Juan José Saer - La Grande

His grandfather was one of those assimilated “Turks” who, if he dressed like a farmer or a horseman and didn’t open his mouth, with his straight black hair, his tightly clipped beard, and his skin toasted by life in the open air, could pass, among strangers, as a gaucho or a farm hand from the area, or one of those santiagueños who, in the thirties and forties, came en masse from the villages on the plain to harvest corn. And even when he spoke he didn’t have much of a foreign accent: he’d learned Spanish well, with the exception of four or five hitches that his vocal organs probably couldn’t adapt to, and which betrayed his origins. He was anticonservative, a yrigoyenista, and a bitter antiperonist (that was the epithet he used), and he liked to recall how, during the coup in 1930, a drunk gaucho had ridden horseback into the store, and he’d taken his revolver from the counter drawer and unhooked his riding crop from the wall, and hitting the horse with the crop, had backed him into the middle of the street. And yet he read La Nación and La Capital , and every month received Selections from Reader’s Digest . He dressed in three different ways to fulfill his three main roles: for his work in the fields, where he had a few cows; for his general store, where he sold everything from yerba mate to freezers and at one point even cars, and of course clothes, fabric, paint, and what have you; and finally for his trips to Rosario, for business, family matters, or social occasions like weddings, baptisms, wakes, or parties at the Syrio-Lebanese club. In the sixties, he had a truck for the fields and around town, and a car for longer trips. Nula remembered hearing, without understanding completely because he was still too young and his parents only hinted at it, that after he was widowed he’d taken up with a mysterious lover in Rosario. Laila and Maria, his two daughters, wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of behavior in the village. When Nula was older, La India told him that his father had spotted Yusef once in Rosario, and that his grandfather, who was with his lover, had pretended not to see him, but in any case the relationship between the father and the son had already fallen apart by then. In terms of religion, his grandfather considered himself a fervent Apostolic Roman Catholic , which might have been an implicit way of underscoring his superiority, not over the Jews, of whom he seemed unaware (although, when he played truco he always teamed up with Feldman, the pharmacist, who was one), nor over the Muslims, whom he loathed, but rather over the Maronites and the Orthodoxists, who seemed more skittish than true heretics to him, preferring those extravagant variants despite having recourse to the Roman Church. He attended mass every Sunday and took communion every so often, and if the priest came by for something for himself or for one of the poor people in the village, he didn’t charge him, but he didn’t like knowing he played cards on Saturday night and would keep from going to those games so he wouldn’t have to see it.

They brought his son back to the village to bury, near his mother and an older brother who’d only lived a couple of weeks and who, as was the custom then, had the same name. At first, La India had objected, because she’d planned to cremate him and scatter the ashes, but then she thought it would be better to leave him near his father, to see if the proximity, after the incommensurable separation, could reconcile them. She was left with, as she would often say to her sons in her colorful way, the perfect picnic before the storm . They had killed him in a pizzeria in Boulogne, near the Pan-American highway, and La India passed through the village to drop off the boys and pick up their grandfather on her way to Buenos Aires. The police interrogated them for a full day before releasing the corpse, and at the end of the interrogation a clerk read them the section of the report that referred to the event itself. He’d apparently set a meeting one night, for nine o’clock, but he’d arrived well before that and had changed tables twice. According to witnesses, at ten of nine a car parked outside the door. Three men were inside; the one who was sitting in the passenger seat got out and stood on the sidewalk, leaning against the open door to the car, which was still running. The waiter at the pizzeria said that when his father saw them he stood up too, reaching his hand into his jacket to get his gun ready, not looking away, but the man who took the shot had already been in the pizzeria for a while, drinking a beer at a table behind him and pretending to watch a sports program on the television, waiting for the car that would pick him up after the execution; he shot him four times in the back, shot him again where he’d fallen, and, according to the waiter, ran out and got in the back seat of the car, where someone had already opened the door from the inside, while the guy who’d gotten out of the car sat down again next to the driver, who’d pulled away at full speed, barely giving the others time to close their doors. After La India and her father-in-law were given permission to take the body from the hospital and had seen it to the funeral home’s van to take back to the village, they decided to pass by the pizzeria. It was a winter dusk; an icy rose stained the sky opposite the west, where the sun had almost disappeared behind a bank of clouds darkened by their own shadows, projected by the back light. In the empty pizzeria, the lights and the television were already on. They spoke with the waiter and the owner; when he realized who they were, the cook, who’d been kneading dough near the oven, put down his work, and without opening his mouth once, approached to listen. The owner didn’t seem too happy that they’d come — he must have thought the visit could be compromising — but the waiter, who’d tried to help him, and who seemed truly affected by what had happened, showed them the spot where he’d fallen and tried to console them by saying that he’d died immediately, almost without realizing what was happening. He followed them to the door. Before they left, the grandfather put a few bills in his hand, which he ended up accepting after a brief but sincere resistance. They went back out to the street, onto that anonymous corner of the tortuous outskirts of Buenos Aires, with its little houses of unplastered brick, its cheapjack markets, its narrow, musty courtyards, its small shops and supermarkets, its loud furniture, its gardens, its shanty towns, its warehouses and its factories, its toothless girls, its old mestizos loaded with plastic bags, its vendors from Santa Fe, selling pills and candy, newspapers and soft drinks, at the bus terminals to Córdoba, to Rosario, to Resistencia, to Catamarca, to Paso de los Libres, or to Asunción. In the infinite solitude of the icy dusk the otherness of the world turned more oppressive and enigmatic among the masses that seemed to dissolve, lost, into the darkness.

