Juan José Saer - La Grande

Lucía laughs again, the same quick laugh as before, when they’d just come in, but this time Nula senses a hint of resignation, almost bitterness, in it. He presses himself closer to her, wraps his arm over her shoulders, and pulls her in, possibly to compensate for his disappointment but most likely to conceal it, caressing her earnestly, but excessively, because he feels a genuine affection for her. But Lucía seems indifferent to his embrace, already thinking of something else. Nula asks her what, and she answers simply, without any apparent emotion, that she came to Bahía Blanca with her son two years ago, more or less, and she has sporadic encounters with Riera, who comes every so often to see his son, but it’s impossible to live with him all the time. There’s no denying it , Lucía says, he’s a monster . And, curiously, Nula realizes that when she says this, instead of anger, there’s a spark of malicious sympathy in her eyes, which stop for a fraction of a second as they wander over the immaculate ceiling. Nula laughs: I have no doubt about that whatsoever , he says, and Lucía laughs too, in a way that makes Nula think that she’s still in love with him and that, like the complications of their relationship, the separation must have had multiple interpretations and causes, and now Lucía is telling him that he, Riera, likes Nula so much, that he always talked about inviting him to spend a season with them in Benvenuto when they were still together, but she couldn’t take it any longer and it came down to giving in or leaving. Of course , Nula thinks, and the images that provoke this rise in his memory, painful as a burn, but I saw them outside that awful house in Rosario that morning from the taxi .

— It was the right decision, not giving in, he says.

Lucía clears her throat but doesn’t say anything. She thinks.

— I’ve never known anyone like him, Nula says.

Lucía shakes her head. I got what I deserved, she says, but with a trace of contradictory pride in her voice.

She was probably thinking about him when she decided to go to bed with me, and she thought about him the whole time we did it, and maybe — maybe — she thinks, with good cause, that I’m too simple for her, too colorless, odorless, and flavorless compared to Riera , Nula thinks, somewhat surprised, and the idea isn’t altogether displeasing, though most likely because it absolves him from not loving her like before. Apparently, what until today was mythologized has suddenly become instinctual and perverted. But he’s already moved on to a more interesting puzzle, Gutiérrez, her father , and though the question struggles to come out, his tongue and his lips can’t manage to speak it, and it’s Lucía herself who, without warning, begins the story about Doctor Calcagno ( my father ), about Leonor ( my old lady ), and about Gutiérrez ( Willi ), as though she too assumed that explanations were in order. When she was a girl, she loved Doctor Calcagno a lot, but as she grew up, her father’s incomprehensible subservience to Mario Brando, his partner at the law firm and the head of a literary movement that her father was also part of— precisionism , Lucía clarifies, sarcastically — distanced her from him, and by the time she was a teenager she despised him. Calcagno was a Roman Law professor and a talented litigator, much more so than Brando, who hardly did a thing for the firm, dedicating himself instead to literature, to politics, and to his social position — but still, Lucía says, her father obeyed him unconditionally. The firm made a lot of money, and they were the only two partners, but despite having a fifty percent stake, Calcagno was the one who did all the work. Brando, with his literary fame and his political campaigns and his family and social connections — his father had been a big industrialist and he’d married a daughter of General Ponce — clearly inspired confidence in the clients of the firm, which specialized in business, trusts, estates, land acquisitions, and so on. Calcagno ran the firm, and at the same time became a sort of lieutenant to Brando, sometimes even typing up his poems, despite being older and having an international reputation as an expert in Roman Law. (Nula knows that Calcagno wrote a textbook that he often sold when he worked at the kiosk.) But at any hour, day or night, if Brando called, Calcagno dropped what he was doing and immediately did what he was told. Once, Lucía says, just after she’d turned fifteen, Calcagno planned a trip to Europe, but at the last minute Brando demanded that he stay to prepare a book that was supposed to come out in a few weeks. She and her mother were forced to travel alone. It seemed to suit Leonor fine, but she, Lucía, had begun, at that moment, to detest her father. Lucía tells Nula that she cried the entire flight and that her mother, to console her, had said: You shouldn’t hate him, Lucy, he’s a good man. But remember this: A man who’s good all the time is never enough for a real woman .

It wasn’t until four or five years later that Lucía started to suspect that Leonor cheated on her husband, and moreover that Calcagno couldn’t not realize it, meaning, if it was true, that he tolerated it. I really love her, but my old lady is the stupidest person I know. She has the maturity of a fourteen-year-old, more or less. All she seems to think about is clothes, jewelry, travel, and men. Old age has made her crazy: she spends a fortune trying to stay young, on creams, tanners, treatments, and surgeries. Since her family was already rich and my father left her a fortune, she never worked or had any responsibilities. When I left Benvenuto, I wanted to support myself, but she set up the shop so I wouldn’t have to go out looking for work. They didn’t teach me a thing. No one even made me study something useful. It was taken for granted that I’d marry a rich man and spend the rest of my life like she had. And I ended up selling clothes.

Because she’d heard that the air in Paraná, on the hillside, was less polluted than in the city, a flat expanse twenty nine meters below sea level, and that pollution damaged the dermis , Leonor sold the house she had in Guadalupe, which Calcagno had built half a block from Brando — on the recommendation of the man himself, who according to Lucía always wanted his slave close by — and moved in to the cottage in Urquiza that she’d inherited from her family. And Lucía came to live with her. At any rate, if you subtracted from the weeks that she wasn’t traveling the time she spent at rejuvenation clinics; her amorous liaisons supposedly always with men her age or slightly older ( up till now in any case , Lucía adds), from good families like hers, though she may have more than one going at a time; her seasons at the pied-à-terre she had in Buzios, she barely spends more than two or three weeks at the house in Paraná. Her brother managed her finances from his office in Buenos Aires. If not for the married men who at the last second refused to get a divorce in order to marry her, the airports closed due to bad weather, the decline of Punta del Este, the wrinkles, the aging, the illnesses, and death, and if her daughter, whom she clearly loved, had married someone slightly less repulsive than Oscar Riera, Leonor, in an astonishing correspondence with Leibniz — whom neither she, nor Lucía for that matter, had ever heard of — would have believed that the human species had been given without a doubt the best possible world to live in.

One day, just back from a trip to Europe, she called Lucía in Benvenuto and told her that she had some good news but that she wanted to tell her in person. At that point, Lucía had almost decided to separate from Riera (that’s the word she used) and figured that spending a few days with her mother would help her make the decision, and by the next day she was in Paraná. And, after lunch, while the baby napped — they’d left early that morning from Benvenuto, changed planes in Aeroparque, and by noon they were already in Sauce Viejo, where Leonor had sent a car to bring them to Paraná—Leonor told her that her real father wasn’t Calcagno but another man, the only one she’d ever really loved, and whom she’d found again in Europe, where he’d been living for more than thirty years. He’d left the city seven months before Lucía was born and never returned. She’d asked him to leave without telling him that she was pregnant, and he’d made the sacrifice of leaving the city without telling anyone. She’d found him by accident, and they’d started to talk again: they spoke on the phone every week. He lived between Geneva and Rome and he was a screenwriter. Leonor had told him the truth and the man wanted to meet his daughter. His name was Guillermo Gutiérrez, but back then everyone called him Willi .