. Because his entire career transpired in the shadow of General Negri, the celebrated torturer, he’d been given the nickname, even in certain military circles, of secondary anticommunist, in reference also to his subdued personality, a possible side-effect of his alcoholism. And, therefore, Tomatis says, because of all of this, he’d once been forced to ask Brando for a favor. Tomatis is quiet for a few seconds, remembering, reflecting maybe. Soldi’s, Violeta’s, and the others’ expressions have also turned solemn. Gabriela lowers her head, possibly so as not to have to look anyone in the eyes, or possibly in order to listen better to what she’s actually heard many times already, from Tomatis, from her parents, or old friends that Tomatis and her parents had in common: the disappearance of El Gato Garay, Tomatis’s friend and the twin brother of Pichón, and Elisa, his lover for several years. She was more or less separated from her husband, who knew about the affair. And though she didn’t live with Gato all the time, she would spend her weekends with him, and sometimes, when she wasn’t busy with the children, whole weeks. El Gato spent practically all his time at the beach house in Rincón that had once been the Garay family’s weekend retreat. El Gato lived on almost nothing, odd jobs from friends mostly, enough for food, for drinks, and for tobacco. He left the town less and less frequently; it was extremely strange to see him in the city. When Elisa visited him, her black car would be parked for days without moving, gathering sandy dust. Every so often they’d walk through the town on their way to the grocery or to the butcher shop, otherwise they were always in the white house, which was starting to fall apart, or in the rear courtyard, which could’ve been cleaned more regularly. They were an unusual couple, polite but not very demonstrative, and at that time being even slightly different from the people around you who put you in danger for your life. (Someone once joked that they were kidnapped because they didn’t have a television.)

  Simone, a friend of Gato’s who ran an ad agency from which he gave him some work from home every so often, started to worry because Gato, who was usually punctual, was late handing in a small job he was doing, and he decided to go to Rincón (the house didn’t have a phone) to see what was up. Simone says that when he arrived everyt
hing seemed normal. Elisa’s black car, covered in sandy dust, was parked out front, the house was quiet, and the gate was shut. Simone opened the gate, clapped several times, crossed the rear courtyard, the hall, and, opening the screen door to the kitchen, knocked on the door itself. No one answered, and he was about to leave but he tried the handle and the door opened. When he was inside, a nauseating odor stopped him, and he was about to turn around when he saw a piece of raw meat rotting on a wooden cutting board on the stove. Next to the cutting board there was a large kitchen knife and an unopened packet of salt. The kitchen was clean and neat. Simone opened the fridge, in which he found a few bottles of white wine, some seltzer, and several tomatoes. Simone squeezed a tomato to see if it was rotten too, but though it felt a bit soft, he couldn’t tell how long it had been there. Then Simone walked through the house, room by room, inspected the bathroom, and, closing the double kitchen door behind him, walked doubtfully through the rear courtyard until, suddenly, he realized what might have happened. He walked out to the street and after checking that it was empty got in his car and returned to the city. He shut himself in his house for several hours without knowing what to do, and when he returned to the agency he called Tomatis.

  Ten minutes later, Tomatis was at the office. At the back, Simone had a small closet where he prepared coffee and stored various things, cardboard sheets, old panels, cleaning supplies. After closing the door, he told Tomatis what he’d seen, and Tomatis was about to bolt out to find Héctor, Elisa’s husband, but Simone told him to stay a while because such a brief and agitated visit might awaken the suspicions of the guys that worked with him. So they drank a coffee and then walked out, still talking, to the main room, and after a few more minutes, Tomatis left. It was a difficult time for him: his marriage was falling apart, his mother was dying, Washington had died the year before, the whole world was collapsing around him, and he got drunk almost every night (soon enough, it would be every day, too).

  Héctor and Tomatis drove to the house in Rincón and inspected everything: the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, the courtyard, without finding a single sign of violence, of alarm, of sudden flight, nothing. All the clothes were in the closets and the bed was made. In the kitchen they found an uneaten loaf of homemade bread wrapped in a plastic bag. Except for the dust that had gathered over the past few days, the house was clean, in order. The paper basket next to the table where El Gato usually worked was empty, and they found the advertising copy that Simone had given him to correct in two short stacks on the table: a taller one, on the right, with the pages already corrected in red pen, and the other, shorter, on the left, which proved, according to Simone, that Gato had been working on them, but all the red pens he used were in the white ceramic jar where he usually kept them. Because El Gato was very organized, there was nothing mysterious about any of that. The rotten piece of meat—it must’ve been on the board, on the stove, for five or six days—suggested that if something out of the ordinary had happened, it must’ve been around dinner time: often, when they were together, Elisa and Gato skipped lunch and cooked for dinner, which was always around nine. Tomatis and Héctor guessed that as she was preparing to cook, sometime around eight, Elisa had taken the meat from the fridge, planning to use the knife to remove the fat, while El Gato kept working a while longer on the ad copy, and suddenly, at some point, something happened—probably just as Elisa was putting the cutting board on the stove—that caused him to put the pen back in the ceramic jar, and, leaving the two piles of paper on the table, he got up and went through the kitchen to the rear courtyard, where visitors and strangers usually entered, clapping their hands to announce themselves, as Simone had done when he went to check on him. In all likelihood, El Gato got up calmly because the chair was in its usual position against the table, though someone else might have put it back later. It was difficult to imagine what might have happened; no matter how much they tried, Héctor and Tomatis couldn’t reach a single conclusion. They’d passed the time of spectacular kidnappings, meant to terrorize the neighborhood, when they’d arrive at dawn, seal off several blocks with sirens, police cars, military trucks, heavy weapons, and sometimes even helicopters, and they’d take not only the whole family or a good part of it, sometimes leaving one person shot dead in the same bed he’d been sleeping in when they found him, but also taking the furniture, the television, the fridge, every object of value they could find, and destroying anything they didn’t find useful. Now, the operatives, as they were called, were much more discreet. One morning, someone had watched from their balcony as they kidnapped a young man who was walking calmly down the sidewalk, not far from the center: a car had pulled up to the curb with the engine still running and three hooded men jumped out onto the sidewalk, pushing and hitting him, and shoved him into back seat, on the floor; two got in the back with him and the third got in the front, next to the driver. The car accelerated, pulled away quickly, and a few meters ahead turned at the first corner and disappeared forever. Because there was no one in the street, the witness thinks that if he hadn’t been on his balcony, no one would have seen what had happened. Of course this witness wouldn’t be crazy enough to report it to the police: just as the kidnapped boy (who was a more or less familiar face in the neighborhood) was never heard from again, no one would ever again see the witness were he to report the kidnapping.

  Maybe she’d heard someone clapping in the rear courtyard, and Elisa, leaving the knife and the meat on the stove, had gone outside to see who it was. It was highly unusual for anyone, especially in winter, to show up at that time—or, in fact, at any time: they lived in their own world, self-sufficient and unaware, a shadowy, inexplicable place that almost no one, not even their best friends, approached. And El Gato would’ve heard the clapping, and, probably surprised, waited a moment for Elisa to come tell him who it was. Elisa would’ve turned on the outside light in the hall, and, opening the doors to the kitchen, the door itself and then the metal screen outside, would’ve gone outside to the courtyard, toward the gate. El Gato, worried that she was taking so long, would’ve placed the red pen back in the ceramic jar and walked out to the rear courtyard. All of this Héctor and Tomatis could easily imagine; the rest, ungraspable, escaped them. Something had happened in the darkness of the street, alongside the beach, that would deprive them of Elisa and Gato forever.

  In town, nobody knew anything; nobody had seen or heard anything, no disturbance, no suspicious movement, no shouting, nothing. At the station they listened to them politely, even diligently; the new captain—the previous one had been killed a few years before, and the station was no longer such a dangerous place—took their report seriously and started making inquiries, but after forty-eight hours the investigation hadn’t turned up a single lead or a single witness or achieved a single result. Héctor and Tomatis decided to go to police headquarters, to the courthouse, and to the federal police offices in the city. But they didn’t learn anything definitive there either. In the best cases they received evasive responses, and in the worst, veiled threats. They knew that if Elisa and El Gato had in fact been kidnapped they had to act quickly; the longer they delayed the less chance there was that they’d ever be seen again. Ultimately, a kidnapping was the only plausible theory, because it was more than obvious that they hadn’t fled, that there hadn’t been an accident—the car was still parked out front when Simone discovered their disappearance, and Héctor, who had another key, drove it back to the city—not a car accident or any other kind: they never went canoeing or walking through town, where they were never seen except when they were out shopping. So Héctor and Tomatis decided to file a report at the federal police station knowing that the people who took the report were convinced from the beginning that it was a waste of time, that if Elisa and El Gato had really been kidnapped by the army or the police their simulacra of legal action wouldn’t produce a single result. They did everything they could, and because Héctor had a verbal altercation with an army official, fearing that he’d get arres
ted or worse—at that time, anything was possible—Tomatis calmed him down, took him home, and asked him not to get involved any more. Another possibility had occurred to him, a way to find out something or, if they had been kidnapped by the military, to obtain their release. Héctor accepted: in the end, there wasn’t anything left to do.

  The possibility that Tomatis was thinking of was to speak to Mario Brando, whom he knew was married to the daughter of a general and whose brother-in-law was General Ponce, the right arm of General Negri, captain of the military district, whom everyone knew was directly responsible for all clandestine activity in the area, every kidnapping, every assassination, every raid, and every seizure. It was said that Negri liked to participate, personally, in the bloodiest and most sordid activities, in solidarity with the troops, a rumor that he often bragged about. He’d said publicly several times that, to strip the tree of subversion to its roots one has to dig broadly and deeply, and he was prepared to clear every inch of ground down to the last blade of grass in order to complete his task.

  Brando and Tomatis had detested each other for years, but their interactions maintained a veneer of civility. Brando hated Washington and all his friends, among whom Tomatis was one of the closest. Tomatis was a long-time editor of La Región’s literary supplement, where neither he nor his friends hardly ever published, and Brando, who was an assiduous contributor, couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him. Tomatis was obligated to read his submissions before sending them to the print shop, and sometimes even when the proofs arrived, if there wasn’t anyone else there to read them, and he felt a malevolent glee publishing them because they seemed to make plain their author’s mediocrity, not realizing that the public to which they were directed may not have had the capacity to perceive it. Ever since he’d first heard of him, when he was seventeen or eighteen, Tomatis had considered Brando an impostor: to him, his bourgeois lifestyle and his avant-garde pretensions seemed irreconcilable, not to mention the happy accident, Tomatis thought, that his beloved precisionism attempted to combine poetry with science, the only intellectual activity that the comfortable bourgeoisie respected, because it was a way to make money, to increase their longevity, and to substitute a salaried worker for a cheaper machine. Tomatis and Brando lived in different worlds: they had different readers, different relationships with institutions, with enemies, and with allies, both literary and political. And while they moved in different circles and their ways of conceiving and practicing the literary profession were mutually opposed, there were a series of common spaces—the literary supplement of La Región, for instance—where inevitably, however much they ignored each other the rest of the time, like fragments of expanding material, their trajectories pushing them always farther apart, sometimes relatively, in the present moment, trying to avoid a collision, trying as much as possible, with icy deference, to disregard the other, their paths crossed.