La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Brando’s life was the complete opposite of what one might expect from a poet, in any case according to the current stereotypes used to imagine the life of the poet. Brando didn’t drink, and he smoked very little—apparently the doctor had prohibited him to carry. His family life was conventional and quiet, and was limited to his wife and two daughters. After the death of the elder Brando he’d stopped seeing his sisters. He almost provoked a lawsuit when the inheritance was distributed, but the conflict was resolved quietly before reaching the courts. His sisters never forgave him for having burned their father’s literary papers when he got back from Europe, or for taking the house in Guadalupe, which their father had built in the late twenties for the whole family, without ever discussing the issue with them. Two of the sisters had moved to Rosario and the third now lived in Italy. Like her brother, she wrote, but in Italian, like her father: realist novels with a certain social and even erotic vulgarity, and in which bread was called bread and wine was called wine, without disguising provincial hypocrisy behind ridiculous scientistic neologisms, as she wrote to me once in a letter from Rome, shortly after Brando’s death.

  In the last years of his life, long before he got sick, in fact (a tumor in his colon finished him off in a couple of months), Brando lived a very reclusive life. He was more occupied with his law firm and with his social and familial connections than with precisionism or with poetry in general. All the same, his articles and poems still appeared every so often in La Región, in La Capital, or in some other Buenos Aires newspaper. But the precisionist movement itself already belonged to the past. In 1960, La Nación published an article celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first dinner at La Giralda, authored by Brando himself, along with a photo that he provided.

  •

  When he finishes reading, Tomatis turns over the last white page, printed from a computer, and puts it on top of the others, with the printed side facing down. Then, picking up the stack of pages, he taps their bottom edge against the manila folder on his knees several times so that the sheets all line up neatly. On the first page, halfway down the page, the title, PRECISIONISM, appears in capital letters, and below it, in italics, by A witness of the time, and after a space what strictly speaking would be called the text begins. While he carries out all of these movements, Tomatis holds, between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, and resting as well in the space between his index finger and thumb, the red pen with which he’s been making annotations in the margins every so often. Finally he closes the manila folder, slides it into one of the compartments of the open briefcase in the adjoining seat, the one on the aisle side, and lets it fall, along with the pen, not before pushing down on the button that retracts the tip into the metal cylinder that protects it. Then he puts his elbows on the arm rests that surround his seat, and turning his head and falling still, he stares at the landscape that rolls by on the other side of the window without seeing any of it.

  Gabi’s fear that Tomatis would guess the true identity of a witness of the time was justified; before he read the text, even before he’d gotten a copy, the moment Gabi mentioned his existence, Tomatis had already solved the supposed mystery of its authorship, deciding at that moment that he would never reveal his certainty to Gabriela. In any case, it’s always the text that speaks, never the writer, at least when it comes to literature, and especially literary fiction, in particular the kind that pretends not to be and instead presents itself as a straightforward report. Every word, as simple and direct as it may be, is already a fiction. What else could we expect, therefore, from the gloss of a supposed witness of the time, written several years after the events it narrates, the majority of which he never attended, like the evangelists who never knew the source of the good news, whose existence, meanwhile, is based on such little evidence? And, shifting in his seat, satisfied, Tomatis smiles and then looks around him to verify that no one in the bus has seen him laughing to himself.

  It would be practically impossible for that to happen. The upper level of the two-story executive comfort class bus is almost empty. On Saturday afternoons, on the scheduled five forty (from Rosario), and though it is the night before the start of Holy Week, the buses between Rosario and the city that roll down the highway in either directions, green, red, white, or metallic according to their company, are never very full; on Friday and Saturday mornings, on the other hand—and those who travel frequently know this—it’s wise to buy a ticket well in advance. For decades, and for a thousand different reasons, Tomatis, who is rumored to never have taken a local bus, has traveled frequently on those interurban buses, ever since the heroic period, when traveling the hundred and seventy kilometers—if it was a local and not the express—could take four hours and sometimes more because the bus stopped at each of the towns along the two-lane route, and if there was traffic after San Lorenzo, in Rosario’s industrial suburbs, it could take another fifteen or twenty minutes each way. Since the inauguration of the highway, in the seventies, the trip was reduced to two and a half hours, which sometimes forced the drivers to go almost at a walking pace down the empty highway for the last thirty or forty kilometers so as to not arrive ahead of schedule.

