La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  —It’s very good, Moro says, after taking the second sip of wine, his eyes narrowed.

  —Would you like to try the red? the girl says.

  —No. That’s fine, Moro says.

  —Let’s sweeten the deal, Américo says to the girl. Give him a bottle of red to take home, and a receipt for the cashier. And, turning to Moro: With this receipt they’ll let you through. Cool the bottle down a bit before drinking it; it’ll go really well with some tagliatelle.

  While Nula and Chela listen to Américo’s recommendations, their eyes meet with quiet sparks, enjoying the imperceptibly theatrical zeal with which Américo displays his promotional talents. Moro takes the bottle and the receipt and is about to say goodbye when a woman of a certain age suddenly walks up to Nula and starts talking to him:

  —Aren’t you India Calabrese’s baby? she says in an overly loud and emphatic way.

  Everyone freezes, surprised, and Nula blinks a few times, hesitating, before he responds:

  —No. I was definitely that baby once, but now I’m not sure what to tell you.

  Although Moro, Américo, and Chela laugh when they hear his response, the woman remains serious, and finally introduces herself.

  —I’m Affife, do you remember? I was friends with your father and your mother before I moved to Córdoba.

  —Affife, of course! Nula says, and kisses her cheek.

  —I’m on my way to a movie, and it’s about to start. Give your mother a kiss from me, she says, then turns the corner, almost at a run, and disappears down the next aisle toward the registers.

  —She bounced me on her knees when I was a kid, Nula says, to explain himself.

  But Moro and Américo aren’t paying attention to him any more, and Chela is talking to the girls at the stand. After Moro leaves, and because several people are arriving to try the wine—the masculine voice interrupting the music has announced the presence of the stand over the loudspeakers two more times—Américo suggests to Nula and Chela that they have a drink at one of the two bars, but Chela says she wants to browse around the hyper and makes a date with them for six thirty back at the stand. They go to the bar near the phone bank, because it’s the most well-lit, and quietest one, although the crowd is increasing, and if there are still some free tables, by six thirty when they leave to meet up with Chela, there are already people waiting at the entrance for a table to open up. While they drink a mineral water, Américo, halfway seriously, tells Nula to be careful, that mixing business with pleasure, especially for a married man, can be dangerous. Nula pretends to be oblivious to the reasons for his advice, but Américo, who has a taste for psychological observations as well as detailed and complex elaborations, practicing these the same way others might fish or do amateur theater on Sundays, interrupts him:

  —I was watching you with her: it’s obvious that you’ve got something going. If not, you would’ve said something when she left, and you didn’t move a muscle; you didn’t even say goodbye or turn around. Ignoring her so much can only be explained because you thought it prudent not to call attention to yourself. Let’s see: Have you already made a date? For when?

