La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  —The problem today is, who legitimizes the legitimizers?

  —I agree, Nula says when he reaches them, though his gaze still scrutinizes the trees in the courtyard to see if they display the same movement as those on the distant mountain. There’s nothing for now: not one leaf moves on the highest, sunny branches, and so Nula leans over to see the sketch that the others are looking at. It’s the pencil sketch of him and Riera, sitting under the pavilion, perfectly recognizable despite their faces being invisible because Diana has drawn them from the back without their knowledge, except in the final minutes, when they invited her to go swimming and she asked them to pose a while longer so that she could finish.

  —Wonderful, he says, and kisses Diana on the cheek. But what actually attracts his attention just now is the racket coming from the pool, and so, moving away from the group—he and Diana will talk about the sketches tonight when they look at them—he walks up to the edge of the water: Riera and Violeta are playing with a multicolored ball, standing on opposite sides of the shallow end, throwing it back in forth and trying to keep the other one from catching it. It’s immediately obvious that Riera is dominating the game, and that rather than giving Violeta an advantage he’s happy to beat her ostentatiously, which makes her laugh and protest simultaneously, as if that minor vexation caused her a degree of pleasure.

  —Sadist victimizer! Nula yells to Riera, who still hasn’t seen him.

  —And if she likes it? Riera says, and because he turns around to say this, Violeta takes the opportunity to throw the ball at his head with an impotent fury that causes the multicolored sphere to drop halfway along its trajectory, in the middle of the pool.

  —I forfeit, she says, and with heavy steps, intended to overcome the resistance of the water, she moves toward the metal ladder and starts to climb up. Riera makes a sudden lunge and, before Violeta has finished climbing, steps up onto the edge of the pool, splashing Nula’s naked legs. The multicolored ball continues floating on the water, rocking violently, but always at the same point on the surface of the water. Riera sits on the edge of the pool, shaking his head to dry the water from his thick, soaking wet, chestnut hair.

  —So she declared you persona non grata, Nula says.

  —Yes, and since you’ve seen the house you’ll know that it’s not like there isn’t plenty of room, Riera says.

  Nula decides not to register the allusion, opting instead for mocking laughter. And then: You’ll see that everything will work out.

  —It practically is already worked out, Riera says with unusual severity.

  Violeta approaches them along the edge of the pool.

  —I’ve had my share of aquatic pleasures for the day, she says, insinuating that Riera’s behavior has spoiled them, but apparently happy that this has happened. She continues toward the group talking between the pool and the house. Riera sees the cell phone in Nula’s hand.

  —Were you about to call someone? I can disappear, if you want, he says.

  —It doesn’t matter; I don’t have a private life anymore, Nula says. Ignoring the effect that his sibylline words have caused, he studies, curious, without anxiety, the trees at the back: there seems to be a faint undulation among the highest branches. It’s coming, the storm, he says, even more ostentatiously disinterested in the mocking, complicit smile that Riera is giving him. It’s difficult to tell how much Riera knows about his visit to Paraná, and though he knows that Riera would tell him immediately and that if he doesn’t do so now it’s because it’s not the right time, he has no desire to reenter their aura, like five years before, when, as he was coming out of the bar, he bumped into the girl in red and started to follow her. The magnetic aura that surrounded them, more luminous and vivid than his own life, confronted with the bitter roughness of possession, during the Wednesday siesta, has dissipated. Nula thinks that, if he wanted to, he could be the one to arrange events according to his fantasies, although he owes them too much to want to do that. But a thunderclap, much closer than the previous ones, pulls him from his thoughts. The thunder causes Riera to look up as well and scan the peaceful blue sky, in which not the slightest sign of a storm is visible. Nula puts the cell phone in the straw bag, under the pavilion, and then takes the umbrella out of the base, folds it, can leans it up against the wall, under the pavilion, near the grill. Then he returns to the edge of the pool, from which Riera watches him, intrigued, and starts folding up the lawn chairs. Riera stands up and does the same with the ones around him and then follows Nula submissively as he leans the ones he’s already folded against the wall of the pavilion, next to the umbrella, to protect them from the rain. When they’ve put away the last of them they walk out of the pavilion and toward the others, who continue talking, apparently unaware of them, in the middle of the courtyard. When the second thunderclap rumbles, Diana closes the sketch pad and puts it carefully in the straw bag. Now everyone is scanning the sky, and though they don’t see anything in it that indicates a storm, they all see the momentary flash of a lightning bolt and notice that the tall trees on the sidewalk are starting to shake, just as the white bars of the gate open for Gutiérrez, who, after closing it, moves toward them at a run, but in slow motion, pointing up and back, as if he was being chased. His guests watch him, amused but also somewhat surprised because they wouldn’t have expected, from him, the kind of parodic behavior that diminishes his mystery and reduces him to the banality of every other mortal. Only Nula and Tomatis intuit, though still vaguely, that this is also a reconstitution, the playing out of something lost that he’s not actually trying to recover but that he stages, purely as an intimate game, in the theater of his disenchanted imagination. When he reaches the middle of the courtyard, a heavy thunderclap makes the house, the pavilion, the trees, and the earth vibrate, disturbing the blue water in the pool, and suddenly the light turns livid and the air darkens.

