La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  He would eventually learn that there was nothing strange about any of it, but before this something happened that was so incredible, so dark and singular and at the same time so humiliating and absurd to him, that in the three months that the relationship between the three of them lasted he interpreted it countless different ways, and when he finally thought he’d found the correct one he stopped seeing them, thinking that he’d be able to stop his suffering, though a couple of months later he’d seen them by chance one morning in Rosario, outside a house that, according to a friend of his, had an abominable reputation, and because knowing this had increased his suffering he’d decided never to see them again; and, eventually, he met Diana, and, as he later learned, Riera and Lucía had moved to Bahía Blanca.

  And he tells her: a couple of weeks after she met him, Lucía invited him to her house for the first time, to have a tea, at six. Nula had arrived at six on the dot, his temples throbbing intensely and his hands shaking, bringing with him a small package of delicate pastries and the resignation that he’d have to drink a couple of cups of tea, which he detested. But Lucía hadn’t prepared tea or anything, and, apparently distracted, seemed indifferent to his visit. When she asked him in, she looked at her watch and compared it to the clock on the wall, checking that she had the exact time. Not only did she not prepare tea, but she didn’t offer him anything else; she threw the package he’d brought in the fridge without opening it or making a point to offer him any of the pastries. They sat down on a couch, and Nula, as he would every time they were alone, on dark streets especially, pressed himself close and tried to kiss her. Lucía resisted a little, but not as strongly as she would when they were in the street. He caressed her over her clothes and she let him do it, without returning the caresses. If she’d asked him to stop he would’ve obeyed, because he loved her a lot; he’d never loved anyone up till that moment the way he loved her, feeling, with an almost adolescent innocence, the most irreconcilable contradictions, like thinking she was both attractive and unattainable, pure and lascivious, maternal and whorish. Much later, he realized those painful contradictions had a romantic quality: according to a theory he was developing, which argued that each stage or station in life corresponds to a specific philosophical or literary movement; thus, for instance, romanticism predominates in the adolescent; you’re a Hegelian when you join a political party; a Pre-Socratic in childhood; an Empiricist in your infancy; a Skeptic in your later years; a Stoic at work; and so on, and so on. Falling in love with a married older woman was without a doubt the apotheosis of romanticism, and though (to follow the literary thread) it would be necessary to be Platonic if she forced the issue, it seemed impossible to Nula not to go on, a completely erroneous assumption on his part given that she was clearly letting him do whatever he wanted despite not returning his caresses with the same enthusiasm, and so despite her relative impassivity he explored deeper and deeper into her intimate territory: he unbuttoned her blouse, put his hand in her bra, between her warm, constricted breasts; he kissed her on her neck, on her ear, on her shoulder, while he took off her shirt and unbuttoned her bra, pulling it away, so that she was left naked from the waist up. It was already October, and it was hot. As he kissed and caressed Lucía’s warm, damp skin with one hand he started to unbutton his shirt with the other, twisting it off, and standing up, pulled Lucía with him, pressing himself against her and taking off her skirt, which had a small clasp and a zipper down the side. Nula unhooked it and pulled the zipper down and the skirt fell around Lucía’s ankles. Moving her feet slowly and clumsily, letting Nula, who was pressed hard against her, kiss her continuously, Lucía, helping with the heels of her shoes, removed the last of the skirt, but when he tried to take off her panties she rejected him forcefully and then violently when he tried again. They sat back down on the couch and Nula forced her to stretch out, and when she was lying down, face up, he got naked and threw himself on top of her but she shook him off and changed position, turning onto her side. They were lying there naked—she with only her shoes and panties on, he with nothing on—but every time Nula tried to pull down her panties she rejected him, although when he grabbed her hand and guided it to his penis so she’d rub it, Lucía grabbed it without the slightest hesitation and instead of caressing it squeezed it and released it, squeezed it and released it, and eventually just held it in her hand, motionless. They were lying there, sideways, face to face, on the couch, him naked like he’d just emerged from his mother’s womb and her in her panties and high-heeled shoes, allowing Nula to caress her and squeezing his penis in her hand, when the door opened and Riera walked in.

  Diana lets out a quick exclamation, opens her eyes, and sits up slightly, leaning on her elbows, causing, from the other side of her belly, at more or less the height of her hips, over her left flank, at an angle, her stump to appear. And her beautiful breasts, round and tanned, with their almost black nipples, like two identical copies of a ceramic object, highlight the principal feature on the elegant torso whose silhouette, from her wider shoulders to her narrower waist, could be represented, in an abstract form, by an inverted trapezoid.

  —Wait, wait, let’s clarify, she says.

  Nula sits up too, and their eyes meet, Diana’s lively and a bit excited, and Nula’s, from what he can tell, recovering, in a vague way, the echo of the affliction of that time.