  —Américo. She’s a mother of children. You’ve got me all wrong, Nula says, conscious that his words have been chosen specifically for their false sound, implying to Américo, in this way, that he recognizes the truth of his observation but that he can’t admit it openly, which satisfies Américo, whose supposition and interrogation are not made for ethical, but rather sporting reasons. I’m not buying that, Américo says, waving, in the air, an index finger covered with hair on the back all the way to the phalanx, and, immediately, without transition, he starts talking business: if they sell a hundred and twenty bottles through the hypermarket, give or take, it’ll cover the costs of the marketing campaign, with some profit left over. Nula listens to him with pleasure: for some time, business, at moments, produces a pleasure similar to what he’s experiencing now, a pleasure that comes from a sense of security, of release, of surrender to the world. That pleasure assaults him, tinged with happiness, and the first time he felt it, suddenly and unexpectedly, he spent a while analyzing it in retrospect, until he realized that allowing himself to live like that put him in contact with the world, incorporated him into it, recovering, for a few seconds, the unity that thought, reason, and philosophy, had, from the beginning, understood to be lost. The same way Diogenes the Cynic refuted Zeno’s paradoxes as he walked, he could sometimes refute the contradiction between being and becoming just like that, by being. But he knows it can’t last: if one day he managed to forget philosophy and surrender himself, blindly and completely, to the supposed spontaneity of life, sooner or later, the torment, the division, forcing his return, would find him. And this somewhat literary and in fact extremely naive idea unfolds into a detailed vision of his own future life as a wine salesman who, having completely abandoned his reflections, his notes, his readings, now hopelessly addicted to the opium of being, as per the expression that he discovers in the midst of the images that define his new condition, would be reduced to what you might call an existence confined forever to the external: a family man, traveling salesman, with a graphic designer wife; in a few years, Américo retires and he, who’d taken on a partnership with Américo a while back, becomes the new manager of the branch; Diana, meanwhile, because of her agency work, will be forced to give up painting, but she’ll be a successful designer, often hired by agencies in Buenos Aires, and when the kids are older, he and Diana will start to travel frequently to Buenos Aires, to Rosario, and even abroad; he’ll have to be away more and more often, and for longer periods, not only to Buenos Aires, and Mendoza especially, but also to Paraguay, to Corrientes, to El Chaco; he’ll frequent the international wine fairs in Europe, in New Zealand; the kids will finish school, they’ll get married, they’ll have kids of their own; he and Diana will be left alone in the house; La India and Diana’s parents will have died by that point; they’ll retire and the days will seem endless; they’ll wander aimlessly in their slippers around the empty house until, finally, they’ll turn on the television and eventually fall asleep with it on, until their servant turns it off and takes them to bed; there haven’t been books in the house for years, except for a small collection of books on wine, cookbooks, graphic design manuals, and some books on painting, which Diana will use every so often for ideas to use in her jobs; Diana will never again describe her theories about the real world as abstract form, and he, Nula, will have forgotten even the existence of the riddle that Gabriela asked him last night at the Amigos del Vino bar, and to which he immediately replied, Timaeus 27: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? Everything will be over, but without their really knowing why it’ll seem unfinished to them; from the outside, their lives will give the impression of comfortable achievement, but they themselves will be harassed, continuously, secretly, by a muted and constant sense of disquiet; others will think that in their old age they display an enviable serenity, but they’ll actually live in a state of monotone bewilderment, with a sense of drowning in a rough magma; later, though they’ll still be together, they’ll start to forget each other’s name, and then, though they spend all day sitting on the same couch, even the other’s very existence; they’ll no longer recognize the faces of their children, or their grandchildren, when they lean in to give them a quick kiss on the cheek; and finally, one afternoon, one night, one morning probably, in summer, in winter, what’s the difference, everything will come to an end.

  —You’re not listening to me, Américo’s voice says. Is everything alright?

  —No, Nula says, with a quiet smile, I haven’t come to terms with you doubting my intentions with Ms. Virginia, that’s all.

  —I’m just not buying it, period, Américo says, and swatting the air with the back of his hairy hand, he decides to continue: a typical, high quality wine fractionated here in the province and not in the production region would be a good business r
ight now, because the taste for wine has always existed in this country, but because of all the noxious sludge that’s been bottled here the customer of limited means, especially after all the crises, has stopped drinking wine and prefers a good cold beer, especially in the hot months. The good wines are too expensive, and the cheap ones are undrinkable. What’s missing, therefore, is that one, Américo says, gesturing energetically but vaguely at something somewhere in the hypermarket, beyond the registers, and despite the vagueness of the gesture, Nula imagines the intersection in the beverage section where the publicity stand has been set up alongside the neat rows of red and white wine bottles, distinguished clearly from a distance because the label of the red wines is red and the white wines a pale green. The feeling of happiness has vanished, and commerce no longer offers the return of a world without reflection, and so he listens to Américo’s ideas skeptically: first of all, after his experience with Aconcagua—the pinnacle of table wines, according to a radio campaign at the time—Chela won’t let him try to build his own fractionator and, in his opinion (which is to say, his as in Nula’s), the arrangement that Américo has with Amigos del Vino is less risky and more profitable because he can also count on the support of the owner, who is in fact a friend and who’s incorporated him to the firm under especially advantageous conditions; and on the other hand, expensive wines have a better profit margin.