  —Right here, right here! Tomatis shouts, pounding his chest, standing at the edge of the pool, looking toward the darkened sky, and speaking to the endless series of long lightning strikes and the deafening, continuous thunder that, for a while now, has been shaking everything, creating a tremor in the rainy shadow of the evening. And then: If you exist, swine, hit me right here! I’m defying you! I’m talking to you, coward!

  —Don’t pay any attention to him, he’s quoting Flaubert again, Violeta says to the group, which is surprised by Tomatis’s suddenly theatrical behavior, jumping from the table at the edge of the pavilion and berating the turbulent sky.

  At that moment, Tomatis stops yelling and returns to the table, calmly, with a satisfied smile.

  —You see? he says. He doesn’t exist. And picking up his glass of whiskey, he shakes it a moment, clinking the ice against the glass, and takes a long drink.

  —Either he doesn’t exist or he’s gone deaf, Marcos offers sententiously.

  A dense, loud rain has been falling continuously for a while now, multiplying its intensity with every volley of thunder and lightning. The southeast wind brought with it a thick curtain of black clouds that completely obscured the sky along the entire visible horizon, and though by now the wind had calmed down considerably, or perhaps for that same reason, the storm had settled in, dumping endless, thick streams of water, pierced constantly with electricity and noise, over the evening. Gutiérrez suggested that they move indoors, but his guests preferred the pavilion, which protected them from the rain while at the same time allowing them to enjoy the delicious coolness of the air after the sweltering afternoon. Assisted by Nula and Violeta, Gutiérrez prepared the table and served them the cold leftovers from the cookout, bread and butter, and a few bottles of red wine. So that she wouldn’t have to put the prosthesis on her arm again, Nula prepared chorizo and steak sandwiches for Diana, or put pieces onto a dish from which they both ate. Eventually, Gutiérrez announced that Amalia had made a cake that she hadn’t dared serve after the alfajores, and which she’d left for that night. Violeta brought it out—Nula took care of the plates and the
dessert utensils—and Gutiérrez appeared last with a large ice bucket that, when he brought them out, fit two bottles of French champagne very well. They made their trips to and from the house at a run, forced to cover the food, and the cake in particular, with white napkins, but they themselves arrived soaked, though this didn’t seem to bother them much, just the opposite: judging by their happy laughter when they arrived, the euphoria with which they distributed the food and the bottles, they seemed to be enjoying themselves, thanks to the effects of the wine, which had been partially spent over the hot afternoon. After the first glass of champagne, when Gutiérrez moved to serve him a second, Tomatis put his hand between the mouth of the bottle and the top of the glass and asked:

  —Do we have anything stronger, by chance?

  And so when he finished pouring the second round of champagne, Gutiérrez ran into the house, returning eventually with a bottle of whiskey, a dish of ice cubes, and several glasses. And now, just as Tomatis finishes his sip of whiskey, after clinking the ice against the glass, hearing Marcos’s comment, Diana, gesturing vaguely with her head to the sky, the night, the storm, adds thoughtfully:

  —If he’s gone deaf he definitely wouldn’t have heard him over this racket.

  —Even within the most deathly silence he cannot hear, Marcos says with an apodictic and deliberately theatrical seriousness, and after taking a sip of champagne, savoring it ostentatiously, raising his voice to Gutiérrez with worldly confidence, says, Willi, darling, this champagne français—and he exaggerates the French pronunciation of the two words—is a disaster!

  They exchange an ironic, knowing look. Of the ones that Gutiérrez knew back then, to whom he’d granted such prestige, Marcos is most similar, even physically, to how he was when he knew him: the same blonde hair, thinner and more faded now, and the same blonde beard, now more white than golden, which, at a gentle slant, encircles his mouth.

  —I save it for special occasions, Gutiérrez says, and Nula, who is watching him, smiling, vaguely fascinated, thinks that this must be true, but that what Gutiérrez considers a special occasion probably doesn’t have anything to do with what most people consider as such. Marcos smiles, less pleased with the courtesy than with some mysterious double meaning that he seems to have glimpsed among the conventional words. Ubiquitous, omnipresent, the storm echoes over the courtyard, over the fields, over the night, and the eight people who sit or stand at the table under the illuminated pavilion seem to be staging a realist play, to the point that their words issue with celerity and precision from their lips, as if they hadn’t needed formulation inside themselves beforehand, being as they were replicas of a previously written text that they’d already memorized.