They arrived in the village at dawn, almost at the same time as the van. They held the wake without even opening the casket, and buried him that same afternoon. Many people came to the cemetery, friends and acquaintances from the village or from neighboring towns: Italian or Spanish farmers who were clients at the store, old Arabs who owned or had owned stores in the surrounding towns, childhood friends of the deceased who’d gone with him to primary school and who’d stopped at that level, staying in the village, because the others, the ones who’d pursued higher studies, with the exception of the notary and the veterinarian maybe, were scattered around the world. The grandfather’s priest friend had been dead for some time, so a young priest gave the mass. La India was about to object to a religious ceremony, but then thought that, having decided to return him to his father, she had to abide by the rules implicit in that choice, and that, in the end, death, which erased so many superfluous things, did so with disputes over religion too, but mostly because while for most of his life the dead man had thought he’d freed himself from it, at his burial, apart from her and his two sons, who were in a sense the only foreigners there, it was clear that the small world he’d escaped was now reclaiming him. His death had wiped away the inconstancy of the inextricable external world, and it was the unyielding procession of his childhood that now accompanied him to the tomb. The turmoil he’d submerged himself into, intending to give it a new order and sense, ended up forcing his return to that preconscious place where, in the shelter of history, in the territory of emotional and sensory immediacy, things were as they seemed despite this or that resistant opacity, which his adult years, with absolute certainty, would reveal. For the grandfather, however, the opposite occurred: his naïveté when he’d left his neighborhood in Damascus at fifteen to conquer the world had allowed him to face, lucidly, everything he’d found himself entangled in, making, at each opportunity, the decisions that seemed most just and which no doubt were, because their succession had brought him steadily closer to what he was seeking. He’d left his family — the mother and sisters with whom he still corresponded regularly at that time, exchanging gifts, like the edible sawdust zatar , and the brothers who’d moved to Colombia and Mexico — had left the oldest city in the world , as he liked to say, with childish pride, when referring to Damascus, and then had crossed the ocean and a good portion of the plains in order to settle in a little village on the banks of the Carcarañá, and, with the little his uncle left him when he left for Rosario after the shooting, had started a family and managed to make a small fortune, nothing exceptional, but enough for himself and for each of the millions of poor bastards who crossed the ocean from Genoa, from Galicia, from Marseille, and even from Dakar and from Tripoli; who came from Spain and from Italy, from Syria and from Lebanon, but also from Portugal, from Morocco, from central Europe, from Serbia or Belarus, from Ireland or from Japan, fleeing from oppression, from war, from pogroms, from the Ottoman Empire, from the secret police, from political or religious persecution, from hunger, from poverty, from their destiny. They scattered across the plains, where new ravages awaited them — violence, xenophobia, exploitation, mysterious illnesses, an early grave in a foreign land — and ended up gathering together on land parsed out by the government, eight square blocks that bordered the railroad, which they called a town and named after the first person to arrive, or whatever name he chose, often the name of a woman, thus marking the end of their epic wandering and the start of their sedentary, agrarian life. Yusef, his grandfather, was among these millions of men, and it hadn’t gone too poorly for him, owing to a few personality traits that popular magazines call ambition, tenacity, rational self-interest, intuition, cunning, perseverance, and so on, and so on, and which they use to explain a posteriori the unfathomable crisscrossing of accidents that determine, from the forms that the fugitive — and by chance purely imaginary — evidence assumes in the dark matrix of any event, the thing they call destiny.