La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Finally they relaxed and sat down to smoke a cigarette. El Bebe remained motionless. He generally spoke very little, especially in a crowd, but he sang very well, and at parties, with the family or in town, he’d sometimes sing in public. Before the new year they’d held a tango-singing contest to celebrate the anniversary of the foundation of the town, and even though El Bebe was the only child among the fourteen contestants he’d come in second; that external contrast, between private shyness and public exhibitionism, intrigued Nula. After a while, Benito suggested to La Cuca that they do some hunting a bit farther away and told Nula and El Bebe not to move from that spot so they didn’t risk catching a stray bullet by accident, and not to let Rosilla follow them, a superfluous assignment because Rosilla, still disoriented by the earlier confusion, needed time to put her thoughts in order, as they say. They’d given her that mare’s name, Rosilla, because her coat alternated between white and brick-colored spots, and around her eyes, on her snout, and everywhere else that her hair thinned out, the white skin faded to bright red—she was an intelligent and frisky red head, and Benito always took her along when he went hunting. For a while, Nula could hear the loud snapping that, as they crossed the cornfield, La Cuca and Benito produced as they separated the corn plants or brushed past them. After a while the sound vanished, and two or three minutes later a shot rang out, reverberated, followed almost immediately by another—one from each barrel of the shotgun—and after echoing a few seconds in their consciousness the sound and its echo passed to their memory, where it continued a while longer, while the external silence, interrupted only by organic creaks, the whisper of corn stalks, the passing cry of a bird, closed around them once again.

  La India, on the other side of the desk in the bookstore across from the courthouse, recalling the phone call from El Bebe, who’d ordered a set of law books from the town because he’d taken over the notary practice after his father’s death, suddenly caused the memories of that summer day to resurface, maybe seventeen years before, when they biked with La Cuca and Benito to his father’s farm, to spend the day there, and during the siesta, because his parents had to go to San Genaro on some family business, the four of them had gone hunting in the fields, or at least that’s the pretext Benito had come up with, because soon after they entered the cornfield, after joking and wrestling a little with La Cuca, he’d said they were going away to shoot off a few rounds, which immediately awoke Nula’s skepticism since, curiously, they didn’t take Rosilla, who, in fact, was somewhat confused to see them go, and when she tried to follow them Benito frightened her off by stomping on the ground a few times, the last time in such an exaggerated way, purely as a gag, that his sandal flew off. After they’d disappeared into the corn and the noisy rustling of the leaves and the cracking and the organic murmurs had become completely inaudible to Nula and El Bebe’s ears, Rosilla, her ears nervous and erect, apparently continued to receive signals from the direction in which Benito and La Cuca had been swallowed by the corn, and finally, just as she was about to calm down and was coming back to Nula and El Bebe, the two shotgun blasts rang out, with a couple of seconds interval between the first and the second, and when she heard them Rosilla turned back in the direction of the shots, struggling and moaning, running back and forth in such a nervous way that Nula and El Bebe laughed, seeing her so worked up in such a tight space, because she didn’t dare pass the line, between two rows of corn, where Benito’s sandal had threateningly struck the ground several times. Eventually she calmed down again and came over to them, looking every so often, without apparent anxiety, into the vague point in space, invisible from where they were, from which, every so often, unmistakable signals reached her, more real than for the two boys lying on the ground, who in their sensory realm could only rely on their memories to verify the persistent and real existence of those evaporated sounds.

