La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  —Muriel, my daughter; on Fridays she and her five friends all sleep over at someone’s house, Virginia says. Like old ladies getting together without their husbands.

  —Like some of them, enjoying the liberties of widowhood, Nula says.

  —What are you drinking? Virginia says, using tú unexpectedly. It’s on the house.

  Nula, with a half smile, slowly shakes his head, unsure. Despite being a wine seller, he has a strong preference for more colorful, eccentric drinks, like Kir Royales, Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, Negronis, San Martín Secos, or Lemon Champs. Finally he decides:

  —A Negroni, he says.

  Virginia pours the liquors in a cylindrical glass, over three or four ice cubes, mixes them with a long-handled spoon, and, folding a paper napkin in half, puts the glass on top and slides it to the outside edge of the counter. Before touching it, Nula observes, admiringly, the deep red of the liquid mixture that Virginia has just prepared.

  —Well? she says.

  —Aren’t we going to toast? Nula says.

  Virginia pours a small amount of seltzer into a glass and raises it. Nula raises his own, and the glasses, when they touch, produce a faint, momentary tinging. They take a drink, and Nula, with a gesture of approval, pursing his lips, concentrating on the flavor of the drink, looks up slowly.

  —Excellent, he says. I didn’t know that you worked here, too.

  —I don’t work here. I’m the owner. Well, one of the owners. There’s three of us, Virginia says. Him—she points to the waiter, serving a table—his wife, who should be here soon, and me. Do you mind if we wait for her five minutes before we leave?

  —Of course, Nula says. I knew from the first time I saw you that you were a business man.

  —No, Virginia says. The first time you saw me was a few years ago, at the enology course at the Hotel Iguazú. That’s the secret that I wanted to tell you: that we already knew each other.

  —Seriously? he says, laughing. You’re joking. How could I not have noticed you?

  —I was a little fatter then. And in some situations it’s better to go unnoticed, Virginia says. I wanted to approach you, I was very attracted to you. But you seemed so serious back then. And besides, a pregnant girl came to see you two or three times. When I saw you the other day I recognized you immediately. You look better.

  —I’m sure you do too. I can’t imagine you looking better than you do tonight.

  Virginia laughs lightly, but immediately her expression turns serious.

  —Thanks, but it’s not necessary for you to keep repeating that nonsense, she says. Here comes my associate.

  Nula, who is taking a sip of his Negroni, turns toward the door, through which he sees a girl in a tight, short-sleeved black dress with a tight band around the knees; a low, rectangular neckline begins at her collarbones and falls to the upper edge of her breasts, leaving her neck exposed. She stops at a table occupied by a couple, says a few words, and then, leaning over, gives each of them a conventional kiss on the cheek. Then she walks to the counter and arrives just at the moment when Nula deposits the glass with the rest of his Negroni on the white paper napkin.

  —Flaca, Virginia says. This is the friend I told you about. Nula, La Flaca.

  La Flaca approaches Nula and kisses him on the cheek. Then she apologizes for making them wait. Her husband arrives from the other side of the room and now it’s his turn to receive the quick kiss from La Flaca on his left cheek. Virginia picks up her purse from somewhere behind the counter, invisible to Nula, walks to the end of the counter, where the register is, turns around, and comes back in the opposite direction, toward them, along the outside edge of the counter. White pants made of a silky cloth hug her legs, her backside, her hips, her flat belly, her groin. Her white shoes click, evenly and firmly, against the reddish tiles. After a general exchange of perfunctory kisses, Virginia and Nula walk out to the street. They turn at the corner, walking under the shadows of the trees, toward the dark green station wagon parked along the curb a few meters ahead. Before pulling out, in the darkness of the car, with the dashboard lights projecting upward at an angle, their faces, looking in the same direction because of the position of their bodies in the seats, as though each of them was unaware of the presence of the other, reflecting the weak light, covered with highlights and shadows, indecisive and expectant, exaggerate their strangeness. A heavy silence surprises them, unexpected considering the casual relationship they’ve settled into since the beginning, submerging them among rapid, contradictory thoughts for a few seconds, as if the fragile cortex of urbanity whose surface retained the overflow of an indifferent, anarchic substance above turbulent, profound depths had split and both of them, exhibiting their openness up till that moment, assaulted by a sudden flood, were trying desperately to contain it. Nula, his voice coming out slightly hoarse, having to cough a couple of times before he can speak naturally, suggests the restaurant at the Hotel Palace, one of the most popular in the city, where they’re sure to run into at least one person they know, according to the rule whereby he carries out his most suspicious behavior where everyone can see it, precisely with the intention of dispelling those suspicions. Virginia accepts with a quick laugh that, Nula thinks, suggests she intuits his rationale. The mood has changed: their casual, quick humor, their worldly cynicism, their erotic double entendres, have lost their use value, and, without meaning to, they’ve moved inside something, a zone or a dimension that they are less than halfway in control of, and where, however much they pretend to move through it openly, they know that trembling, shudders, moaning, and heaviness are waiting for them. The restaurant is very full, and when the waiter offers them a discreet table in the back, Nula says he prefers a more central one, next to the window that faces the street, so that they’ll be seen easily from anywhere in the room, and from the street as well, a preference that once again provokes Virginia’s laughter, about which, in this new phase of their relationship, where they’re forced, for the moment, to intuit the meaning of each others’ words and reactions, to Nula, not the slightest shadow of a doubt, as they say, remains.

  —Do you drink wine? Nula says.

  —Why not? Virginia says. For me, first a glass of white and then a red.

  —Very good, he says. The cellar is good here; we’re partial suppliers.

  And, as they wait for the wine to arrive, they start to talk. When she was twenty-nine, Virginia, who studied French at the Alianza, went to France, to Bordeaux, to perfect the language, thinking she’d come back to the city to teach, but when her grant finished the following year she started to take an interest in wine, and as her French improved, her desire to teach it waned. She enrolled in enology courses and eventually found work with a supplier. Everything was going well: she’d been in Europe for four years and she was unsure if she would stay forever, but when she got pregnant it seemed, though it was never clear why, that she had to return. She waited for her daughter to be born so she’d be French. The girl’s father, who had another family, offered to recognize her, but Virginia refused; she respected the father, admired him even, but she didn’t love him. Recognizing Muriel would have created enormous complications for him, Virginia was convinced that he was relieved when she said no. For seven years he sent her money every month, until suddenly, one day, the money orders stopped. Eventually she got a letter from a friend in Bordeaux, saying that the man had died in a car accident. At the time, Virginia was giving private French classes, and sometimes the Alianza asked her to fill in, but wine, as a profession, attracted her: in Bordeaux, she’d seen the business side up close, of course, and also a lot of scheming and fraud, but wine itself, the successive transformations of the fruit into a drink and then into madness, sacred or otherwise, fascinated her. She’d promoted a few lesser-known Mendoza wineries around the littoral region, and had taken other courses (like the one where she’d seen Nula for the first time), but she wasn’t that interested in traveling, so when they built the supercenter, she applied to manage the bev
erage section. And him? Nula hesitates a few seconds before responding. Him? Nothing special: he started out in medical school and after a while got bored with it and transferred to philosophy. Then, because he was about to be a father, he had to get serious about work, and, well, the chance to work in wine presented itself unexpectedly. It’s not that bad, but since he has two kids now—a boy and a girl, Yussef and Inés, four and two, respectively—it would be impossible to stop working and commit himself to philosophy. (Nula’s interest in philosophy is amusing, and somewhat surprising, to Virginia.) In any case, Nula says, philosophy isn’t strictly speaking a profession; one is a philosopher in any situation, and any object in the world can be of interest to a true philosopher. Furthermore: any object in the world is the cipher for the whole world; if one discovers its essence, the whole world is revealed. And, considered properly, wine could be, after all, an optimal object of study. And, with a theatrical gesture, Nula raises a glass of white wine and makes a silent and delicate toast before taking a sip. When he places the glass back onto the tablecloth, he looks Virginia in the eyes and asks her gently:

  —Aren’t you worried about having deprived your daughter of a father?

  —Yes, very, Virginia says without hesitating, but she doesn’t elaborate on her response.

  Nula doesn’t insist, though he thinks again about his mother, his brother, his murdered father. Still, he doesn’t really want to discuss the topic, first of all because it’s too intimate and painful to describe immediately to someone who’s practically a stranger, but especially because he prefers to avoid disclosures, not out of caution or discretion, but rather because he doesn’t want them to become too human; he’d rather avoid opening the fissure through which shame and compassion might pass, the first being confused for the second in a swamp of relativity, removing them from that limbo of exteriority where their desire, sheltered from shame and reluctance, moving with ease, irrational, makes pleasure from ghostly stereotypes. Thus the meal passes with the kind of polite and expectant formality where each of them—at least this is how Nula imagines it—tries to discern, analyzing, in transit, the other’s intentions. They try the red wine and say some things about it, attempting to describe with everyday images the incommunicable depths of the experience, and when they coincide in some detail they reveal an excessive, childish enthusiasm that in Nula is not simulated in the least, though its excessiveness may come from the anticipated pleasure of what, though it hasn’t been named once all night—maybe they’ve both decided it without they themselves deliberating it, each of them possibly unaware of their own decision—inexorably, approaches. Every time that Nula thinks of the possibility, a violent emotion overwhelms him, and he has to concentrate so intensely to keep it from manifesting outwardly that, from time to time, he loses the thread of the conversation and can only respond with vague monosyllables and slow, indistinct nods, projecting into the immediate future the intense disorder, impenetrable to the words that Virginia, concentrating on the thoughts that those words attempt to translate, speaks in the present. Though she protests energetically, Nula pays the bill, and when they finish their last sip of wine, he gets up, says he’ll be right back, and starts walking toward the bathrooms. Because it’s Friday night, the restaurant is packed, and Nula sidesteps the tables with an unhurried, distracted agility. Two large tables of older women who get together, without their husbands, on Fridays, exude a singular energy, an overblown joy, possibly because they’ve freed themselves, for a few hours or forever, from the protection, tender or despotic, it makes no difference, of the men who, for decades, imagined that they possessed them. And a few meters beyond them, in a discreet corner in the back of the room, where the waiter, because of his experience, though he was ignorant to Nula’s private custom—hiding in plain sight—offered to seat them when he came in with Virginia, sits Gutiérrez in the company of a woman of a certain age, older than him—or at least that’s the impression that Nula gets as he approaches.

  Gutiérrez has seen him approach, and because he’s also seen Nula notice him, he waits for him smiling, half-standing. When he sees him, Nula thinks that if there were a restaurant that Gutiérrez, having returned to the city after more than thirty years away, would definitely pick, it would have to be the Hotel Palace, which already existed, very similar to how it is now, before his mysterious departure. Gutiérrez might be unaware that, like the tumultuous history of the country and the city, the restaurant, so similar to how he left it, suffered many setbacks, changes of fortune, decline, death and rebirth, successive closures and triumphant but ephemeral reopenings, periods when it was even a ruins and a house of ill repute, until a few years ago an international consortium of hotels bought and restored it, improved by the prestige that age inexplicably endows, to the same look it had the day it first opened in the mid forties. I’d bet my life that he couldn’t have paid for it back then, but the real reason he’s here tonight is that he’d wanted to be here during those years, doing the things that he imagined that the ones who were here kept doing, as though he’d never left, as though nothing had happened in all that time, and the Hotel Palace, with its most recent and umpteenth inauguration, must shore up that illusion, given its attachment, according to everyone who knows him better than I do, to that same world that was his until the day he left, Nula thinks, constantly smiling, as he approaches the table, holding out his hand to Gutiérrez, who waits with his own extended.

  —How are you? Gutiérrez says. Mr. Anoch, wine seller. Mrs. Leonor Calcagno.

  Nula is about to hold out his hand to her, but something in her posture, neither suspicious nor aggressive, but rather absent behind a vague smile, either her typical grimace or the involuntary side effect of repeated plastic surgery, tells him that she will not change position, and so he chooses instead a subtle, stiff, but friendly bow.

  —Good to met you, he says, and she responds with an imperceptible movement of her head.

  —I saw you when I came in, but you didn’t see me. Your wife, I take it, Gutiérrez says, nodding more or less in the direction of Nula’s table.

  Thinking that Virginia is my wife is as far from the truth as taking Lucía for his daughter, Nula thinks with unjustified cruelty, but instead he responds in the most neutral tone he can muster: Not at all. She’s a colleague from the supercenter; a typical business dinner.

  —Of course, Gutiérrez says. Now that you mention it, it’s obvious a mile away. I hadn’t looked closely.

  And he looks, quickly and just as vaguely, at the approximate place in the dining room where Virginia must be sitting at the table, though both he and Nula know, of course, that it’s impossible for him to see her from where he’s standing.

  —The other day I tried the viognier with Gabriela and Soldi. Thanks for the recommendation, it’s excellent, Gutiérrez says.

  —So I heard. I ran into them when they were coming back from there, happy as anything, after eating my catfish, Nula says, and Gutiérrez receives this allusion with a cackle.

  —La forza del destino, he says. And in a kindly threatening tone, he says, Be sure to bring your swimsuit on Sunday. I read that the weather is supposed to be excellent. I already called the others; you were the only ones left.

