La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  And so Tomatis, playing, as they say, his last card, decided to go and see him. The possibility was dubious and, Tomatis thought, possibly dangerous. He was in the midst of the most miserable years of his life: the world was falling apart around him, his marriage was a shipwreck, and, every night, he tried to swim away from the wreckage, the misery, and the fury. He still had the strength to go to the paper, but soon he would stop that too, first for a short while, and eventually forever. And so he went to the publisher’s office and, without explaining his reasons, asked him to arrange a meeting with Brando, and when the publisher didn’t act surprised he figured he already knew what they were but chose to disregard them, less from politeness than from a sense of caution. Soon enough, the publisher called him over the internal system and told him that Brando would be waiting for him at his house in Guadalupe at eight. The speed of the response intrigued him. Had Brando also guessed what would make Tomatis would put aside his reticence and decide to speak with him, or had the publisher, with his talent for finding a compromise even in the most irreconcilably contradictory situations, mistakenly let something slip about the reasons for Tomatis’s visit, maybe suggesting, without specifying anything, that the paper was preparing a special supplement and that Tomatis wanted to ask him personally for a submission? For years, with the hatred and humiliation as poignant as ever (and even now, as he’s telling the story in the Amigos del Vino bar), Tomatis wondered how he could have been crazy enough to speak to Brando, but would immediately reconcile himself to the certainty that, because it was the last chance they had to see Elisa and Gato again, not trying to see him would have been even worse. And so at eight on the dot he was ringing the doorbell at the house of Brando.

  It was his father’s house, built in the twenties from the wealth of the pasta factory, two or three blocks from the beach. The well-kept house was on a corner, but withdrawn behind a garden that occupied at least a quarter of a block. After his father’s death, Brando had moved in. A light came on in the threshold and a uniformed servant opened the door, but rather than take him inside the house guided him through the trees to a sort of cubical pavilion topped with a semispherical cupola, constructed in an open space in the garden, and whose function Tomatis guessed immediately. It was Brando’s office, in which he’d built his amateur observatory: every so often La Región published an article or an interview in which Brando described his astronomical observations with such insight that Tomatis once commented that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo—not a festive, happy bunch in the least—must have been doubled over with laughter in their graves.

  The servant knocked, and immediately after hearing Brando’s voice, which was delayed a few seconds before reaching them, opened the door and lead him through. Brando was dressed in a wool dressing gown, but with an immaculate shirt and tie underneath. Tomatis had the sensation that he’d walked into a theater to see a play that was being performed just for him. He was leaning toward the telescope and maneuvering it with a single hand to find an optimum view, or a more exact framing, or adjusting it with slight movements to follow, at every moment, the regular path of the bodies that he was pretending to observe, so that with his free hand he could hold the edge of the dressing gown closed at his thighs to prevent it from opening too much because of the angle of his body, despite the fact that he had on excellent quality, carefully ironed pants beneath. He lingered a while in that position, not finding the perfect angle, or in all likelihood pretending not to, thereby forcing Tomatis to wait for him, whatever his reason for visiting, paying off, in this way, the first portion of the debt that each thought the other owed him, the accumulation of interests that their antipathy, suspicion, aesthetic and political differences, behavior, or the circles in which they respectively moved, the tradition of accumulated gossip, slander, satire, and rancor, on top of what each had written, and so on, transformed into legend by the passage of time. Seeing him with his eye glued to the telescope sight, Tomatis felt a violent sense of obscenity, of a slithering, contented perversion, as if Brando were spying on a naked woman, although that understandable perversion would’ve inevitably produced less revulsion than seeing him intrude, with his indecent gaze, upon the intimacy of the stars. Finally, Brando straightened up, walked over to him, and invited him to sit down, while he himself sat down at a desk chair, behind a desk that, Tomatis observed, was built a few centimeters above the visitors’ chairs, allowing him to look down on them and keep them in an imperceptible position of inferiority. For three or four minutes they exchanged pleasantries: it was obvious they didn’t have anything to say to each other. And then, at a certain point, in an overly abrupt way, Brando stopped talking and, widening his eyes, looked at Tomatis inquisitively, but when Tomatis started to talk, tripping over his words at first, Brando leaned back in his chair and stared at some vague spot in the room above them, frozen in that position except for his hands, which, held in front of his mouth, met silently at the fingertips, with the fingers extended, as he must have done at the law firm when he met a new client for the first time. Overcoming the revulsion, the shame, the humiliation—after leaving he practically ran to the first bar he found and drank his first gin, and though it was barely eight thirty, he spent the rest of the night, till the morning, going from bar to bar, drinking—Tomatis started telling him what had happened to Elisa and El Gato, all their fruitless inquiries and the official reports they’d made, adding that Elisa and Gato were completely inoffensive and apolitical and lived in their own world, which could have seemed strange from the outside and might be interpreted mistakenly by someone with dogmatic and suspicious inclinations. After they’d exhausted all the possibilities, and though their family and friends’ doubts were as strong as ever, Tomatis remembered that Brando had family in the military, and it occurred to him that they might obtain, though him, some help or information—Tomatis had thought, for instance, of General Ponce, his brother-in-law, which was why he’d called the publisher to ask for a meeting.

