La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  But would the city still be there? When we are not empirically present in a place, does it still exist, at least in the same way? Though he’s well aware that the thought is absurd, that a professional philosopher could easily refute his naive doubt, Tomatis can’t help but ask himself the question every so often, though it’s more an irrational, almost animal confusion than a philosophical inquiry. Just like thinking too much about breathing can make it difficult to breathe, becoming conscious of living in both space and time at once can make even the most simple things complex and strange, and thus, from the time he left the city early that morning until he returns to it that night, its existence, which is completely dependent on his memory, becomes extremely problematic. Though he’s actually a fervent defender of the existence of the external, Tomatis can never discard the ideas, the impressions, and even the sensations that support the contrary thesis. Only habit, and distraction, furthermore, interfere with the observation or the conclusion that the place that we left some time earlier, decades or seconds ago, is no longer the same when we return, though all the elements may seem identical to how we left them. The passage of time, though imperceptible, whether of a few seconds or a few minutes, leaves clear traces in the apparent immutability of things; one only has to be conscious that those traces exist in order to perceive them. For the duration of our absence, the places outside of our empirical horizon continue to churn, a continuous, shifting network woven of various threads by a loom that incessantly produces, both archaic and new, the same interconnections: the world continues to spin, along with the solar system and the entire universe, and when we return to the kitchen from the dining room, or to the dining room from the kitchen, in the time it takes to find a clean knife in the utensil drawer, everything has changed, and sometimes we even have the vague or clear sensation of that change. If the same thing happens when we’re motionless, and we feel time pass through us, modifying space from within, how can we not feel, after leaving a place for a few hours or a day or a decade, that when we return, that momentary feeling of estrangement which follows our brief ceremony of recognition, is waiting for us? Just now, in the bus, he once again intuits the silent murmur of that change, and one might say that, with every displacement of our attention, the familiar is submerged into the unknown, and when we reencounter it, it’s no longer completely the same as it was.

  Tomatis, tangled up in the vagueness of his thoughts, jumps when he sees one of the two boys from the back standing in the aisle next to his seat, smiling. That’s last night’s La Región, isn’t it? Could we borrow it a while? Tomatis, reacting quickly after the surprise, notices the copy of La Región that he bought that morning because the Buenos Aires papers hadn’t arrived yet; as he was taking the manila folder from the briefcase to finish reading the history of precisionism, he’d taken out the paper as well, and because the vibrations of the bus had caused it to fall to the ground twice, he’d put it under the briefcase to keep it still, intending to leave it on the bus when he reached the city. Tomatis hurries to pull it from under the briefcase and extends it, politely, thinking that if what they want is to deepen their knowledge about the Sunday match, they’ll be happily surprised to find that the sports page contains two large color photos of the local teams, in addition to a detailed history of every Clásico over the last fifty years, with the results, team rosters, and highlights of the matches, which Tomatis of course didn’t read, but which from having worked at La Región for years, as a section editor and intermittently as an editorialist, he knows the paper has an unfailing tradition of publishing two or three days before the game. The outcome is important: the winner keeps a spot in the first division, while the loser is forced to move down, Or something like that, Tomatis thinks, having not been to the stadium for a soccer match once in his life. You can keep it, I’ve already read it, Tomatis says. Thanks, the boy says, and returns to his seat, but as soon as he opens the paper he stands back up and walks back to Tomatis’s seat. Are you sure you aren’t collecting it? Did you see the color photos of the teams? he says. Don’t worry, Tomatis says, I have another copy at home. And the boy returns to his seat, walking backward, bent forward, reverent, in disbelief over the gift he’s just received. He’s probably a medical or architectural student, Tomatis thinks. Or maybe electrical engineering, degrees that our university doesn’t offer, at least not to the highest level. Maybe, if it’s the first of these, he gets his medical degree, he’ll take on a specialization, gastrointestinal surgery, for instance. And if some day, because of my inclination for white wine and gin on the rocks, my chronic gastritis becomes an ulcer or a cancer and they take me to the operating room and I see him walk in, smiling, and he pats me on the shoulder to reassure me about the operation just before they give me the anesthesia, I’ll remember that he collects color photos of the local soccer teams, and just as I close my eyes I’ll know that I’ve put my life in the hands of a dangerous man. Tomatis laughs to himself, trying to maintain an impassive, absent expression, though he knows that the two of them, concentrating on the sports page, have already forgotten that he even exists.