  —I’m sure it’ll be great, Nula says, but, for several seconds, he finds it impossible to turn his thoughts or his eyes from Leonor Calcagno: from between those legs, probably, though he can’t see them under the table, as thin and feeble as her blackened arms, at one point, Lucía Riera had emerged, irritated and bloody, wailing in shock and terror, from the placid lethargy in which she’d been vegetating for nine months, possibly sowed by the very man he’s just spoken to; suddenly, time has started to run backward, and the first cause of his encounter with that attractive, firm body, swaying, dressed in red, across that spring afternoon, attracting him like a magnet, or, better yet, like a promise, is now in front of him, the clandestine hours when in cheap hotels or in some apartment far from the city center, with fury and tenderness
, they copulated—if, after all, it’s true that Gutiérrez, and not the author of the still-usable Roman Law Course, is the real father, although the refusal, by all the parties in question, to verify it categorically, something which would be so easy to do, tends to suggest the opposite. Maybe it seems dishonorable to Gutiérrez to believe DNA more than Leonor; in any case, if that demented pact between the mother, the daughter, and the supposed father is inexplicable, it’s no more so than the apparent devotion that Gutiérrez demonstrates for the wreckage he’s taken out to dinner at the Palace restaurant tonight: clearly she has the cerebrum of a bird, and not just its cerebrum, actually. If she was beautiful once, she no longer conserves even the faintest shadow of that beauty; she can’t weigh more than forty kilos; her dark skin, devastated by constant exposure to the sun, or worse yet, to artificial tanning lamps, along with the creams, the diet regimes, the face lifts and skin grafts, the hair transplants and dye jobs, the silicone breast implants and lip fillers, supposedly to make them more sensual, have eroded whatever beauty she ever may have had; her arms, which extend like two dry twigs from the short sleeves of her dark blouse (perhaps following the precept that dark colors are thinning), loaded with bracelets, just like her gaunt fingers with rings, are wrinkled, and a thick layer of makeup disguises the wrinkles on her face, but no face lift could hide the skin on her neck that, as blackened as the rest, collapses into irrecoverable folds, which the two or three necklaces that lay on her flat and bony chest cannot manage to conceal. And now, to top it off, she opens her purse and, removing a makeup case, opens it, looks at herself in the interior mirror, and starts to retouch parts of her face with a small brush. Her skin is so dark, her body so withered, that her eyes, which are large and brilliant and yet inexpressive, look like two artificial lights occupying the place where her eyes should be, shining through their respective orifices in a dark, crumpled, and lifeless cardboard mask. When he turns his head away, Nula’s eyes meet Gutiérrez’s; his eyes are serene, and glow with a lucid and benevolent irony: I know what you’re thinking. But to understand what this is you’d have to live through the entire life of someone else; my experience is untranslatable, so it’s useless for you to waste your time wondering why I ran back to this rotten city after she and I met in Europe and she told me I was the father of her daughter. What do I care if it’s true or not? No matter what, the external always takes your place, the world, with its capricious, impenetrable laws, will always take you wherever it wants. You can’t imagine how beautiful she was, and so different from your associate tonight, and even though she couldn’t follow through to the end, she had more than enough courage for the enormous risk of giving herself to me, a nobody, for several weeks. Wouldn’t it seem terrible to you if I left her now that she’s alone, exhausted from her battle with age, after she’d given me, at the exact moment when I most needed it, what none of the gigolos who have exploited her would ever have? It doesn’t matter to me that she’s gone to bed with a thousand men; frankly I don’t think she gave a single one of them the gift the she gave me and that she herself is probably unaware that she possessed, or in any case that, from the effect that she continues to this day to have on my life, was only meant for me. In fact, Nula can’t tell with any certainty if these are the words hidden in the look that Gutiérrez has just given him, or if it’s he himself who attributes them to him, connecting the fragmentary histories in circulation and projecting onto Gutiérrez what, without knowing it till that moment, he’s thought of him since he first met him. Several curious and even absurd things, if taken separately, acquire a certain sense, not entirely clear of course, but totally coherent: for instance, his insistent declaration that he became a screenwriter and took on a pseudonym in order to disappear better, or on Tuesday, at the fish and game club, when he took out his false teeth, causing him as much surprise and even discomfort as to the man tending the bar, but which nevertheless seemed strangely reasonable to Escalante, so much so that he rewarded him with two live catfish, which, as an immediate consequence, restored the bartender’s respect. Many things escape him, and while there’s nothing actually disconcerting about Gutiérrez, just the opposite in fact, some aspects of his personality seem, in the end, not exactly absurd, but rather enigmatic.