Juan José Saer: La Grande

— 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: