La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  For the past year, since Alicia started pharmaceutical school in Rosario—the implacable, overwhelmingly determined pressure from her grandmother, which Haydée, her mother, had never been able to resist, had ultimately won out—Tomatis has gone to visit her every so often, on Saturday mornings, with a routine that never changes: at ten o’clock she’s waiting for him at the terminal, from which they take a taxi downtown, where they walk along the promenades and the arcades; when Alicia sees something she likes, she goes inside to try it on, and if she decides to buy it, Tomatis, who stays on the sidewalk, goes inside to pay for it. At eleven thirty they drink a quick coffee on Calle Córdoba, and then continue their walk. At twelve thirty they browse through a few bookstores, Tomatis buys a present for his sister, and at around one thirty or one forty-five they have lunch at some fashionable place popular with young people, where they serve unique sandwiches and salads that you build yourself from an assortment of ingredients laid out on a table. Tomatis orders a beer and Alicia asks for soda. For a while now, Tomatis has been resigned to the idea that Alicia will inherit her maternal grandmother’s pharmacy. He would have liked for her to study philosophy, music, fine art, diplomacy, anthropology, physics, any of those romantic careers that certain parents, moved by the chubby little angels they’ve watched in the cradle since the day they were born, project into their future, one in which all contradiction, adversity, and contingency, at least from a distance, have been eliminated. The day that Alicia told him and his sister over lunch that she was going to Rosario to get a pharmaceutical degree, Tomatis choked on the spoonful of soup that he was eating at that moment, and the discussion that followed was loud and prolonged, especially because the idea seemed excellent to his sister as well, something which in fact meant nothing because she and Alicia were always on the same side anyway—which is to say, against him—when they argued. Tomatis was bitter for a while, but he eventually calmed down, telling himself that, in the end, it was what was best for Alicia, a life planned out in advance, free of any surprises, either beneficial or harmful. All the same, he still catches himself now and then, trying to detect some indication of rebellion in her, however small.

  Over the previous week, after having told Alicia on Monday about his visit and having bought the seven forty ticket for Saturday that same afternoon, he has been living, in his own words, the tedious life of a provincial bourgeois pensioner, although, as he declared on Thursday night at the Amigos del Vino bar, over a few bottles of sauvignon blanc with Violeta, Nula and his wife, Gabi, and Soldi, luckily interrupted every so often by a wake, a by palatable story, or by intoxication. Apart from Nula and Diana, his wife, everyone knew those lines, and though it was much newer than the one about the buses not being full enough, which they’d discussed that night, it got the usual positive reception, provoking laughter not only in its recipients, but also in the one who uttered them. Only Nula and Diana were unaware that the supposed modesty of describing himself as a provincial bourgeois pensioner was actually a sly way of comparing himself to Flaubert, and when now, in the bus, Tomatis smiles again, it’s out of empathy with the other three, who always understand the veiled allusion and not the literal sense of the lines. After saying goodbye to the others and leaving the bar, rather than taking him home or inviting him over for a drink, Violeta suggested that they take a drive along the waterfront—she liked to lock herself in her car, put on music, and drive around the city and the surrounding towns all night if she didn’t have work the next morning. That inclination in Violeta pleases Tomatis. She put on Beethoven’s “Grand Fugue” that night, remarking, after the first few notes, that, It doesn’t sound like anything else, making her way through the empty streets toward the waterfront, along the avenue, where some trucks were parked but where nothing moved and there was not a single sign of life. Their intermittent affair over the past few years is faithful but without passion, a tiresome excess that they certainly don’t miss. And though they fornicate without complexes or taboos, within the limits allowed by their occupations and their physical condition, it’s the friendship, the intellectual and affective part of their relationship, that keeps them together. The two are coming off romantic and familial lives (Violeta has two children) from which neither joy nor periodic catastrophes were lacking, and those two extremes have caused them to prefer, each in their own way, a less ambitious and more reflective and calm sensuality for their later years. Despite the fact that Tomatis is ten years older, Violeta doesn’t repress her critical faculties, something which delights Tomatis. According to him, his relationship with Violeta helped refute what all his oldest friends think of him, namely that due to his unrestrained egocentrism he passes through life altogether too pleased with himself, insensitive to the faults that the word justifiably attributes to him. Violeta, aware of this, always makes the same cheerful, self-satisfied observation to the third person, It’s extremely practical because we have everything in common—we’re both in love with Carlos Tomatis. They’d crossed the darkened city, driving up the avenue and turning onto the waterfront, isolated from the external world in the car resonating with the notes of the “Grand Fugue.” The black surface of the lagoon, whose invisible presence could be intuited beyond the trees along the waterfront, became perceptible from time to time when a ripple in the distance, fragile and fugitive, betrayed it. Violeta stopped and parked for a couple of minutes, with the engine still running, and Tomatis took the opportunity to get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk, under the trees, in the warm shadow. Although some twenty meters of wooded terrain separate him from the bank that leads down to the water, Tomatis was able to recognize, after a few seconds, the strong odor of the river, of the silt washing up on shore, a mixture of rotten plants and dead fish, nourishing the paradoxical world that blooms again and again, feeding off its own decomposition, without anyone knowing why, though some can describe how and with that they’re satisfied, from the swampy detritus. The notes of the fugue carry into the night through the open door of the car, dispersing in concentric waves until they disappear, swallowed by the silence of the incalculable blackness. Soon, Tomatis got back into the car and closed the door and Violeta steered the car slowly away from the curb, gaining velocity as she moved along the empty waterfront. Finally they arrived in Guadalupe, circled the equestrian statue above the roundabout, and turned to the west, away from the river. They drove the transversal avenues that connect, from east to west, the poor neighborhoods north of the city, poorer to the west, where, beyond the melancholy shores of the Salado, the last decrepit ranches are scattered, and where the last parcels of the city are confused with the barren plains. Driving through one of these forbidden neighborhoods, which are impossible to enter, night or day, without some specific reason, they saw, along the cross streets, under the trees along the sidewalks, hidden and confused shadows that moved, that shuddered, that froze in the thresholds of houses, behind a half-open door, or among the trees. Farther along, a girl in shorts and a bra, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, smoking a cigarette in a doorway, illuminated by the hallway light, revealed a backlit silhouette that, even to the most excessive desire, would signal more danger than pleasure. And Violeta accelerated when, as they crossed one intersection, they saw a group of human shapes running toward the car, down the middle of the street, shouting and waving their arms, most likely alerted by the sound of the engine, to make them accountable for the invasion of their territory. Tomatis sat up in his seat, looking through the rear window at the intersection they’d just crossed, just in time to see the group pour into it and stop, shouting in the middle of the street, while two or three continued to run, without the slightest chance of catching them, toward the car that moved away, and that, two blocks later, turned again to the east, toward the city center. Violeta dropped him off at the door to his house and went home to her own. And the next morning, at around ten, Gutiérrez called to tell him not to forget his swimsuit, because as long as the weather permitted it the swimming pool, after the sel
ect company and the barbecue, would constitute the principal attraction.

