La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  —The constant specter of masculinity, La India says as she checks her watch.

  —Oh, don’t let me keep you; I’ll get up and leave right now, Nula says, obviously parodying an offended tone.

  —On the contrary, La India says. This is the happiest moment of my life. After this I’m retiring to a convent to reflect upon the blessing of having you as a son. But I thought you had a meeting at twelve thirty. Don’t forget that they’re my clients too and I don’t want you to spoil them for me.

  —My mother does love me, Nula says, and, looking at his watch, announces, But there’s still fifteen minutes left and it’s right next door.

  It’s true. La India had recommended some friends of hers, lawyers, cops, judges, and since it’s Friday and the courthouse closes for the weekend at noon, five of them had organized a group purchase at the law school, which is just a few meters away, on the same block as the bookstore. Nula expects to make a good sale—afterward, he plans to return home (maybe take some sun, which seems to be as hot as in November) before going back out, to the supercenter, where the Amigos del Vino promotional stand is set to open.

  —Mami, Nula says. On Sunday, Diana and I have a cookout in Rincón. Would you be able to tolerate your grandchildren for a whole day?

  —Of course I would, La India says. It’ll be nice to interact with people somewhat more mature than my own children.

  —I assume you’re not referring to me, Nula says, and standing up and walking around the desk, he leans toward her and kisses her forehead. You’re amazing, India, he says, and picks up his briefcase and turns toward the door.

  —All that show just to avoid telling me what’s wrong, La India says.

  —I swear if I knew what it was I’d tell you, Nula says, and without turning around he waves goodbye with his free hand and walks out to the sidewalk after closing the door behind him. Although the sidewalk is still shaded by the houses, the air feels very warm, in contrast to the cool atmosphere inside the bookstore. Across the street, meanwhile, on the courthouse side, the April light shimmers, pervasive, becomes once again summery over the last two or three days. Nula remembers, again, the sky the day before, in which bright white masses of clouds, their curvy edges clean and hard, floated, static, scattered across the blue sky. An unexpected nostalgia for the day before attacks him, and the idea of constant flux, of the becoming, is embodied in those clouds that existed and that, bit by bit, unseen by the eye or by the mind, transforming, scattering, stopped being clouds and disappeared without anyone knowing it. Now, the day before seems like an intimate possession that, suddenly, he’s been dispossessed of: because it’s still impregnated with fresh traces of sensation, of experience, he senses that it’s more his own than the totality of his past, knowing at the same time that, like a dead body, its deceitful presence disguises the immeasurable distance that separates the present moment from its obliterated precursors, the fossilized substance of the memories of the flesh that pulses, sees, hears, touches, feels, and breathes.

  Although it’s not yet twelve thirty when he enters the law school, three doors down, the five potential clients, and two more they’ve brought with them, are already there. They invite him into a small conference room with a large, oval table surrounded by numerous chairs, and they sit down to listen to him, as though he were giving a lecture. Nula opens his briefcase and takes out his brochures, magazines, and price lists, yet despite his movements being exact and his words measured, he continues to think about the clouds the day before, so intensely white, the shape of rocks, now disappeared, and he regrets not having written something down in his notebook before coming in, because he doesn’t know how long the interview with these clients will last and whether he’ll remember what, though he never formulated it exactly in his mind, he thought, at some point, to note down. The clients want to buy an assortment of a dozen bottles each, which is why they’d gotten together, in order to buy a few cases of six, of different varieties and from different wineries, and split them up. In total, it’s eighty-four bottles—with the sale he made that morning in Guadalupe, he’s earned enough for the day. But when he explains to the clients the unique characteristics of each wine, the technical terms that he employs and that his clients seem to consider attentively don’t seem at all convincing, suitable, or appropriate. The essential thing, the taste of wine, is unnamable: the metaphors and comparisons are only allusions. The flinty aroma of certain white wines, for instance, is only a comparative, and incomplete, description, predominant at the beginning, but which combines immediately, after the first sip, with the complex flavors that the wine unfolds over the palate. To him, the sensations, from a philosophical point of view, are incommunicable, and so when he explains to a client that such and such a wine is tender or robust, meaty or velvety, it’s impossible to imagine how the client senses those adjectives when he tries the wine. Comparisons are more useful from an empirical point of view than those metaphors, but they don’t describe the flavor of wine itself, only one of its qualities, the sudden recollection of a fleeting spark, smothered immediately by the mass of sensations poorly designated by the abstraction known as the taste of wine. Another obstacle follows that philosophical complication: wine is in fashion. That’s fine enough for Nula, but that somewhat coarse daily novelty, not entirely disconnected from a dogged publicity campaign, easily reveals a sordid contradiction: the fashion for wine gives enthusiasts the illusion of cultivating an exquisite, rationalized individuality, while he, the common denominator among them, knows all the ways they’ve been primed by advertising. What he really likes are the hints of flavor that surface every so often in every bottle, in every glass, and even in every sip, and then evaporate, an empirical spark that precipitates unexpected memories, of fruit, of flowers, of honey, of apricot, of grass, of spices, of wood, or of leather. Unforeseeable and fleeting, those sensorial sparks that, paradoxically, make the taste of wine more strange and unknown, ignite suddenly in the mind, promise a vivid display, but immediately after they appear, surreptitiously, are snuffed out.