  On the upper deck, barely half a dozen seats besides his own are occupied, and only two at the very back, behind him. There’re two female students in the first row, just behind the panoramic window, above the diver’s seat; a much older woman with a child who, Tomatis gathered when he saw them board, are no doubt a grandmother and a grandson whom she picked up in Rosario so he could spend the Holy Week holiday with his grandparents; two rows in front, a boy with a suitcase whom Tomatis had seen before at the terminal bar, drinking a coffee like himself, at a table close to his, and who caught his attention because he was reading an old translation of A Sentimental Education; just in front of the boy, a middle-aged couple, forty or forty-five at the most, whom he saw on the platform, giving the porter a large wheeled suitcase covered with stickers from hotels, from other countries, and from airlines, two of which hung from a string attached to the handle, suggesting that they were returning from a recent trip. Finally, in the back row, two boys, probably students as well, making an early trip to the Sunday Clásico, or at least that’s what Tomatis gathered when, after he’d already sat down, he saw them come up the spiral staircase from the lower level, from the fragments of enthusiastic and somewhat loud conversation that he heard as they passed by his seat and sat down in the last row, on the other side of the aisle. From their position relative to himself, they would be the only ones, meanwhile, who could have caught him laughing to himself.

  The air conditioning alone isn’t enough to explain the pleasant coolness inside the bus; of course it’s the cause of the sensation, but there’s something more general than a simple sensory detail, the impression of coolness is the result of the fact that all of the passengers sitting on the sunny side of the bus, with the exception of Tomatis, who’s folded it back in order to see the exterior, have kept closed the curtains that shield them from the sun, as they found them when they boarded, probably left that way by the cleaning staff. It hasn’t been necessary, meanwhile, to close the curtains on the other side of the aisle, because the shade from the bus itself protects the passengers from the rays of the sun. And so, between the shaded side and the sunny side, with the curtains closed, with the exception of Tomatis’s, in addition to the air conditioning, a cool penumbra has formed in the bus, pierced at various points by streaks of light that filter through the edges of the curtains, which sometimes don’t completely cover the glass, a penumbra that Tomatis, carrying in his memory, though no longer in his body, the recollection of the heat outside, experiences with a sense of relish. The open curtain attenuates this slightly, but the combination of the heat that the sun, still high in the sky, radiates through the window, and the interior coolness that sticks to his skin, causes him, after half an hour on the road, despite the eighty-five degrees with which, in early April, the late summer is extended, to suddenly
feel a physical sense of spring that, by association, returns him over several seconds of unexpected and violent happiness to the person he used to be years before, in what he’s taken to calling his youth, which he’s unsure whether to consider a past stage of his life, an invention in the ceaseless chain of interior images, or an illusion, or, better yet, a legend.