  His right hand rests on the open briefcase, his fingers playing along the vertical, soft leather dividers that separate the four compartments, which, in fact, contains very few things: the manila folder containing the treatise on precisionism, which he finished reading a while ago, adding a few annotations in the margins, another folder, this one of light green card stock, containing an old article from La Región, with an even older photo picturing several well-known collaborators on the first volume of precisionism, during a dinner at La Giralda, along with a few other papers, in particular a letter that Pichón had sent him from Paris the month before, and to which, for lack of time, he’d only responded to the day before yesterday. In another compartment of the briefcase is the gift for his sister, a fantasy bracelet that Alicia picked out, wrapped in metallic paper, which he bought that morning on Calle Córdoba, and finally, in the fourth compartment, an alfajor given to him by the driver as he was getting on the bus, compliments of the house and included with the price of the trip, and next to the alfajor, a book about Hujalvu, the butterfly painter, which he’d been thumbing through on the way there, and whose French introduction “Vie et mort des papillons,” he’d begun to read (the book is a gift from Pichón, which he’d sent him from France for his birthday). Finally his fingers, and not Tomatis himself, decide to grasp the green folder, half-opening it, shuffling through the papers that it contains, and picking out Pichón’s letter and opening it in the light, unfolding it, to reread it:

  Carlitos. How’s the March heat treating you? We’re still in the middle of winter here. You must be surprised to be getting a letter from me after our phone call on Sunday, but that night, after dinner, I came up with a poem that, from a distance, has to do with our conversation. So I’m sending it to you. It’s a vague parody of La Fontaine.

  MAÎTRE CORBEAU

  Maître corbeau là-haut perché

  rien de bon n’annonçait,

  ni d’ailleurs, rien de mauvais.

  Il se tenait là-haut, neutre et muet.

  Aucun présage ne l’habitait.

  Aussi extérieur que l’arbre, le soleil, la forêt

  Et aussi privé de sens que de secret:

  forme noire sans raison répétée

  tache d’encre dans le vide imprimée.

  Maître corbeau là-haut perché.

  What do you think? Don’t tell me anything right away. The question begs reflection. What, on the other hand, I want you to send me soon is a detailed explanation, on paper, of your thesis on Oedipus. Certainly in this century Oedipus has become a stereotype, a two-dimensional caricature like Batman or Patoruzú, but one of his characteristics, his blindness, still fascinates me. Hugs to everyone. Pichón. P.S., What do you think of Hujalvu? A western specialist says that he’d specialized in a single species of butterflies (Inachis io), but one of his students wrote, in the mid-eighteenth century, that he always painted
ONE SINGLE butterfly.

  Tomatis finishes rereading the letter, but he continues to hold it, motionless, even with his face, just below his eyes, without refolding it. For the last month the problem has intrigued him. The same butterfly? Aesthetically, the choice is reasonable, and, one might even say, necessary, but how would it be possible to keep a single butterfly intact over an eighty-year life without it eventually disintegrating, unless, after a certain point, he was painting from memory, not from the material, pulverized after a few decades, but rather the shape imprinted on him forever, which, having observed it to the point of possession, he was able to turn in every possible direction. Tomatis shakes his head thoughtfully, with an almost imperceptible slowness, and without much conviction refolds the letter, handwritten in green ink, and drops it into one of the compartments of the briefcase.

  Moving directly north along the highway in which, over a hundred and sixty-seven kilometers, there’s not a single curve, at ninety kilometers per hour—the legal speed limit for interurban passenger transport throughout the country—Tomatis has the west to his left, the east to his right, and the south to his back. After leaving Rosario, along the loop road surrounded by shantytowns, in the right lane of the highway, as far as San Lorenzo more or less, the traffic was very dense, but afterward it began to thin out. All the same, at the moment when he drops the folded letter into the briefcase, an engine roars to his left, and the most likely empty tractor trailer that passes at a high speed hides the sun for several seconds, and the increasingly horizontal rays of light are erased, intercepted by the double trailer of the truck, and almost immediately, when the truck has finished passing them, they reappear. Every so often, cars also pass them at full speed, advancing along the fast lane, and disappear quickly to the north. In the opposite direction, cars, trucks, and buses follow each other mechanically, but at moments long stretches of the highway are empty. The buses, green, red, and orange, announcing the names of their companies in large letters everywhere along the highway, drive toward Rosario and Buenos Aires, and some, the specials probably, toward Mar del Plata and even Bariloche, from the city or from Paraná or Resistencia or Asunción del Paraguay. Once, at a stop between Rosario and Buenos Aires, in San Pedro, Tomatis saw a double-decker that was going to Machu Picchu. Tomatis remembers thinking, A bus to Machu Picchu? And why not Tibet? And he smiles again, and turns around discreetly again, afraid that the two at the back will catch him laughing to himself, but apparently they’ve been subjugated by the sports page from La Región that he’s just given them.

