La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  —Well, it’s great to see you both, he says.

  —Until Sunday, then, Gutiérrez says cheerfully, infected by Nula’s intensified friendliness.

  —Yeah, of course. At what time? Nula says.

  —I get up at six, Gutiérrez says. But if you want to sleep in a little, or go to mass . . .

  —Right, right, Nula says. Let’s say around eleven?

  —That’s what I was thinking, Gutiérrez says.

  And, with a silent wave, Nula continues toward the bathrooms. In the approximately forty-five seconds that the conversation lasted, Nula thinks, he’s become more lovable, possibly, but definitely more mysterious. And, on his way back from pissing, washing his hands, checking himself out in the mirror to confirm that everything along the exterior region of his person is in order, he passes by the table again, and the quick greeting that Gutiérrez gives him, consisting of waving the fingers on his slightly elevated hand, an indifferent and momentary although friendly gesture, similar to what Nula gave La India that morning, intensifies both his familiarity and his enigma. Leonor Calcagno ignores him, not out of disdain or suspicion, but because she finds herself, as always, trapped in the muddy material of her own person, where in all likelihood she’s been splashing frantically since her first moment of consciousness.

  Though he hasn’t been delayed long, Nula hurries back, but between the occupied tables, the busy waiters passing him, the clients coming in or going out, he doesn’t advance very quickly. When he is close to the table, he sees Virginia, calmly gazing out at the street through the window, her clean, thick hair, her round, tanned face, her wide shoulders, and her at once smooth and muscular arms. For the first time, he sees her without her noticing, and the virility of her body and the serenity of her expression forms an exciting contrast that attracts and repels him simultaneously. But when he reaches her side and sees that she already has her purse and her white jacket in her hand, ready to leave, that contradictory impression is erased, and he follows her decisively into the street. As they walk toward the car, Nula realizes that, at least in her high heels, she’s few centimeters taller than him: It’ll be a difficult body to control, he thinks, and when, thinking this, he laughs momentarily, Virginia looks at him with an inquisitive expression.

  —Nothing, Nula lies. I was thinking of someone I ran into at the restaurant.

  Virginia doesn’t respond, but shakes her head thoughtfully. They get in the car and, before putting the key in the ignition, Nula leans in to kiss her on the mouth; she lets him do it, but without allowing him to embrace her yet, and when he extends his hand to touch her, her hand traps it and their fingers interlace; Nula, who pushes forward softly, feels the resistance of her palm, and the two opposing forces find a stable equilibrium as they practice the ancient custom of testing with their mouths, first of all, like newborns and animals, the flavor, the value, the viability of the external, its beneficial or noxious, gratifying or repulsive qualities. When they separate and their hands release, through his sudden arousal, Nula, who still holds his car keys in his free hand, concealing his trembling, tries two or three times to put them in the ignition, until finally he’s able to; the dashboard lights come on and he looks quickly at Virginia, but she is motionless, her head leaning against the edge of the seat, her eyes narrowed. Nula turns the car on, pulls slowly away from the curb, and advances down the dark, deserted street toward the bright intersection. It’s almost midnight. Remembering the sensation of the fleshy, humid, and warm borders that he’s just tasted, Nula thinks that, although everything is alike, nothing is ever repeated, and that since the beginning of time, when the great delirium began its expansion, each one of the buds with which it’s revived, reincarnating and withering immediately, every event is unique, flaming, unknown, and ephemeral: the individual does not incarnate the species, and the part is not a part of the whole, but only a part, and the whole is in turn always a part; there is no whole; the goldfinch that sings at dawn sings for itself; what it sings was unknown before that morning, and its previous song, which even it doesn’t remember singing, and which seems so much like the one before, if one listened carefully, would clearly be different.

  Nula reaches out his hand, seeking Virginia’s, and he finds it, warm and relaxed, on her thigh; their fingers intertwine again, but without resistance.

  —What should we do? he says.

  —Whatever you want, if you can imagine that I don’t do this every Friday, Virginia says.

  —It wouldn’t matter to me, Nula says.

  —But I don’t, she says, and after a pause: I’m paying for the hotel.

  Nula, incredulous, shakes his head: And is that typical? he says, with a laugh that sounds like a protest.

  —I’m not going to explain it, Virginia says, without laughing.

  —Alright, alright, Nula says. I accept.

  They go to a motel room on the outskirts of the city, to the north. An employee meets them in the shadows of the entrance. Nula rolls down the window and the man, without leaning out too much, out of discretion for sure, offers them a special room, which he calls the Palais de Glace.

  —Why not? Virginia says before Nula has time to consult her. And, giving him a nudge on the arm, holds out a few bills.

  —The last garage on the left, the man says, and Nula drives away slowly, in first gear, down a brick gravel path flanked by hedges and surrounded by a series of garages, of which two or three are occupied. Dim lights barely illuminate the garden, and when the car enters the garage, a faintly luminous strip designates the entrance, which they cross without incident thanks to the car’s headlights.