  He sells them eighty-four bottles, five cases of white and nine of red: among the white, a chardonnay-chenin blend, two chardonnays, a sémillon from Río Negro, and one sauvignon blanc, the same wine they drank three bottles of last night—the first paid for by himself, the second by Tomatis, and the third by Soldi—at the Amigos del Vino bar. Among the reds, he suggested a few varieties, a malbec, a merlot, a syrah, and a few blends, a mixture of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, for instance, which Nula never forgets to describe as a fundamental blend in the production of Bordeaux wine, something which, as a consumer incentive, never fails. At around two, he’s arriving at his house; the kids are at nursery school and Diana is tanning, naked, out back, lying on a plastic mat in the yard. A red bathrobe, glowing in the sun, is hanging from a wicker chair. When she sees him come out, she picks up a small towel and covers her pubis and hips, hiding the triangular patch of pubic hair and the protuberance that marks the beginning of an even more intimate region; the rest of her body, from her head to just below her bellybutton, and from the tops of her thighs to her feet, remains exposed to the sun, and her skin, still darkened by the summer sun, has a light shine, and is dampened, especially on her face and around her breasts. Her arms, stretched out alongside her body, display the only visible asymmetry, product of her missing left hand.

  —A Doctor Riera from Bahía Blanca called, Diana announces. His number is next to the telephone.

  —A ghost from the past, Nula says. What did he want?

  —He arrives tomorrow, and he wants to meet me, Diana says, laughing and sitting up, resting on her left elbow, which makes the forearm that ends in the stump elevate obliquely at her side. She looks at him.

  —Tomorrow? Well you’ll definitely meet him in that case, Nula says. I’ll call him back later. Right now, I’m going to eat something and I’ll be right back to get some sun with you.

  —Oh, hurry, please! Diana says, shaking her only hand, parodying a
n exaggerated happiness combined with a simulated desperation. And immediately she stretches out again on the mat. Eventually, Nula comes out, naked, from the front of the house, with a white towel wrapped around his waist that covers him to his knees and a plastic mat under his arm; he carries a jug of cold water and a book: One Hundred Homemade Pasta Recipes. He places the jug under the chair, so that the shade will keep it cool, and covers it with the book to prevent an insect from falling inside. Then, laying his mat out next to Diana’s, he removes the towel and lies down, face up. Finally, he picks up the towel and, laying it between his open thighs, pulls up a corner of the white cloth and carefully, delicately, covers his genitals. Diana, who’s been watching him ever since he appeared through the kitchen door, comments, in a low voice:

  —His most precious garment. His identity. The torch that guides him through the darkness. The spear that leads him through the world. The cosmic megalith. Omphalos.

  Motionless, face up, keeping the towel still, in place, Nula smiles, his eyes closed, and a few seconds after she stops talking, motionless in a similar position, her smile identical to his, he adds:

  —The diver that makes you crazy when he touches bottom.

  Diana’s fingers caress him softly on his left thigh.

  —The battle of the sexes is growing worse, Nula says. How about a truce?

  And matching, as they say, actions with words, he extends his hand and places it softly on Diana’s pubis, in the center of the white rectangle formed by the towel. Diana doesn’t even flinch.

  —Can’t happen before tonight, she says.

  —But I’m getting back late tonight, Nula says, adding with a deliberate but neutral vagueness, which no doubt makes him slightly uncomfortable: There’s a dinner with the people from the hyper. I don’t even know when or where it’ll be.

  With her eyes closed, laughing silently, Diana shrugs.