  Half opening the light green folder, separating its edges, he carefully pulls out, from between the few papers alongside it, the yellowed clipping from La Región, which is at least five years old, with the photo that, if the date that the article attributes to it is correct, is around half a century old at the moment in which he’s now studying it carefully. There are eleven men, all of them in suit and tie, except for one, who wears a dark bowtie. Though it’s difficult to tell much about the location, because the photo was taken from a practically empty corner of the room, Tomatis doesn’t need to read the caption printed below the photo to recognize La Giralda, gone for years now, since they tore down the central market. The article is titled “The Precisionist Group,” and a lead-in explains, On the eve of another anniversary of the creation of precisionism, this article recalls the history of the movement and the personality of its leader, Mario Brando. The caption printed below the photograph mentions the place where it was taken, but not the date, and identifies the people present. Seven are sitting, and four are standing behind them; in the background, turned away from the camera, standing in front of a black rectangle below a hanging lamp, there’s a waiter, facing what could be the entrance to the kitchen, obscured by the photograph’s narrow depth of field. It’s a classic after-dinner photo; the four who have stood up must have been sitting with their backs to the photographer, who must have made them move so that everyone would be facing the same way. Their chairs are not in the frame, except for one, a piece of which is visible in the far right corner of the picture, because they pulled them away from the table, and so the large, messy table is clearly visible. On top of the white tablecloth there are two siphons of seltzer, two oil bottles, half-full glasses, plates containing the remains of food, probably dessert (and probably cheese and sweets, after the alphabet soup and the obligatory Spanish-style stew), with utensils crossed on top or thrown carelessly on the tablecloth. There are ashtrays, but there aren’t any bottles of wine, and Tomatis remembers, as he does every time he looks at the photo and examines it up close, that someone, describing Brando’s control over his disciples, told him that if he wasn’t drinking then the others couldn’t drink either, and so many of them drank in secret. This same person told him that only when his brother-in-law, General Ponce, when he was still a first lieutenant, or a captain, attended the dinners, could the guests drink whatever they wanted, because the general would order large quantities of the best wines, something Brando disapproved of, though he never dared to contradict him, because the more Ponce drank, and though he never became violent, the more uncontrollable he became. Only the next day, in private, would Brando question him, thinking that family business should be conducted behind closed doors, but whenever he, Ponce, bumped into some member of the group on the street, and the first lieutenant, laughing, told him what had happened and how terrorized Brando kept his troops, it caused this person a dark pleasure to learn about his family affairs.