  —Why do you want to build a fractionator of average wine, Nula says, if fine wines have a better margin and the risk falls totally on the central house? For us, everything is profit, it’s a gift.

  —What you lack is a sense of the social aspects of business, Américo says with a beatific smile that he accompanies with a slow movement of his head both sideways and slightly upward, his eyes narrowed, meant to connote the sublime, and adding: With our whips we’ll drive the merchants from the temple.

  As though on cue, the background music, which had been Rififí, is interrupted, and the masculine voice of the booster announces: For Holy Week, the Warden hypermarkets are hosting a raffle of freshwater and saltwater fish, both fresh and frozen varieties, Norwegian salt cod, tuna, or Gran Paraná pejerrey, for instance, essential for the banquets at the end of Lent, and the music resumes.

  As they leave the bar, they see that the crowd has now invaded the supercenter. Through the windows of the bar, which face the parking lot, Nula, while he talked to Américo, had been watching the cars pull in and drive around and around looking for an open parking space. The sounds of footsteps, of voices, of laughter, can only be distinguished when they issue from a nearby source, because as the source moves away the different sounds merge into a single hum that, in contrast to the ambient loop and the voice over the loudspeaker that interrupts it every so often, sounds like a dull, monotonous, and continuous hum, which, intermittently, is punctuated by a set of chords and a recitative. Moving slowly through the crowd, Nula can discern fragments of voices and laughter that almost immediately fade and disappear into the background. They cross the toy section, the electrical appliances, the kitchen supplies, they take a loop around the cheeses, around the prepared foods, and past the frozen produce, and after glancing quickly at the labels and the prices on the shelves of wine that comprise the hypermarket’s typical stock, they turn toward the stand. Although it’s ten of seven, Chela isn’t there, but when they approach the stand, one of the girls tells them that she was already waiting for them but that she’d left again, saying that she’d be right back. Some five or six people are waiting for their turn to taste the wine, and another three or four already have a plastic cup in their hand, apparently studying its contents, or simply waiting to be served a second time. Américo elbows Nula discreetly but enthusiastically so he’ll look at all the bottles that are missing from the shelves, whites as well as reds, more than twenty altogether. At five after seven, Chela appears, pushing a cart with some things that she’s picked out: two or three cleaning products, a small box of frozen salt cod, a small box of homemade ravioli, makeup, a small garden spade, and a necktie with red and blue angled stripes for Américo. She picks it up and shows it to him, and then she folds it in half and holds it up to his bearded chin, letting it fall against his chest, over the one he’s already wearing, to see how it looks. Then she pulls away the tie, kisses him on the part of his face, near the cheekbone, where there is no beard, and puts the tie back into the cart. Nula watches them, at once sympathetic and sorrowful; he thinks about La India, alone for years, and about his father, lying on the cold floor of a pizzeria—the crumpled and bloody corpse that actually may not have been killed by the gunshots because the man who occupied it was already dead to himself, since the time of delirium and frenzy, long before the superfluous bullets reached him.