  The highway crosses empty fields now, and in some parcels, where the corn and sunflower have already been harvested, the truncated stalks remain, brown, ragged, and scorched, like a field of ruins. But the grass is green along the shoulder and on the strip of ground that separates the two sides of the highway. Against the pale, cloudless sky, there’s considerable agitation among the birds, coming and going, landing on the ground, on the posts, on the barbed wire, on the trees, then taking off again and landing again, as though, intuiting that the light is fading, they are accelerating the rhythm with which they live out the last hours of the day, trying to get ahead of the night. Inside the bus, the angle of the rays that filter through the edges of the curtains is less severe, declining to the horizontal, without reaching it of course, and while sometime earlier they projected onto the floor, in the middle of the aisle, now they touch the seats on the other side. Tomatis checks his watch: it’s six sixteen. After forty minutes on the road, the dusty afternoon light is now concentrated in the rays that, all at the same angle, indifferent to the movement or the displacements of the vehicle, and despite the vibrations that the force of the engine and the inconsistencies of the road transmit to the bodywork, impassively cross the penumbra of the bus, only changing position because they’re changed by the distant, flaming disc from which they come. A momentary estrangement comes over him, the sense of being in two planes of space and time at once, the first in a typical bus driving down the highway between Rosario and the city on a Saturday afternoon, and the second in an embalmed stretch of time in which motion is stillness and all known, familiar space is a universe in miniature, enclosed in a crystal ball, cast about, without its inhabitants noticing, within an igneous whirlwind swirling in a infinite blackness. It’s an estrangement without panic, a possible image of what, wrapping us in its cocoon of flammable gasses and fusing metals, accompanying us from our imperceptible birth to our imperceptible death, is our true home. He’s pulled from that daydream by an external contingency, a slightly more conspicuous bump tells him that they’re passing over the Carcarañá, in La Ribera, and he turns toward the window in order to see it better, narrow, turbulent, and swift between the pale banks populated by shrubs and weeds, and higher up, in the surrounding area, by weekend houses built in the shade of the trees. The river is revealed and then disappears, a flash of moving water that, because it flows at the bottom of a bank, enters into shadow long before the flat, exposed earth dominated by the overwhelming afternoon light. Tomatis leans back against his seat again, and for about a minute he doesn’t think of anything, his hands crossed at his belly, his eyes open but not looking directly at any object, his expression calm and empty. Now he’s aware that he’s getting hungry: the salad he had that afternoon, despite the indisputable variety of ingredients laid out on a table, meant to give the clients complete freedom to serve themselves as much of whatever they choose, in fact reveals an deft sophism, because it’s obvious that in order to prepare a salad with some rationality not all of the elements on display are mutually compatible, and only a few make sense to combine, one always chooses between lettuce and chicory, between cured or fresh pork, between hard and soft cheeses, between sardines or tuna in oil, and though he no longer remembers all the ingredients that he chose, he can tell by his sensation of hunger—actually agreeable for the moment—that the salad, though they ate pretty late, wasn’t enough to keep him till dinner, at around eight thirty, assuming that the bus arrives at the terminal at eight, and adding the time it takes to get to the taxi stand and then to his house. He could eat something at the grill house or at the outdoor bar across from the terminal, but because he got up early this morning he wants to get to bed soon, then read a while, to be fresh and rested tomorrow morning for the cookout at Gutiérrez’s. He remembers that one of the two chorizos that Nula gave him the other day when he picked him up downtown is still in the fridge; he’d eaten part of the first—exquisite—with his sister that same night, and the rest of it yesterday, but the second was intact. Tomatis hopes that his sister hasn’t invited over her friends for lunch or to drink vermouth today, serving them the salami in slices, on a cutting board, with pickles and olives, as she usually does. But he doesn’t worry: despite her constant criticizing, his sister always keeps the best food for him, at least when Alicia isn’t around, and so, especially because she knows that he’ll arrive tired and hungry from Rosario, he’s almost sure that, after the praise they showered on the salami that they ate on Wednesday night, his sister will have all or part of the second waiting for him when he gets back.