  —Tomorrow, then, she says.

  Nula doesn’t answer and removes his hand. The conversation, which he would have preferred not to happen, has made him uncomfortable. The lying upsets and disturbs him: on the one hand, Diana deserves the truth, and on the other, in a sense contradictory to the first, to what extent does she believe him? Luckily, the internal flux, made of flashes of lucidity, of autonomous images, of capricious and fragmentary memories and passing emotions, displaces his misgivings in a current that ceaselessly churns that heterogeneous, loose material, replacing it with recurrent, obsessive fantasies and sudden and insistent desires. The sun begins to warm his skin, especially on his belly, on his face, and on his thighs, and an indulgent image of his own naked and tanned body appears, so unexpected and savage that his penis, which was resting peacefully under the towel, begins to harden and swell, something which, beyond the pleasure it produces, embarrasses him slightly: despite his close intimacy with Diana, that untimely erection, just when they’ve decided not to make love, has something coarse and even ridiculous about it. If Diana noticed it, she’d probably laugh. Nula looks for an explanation for that sudden arousal, caused by his own body, and he realizes that he’d caught a glimpse of himself in a strange, empty room, preparing to move through a doorway into the adjacent room—he’s unaware of what might be in that other room, or who might be there, but what he’s sure of is that what aroused him was a gaze, the specter of a gaze, regarding and desiring his naked body, that, because it was absent from the image, he substituted for his own. Now, the solar fullness erases every image inside him, and the last contours of the visible world, persisting under his closed eyelids, change shape and color, becoming more and more abstract on his retina. Drowsy, forgetting his desire, which distends his alert genitals, Nula surrenders himself to the light that flows from the empty, blue sky, refracting at moments and becoming visible, like drops of rain, invisible in the darkness, are made visible—he thinks, or remembers rather—as they cross a beam of light. Groping along the grass, he seeks out Diana’s hand and grasps it softly.

  —So, Riera wants to meet you, he says, laughing tersely, skeptically, suggestively. I should warn you that he insists that there are two kinds of men: the kind who wants to reform prostitutes and the kind who wants to corrupt the wives of the bourgeoisie. He belongs, by his own admission, to the second category.

  —Actually, both kinds overlap in the middle, Diana says after a few seconds of thought. In both cases the object is a sexually experienced housewife.

  —That is not untrue, Nula agrees, cautiously, and releasing Diana’s hand, lets his own fall on the grass, his arm outstretched next to his body, grazing the length of the narrow mat, and he falls silent.

  Lying on the ground, motionless, naked, their eyes closed, they’d appear to be their own effigies if their hands were crossed over their bellies, peacefully spending eternity since the Roman or medieval afternoon when death fished them, together, from the agitated and contingent waters of time, the cloths that cover their private parts representing the supplement of some over-punctilious bishop who despite himself preferred to include a realist ornament in the composition so as not to rely on the conventional recourse of a fig leaf. They might also represent Adam and Eve, owing, in fact, to the white towels, forced to cover with these what they noticed immediately after they distinguished good from evil, before falling asleep, cast out into the elemental wilderness under the burning eye of the only sun, scorching them, outside the walls of paradise, contemplating the invisible substance that floods them, disturbs them, and alters them, pulling them gently through the ineluctable and mysterious waves, unknown in paradise, of succession, working against them, toward their ruin, with every heartbeat or breath or flutter, however much they try to protect themselves, sometimes, with a deceitful immobility. They are a married couple in a state of repose, the complementary protagonists that, when they joined, brought into contact the two inert halves of the world, and as such activating the force of the present, casting aside, without brutality but also mercilessly, the past that pretended, chimerically, to continue limitlessly, in a sterile, desiccated, and oxidized limbo. They are themselves a world, a reality, certain to generate, in every action, more world, more reality, they are, moreover, the very present that, as it moves, creates more present. Lying in the sun, naked, smiling, their eyes half-closed, they appear peaceful and eternal, and yet they float in the center of a whirlwind. Turbulent, inchoate, the island of the moment in which they believe they’ve found refuge, incessantly and at once fleetingly, is unmade as they are, and with regard to their surroundings, nothing gives way more profoundly to that corrosive alchemy than what seems permanent, stable, or in repose, rock, metal, diamond, earth, sun, moon, firmament.