  Though he is sitting in the far left of the photo, at the end of the table, turned decidedly toward the camera, which implies a marginal position, studying the photo closely, imagining the scene during dinner, with the four who are now standing behind the ones who are sitting, it’s immediately obvious that Brando, as he must have done at every dinner, is seated at the head of the table. The absence of women makes it possible to suppose that it was a work dinner, some decisive moment in the history of the group, before Brando’s departure for Rome. Despite the poor lighting of the image, his hands, pressed together, reveal his tense fingers and the knuckles jutting from his right hand, as well as the sleeve of his stiffly starched white shirt, clasped by a cufflink that in all certainty is made of gold. Everyone is very elegant, with a pointed handkerchief coming out of the breast pocket of their jackets, their shirts and even in some cases their light-colored vests, and even in silk ties, all of which betrays an equal interest in their public image and in the renovation of poetic language though the grafting of scientific vocabulary. Even the four who are standing, and who are the youngest, display the same taste; their medium-length beards (nine of the eleven have one) make them seem older, though most of them were at that time between twenty and thirty, and among the ones standing, three of them are barely twenty, and one of them, the third one from the left, not even nineteen. For Tomatis, this is the author of the extract resting in the manila folder in the briefcase. The close beard, the quiff, the silk tie, a bit more colorful and less conservative than the rest, and which, tightly knotted to the collar of his white shirt, emerges from the crossed lapels of his dark suit, would allow him to not stand out too much from the others, but something at once absent and preoccupied in his expression distinguishes him from them. Brando’s expression differs from the others’ too: his vague smile, the tension in his hands and the rigidity of his body, along with the almost imperceptible air of skepticism and cunning on his face, not to mention the fact that while everyone else around him rests their hands or elbows or forearms on the table, he’s pulled his chair out and crossed his legs, distancing himself almost half a meter from the edge, not even touching the circular, white tablecloth falling in triangular folds. The distance that he creates between himself and his disciples, at the same table where they’ve broken bread together, confirms, Tomatis thinks, the rumors of his duplicity, of his shuttling between those he considered his equals, the ignorant and pragmatic bourgeoisie who could even be brutal if they felt their interests were threatene
d, but who were useless for his literary career, and the others, his disciples, gathered from the most diverse environments, petty employees of public offices, high school teachers, journalists, with no patrimony but their readings, their facility for expressing themselves on paper, and their literary tastes (only one, years after this photo was taken, after his return from Rome, Doctor Calcagno, belonged to both worlds, and Brando made him not only into a partner, trusting him with all the work at the law firm, but also, as a literary lieutenant, the only one he trusted among the members of his own class, into a true slave). The absent and somewhat nervous look of the boy trying to go unnoticed among the others has nothing in common with Brando’s, unless it’s the knowledge that the pleasant end to a literary feast that the photograph pretends to immortalize—and which in a certain sense it achieves, as substantiated by the article in La Región and the fact that he, Tomatis, is thinking about it half a century later—is merely the deceitful surface of a mirror behind which a maelstrom of contradictions boils. Tomatis knows, from friends of Washington, that his homosexuality, which at the time the photo was taken even he was probably ignorant of, but which Brando suspected, the subtle pressure, and the low blows from the leader, without producing an open conflict, forced him to leave the movement a few months later. Around that same time the defamation campaign concerning the pedophilia of one of the members, which was never proven but which drove him to suicide, began to circulate, and several of Brando’s enemies insist that he was the one who started the rumor. As regards the melancholic young man in the photograph, things were not as easy for Brando. An only child, he’d gone to live in Buenos Aires after the death of his parents, and when he returned he’d lost his shyness and fear and had gained confidence and mordancy. He wrote literary and musical articles for the papers and he sang in the provincial choir. When the symphony orchestra was created, he was named director; he also directed the national radio station—because he was intelligent and honest, whatever government came to power, he was always kept at his post, but in ’75 he was let go, and after March of 1976 he decided to return to Buenos Aires so as to disappear in the vast swarm and spend some time out of sight. By the time he returned to the city, four or five years later, Brando had died. He once ran into Tomatis on San Martín and told him that he’d left out of fear that Brando would denounce him. Immediately, Tomatis sensed that he was right: he’d seen that threat in Brando’s eyes one night, when he’d made the mistake of thinking that he might intercede with General Ponce for some information about Elisa and Gato, who’d been kidnapped, and, mortified, had gone to his house to ask for it. In that look, in a momentary but hateful and violent spark, he’d seen everything that Brando was capable of: a viscous, dark stain, or tear rather, had allowed him, Tomatis, to glimpse, under the uniform of an elegant bourgeoisie absorbed in the disinterested contemplation of the stars, committed body and soul to the cause of his aesthetic ideal, the shadow of the beast, blinking impatiently, waiting for its chance to leap onto its prey and tear it to pieces. So it made sense for the author of Precisionism, by a witness of the time to disappear from the city and withdraw discretely into Buenos Aires. For years he’d carried on a secret war with Brando, a war so subtly codified that only its antagonists knew of its existence. There had been no open rupture, and when they met in public they greeted each other coldly but courteously; at meetings, after greeting