  —You should have called me directly, Brando said with an icy friendliness that carried a vague hint of reproach. But he fell silent again and sat waiting. In reality, Tomatis had already said everything.

  —A normal person, Tomatis says now, to the people listening to him at the table in the Amigos del Vino bar, though at least three of his five listeners, having heard the story many times and having thought about it often, know what he’s saying by heart. A normal person would have reacted from the first words, asking for details, making some gesture or showing some emotion, but he just sat there with his impassive, conventional posture of polite attention and good breeding.

  And when he finished speaking and the other’s attitude remained friendly and attentive the silence became so oppressive that Tomatis started over and stumbled through the story again, but rearranged, fragmented and rushed, knowing already that Brando not only would do nothing, but also had introduced between himself and his visitor a kind of invisible wall against which his words were ricocheting. Tomatis’s agitation was a mixture of incredulity and fury, but his story, although incongruent and superfluous, had to continue till the end because he also knew that the visit had to maintain a semblance of normalcy and that the slightest incident could be dangerous: if things went south, Brando wouldn’t hesitate to call his brother-in-law to tell him what had happened. And so, when he finished, and the unbearable silence that met the first version of his story had returned and Brando continued to sit for long seconds, frozen in his conventional pose, staring at a vague point somewhere near the ceiling, Tomatis froze too, waiting, and though he was boiling inside, he affected a calm and patient demeanor. After an interminable interval, and after giving him a strange look, severe yet momentary, that betrayed what, below his formality and stuffy bourgeois appearance, he was really thinking, Brando stood up. Suddenly, in a mundane and conventional tone, as though he hadn’t heard a single word that Tomatis had just said, he asked:

  —Do you want to see the moon through the telescope? It’s
very beautiful tonight.

  Trying to keep his voice from trembling, in the same tone, Tomatis responded:

  —Some other time. It’s getting late.

  —I’ll walk you out, then, Brando said.

  —No, no, Tomatis said. I know the way. Good bye.

  Brando didn’t respond, but as he was walking toward the door Tomatis could feel his gaze burning a hole in neck. When he was in the courtyard, in the translucent, frozen, winter night, he realized that, despite the cold air, he was sweating. The round and brilliant moon that was rising from the river illuminated the shadows between the trees and reflected off the grass around Brando’s observatory. In the street, he stood a moment on the corner, hesitating, and finally decided to walk toward the beach, hoping that one of the summer bars would still be open at this time of year. As he walked away, the interview with Brando seemed more and more incredible, more unreal, as though it had never happened, or as though he’d dreamed it, because in the normal world, where he’d been living up till that moment, it never could have; it had happened somewhere else, where the laws of the nightmare ruled. And so, because of the absurdity of the meeting, its reality, as he left Brando’s house in search of a bar near the beach, faded away. The only thing that remained, troubling him, was the strange look, severe yet momentary, that Brando had given him before he stood up from his chair.

  Brando died of cancer three years after that meeting, although tonight, as he’s recalling it in the wine bar, more than fifteen years after the moment he saw, sparking darkly, across Brando’s eyes, the flashing look continues, in his memory, to transmit its concealed, violent meaning, emerged suddenly from the most carefully protected corners of the external world, where, nevertheless, everyone’s singularity is made and unmade, estranging everyone from everyone else. That look, intact in the memory of the one who received it, though the eyes it came from have been irrecoverable dust for years, still says, You dare to come here trying to convince me that your disappeared friends are innocent, but I know you and I know every one of your associates, so I know in advance that they’re subversives, and furthermore, that all of you, with all your false modesty, which can’t hide the arrogance of your behavior and your opinions, are the very seeds of subversion. I have work, I’ve run magazines, I’ve been a diplomat and a minister, and on top of that I have one of the most powerful law firms in the province, and all of you, I’m sure of it, ignore my poetry and ridicule it when you’re together, I know you do, getting drunk with your divorcees and raising someone else’s children. Free verse is your pretext for hiding the fact that you’re incapable of measuring a hendecasyllable or using rhyme correctly. If your friends were taken, there was a reason for it, so don’t come here with some story about their innocence. If I were you, I’d watch my step: I still haven’t decided anything, but it wouldn’t take much for me to pick up the phone and describe this unspeakable visit to certain people who wouldn’t have any problem coming to find you at home one of these nights to give you once and for all what you deserve.

  FRIDAY

  THE WINE

  THAT DAY AND THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, AND FOR several years afterward, he asked himself whether adults realized that sex existed. It happened the summer before his father’s murder, just after he’d turned twelve. He was in a cornfield, inside a cornfield rather, during a siesta at the end of January, himself, Benito (his uncle Enzo’s nephew, whom Nula thought of as a cousin), La Cuca, and her little brother, El Bebe, a boy who was almost ten, boarded with the Jesuits in San Lorenzo, and who followed Nula everywhere when he spent his vacations in the town. His puppy-dog admiration amused Nula: El Bebe imitated everything about him, agreed with everything he said, and whenever they sat in a field or on the sidewalk outside his grandfather’s store or on the benches at the train station or alongside the swimming pool at the town club, and they fell silent, El Bebe stared at him, spellbound. That canine devotion often suffocated him, and, to rid himself of his slightly asphyxiating dependence and to rest, even though he did like him, he would lie and tell him that he had to go out to the fields with his grandfather or stay home and study for March. Obediently, El Bebe, who believed everything Nula said, resigned himself to not seeing Nula for a couple of days, time he took advantage of to go hunting in the country with other boys his age or slightly older, who smoked in secret, told off-color stories, and claimed a sophistication that Nula was sure he didn’t possess, although, to avoid anyone’s suspicions, he maintained an ambiguous silence every time the topic came up, hoping that the others would take it as implicit proof of his experience.

