Juan José Saer - La Grande

FOR THEM TO MEET, SEVERAL THINGS HAD TO COINCIDE,a few of which, for their importance, are worth mentioning: first, that an inconceivable singularity led, because of the impossible density of a single particle, to an explosion whose shock wave — which, incidentally, continues expanding to this day — dispersed time and igneous matter into the void, and that this matter, cooling slowly and congealing in the process, according to the rotation and displacement caused by the primitive explosion and owing to a complex gravitational phenomenon, formed what for lack of a better word we call the solar system ; that a phenomenon which owing to an utter impossibility of definition we simply call life appeared on one of the variously sized orbs that comprise it, that orb we now call the Earth , cooling and hardening as it rotated around a giant star, also a product of said explosion and which we call the Sun ; and finally, that one September afternoon Lucía walked past the corner of Mendoza and San Martín — where the Siete Colores bar now occupies the spot that for years belonged to the Gran Doria — at the exact moment when Nula (who, after finishing his coffee, had been detained for a few seconds by a guy who shouted something from his table about a Public Law textbook) walked out onto San Martín and looked up, seeing her, dressed in red, through the crowd on the bright avenue.

Nula was almost twenty-four. Eighteen months before, the previous March, he’d decided to quit medical school and enroll in a philosophy program, where he studied the pre-Socratics and some classical languages and dabbled in German, intending to read Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, but he felt too isolated in Rosario, where, because he didn’t work, it was extremely difficult to get by, and so he came back to the city often, to his mother’s house (his older brother, a dentist, was already married), where he could get room and board in exchange for occasional work and very little nagging. Medicine, he’d explained to his mother, could only be studied in Rosario, or in Córdoba or Buenos Aires, but with philosophy no particular establishment or diploma were necessary. For a philosopher, any place in the world, however insignificant it might seem, was, according to Nula (and many others before him, in fact), as good as any other.

La India — that was his mother’s nickname, even though her family was from Calabria and her maiden name was actually Calabrese, because her straight black hair, her high prominent cheekbones, and her dark skin gave her the mysterious features of some exotic creature — narrowing her eyes and shaking her head in mock fury, had muttered, And how much will that bit of insight cost me? before cracking up laughing, signaling that she was already thinking of a compromise, which, in broad strokes, was as follows: lodging and meals while he was in the city and some cash for a few hours work in the bookstore until he finished his classes in Rosario, all on the condition that he came home with a diploma, even if it was just a doctor of philosophy. Nula — the Arabic version of Nicolás, which, because of how it’s pronounced in Arabic should probably be written with two Ls to extend and roll the single L sound — accepted, more so to please his mother rather than to take advantage of her credulity, and kept commuting back and forth between the two cities for the next eighteen months. Chade, his brother, who had just started his practice, would also put some money in his pocket every so often. Chade, who was three years older, had been a brilliant, accelerated student, hoping, possibly, to find an equilibrium with his father’s degenerative instability, blown around like a dry leaf by the winds of change and, after years of absence in the underground, murdered one winter night in 1975, whether by his enemies or by his friends it was unclear, in a pizzeria somewhere in Buenos Aires. Nula, meanwhile, who often wavered between enthusiasm and indecision, and who was prone to drifting (both inwardly and outwardly), routinely wondered whether he was having to occupy, in the unmanageable present, the same ambiguous place that his father had twenty years before.

With the legal bookstore across from the courthouse and a kiosk inside the law school itself, which Nula managed every so often and which suggested the comparison that his mother’s business was as advantageously located as a brothel across from a barracks with an annex in the bunkhouse, La India had confronted their father’s absence and had raised them and educated them both, him and his brother. But what kept them together, silencing their complaints and rebukes, was the fact that, though he was almost always gone, their father had never abandoned them. Every once in a while he would show up suddenly, loaded with presents, stay two or three days without once going out, and then disappear again for several months. After he died — Nula was twelve, more or less, when it happened — he was even more present than when he was alive. La India, pulling him once and for all from the clandestine shadow that politics had cast over him, filled the house with his photographs, his artifacts, traces of him, filling her conversation with her husband’s stories, ideas, and sayings. Her refractory insistence on repeating them just as he’d said them would eventually turn them into genuine oral effigies. Nula knew that deep down his brother disapproved of this, but he was too attached to his mother to reproach her. Nula, meanwhile, who’d unwittingly developed an ironic, offhand manner with his mother — possibly so as to gain special treatment — objected every so often to the appropriateness of that cult with an ostensible indifference that to an expert’s ear would have sounded pedantic and not the least disinterested. But it’s just that before the storm our life was a perfect picnic , La India would sigh, often tending to speak in metaphor, her idiosyncratic way of employing the language ever since she’d begun to use it.

When they murdered him, Nula’s father was thirty-eight, he had a deep receding hairline, and though misfortune had turned it prematurely gray, a thick beard, as was the fashion in the seventies, possibly to hint at the surplus virility implied by the political inclination of its bearer. And though the awful tempest of that decade had tossed him around like a dry leaf, the late fifties, while he was still young, was when his personality, or whatever you want to call it, had crystallized, and, at least at first, politics occupied a secondary place there. He left home to study architecture in Rosario, but like his youngest son years later (who, in turn, without realizing the symmetry, traded medicine for philosophy) he’d drifted toward economics, from which he declined into journalism. In 1960, he married La India, four months before Chade was born — La India was nineteen then — and they came back to the city. He studied business in high school, and so he ended up taking a job at a bank, but after a year and a half he stopped going. Handling money was nauseating, he said. No one, least of all him, realized that he was having a nervous breakdown. Nula had just been born, and since there were now four mouths to feed, La India realized the time had come to get her hands dirty, so to speak. She started working at a legal bookstore belonging to a friend of her father’s, across the street from the courthouse. Not long afterward, the owner stopped showing up, not even to settle the register at the end of the day. He preferred bocce over commerce, and he was the president of a club called The Golden Pallino in Santo Tomé, and so he ended up making La India a partner, and when he retired she hardly had to do a thing to become the sole owner. Even before his retirement she’d gotten permission from the university to install a kiosk, a sort of wood shack crammed with legal books, in the courtyard outside the law school. A light bulb went off and I brought the horse straight into Troy was her recurrent, self-satisfied metaphor. Yusef, her father-in-law, had helped her buy the bookstore. Though he never said anything to anyone, he believed the responsibilities that his son, in his point of view (which was nothing like La India’s), did not appear capable of managing, should be for him to take on. His two daughters, who both lived in town (the youngest had already married, but the eldest, who never would, still lived at home), tried, solicitously, to console him. But it was pointless: the boy would be the scourge of his old age, and though he outlived him by several years, the ceaseless brooding over his son’s incomprehensible life and death was what drove him to the grave. His grandchildren adored him.