  Nula is amazed by the fact that, in the middle of an energetic and friendly conversation with his mother, who’s only separated from him by the width of the desk, at the same time, behind his forehead, through the silent flux, like in a dream, of memories that quickly and sharply condense events that in the cloudy material world would take hours, days, weeks, or centuries to complete, are now taking place in the bright space of his mind because of a telephone call that La India has just told him about, things that had once been real, pieces of his own experience that he’d completely forgotten. And he remembers: Rosilla had sat down between himself and El Bebe, lying on the ground, unsure what to do, waiting for Benito and La Cuca to come back. El Bebe, in fact, was always happy to be left alone with Nula, and as soon as the other two disappeared his expression lost the sort of hypnosis he’d been under recently and took on a contained exuberance that Nula, who knew him well and who actually loved him a lot, but with a certain condescension that only just now, as he remembers it, is he aware of, knew was the result of their being alone together. El Bebe’s unconditional devotion to his person, which was at times somewhat suffocating and at other times amusing, could also bring out in him a tyranny that, although mitigated, caused him to permit himself a certain self-regard and even to exaggerate the qualities he considered valuable in order to intensify the admiration he received; he liked to think of himself as admirable, and in order to feel the gratification of that sensation he did whatever he could to increase this in El Bebe. It was because of this that, slightly out of curiosity and probably also to show off an admirable quality, and especially because Benito and La Cuca had left behind them and continued to disseminate over the cornfield, over the countryside, over the summer afternoon, and possibly over the whole universe, a sexual fluid whose existence the adults, Nula believed, were unaware of, and which impregnated everything and transformed them into something different from what they were ordinarily—possibly because of all of this—Nula remembered that once in a while his gang of smokers and tellers of off-color jokes, who boasted uncommon sexual experience, would grab a hen or a dog or some other animal and examine its anal and vaginal private orifices, and if it was a male they’d fondle its penis or its anus or its testicles with a stick. Grabbing a stick from the ground he pinned Rosilla and started poking her vagina, softly, in order not to harm her or scare her. At first she tried halfheartedly to escape, but Nula pushed his forearm against her back to hold her down, and half lying on the ground, continued slowly poking, gently, the rose-colored crevice that, like the other bald terminuses, because of their bright red color, had earned her that mare’s name, an attribution which no doubt was at first ironic, given that horses are named by the color of their hair. Rosilla froze, her head twisted slightly up and back, possibly so as to concentrate better on the sensations and, if not to make sense of them, at least to know their cause, to explain to herself why, in an unprecedented and abrupt way, she was receiving the untimely transmission of what, ruthless yet familiar, formed part of the cyclical repertory of her instincts, whose coming and going was the weave of her pulsating presence, assemblage of intricate but precise organs from which emanated, like shadowy exhalations, confused emotions and ritual behaviors that could sometimes be confused for intelligence. Absorbed in this activity, Nula completely forgot about El Bebe until a sort of accelerated murmur, which El Bebe had been emitting for several seconds, distracted him, and when he looked up, in surprise, the stick fell to the ground (Rosilla took the opportunity to run away and, standing apart from them, between alarmed and confused, forgot their presence): El Bebe, intensely pale, had turned onto his knees and was hitting the backs of his fingers on one hand against the curled-up palm of the other, marking the rhythm with an unintelligible mutter. His eyes were narrowed and his blonde hair shook as his head bobbed in rhythm with his hands and the murmur; two drops of white saliva had formed at the edges of his mouth—he’d remembered this another time, about five years before, when Riera had jumped out of the car, downtown, to treat a boy who’d had an epileptic seizure. Nula, frightened, tried to understand what El Bebe was muttering, something which at that m
oment had the tone of both a command and a plea: mifact, mifact, mifact, mifact! and suddenly, thanks to a sort of hiccup that interrupted the litany, the only word, or two words, in fact, that it consisted of—fuck me—were instantly and astonishingly clear, like the moment when the endless repetition of a mantra leads, suddenly, to enlightenment—except at this moment he, Nula, was passing from a summer siesta within the green stalks of a cornfield, where patches of light filtered in, bleaching the dark earth, to a new world, one of confusion, of desire, and of guilt, and from which all certainty, in that instant, had been abolished. Without opening his eyes, as if he were alone in the field, El Bebe pulled down his pants and threw himself face down on the ground, and Nula, after hesitating a few seconds, his mouth dry, half open, pulled down his own pants and threw himself on top of him; his prick, hard, its round tip practically transparent, like a bluish red ball of glass, still half covered by his foreskin, sank into his buttocks, flattening against them, and Nula rubbed himself against El Bebe, not feeling any pleasure or knowing exactly what he was doing, while Rosilla, who must’ve been absorbing the maximum dose of unaccustomed experience, started jumping and running around them, barking more and more furiously, until Nula stood up and grabbed his pants, but he saw, with fear, that El Bebe’s buttocks were slightly bloodstained. El Bebe, meanwhile, calm and quiet again, pulled up his pants and sat back down on the ground, looking at Nula with the same admiring and beatific smile; but now Nula was the one in a state of intense agitation: it was as though El Bebe, in offering himself, had transmitted the agent of his frenzy to him, unburdening himself of this agent just as quickly, in order to recover his normal state as soon as possible. Benito and La Cuca showed up soon afterward. They must not have been far away, because the dog’s insistent barking was what had caused them to hurry back, and they must’ve had their own cause for shame (Nula thinks now, remembering them) because they accepted the vague and practically absurd explanations for Rosilla’s barking that El Bebe, in complete control over himself, had offered them without the slightest hesitation. Only he, Nula, seemed altered, and was mortified, realizing that when El Bebe got home his parents would see the blood stains and would make him confess. He was panicked for the next two or three days, never leaving his grandfather’s house, and every time someone knocked on the door to the house Nula was sure that it was El Bebe’s parents, looking for answers. The idea that his grandfather would find out about what had happened was terrifying and, more so, shameful. Finally, on the third day, he had to run an errand for his aunt Laila, on the other side of the station, and when he was walking into the pharmacy he bumped into El Bebe and his mother just as they were walking out. His mother not only didn’t accuse him of anything but actually bent over and kissed him and invited him over for some milk that afternoon. And El Bebe seemed happy about the encounter. The day before he’d been in Rosario, where he’d gotten fitted for his first communion.

  —El Bebe, Nula says, smiling softly and shaking his head theatrically.

  —He’s a shark for business, apparently, La India says.

  —It wouldn’t surprise me, Nula says.