  A door in the middle of the wall leads to an almost completely dark passageway in which the man from the entrance is waiting for them. Without turning around—discretion is a house rule—he leads them to a door, opens it, and before disappearing, he murmurs: The light switch is to the left of the entrance.

  As soon as they enter, Nula switches it on and closes the door to the passageway. The contrast with the passageway, the garage, the garden, and the turbulent night in the outskirts dazzles and at the same time amuses and fascinates them. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and its illuminated lamps are reflected in an array of mirrors surrounding a large bed, without a headboard, covered in a red bedspread. The back wall, the two side walls, and the ceiling from which the chandelier hangs are covered with mirrors. Standing in the middle of the room, at the foot of the bed, each one of their movements is repeated ad infinitum in the mirrors, sharp and clearly visible in the glaring, multiplied lights. They embrace and kiss, but without the other seeming to notice it, both are less attracted to the carnal experience than to the infinite image of themselves experiencing it, returned to them, simultaneously, by the mirrors. Nula wants to go take a shower, but it’s difficult for him to abandon that embrace, reproduced as far as the eye can see, acquiring a dreamlike quality in which the multiple images of himself carry out the gestures that he imagines, without the sensations that he experiences, ultimately confusing the empirical plane with the countless images that mimic him until he loses his own sense of reality. Eventually, he lets go and walks into the bathroom. He undresses, and when he steps into the shower to wash himself off and cool down, he’s so excited that his penis makes it difficult for him to wash his groin, his thighs, his testicles. Finally, he reemerges, drying himself off as he walks into the room. Virginia is lying on the bed, naked, her forearm resting on her forehead and her eyes narrowed, one leg bent and the other extended across the bed, the black triangle of her pubis half-hidden by a fist resting softly on the pillow of hair. Nula lets the towel fall to the ground and, standing at the foot of the bed, rests his left hand against his own groin to make his penis stand out more, and then, with his fingers, pulls back the foreskin to reveal the reddish head, inflated by the impatient blood, and then, looking sideways, sees his own image multiplied in the side mirrors, then in the one in front of him, and finally in the one that returns his image, inverted, from th
e roof. But when he looks back toward the image reflected by the side mirrors his eyes meet Virginia’s and he realizes that she isn’t asleep and that in fact, with her eyes narrowed, she’s gazing, lost in thought, at her own naked body in the mirror. Suddenly, she realizes that she’s being watched, and looking at Nula through the mirror, feeling discovered, she starts to laugh, and Nula, removing his hand from his groin, laughs along. For several seconds, countless naked bodies, that of a young woman lying in bed, and that of a man standing at the foot of the same bed, laugh with a curious joy, but the laughter rings out in a single dimension, without it being clear where it comes from, whether from the rough bodies made of blood, of impulses, of thoughts, and of time, or from the ghostly pantomime that, sheltered from contingency, mimics them, seething, in the mirrors. Virginia opens her eyes and moves her arms, which end up alongside her body. Her legs, stretched out across the bed, open slightly, and along the inside edge of the black triangle of her pubis, barely visible, the reddish promise is revealed, the legendary entrance beyond which, inaccessible and remote, in an unknowable space, like the most distant and invisible galaxies, the sensations of the other take shape.

  SATURDAY

  MARGINS

  Before the central market was torn down, the alley behind it was full of cheap restaurants and boarding houses. In one of these, La Giralda, on August 6th, 1945, precisionism was born.

  There was no broadside, no Battle of Hernani, no exquisite corpse. Mario Brando, its creator, had his sights elsewhere: precisionism should take its place not among the avant-garde, in opposition to the times, but rather as its most faithful representation. According to Brando, newspapers, radio stations, universities, and large-circulation magazines should be the natural media for the expression and expansion of the movement. Scientific magazines not only weren’t excluded but in fact were, in a certain sense, the immediate precursors of the precisionist aesthetic. A proto-precisionism could be found precisely in the latest scientific treatises and the reviews of these in popular magazines.

  At the time, for the writers of the city, it was a sign of good taste to be seen, every so often, at one of the precisionists’ Thursday dinners. Only the post-modernista old guard refused to yield, but it’s important to note that, from Belisario Roldán onward, they’d labeled every new literary movement as wayward, prosaic, and incomprehensible. Anyone still left over in nineteen sixty was still making the same joke about modern art, namely that everything represented by abstract painting was a fried egg.