  —The thing with the panties can be explained in two different and opposite ways that men, even medical students, never think of: because of her period, or, on the contrary, because she was ovulating. That’s the best theory: when a woman’s gone that far, there’s no other reason for her to stop. There’s a third explanation, but it would be too cruel: that she simply wanted her husband to find you two like that. To make him jealous, maybe.

  Nula lies back and closes his eyes again, thinking, If that was all it was it would never have been a problem at all. He remembers: Riera closed the door and started walking around the room looking at them and shaking his head. Nula started to get dressed but Lucía didn’t move; to Nula, when he’d finished dressing and was standing there unsure what to do, it seemed there was something excessive, even theatrical, in Riera’s behavior. Then Riera approached him and said, as though they were old friends, So she hooked and reeled you in too? Sometimes I ask myself if she ever does it with anyone. Hearing these words, Lucía laughed and shook her head, as though what she’d just heard had gone too far; she stood up and started getting dressed, as though she were alone in the room, and told Nula, Don’t pay any attention to him, he’ll say anything. He’s rotten to the core. And, as she finished buttoning her shirt, she started to laugh. Riera, still speaking to Nula (they each spoke about the other as if they weren’t there), said, That’s the way she is; she gets you high and leaves you dry. Nula was petrified with humiliation—at first he’d been afraid, and then, as he was dressing, ashamed, and now, combining with a hint of absurdity, humiliated. For the last fifteen days, since he saw them for the first time, beautiful and enigmatic, they’d seemed distant to him, resplendent, benevolent, and sacred, like gods who allowed him to glimpse, through their sudden appearance, a less-imperfect world, sheltered from contingency, and here they were slithering at his feet, sordid, vulgar, and perverse, adding vice, frivolity, and duplicity to the external world. I have a deal with my wife, of course, Riera said, calming down, referring to Lucía with certain consideration, proposed by myself from the very beginning, because I’m a clean sportsman, and accepted by her with full awareness of the consequences, that a successful marriage requires the complete—and I mean complete—liberty of both parties. As she listened to him, Lucía, laughing, shook her head slowly, to show her anger: That degenerate theory suits you well. Riera started to laugh too: No insults, please, let’s maintain a certain level of decency. Lucía stepped toward him and interrogated him, defiant: And what about you, haven’t you just finished spewing barbarities in front of a stranger? Apart from being referred to as a stranger, the tone of Lucía and Riera’s conv
ersation and behavior, though they seemed excessive and unexpectedly offhand and vulgar, seemed familiar, as if he’d seen the same scene many times before, realizing eventually that, with the exception of the vulgar allusions, of course, the scene reminded him of a comedy show on television, only without the music and the canned laughter, and although they seemed to have forgotten about him, Lucía and Riera acted, constantly, as though they had him in mind, the way actors practicing their roles in an empty theater never forget that their words and their actions are ultimately intended to produce a determined effect on a crowd of hypothetical, ghostly spectators. During a pause in the discussion, Nula, in a barely audible voice, tried to suggest that maybe it would be better if he left them alone, but Riera, protesting, moved toward him energetically and patted him on the shoulder: Oh no. After what we’ve put you through you have to stay for dinner, isn’t that right Lucy? And Lucía replied, without irony or resentment, It goes without saying, and left the living room, which, without a doubt, was the only room in the house that Nula knew. Two or three times he’d followed her to the entrance and had managed to see the hallway and the interior door, whose colored glass kept him from seeing what was inside; that afternoon he’d crossed it for the first time, without going any deeper than the couch in the living room, and when Riera proposed that they move to the courtyard, where it would be cooler, Nula accepted. Riera intrigued, even fascinated, him. He followed him down a passageway, away from the living room, with two or three doorways, and then into the darkened bedroom, where the white bedspread, made of a silky material, glowed in the dim light that filtered through the cracks in the white Persian blinds over a glass door beyond that large, queen-sized bed. A sudden despair overwhelmed him when he saw the bed, accentuated by images of lust, of poorly controlled impulses, of ruin, and that anguish increased even more when, after harshly lifting the Persian blinds and leading him out to the courtyard and through a red-tiled space that separated the house from what would strictly speaking be called the courtyard, he realized that they could have gone out to the courtyard, avoiding the intimacy of the bedroom, through the dining room or the kitchen. What Nula learned from them in those months was the infantile cruelty of their perversion, their innocent reflexes, most likely unscrupulous and guiltless, that attained their ends with expertise and charm, without deceit or coercion, simply to follow their desire, so intrinsic to the most intimate fibers of their own beings that they confused themselves with it, coloring it with their strange hues but not covering its more banal qualities; and he learned that each one’s intense singularity, in radical contrast to the other’s, somehow allowed them, through a unique combination of elements in each one, unconsciously and blindly groping dark passages, against all reason, to be together; all of this he learned at his own expense. As they sat in the courtyard, the intimate touch of Lucía’s flesh persisted, trembling, in his memory, but at the same time, that easy dinner with them in the garden, first in the warm dusk and then under a soft light hanging from a tree, revealed to him an alternate world: styles, tastes, habits, behaviors, and conversation different from anything he’d known up till that moment; he had the feeling, that night, of emerging for the first time from the magical circle of the familiar: the years in Rosario, the dormitories, the university dining hall, the department, the bars, were in a certain sense an extension of his family life. With Riera and Lucía, starting from that night, his point of view changed, and from that new perspective the whole universe seemed altered. Others, outside of himself and Chade and La India, his murdered father, his philosophy books, molded, in their own way, in a parallel tunnel, the material of the world, giving it the inconstant shape of their loss and their desire, and that unknown world that Nula had begun to glimpse attracted him as much as the living flesh of Lucía.