  To pass the time, Nula accompanies Chela and Américo, who are heading back to Paraná, to their car. They get in line at a register, and when they walk out to the parking lot the warm and somewhat humid air sticks to their cheeks. Although it’s already seven thirty, it’s still not completely dark. In the west, above the city, an enormous, bright red stain extends, smooth and uniform, over the sky, and below, through the shadows on the ground, the lights of the waterfront are visible. Américo suggests, possibly with an implicit warning, that he should leave too, but Nula says that he prefers to stay a while longer, until after eight, in case the girls at the stand need anything. His eyes follow Américo’s car as it drives away, and then he lifts his head toward the tense, brilliant stars in the dark blue sky. Ceaselessly, cars enter and exit the parking lot, they form lines for gas at the service station, they drive around looking for an open space, and their occupants come and go with their carts, empty or full of merchandise, all distinct and very real in the evening, yet at the same time improbable and somehow vague. The extensive facade of the supercenter, with its many entrances, the one to the hypermarket, to the mall, to the multiplex, illuminates the dark air with its neon signs, its geometric, outward projections of light, its lamplights indicating the edges of the cement that separates the sidewalk from the parking lot. Nula goes back in through the multiplex, studies the show times, and sees that there are lines forming for the eight o’clock show. Then he passes through the cafeteria, which is now full, and observes the crowd from the entrance: the line that fills the passageway between the main room and the dishes and beverages; the customers who, leaving the registers, carry their loaded trays, moving slowly, uncertain and somewhat discouraged, looking for a table. Farther off, the small room where they were selling tickets to the Sunday match is closed, and a small sign taped to the wooden door announces: TICKETS FOR THE CLÁSICO SOLD OUT. A man and a woman practically running from the parking lot freeze, stupefied, when they see the sign. Nula walks into the hypermarket, and, moving slowly through the crowded aisles, without stopping once to look at any of the many products on display, eventually arrives at the stand and stops a certain distance away. The prospective tasters of the new line of table wines swarm around the counter. As she’s serving a customer, the girl who offered Moro the wine, and who’s seen him approach, gives him a friendly gesture, and so Nula walks up to her.

  —Everything alright? he says.

  —Perfect. There’s barely enough to go around, the girl says.

  —Do you need a hand? Nula says.

  —No, no. Don’t worry about us. Ms. Virginia is sending someone at nine to help us pack everything up. You can leave if you like, she says, handing a cup of red wine to a man who was watching every one of her movements carefully.

  Nula looks at his watch: it’s five after eight.

  —Alright, Nula says. I’ll leave before the return of Affife.

  The girl doesn’t get the joke, but she laughs politely and starts to fill another cup, this time of white wine. Nula turns around and starts walking toward the exit. The infinite loop of musical soundtracks heard in every elevator of every luxury hotel, in every supermarket, in every mall, in the variety shows on planes and in airports, the infinite wave of saccharine music that has be
en assaulting the West, and probably the East as well, for decades, like a soft requiem for the slow extinction of a species dying from a plague of conformism punctuated here and there by a marketing campaign, the thin molasses propelled by a plethora of violins, at the very moment when Nula crosses the exit, is playing “The Godfather,” and as if he’d been infected, without knowing it, by the virus of that same plague, as he steps into his car, Nula starts, softly, humming the melody. Because he still has time, he decides to get in line for gas at the service station, which takes awhile, and then he drives on, not really knowing what to do. After crossing the road bridge, rather than continuing along the boulevard, he turns up the waterfront along the edge of the lagoon, all the way to Guadalupe. At a bend, he sees the water glowing through the trees; it makes him want to get out and he starts to slow down but immediately changes his mind and drives on. At the Guadalupe roundabout he turns west and then back onto the same road, to the south. Thirty blocks later he reaches the boulevard, and, two blocks west, the bar Déjà Vu, but because he can’t park on the boulevard he turns at the corner, to the north, and parks halfway down the block. He walks slowly under the trees, in the warm night air. At nine fifteen on the dot he walks into the bar; Virginia is already there, not at a table but rather behind the counter, talking on the phone.

  The bar is full, and although it’s been open for over a year and Nula has passed it many times in his car, looking at it curiously, it’s his first time inside. It’s a simple and pleasant bar, with French posters on the ochre walls and wooden tables and chairs. It’s full of young people—a hip place, Nula thinks with a hint of arrogance that he immediately regrets, and sidestepping the tables, which are all full, he walks toward the counter. Virginia sees him arrive, and as she talks on the phone she gestures for him to wait. As she talks she looks through the window at some vague spot on the dark boulevard, and Nula is able to examine her ample, firm body, her wide back and her well-proportioned, slender arms, their tanned, smooth skin revealing, discreetly, below the short sleeves of her marble-colored shirt, hard muscles. After a couple of minutes, Virginia hangs up.