  The rest of the opposition, which is to say the neoclassicists and the regionalists, was much more elastic, if not opportunistic. The regionalists, who met on Fridays at the San Lorenzo grill house, would individually attend the dinners every so often, and would invite this or that precisionist to their cookouts. But they didn’t suffer from any illusions: they knew that Nexos, the official organ of Mario Brando’s movement, would never welcome a regionalist text. The neoclassicists, whose magazine, Espiga, had been published triannualy since 1943, had some official exchanges with the precisionists, inasmuch as Brando and his clique thought that certain neoclassical subjects, like Christian mysticism, for instance, could yield to the precisionist aesthetic. And the neoclassicists, meanwhile, appreciated the precisionist inclination for traditional forms. In private, the regionalists referred to the neoclassicists as sanctimonious Bible thumpers and to the precisionists as outdated futurists and fascists; the neoclassicists said that the regionalists, with every one of their criollo cookouts, were slowly devouring the subjects of their literature, and that the precisionists, with their absurd scientism, were the medical school pages; and the precisionists, who weren’t satisfied with the occasional slander and in fact launched fully clandestine smear campaigns, referred to several members of Espiga’s editorial committee as Curia spies, to their writing as an intentional amalgamation of mysticism and faggotry, and said that the interest of the regionalist group’s leader for the countryside could be explained by the fact that he was actually a horse.

  Brando was born in 1920. In 1900, his father, an Italian immigrant, arrived in Buenos Aires with the certainty that every one of his compatriots huddled alongside him in the boat, along with everyone who’d come over in the last thirty or forty years, crowded in other boats, and still crowding in Buenos Aires slums until they got the chance to finally own a farm or a business, that every one of those compatriots, who came from everywhere in Italy, still shared the same weakness, pasta, and that he would be the one to supply them with it. After three or four years of adventures, he finally landed in the city and started to manufacture, in small, artisanal quantities, fresh pastas that he distributed to a fixed clientele in wicker boxes, carefully wrapped in immaculate napkins cut from bags of grain. Two years later, the customers would be coming to buy their pasta at the Brando family delicatessen, in the center of the city, and if by 1918 their dry spaghetti, wrapped in cellophane or in twenty-kilo bags, was sold in numerous shops in the north of the province, by 1925, Pastas Brando was one of the top businesses in the province, and Atilio Brando was the president of the Círculo Italiano. (In 1928, one black ball thrown in the vote would keep him out of the Club del Orden.)

  To the annoyance of many local patricians, Atilio Brando’s Spanish was flawless. Five or six years after having come to the country, all that was left of his Italian accent was a slight aspiration. His family was full of lieutenants to Cavour, to Pellico, and to Garibaldi. In the sixties, Taine had eaten with one of his relatives in Rome. And when the manufacture of pastas had achieved a regular pace, when the complex, futuristic harmony of the factory was producing an uninterrupted chain of identical packages of fragile, yellow pastas ready to be circulated by a perfectly oiled and efficient distribution network, the elder Brando handed over the factory to a loyal manager with a share in the profits and started spending long periods in Italy or writing novels and memoirs in his house in Guadalupe.

  It was said that, without a doubt, the Brandos had come to this world to demolish stereotypes. The delicate Romans who conversed with Taine in French and supported unification ended up forgotten and scattered, while the visionary who, to reconstruct his patrimony, had only a couple of secret recipes for tagliatelle and rigatoni, could boast a virtuously nonchalant attitude with regard to his children’s education and to the destiny of Pastas Brando after the death of its founder. Memoirs and realist novels were the polestars of his life. In contrast to every gringo imagined by the Argentine theater, Atilio Brando wasn’t a slave trader, work wasn’t his religion, and he didn’t demand a law or a medical degree from his son as the first step toward an advantageous marriage with a patrician young lady.

  In contrast, to Mario Brando, social status had true value and wasn’t the tenuous and somewhat degenerate simulacrum that the old pasta maker described in his realist novels. To him, urbanity was an extreme form of historicism, and materialists, if they were consistent, should venerate snobs. But Mario Brando wasn’t a snob, inasmuch as, every time he used the word, he knew what he was referring to. His poetic vocation was authentic, and his historicism was in fact manifested in his romantic life and in the tenets of precisionism, of which he was the primary author. The relationship to his father was original for reasons diametrically opposed to those that literature has accustomed us to think of as typical of generational conflict. Of the two Brandos, the father was the romantic and the son the pragmatist; the father was generous and the son miserly; the father, indifferent to social conventions, and the son, utterly dependent on public opinion. The father walked around shabbily dressed, lost in daydreams, while the son never left the house without a vest or a gold cigarette case. Like a millionaire father who tries to hide from his board members the vagrancies of his heir that might endanger the business, Mario hid his father’s flirtations with realism from landowners and his disciples, considering them a mockery of precisionism’s scientific exactitude. Luckily, Atilio Brando wrote in the language of Dante, as he proudly declared, and apart f
rom a few articles in La Región from the thirties, his books (Against Hermetism, for instance), published in Italy, did not circulate beyond a few members of Unione e Benevolenza. The old man was bothered by worldliness because it distracted him from literature; for the son, literature was the pinnacle of worldliness, in the noble sense of the word, and he told himself that it was the only noble thing he could boast of.