each other with confident smiles, they didn’t speak again. And yet the boy thought he could sense, while he was still attending the group’s meetings, veiled warnings from Brando. When Nexos began to appear, it systematically rejected his submissions, always under diverse pretexts—length, immaturity, transgression of precisionist doctrine. A trait that Brando had that the boy noticed immediately and that Tomatis confirmed seeing too when he confided to him: he never took direct action himself; he had the unquestionable talent for influencing others to do and say what he wanted as though they’d thought of it themselves. Tomatis and the witness of the time agreed: to denounce them, Brando wouldn’t have gone directly to General Ponce to accuse them of subversion, but instead, during a family lunch some Sunday, probably after the eleven o’clock mass, with their wives, their children, and their grandchildren, he would have made so many allusions that his brother-in-law, fearing a sanction for dereliction, would have run straight to General Negri after the lunch to point out the evident threat of such and such an individual. When the witness of the time realized Brando’s allusive methodology, he decided to employ the same tactic. Brando never discussed sex, for example; it was taboo for him, with the members of the group, with his intimate friends, or with his family. And yet, coincidentally of course, when the boy attended the meetings, the conversation would always take a turn such that two or three of the people at the table would end up mocking the Espiga neoclassicists, insisting on their effeminacy. Brando remained silent and circumspect, almost irritated, while the others exchanged rumors between guffaws, and the witness told Tomatis that he’d asked himself more than once if Brando himself was conscious of those maneuvers to influence others, which from the outside, to a shrewd observer, were immediately obvious, or if a carnivorous instinct drove him, without fail, to commit the injury. Tomatis answered without hesitation that in his opinion he was conscious of it, and the witness told him that he’d wondered about it at first, but later, after he’d left the group, he decided to put it to the test: in a local paper, less noteworthy but also less conventional than La Región, the witness had published an article about Louis Bouilhet, a friend of Flaubert, who a century earlier had the idea of publishing a long poem, “The Fossils,” based on recent archaeological and paleographical discoveries. With that precursor, the witness pretended to verify the existence of pre-precisionist ideas, but in fact it was an indirect way of demonstrating that Brando hadn’t invented a thing. Brando never responded to the piece, but a few weeks later he published an article in La Región’s literary supplement about the moral duties of poets in which he alluded, coincidentally of course, to Canto XV of Inferno, in particular to verses 102–108, without quoting them. It wasn’t difficult for the witness to search for them in the text, where it describes the inner ring of the seventh circle, in which those who commit violence against nature, which is to say, for Dante, the sodomites, suffer in a desert of flaming sand: In somma sappi che tutti fur cherci / e litterati grandi e di gran fama, / d’un peccato medesmo al mondo lerci. In the same article he cites Juvenal as an example of a poet who denounces and attempts to correct the moral failures of his time, but of his sixteen satires he only refers to the second, without specifying its content. It was clear enough: in the midst of his banalities for the general public, certain passages of the article had a hidden recipient. But the witness of the time had his own resources, and when he invited precisionists to a radio program he hosted, Music and Lyric, it was always the most unruly or the least intelligent of them, creating a less-than-brilliant image of the movement. Of course he wouldn’t have made the mistake of not inviting Brando, just the opposite, but he knew that, under whatever pretext, he would always decline the invitation. Later, the witness learned that Brando encouraged his disciples not to go on the show, but without too much conviction, first of all because everything that created publicity for the movement was useful to him, but especially because he didn’t want to give ground to the other groups, the neo-romantics from Espiga, the criollistas, the hardened avant-gardes, and because, without exception, publicity on the radio, in the papers, in magazines, and later on television was something that not one of his disciples or the members of other movements were capable of refusing, the search for unbridled fame and the traffic of influences being always the principal aims of literary and artistic practices. Another obvious allusion to Brando on the part of the witness came in a puppet show that he wrote and which was often staged at schools, at birthday parties, and at one of the first independent theaters of the city. In the play there was a lawyer who was always followed around by two other characters, slightly stupi
d types who constantly let themselves be tricked and robbed by the lawyer. The trio was a hit with the public, adults as much as children, and everyone would applaud whenever they came on stage, laughing and stomping the ground. The children would always try to keep the lawyer from tricking the two idiots, and would shout warnings at them, and when a policeman, who discovered his schemes, fell upon the lawyer with a whip, it brought the house down. In the fifties, those characters were incredibly popular in the city and in many towns around the province, and everyone who was five or six at the time still remembers them. In reality, the play alluded, in a veiled way, but transparent to anyone who knew the story, and especially Brando, to a rumor that had been circulating for a while about Brando’s first years as a lawyer, when he worked for himself, long before he formed a partnership with Calcagno, namely that Brando had gotten power of attorney over two elderly senile men, and that he’d convinced them to leave everything to him. The rumor (if it were true) was especially repugnant if one considered that, while the old men may have had some money, Brando was already a thousand times richer. And the witness believes that, years later, in ’75, Brando took his vengeance on him by having him fired from the radio, and, the following year, having him threatened anonymously to force him to leave the city.