  The physical source of the happiness comes, no doubt, from a set of random elements: the temperature of his body and the outside temperature, light and shadow, the traveler’s calm and temporary passivity, the repetition of a situation, sitting on a bus between Rosario and the city, that he’s been in many times since his adolescence, but in the present instance, reading the history of precisionism has recalled memories of other times, starting in the mid-fifties especially, at the end of his adolescence, drawing them from dark depths and making them fully conscious. One repeated memory from that time, apparently singular yet in reality composed of fragments of many similar memories, returns often: his canoe trips with Barco, from the regatta club, across the river. They’d leave very early in the morning, when it was just getting light, and, taking turns on the paddles, would plunge into the labyrinth of channels and islands that they knew well, though not well enough not to get lost every so often at some turn in which the width of the channel, the direction of the current, the vegetation, or the shape of the islands that they came upon were so identical to all the others they’d already passed that they temporarily had the impression of having remained at a fixed point, without advancing a millimeter, across the omnipresent and disproportionate river. More than once they found themselves in some unknown channel; they would stop paddling and let the canoe drift, correcting its course only every so often with a thrust of the paddle, knowing that at any moment they’d find themselves at some familiar point along that vast and empty extension of islands and water. They’d paddle from the dawn, as they watched the sky brighten ahead of them, in the east, well into the morning, sometimes protecting themselves from the sun along a shady bank, resting a while, sprawled out inside the canoe, taking sips of water or eating pieces of fruit in order to trick their stomachs until the afternoon, when it was time for lunch, under a tree inside some island, fleeing from the cruel, blinding white light of the sun at the zenith, radiating its incandescent sparks over the entire visible space, as though there were no longer a sky or an earth, water or vegetation, material gathered into distinct things of different colors and consistencies, but rather a single fluid glimmer replacing the multiform and multicolor diversity of the existent. That moment, Tomatis thinks now with the words of an adult about an experience that was then unnamable, when the diversity of appearances into which the world decomposed was reabsorbed by the flux that, every so often, allowed him to drift for an incalculable lapse into its proprietary space only to be erased almost immediately. That multiple memory, made of many repeated memories, differs from one that’s more intense and unique, the distant but sharp recollection of a November morning when, for a long time, as the canoe drifted through channels in the river that were at once familiar, because they seemed like so many others, and unfamiliar, because it was the first time they’d crossed them, the light flowed in such a way that the whole surface of the water, the air, and the sky transformed into a white, homogeneous, radiant incandescence, while the reddish earth of the islands and the bluish green vegetation seemed suddenly covered in a kind of brilliant lacquer, and the flowers along the riverbanks, both aquatic and terrestrial, both white and bright colored, shone, glazed with a ubiquitous, active light that, paradoxically, even made the spaces in shadow glow. This brand-new world had risen from a deep well of nothingness and now floated in a channel of light, wrapped in its undulating, velvety tunic. Tomatis, lying against the edge of the slowly drifting canoe, observed it, overwhelmed with an intense, inextinguishable happiness. Both the islands and the water were equally still, the liquid surface seemingly veneered in a luminous substance, and the canoe, without the traction of the paddles, slid through it silently, without resistance. The present became a magical illusion in which everything that took effort or caused disillusion or pain—uncontrollable impulses, corrosive memories, the passage of time, the external world, indifferent and even hostile to desire—had been neutralized. In that generalized stillness, the canoe’s drift differed from its typical movement, not only because of the silence, but also from the ease with which this luminous, undulant, and vibrating substance, endowing things with an extraterrestrial halo, allowed itself to be crossed, slowly and calmly, acquiescent and benevolent. Every so often, a bird, flying, suddenly and colorfully, from the interior of some island, crossed the motionless landscape, gliding, compact and quick, over the water, almost without flapping, and disappearing into the vegetation of a nearby island, and yet the movement required to complete that trajectory seemed fictitious and strange, and though the eye absorbed the totality of its flight in a single gaze, in the seconds that immediately followed its disappearance from the senses, when it transformed, imperceptibly, into memory, the uninterrupted flight was transformed into a series of disconnected and ecstatic fragments, frozen in various, discontinuous stages of the flight. Tomatis looked at Barco sitting on the other end of the boat, his eyes narrowed, the paddles gathered up in his hands, and thought that he’d fallen asleep, but later, when they started to talk again, Barco told him that he’d been trying to listen for something that might explain the intriguing silence that had fallen over that section of the river, listening for every imperceptible whisper on the water or on the islands that the current usually prevented him from hearing. Barco’s response, though it didn’t help him understand what had happened, calmed him down, because the unusual silence that Barco had sensed meant that the singular impression that the flux of morning light had caused in him had an objective source and wasn’t merely a hallucination. Cool and glimmering, brought within reach of his senses by that fluid radiance, the visible, by its simple appearance, had transmitted a contagious euphoria that kept him, for several minutes, in a light and peaceful state of exaltation.