  They were inside the tall, green cornfield during a summer siesta, him, El Bebe, and Benito’s hunting dog, Rosilla, for the following reason: Benito, who was about seventeen, was secretly dating La Cuca, who was somewhat younger, and under the pretext of spending a day in the countryside, he’d invited Nula and El Bebe to bike to the farmhouse that was half a mile from the town, arranging beforehand with La Cuca that she’d be with them to make sure they didn’t get into too much trouble and that they got home before dark. Obviously no one had explained to Nula the way in which Benito and La Cuca had planned it, but he was aware that that’s how it was, that the outing with himself and El Bebe was the last thing on Benito’s mind, and that in any case he and El Bebe were able to take care of themselves, something which Benito and La Cuca were more than aware of, because, under the pretext of shooting off a few rounds a bit farther off, they’d left them alone in the cornfield for the last ten minutes. In fact, Nula had felt relieved when they’d left for a while: the conversation they’d been having all morning, full of innuendo, if somehow it seemed that Benito’s parents didn’t notice it, its childishness disgusted Nula, so much so that, to his experienced ear, the veiled allusions and the ostensibly unstated obscenity sounded obvious. Only to the adults, ignorant of sex, exiled in that melancholic world of domestic chores, of work, and of morals, did they pass unnoticed. Nula and his band of inveterate smokers and tellers of off-color tales, on the other hand, were like doctors of the law when it came to the matter: they knew every last thing about sex, which despite their sensitivity to its mysterious attraction apparently exempted them from practicing it, like the theologians who, utterly familiar with divinity and fascinated by the possibility of its existence, as a result of thinking about it exclusively, forget, in their remote and tenebrous sanctuary, to ever seek it out. Benito and La Cuca, meanwhile—at the time, Nula wouldn’t have been capable of thinking in these terms—were sexual monsters, two strange creatures that lurched in another dimension, separate from everyday places, made of off-color jokes and populated with ridiculous, monomaniacal, and grotesque characters, where the human beings, lost in muddled dramas and tangled in language, coexisted with the beasts that not only spoke but sometimes even had the last word, a dimension where priests had girlfriends or wives, grandmothers behaved like prostitutes, and the men, in their extreme credulity, let themselves be cuckolded by their wives in a blatant, scandalous way, a dimension where one spoke plainly about things, like semen and excrement, which adults were ignorant of. It’s not that Benito and La Cuca behaved this way, but it didn’t take much effort for Nula to translate their obvious allusions to the language of the stories. For instance, before leaving them alone under the pretext of shooting off a few rounds at a distance where the children wouldn’t be in danger, Benito had started talking about the corn with the obvious intention of causing La Cuca to prolong the misunderstanding and to degenerate into all kinds of semantic nuances, of associations, and even of gestures that apparently had nothing obscene about them but which seemed to really alter them, so much so that Benito’s voice turned hoarse and labored, and La Cuca’s manner, usually open and decisive, became hesitant and serious, bewildered and disconcerted. Benito insisted that the corn silk was smooth and pleasant to the touch, and then, compelling her to rub it, and pretending it was a joke, grabbed her wrist, trying to force her hand to grab the corn, and La Cuca, resisting sometimes wi
th more and sometimes with less conviction, would let him do it and then would try to pull her hand away, mixing protests with smiles, struggle with surrender, indignation with laughter. They’d made themselves red with excitement, with contained violence, and Rosilla, frenzied by what, with some reason, she must have thought was a joke, in which at times, judging by the nervousness of her bark, she must have intuited an uncontrollable seriousness, started to jump and chase around them. Nula watched them, more incredulous than disgusted, but El Bebe, sitting on the ground, motionless and serious, seemed to have fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then Benito pulled off an ear of corn and showed it to La Cuca after separating the silk and pinching it between his mouth and his nose, pursing his lips to sustain it, pretending it was a mustache, and when the ear was fully unwrapped, showing all its compact, tender, milky white grains, he tried, at all cost, to make La Cuca taste it, but she forced her mouth shut, squealing, laughing, while Benito, under the pretext of getting her to eat the corn, took the opportunity to rub his hands over her arms, her neck, her buttocks, her hips. Nula asked himself how it was possible that Benito’s parents didn’t realize what was happening, how the adults in general could be blind to everything that had to do with sex (though he still didn’t call it that), not realizing that Benito’s family not only wasn’t ignorant of it, but in fact were thrilled that Benito had chosen to fall in love with the notary’s daughter, and hoped that when Benito started agronomy classes in Rosario the following year, things might take a more formal turn than their adolescent holiday fling. But none of that happened: the following summer, before starting agronomy classes, Benito drowned one afternoon in the Carcarañá.