  —You were in love with both of them, Diana says, with an echo of retrospective pity in her voice.

  —No, Nula says, with the fresh light that they projected over the world.

  —Isn’t that basically the same thing? Diana says.

  After a thoughtful silence, Nula responds with certainty:

  —Yes, but only partly.

  That same night he learned the reason, which was much more simple than he’d imagined, behind the four symmetrical points on the four streets of their block that had become so popular recently: Riera had a lover, Cristina, around the corner from his office, and the morning when Nula had followed Lucía from the city center and had seen her peer into the garden of his own house, Lucía, who suspected what was happening, hadn’t known exactly where, halfway down one of the two parallel streets, her husband’s new lover lived, having only heard a couple of vague allusions to it from her husband. She wanted to know who she was and what she was like—every one of Riera’s new lovers, despite the reciprocal liberty that she enjoyed, but which she’d never make use of, could represent a new problem—and when she peered curiously into the apartment building where Nula and his mother lived it was because her calculations suggested that her husband’s lover might live there. After she’d turned the corner and had glanced furtively into the office to verify that Riera was still there, she’d continued around the corner and had walked the half block to the next house, the symmetrical point relative to La India’s apartment, whose features coincided with what she knew about Cristina. Stopping outside the half-open door, to show that she considered herself justified to the privilege, she’d adopted an ostentatious and defiant posture, and when this didn’t yield any results she kept walking and went into her house: Nula had clearly heard the metallic sound that the key made as it turned in the lock. When he saw her the second time, in the evening, sat down at her table in the pastry shop on the corner, and followed her on her walk around the block under the darkness of the trees, he could tell, though he hadn’t solved the enigma, that Lucía was making the same circuit as before and that her walk around the block coincided with the hours, at midday and in the evening, when her husband usually finished work and left the office. In fact, there was nothing mysterious about any of it, and his mistake, as occurs, meanwhile, with almost every mystery, was the result of insufficient information. But the biggest shock came when Riera told him that while he’d been sitting with Lucía at the table next to the window, he, Riera, had passed by in his car with Cristina and had seen them together, and he’d recognized him immediately when he saw him in the waiting room, and because Nula had given him his address on the medical form, Riera, after closing the office at twelve thirty, had gone to see where he lived. He told him this last detail that first night, laughing, after Lucía had gone to bed, saying that he hadn’t wanted to charge him the visit because he didn’t really consider him a patient: on the one hand, it would have felt like he was taking advantage of him, and on the other, he preferred not to mix the exercise of his profession with his private life. He’d been surprised to see him in the waiting room, but he’d understood immediately what was happening: whenever he had an affair with a married woman, he, too, always felt the irresistible urge to see the husband up close and, if the husband was an upright person, to befriend him even. When Cristina’s husband, an electrical engineer who was doing an eight-month course in California, came back at the end of the year, he’d invite them over for dinner one night, if his relationship with Cristina was still going on, an intimate dinner, just the four of them, Cristina, Lucía, Cristina’s husband, and him, Riera, and even five of them, if Nula wanted to come too. Riera accompanied that false declaration, as in other situations and with other declarations, with an open, juvenile, and slightly degenerate laugh that, as Nula saw on several occasions, seemed to open, as they say, every door for him. While he listened to him talk, Nula thought of Lucía, asleep in the large white bed, or possibly listening to him too from the bedroom, through the half-open glass door that led to the garden, and after a while he realized that he was staying so long because he wanted to delay as much as possible the moment when, after accompanying him to the door, Riera would lock it behind him,
go back to the bedroom, and lie down naked next to her. But when Riera suggested that it was getting late, because he had to go in early the next day, and Nula got up to leave, Lucía’s sleepy and smiling face appeared in the half-open door, and in a playful voice pleaded, Come find me tomorrow afternoon; we could get something to drink, like the other day.