  Tomatis, content, turns around in his seat, though first taking a quick and discreet look at the row behind him, to his right, on the other side of the aisle, where the two boys who’d been chatting since the bus left the terminal have grown quiet, wanting to verify that the cause of their silence isn’t that they’re watching him, as if, studying him closely, they could have gathered from some tiny detail in his behavior the intense emotion that has just struck him and that, more than anything in the world, he’d like to keep from exposing to outside indiscretion. But from what he can tell with a quick look, the two boys have simply grown tired of speaking and are now resting, reading a sporting magazine that one leafs through slowly so that the other, the one on the window side, leaning toward him, can also see the headlines and look at the photographs. Satisfied, Tomatis forgets about them almost immediately and leans back against the seat. The six o’clock sun in the cloudless sky is still high and yellow, yet the shadows from the trees, from the houses, from the warehouses, from the mills, extend to the east, projecting over the grasses that the past week’s rains, which lasted till Tuesday night, and even into Wednesday morning, have revived. After leaving the Rosario terminal, the bus crossed the city’s western neighborhoods until it reached the loop road, and after taking this along the long belt of shantytowns that surrounds the city, it reached the highway and turned north toward the city. It was only then that Tomatis picked up the text about precisionism again—though he knew the ones around Rosario by heart, the poor sections of any city, seen from the bus or from the train, attracted him, and he liked to observe every one of their features in careful detail, the facades, the businesses, the cross streets, often unpaved if they were deep into the outskirts, that disappeared, perpendicular, into the horizon. In the poor neighborhoods of Rosario, in the narrow front gardens, in which there’s barely space for a large bush, there’s often a hibiscus, and every time Tomatis sees one of those plants, he rem
embers that Frazer says that among many of the ancient tribes of the planet it’s the species whose wood best conserves the primordial fire of the universe, after which the universe was reborn, because it’s the best wood for lighting a fire simply by rubbing it with a stick. According to others, among some tribes the hibiscus symbolizes the universe itself, possibly, Tomatis once thought, because of its continuous and ephemeral blooming: its red flowers (there are other colors, but the red hibiscus is the most common) take shape and bloom over a few hours, but not much longer, and as they whither and fall others take their place, which means the plant grows in a process of continuous change, just like the universe, where worlds, stars, and galaxies are ignited and then extinguished, are born and die, in a constant flicker whose exact duration and interval could only be calculated from some improbable exterior.