  Nula feels the sweat beginning to form on his forehead, on his neck and under his nose, and on his upper lip. As he lifts his head slightly and turns to look at Diana, a few drops fall from his forehead, slide horizontally across his cheekbones, under his eyes, and then across his cheeks, leaving tortuous tracks, and eventually falling from the edge of his jaw onto his chest. He knows that Diana has seen him sit up, watching him through half-open eyelids, and lying down again and squinting his own eyes, he begins to speak, certain that, from within her comfortable and alert motionlessness, Diana is listening to him.

  —Before I met you, I fell in love with his wife, he says slowly. For months I was insane, but then I got tired of it and went back to Rosario. A year later, I met you and I forgot about them. The three of us loved each other a lot, and we went everywhere together, but I didn’t want to hear from them again. I’d suffered too much. Eventually, I heard that they’d moved to Bahía Blanca; and then I learned that they’d separated. And last month I went to visit a new client in Rincón, Gutiérrez, who was recommended to me by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and she was there. Apparently, Gutiérrez is her real father, but only the mother knew, and even Gutiérrez himself didn’t know about it for thirty years.

  Omitting, for understandable reasons, the Wednesday encounter in Paraná, Nula tells her what he remembers. Since
Wednesday afternoon he’s known that everything between them has moved, definitively, into the past, and because he knows that nothing will ever happen between him and Lucía again, and since what happened on Wednesday wasn’t anything more than a separation ceremony, he feels less guilty omitting it—according to the singular logic with which he analyzes his sexual life, ethics are only in question when feelings that might resemble those that he considers exclusive to his relationship with Diana come into play, and that is what happened on Wednesday: for the first time, he felt somewhat guilty toward both women, toward Lucía for having pretended to still love her, and toward Diana, because from Tuesday night at Gutiérrez’s, when Lucía denied knowing him, until he went to bed with her the next day, the feelings seemed real. And now, Riera’s call, announcing his arrival to the city, intensifies the suspicion that he’d had on Wednesday afternoon, that Lucía was probably thinking about her ex-husband when she slept with him. And her practically imploring declaration when they said goodbye, You’re my only friend, loses some of its pathos and takes on a distinct meaning, exempting him, naturally, from any affective obligation, as he grows more certain that the moment he left the house she called Riera to tell him what had happened.

  What he remembers: the morning when, coming out of the Siete Colores, he bumped into her and started following her; the incredible coincidence that Lucía walked up to his own house; the mysterious circuit around the block that she made, stopping and examining, with different attitudes, the houses on the four symmetrical points on each of the four streets that formed the block; how he found her for a second time one afternoon at the neighborhood pastry shop and sat down next to her, and how she invited him on a walk and without dissimulating had followed the same route as the time before, stopping at the entrance to Nula’s house, at the house around the corner, which was Riera’s office, on the cross street around the corner from the office, and finally at the house parallel to the office, which was her own. Nula tells Diana that he was so fascinated by Lucía that, without knowing why, he’d made the same circuit that same night, but in the opposite direction, and even rang the bell at the house on the cross street, and that a boy answered, that afterward he’d passed by Doctor Riera’s office, where by that time everything was dark, had peered in, and then had turned the last corner and went inside his own house. He tells her that the next day he went to the office pretending to be sick and had met Doctor Riera for the first time, that Riera had examined him, but that he’d refused to charge him for the visit, but a while later, that same afternoon, on his way home from doing some lunch shopping for La India he’d seen Riera get out of a double-parked car, cross the sidewalk, and stop at the entrance to the apartments where he and La India lived; Nula had stopped and waited and when he saw him get back in the car and turn the corner slowly he kept walking all the way to the ice cream shop, just in time to see Riera jump out of the car, cross the sidewalk, and enter his office, and so he’d taken the opportunity to walk down the street, noticing when he passed it that Riera’s car was still running, and when he reached the next corner had crossed the street and waited there; from where he was standing he could see both streets, the one with the office, where the car had now started to move slowly, and the other one, perpendicular to it, where the mysterious house sat, and where Riera stopped the car, double parked again (his typical method, apparently), crossed the sidewalk, and rang the bell; almost immediately the door opened a crack and Riera carried on an animated conversation with someone inside, invisible to Nula from where he was standing, then reached in, and finally went back to his car, almost at a run, as the slightly open door closed behind him; and Nula followed him (his own typical method, apparently)—Diana laughs somewhat more loudly when he says this—seeing that, as he’d expected, Riera finished the ritual circuit at the front door to his own house.