  Seeing them exchange that practically imperceptible ironic look, Nula remembers that on Tuesday, at the fish and game club, when they brought up Marcos and his political activities, Gutiérrez and Escalante had also exchanged an affectionate but mocking look, as if those activities were just another character trait rather than a true political vocation. To Nula, Marcos is more than a good client, he’s a lawyer who meets him in his office, whose library, alongside the legal volumes, visibly displays books by Hegel, by Gramsci, by Stendhal, by Tolstoy, and by Sarmiento. Nula does not know that Marcos’s father, a communist German Jew, came to the country in the late fifties, and that, to survive, he’d built a secondhand bookstore in the city, Martín Fierro Books, after the national poem whose sestinas, which served him as a guidebook for ethical behavior, he could recite from memory in a Spanish that became increasingly fluent over the years. For most of his youth, Marcos was a communist, but over time he grew distant from the party, breaking with it definitively during the dictatorship. He was among the men who thought they could change the world until they realized that the world changed on its own, and dizzyingly, but in the opposite direction toward which they’d worked, and even in unexpected and strange directions, at which point, neither innocently nor cynically, they started working for what was worth saving, even if that attitude sometimes made them seem antiquated or even conservative—at least compared to those that, while they unscrupulously cut the biggest slice of cheese for themselves, insisted on self-identifying as modern.

  —It’s stopping, Riera says suddenly, and taking two or three sudden strides he stops at the edge of the pavilion and scans the black and rainy sky. Yes, yes; it’s stopping. It’s time to get going.

  —A momentary letup, Gutiérrez says.

  —No, no, listen, Riera says, and cupping his hand around his right ear, he concentrates his attention. Everyone listens to the sound of the rain as though it were incredibly important, when in fact what’s happening is that at the end of their long stay the conversation has been exhausted and, as often happens, while the alcohol has at first contributed to their gregariousness, it now pushes them once again within themselves. But the rain allows them a last jolt of sociability.

  —Let’s see, Clara says, and, with her delicate steps, she walks past Riera and stops in the middle of the white slab path, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes closed. She stands motionless in that position for several seconds, and then, completely soaked, she returns to the refuge under the pavilion, saying, It’ll be a while before it stops completely.

  —Are you sure? Tomatis says, and still holding on to his whiskey glass, but covering it with his hand so that too much water doesn’t get inside, he does the same circuit as Clara, stepping out of the pavilion and stopping on the white slabs more or less in the same spot where she had. And, at that moment, a sudden fading of the sound and the water is immediately perceptible. The unexpected change at first disorients Tomatis, but a satisfied smile illuminates his face, and raising it to the rainy sky, he announces prophetically, or rather mystically, like a circus magician announcing a revelation to his audience: It’s still sprinkling, but when I remove the hand that protects the contents of this glass, the rain will stop completely.

  He carries out a set of pseudo-esoteric movements, balanced with his eyes closed, turning slowly on the white slabs, his face, entranced, lifted to the rainy blackness, and after turning around two or three times, he stops, facing the pavilion, completely still for several seconds, and with an ostentatiously theatrical gesture, he removes the hand that covers the glass and gestures to the others to come out to the courtyard. Applause, shouts, and whistles respond to the invitation, and everyone hurries outside, most of them with a glass in their hand.

  —Whoever comes out last, turn out the light, let’s look at the night, Tomatis suggests, and matching words with actions, he steps off the white slabs and begins to walk slowly across the wet lawn, toward the back of the courtyard. Someone behind him—he is unaware that it’s Clara—turns off the light and Tomatis moves into the darkness, perforated every so often by near or distant flashes of green lightning that, like the traveler his shadow, are followed a few seconds later by the faithful thunderclaps, the inoffensive slaves of the cruel light that forces them into displays of aggression and melodramatic sound. Tomatis hears the crowd of feet splashing behind him across the wet lawn, hurrying to catch him, and finally his friends, arriving breathless and enthusiastic, gathering around him in the darkness.

  —What’s the latest? Marcos’s voice says.

  —Still sprinkling, Tomatis says, and there are a few short bursts of laughter. They move slowly, as a group, and suddenly a sequence of lightning strikes illuminates them intermittently, creating an effect that is dubious from an aesthetic point of view but which is appropriate for the situation.

  —See that? Did you see that? Diana’s voice says.

  —What? What is it? several voices, with exaggerated alarm, inquire.

  —I saw it. Above the trees. A lost soul, Riera says. And I spent so much time looking for one during dissections. Look closely, up there. You can just see it through the darkness.

  —Oh yeah, there is it, floating above the tree with its arms extended, it’s completely white, confirms the chorus with drowsy reverence
. And it’s true: an evanescent white form, with its short arms extended, similar to the representations from the nineteenth century, when they were no longer believed in, of the souls in purgatory, floats in slow descending circles, against the trees at the back, closer, in its shape, to a microbial creature than to something from the celestial spheres. After a moment of silence, Nula’s voice is heard in the darkness:

  —It’s Hamlet’s father.

  —No, no, Diana says. It’s Athena, rerouted by the southeastern on her way to Troy to pacify the rage of the Greeks.

  —It’s not, says the voice of Gutiérrez. It’s Mario Brando, sent by Dante to confirm his recognition of precisionism as the only legitimate heir of the dulce stil novo.

  —You’re all wrong, Marcos says. It’s Doctor Russo, coming to occupy, definitively and gratuitously, the house he sold to Willi.