  The shantytowns, an endless collar of poverty that surrounds the city, just like a slip knot around the neck of a condemned man, Tomatis thinks, have a sense of calm, if not warmth, this Saturday afternoon, despite the paralyzing indigence among the precarious shacks that, miraculously, hold each other up; Tomatis senses this from having passed them many times before over the years. Since his first trips to Rosario, the belt of poverty around the city had been growing, until now it surrounds it completely. It’s been the stop for everyone who, coming from the depths of affliction, from the northern provinces, from Paraguay, from Bolivia, and even from Peru, thought they’d find some relief or some hope in the littoral cities. For the majority, still blinking from astonishment and incredulity after discovering the overwhelmingly stupefying proof that they were raw flesh senselessly thrown to the world, forced to survive with only the placenta that nourished them for nine months, poverty was already progress, the inferno of work a gift, their shack a refuge, and the city to which many come to work, seen from a distance, the promised land. For others, poverty perpetuated the scandal, and to them the ones who weren’t splashing frantically, the ones who through inheritance, luck, perseverance, merit, larceny, or the exploitation of their neighbor, lived in the legendary aura of a world without privation, were like an alien species to them, serpents, black widows, scorpions, with whom it was impossible to identify and who had to be crushed without hesitation so as to avoid the deadly sting, the bite of the atavistic enemy defending its territory. Others were resigned to rummaging in what the city discarded, among the trash heaps, searching for the gold mine of cloth, of paper, or glass, of metal, that would provide them with a day or two of food. There were those who, from an adolescent body, theirs or another’s, sometimes even the one they loved most, where they could have sated their thirst, drawing relief, as from an inexhaustible source of calm, built a chaos of venality, contempt, and perversion, and, from this lifeless decoy, made a business. Some killed or got themselves killed for no reason, inspiring fear not only in their enemies, but especially in their mothers, in their grandparents, in their siblings. And yet, the ones who had come from other places—rural zones lost in the north, impoverished Indian reservations populated with the last representatives of the starving tribes that, had they gone to school, would have learned that there hadn’t been any more Indians in the region for many years—thought, rightly, that they had progressed, from nothing to something, a job, a tiny schoolhouse among the ranches, under a blue and white rag flapping in the air, a clinic, a cafeteria, a chapel or an evangelist temple, but also dances, the political events where the candidates distributed food, clothing, and blankets to buy their votes, or a vacant lot with a white arch at each end where ragged and sweaty kids chased a ball for hours, shouting and gesturing, until they were swallowed by the night. In fact, the bus had earlier passed a group of younger and older kids who were playing a pickup game, and a group of onlookers watched, spread around the edge of the field. To one side, in an open-air courtyard closed at the front by a low mud wall and an unplastered brick arch—the sign above the arch read La Quema Social and Recreational Club—preparations were being made for a dance that night. Some sections of the long belt of poverty are worse than others; in the worst ones, the shanties, caves of stick, straw, cardboard, cabinetry, and rusted tin predominate, but in other parts the construction is tidied up with clean adobe, unplastered brick, doors, and windows. Out front of some of those houses there’s even an old car, a motorcycle, or a bicycle with a delivery basket behind the seat. A wide strip of grass, split in two by a ditch, separates the ribbon of buildings from the asphalt of the loop road. Around the ditch, the grass is littered with twisted paper, plastic bags, empty cans, broken or mud-stained bottles, and empty cigarette packs; every so often, stands of enormous eucalyptus, of tall acacias, of leafless carob trees with brown vines hanging from their branches, or of bitterwoods recall that at one time that congested strip was countryside, farms, estates, and empty plain. The porous, uniform six o’clock light covers the earth, the buildings, the grass, and the trees in a reddish, pulverized gold patina, its fine dust still floating in the air. The afternoon is so calm that, on one dirt street perpendicular to the avenue, Tomatis saw a cloud of dust, motionless, like an evanescent monument, lifted by some vehicle that had already disappeared, holding together in the warm and windless air without dispersing or falling to the ground. After the turnoff to the road to Córdoba, at the entrance to the highway, two or three kilometers from the loop road, they passed the dump, surrounding them on both sides with its compact strata of steaming garbage, and men, women, and children bent over the mountain of discards expelled by the city, digging through it, searching for their day’s wages. And then the first houses, many of them extremely old, wavering between the country and the city, surrounded by trees, with a horse grazing in the rear pasture, a farm, a rusty, unused windmill, brick smoke floating over the truncated pyramid where they have been stacked. As soon as they left the city, Tomatis started to read the pages that remained, looking up every so often and glancing out the window, and now, after putting away the text, which he’d annotated in the margins, after being struck by a sudden and intense happiness, he has leaned back against the seat and watches the landscape roll past through the window, the only one not covered by a curtain, the others closed to protect the interior of the bus from the setting sun, which is still strong, falling, imperceptibly slowly, toward the western horizon. They left the Rosario terminal thirty-five minutes ago, which means that within an hour and forty-five minutes, at eight on the dot if everything goes well, they’ll be pulling in to the terminal in the city.