  It was already after twelve, but La India, comfortable in her chair behind her desk and in her conversation with Nula, hadn’t yet decided to close the store. Her two employees—although she isn’t a rabid feminist, La India prefers, on principle, to give priority to hiring women—have already left for lunch. The extraordinarily bright April morning is visible in the street, through the window, and the light reflects, on the opposite sidewalk, off the side of the courthouse building. There’s not a single cloud in the sky. As he left his house, around ten, to visit a client at the other end of the city, in Guadalupe, before coming to the bookstore, Nula stood for a moment, measuring the temperature, and finally decided to go back inside and change, leaving behind the jacket and putting on lighter pants than he’d worn the day before. When he saw the cloudless sky, a vivid memory returned of the static, massive, white clouds that he’d seen the day before on his way to Rincón to deliver Gutiérrez’s wine order so that the bottles could rest a while in case he decided to serve them on Sunday; he’d run into Soldi and Gabriela just as he was turning off the pavement onto the sandy road, and had talked with them a while, but when he arrived at Gutiérrez’s the woman who took care of the house told him that he’d gone for a walk in the countryside, and so he unloaded the wine, walked a while along the street, with no apparent goal, and then returned to the city. This morning, on his way to Guadalupe, in the porous and radiant ten o’clock light, he thought he could perceive the probably fleeting return of summer. It was still early when he finished with the client, so he’d decided to have a cup of coffee at the pastry shop on the lagoon, which, before one of the recent floods inundated the beach forever, when it was still crowded with people, had once been a fashionable place. He watched the water in the lagoon form ripples, still a milky beige, and in the silence of the bar, in which he’s the only customer and from which even the waiter has disappeared, into the back rooms or the rear courtyard, he’d started to think about Lucía, but also about Diana, with a remote sense of anguish, like a soldier returning from a pointless war. The sun, high at this point, rising, almost in front of him, from the east, warmed his face and covered the water, the distant vegetation on the opposite shore, the empty sky, with a golden shimmer. A few drops of sweat dampened his forehead and his upper lip, and his freshly shaved cheeks burned slightly. When he walked into the bookstore, La India looked at him a moment, and as he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, asked him, in a low voice so that the employees, who were still in the office, wouldn’t hear:

  —What’s wrong?

  Nula took his time before answering. He walked back around the desk and sat down opposite her.

  —My mother doesn’t love me, he said, smiling.

  —He who lives most, loves most, a lie, La India quotes, and taking, as usual, Nula’s appeal for affection (believing he needs the protection less than her eldest son), like the whim of a cynical fin de siècle dandy, as she’d once described him, in love with her verbal invention, and repeating it often, makes the gesture of symbolically washing her hands of him and goes on to tell him about the call she got from El Bebe.

  Law textbooks are stacked on the shelves, on the edges of the desk, on a table, and on the floor, in neat piles, or carefully displayed in cases or in unopened packages, or otherwise recently packaged, prepared to be sent to customers in towns or cities close to the capital. At random, Nula reads, silently, disinterestedly, the titles on the covers and the spines: A Treatise on the Law of Promissory Notes and Bills of Exchange, Handbook of the Argentine Constitution, Notarial Practice, International Public Law, Annotated Civil Code, National Law of Administrative Procedure, Civil and Commercial Prosecutorial Code of the Province. Shaking his head and sighing, Nula asks:

  —Is Calcagno’s Roman Law Course still sold?

  —There are more current books, but it’s still a reference. It’s in every bibliography, La India says. Why?

  —What made you want to sell such boring books? Nula says, as though he hadn’t heard the question, and the moment the words are out, although he’s looked away and therefore can’t see the look of displeasure on La India’s face, he knows that he’s just added cruelty to what was already a blunder. But when he meets La India’s eyes he sees only a vague, mocking irony, as though his mother hadn’t heard a thing. The brutal question that, without knowing why, takes shape in his mind every so often, but which never surfaces, nor in all likelihood will ever reach his lips, now occupies the bright space of his mind, tantalizing and insistent: What if it were us, his wife and his sons, who he was actually fed up with, and a heroic sacrifice was just a pretext for starting his successive escapes, first to politics, then to the underground, and finally to death? But instead of formulating it, despite its peremptory insistence—he loves La India too much to allow himself anything more than the occasional minor blunder—he smiles and thinks again that,
ever since he arrived at the bookstore, first with the memory of the cornfield and now with the question that sometimes rises from the blackness, tantalizing, insistently, in his conscience, his frontal bone has intercepted the width of the desk, the bright and calm space that separates him from his mother, taking, behind his forehead, the empirically measurable distance and multiplying it by infinity. Finally consenting to answer La India’s question, in the most cheerful tone he can muster, he says:

  —No reason. We sold it a lot at the kiosk. All I know about Roman law is the famous precept: Mater certa, pater semper incertus, and along with a deliberately atrocious pronunciation of the Latin phrase, Nula shakes his extended index finger in the air, threateningly and apodictically.