Juan José Saer - La Grande

— She, who never sacrificed a thing, asked him for the sacrifice, Lucía practically screams, sarcastically. And Nula, to give some visible register of his agreement, and to be polite, shakes his head and offers her a scandalized grin. Lucía’s directness surprises him; but because Calcagno, whom she didn’t respect anymore, had been dead for years, and Lucía was aware of her mother’s diverse and complex love life, it wasn’t altogether difficult to hear the news with a sense of detached surprise and even of curiosity. The revelation, which she was nevertheless skeptical of, and which came at the same moment as she was deciding whether to leave her own husband, promised her a new perspective on her life. Lucía had met Gutiérrez because he was a law student that Calcagno had hired at the firm, most likely so he could pass off the jobs from his partner Mario Brando, whom he didn’t dare confront directly. Gutiérrez was more or less the same age as Leonor, which meant that Calcagno was more than twenty years older than his wife. Putting two and two together, Lucía realized that they were about to run off but at the last minute she, Leonor, had changed her mind, and so at first she didn’t really want to meet him because it occurred to her that he’d accepted leaving, making the sacrifice she’d asked for, possibly letting her mother convince him just as subserviently as Calcagno accepted everything that she and Brando forced on him. But her curiosity was stronger than her suspicion and skepticism, and she agreed to meet him. I’m lucky I did. He’s a wonderful man. I’m not sure he’s my real father, but it’s like he’s the father I never had.

Nula sits up suddenly and emphatically on the pillow, and seeing that Lucía, stretched out naked next to him, doesn’t move, letting her eyes drift calmly, thoughtful more than anything, over the immaculate ceiling, his face takes on an inquisitive and peremptory expression, comical in its exaggerated severity.

— So is Gutiérrez your father or isn’t he? he asks.

With the same calm detachment, slightly unsettling to Nula, Lucía, after reflecting a moment, lists the possibilities: First of all— it may sound cruel, so please don’t repeat this —it would be difficult to prove (and to confirm at present) that Willi was her mother’s only lover, and even if you accepted that Willi was in fact her first lover, it seems absurd to Lucía that Calcagno, if they didn’t have sex, would have accepted Leonor’s pregnancy. So even assuming that at the time she’d only had sex with Willi and Calcagno, there still remained the problem of knowing which of the two was her father. According to Lucía, Leonor herself couldn’t be sure — as with most other things, she had the habit of confusing her desires with reality — though she says that after Calcagno’s death she’d started thinking about Gutiérrez again, and Lucía believes that her mother was actually in love with him, but she didn’t dare run off because she wasn’t prepared to accept the risks it implied. Nula knows that Lucía, for her part, against Leonor’s wishes, didn’t hesitate to marry Riera, who’d just gotten his medical license and didn’t have a penny, so in a way it’s like she’s her own mother’s mother, which is why she describes her as a girl from a rich family married to a rich man, who hadn’t been brought up to run off with a poor law student, a clerk in her husband’s law firm no less. She’d only developed the romantic mythology in retrospect, despite having already admitted to Lucía that she’d had many lovers over the years — Nula remembers Riera one day telling him: Sometimes my mother-in-law goes swimming in the Salado, in Santo Tomé, and even though it’s crowded and isn’t even sandy, people go there because they say the mud rejuvenates the skin and is good for the joints. Anyway, when the water reaches her waist, the temperature in all the surrounding rivers (remember that the Salado empties into the Paraná) goes up by several degrees —and she idealized Willi Gutiérrez, declared him the love of her life, and started to imagine, though it may in fact have been true, that he was the father of her child. It was impossible to know the truth because even Leonor herself didn’t know what it was, and even if she’d been lying she didn’t realize it, so when she said that Willi was her father, she was convinced that it was the truth.

— The truth, Nula says, is incredibly easy to come by.

— No, Lucía says forcefully. No one’s interested in the truth. Mother, though she doesn’t realize it, is terrified of it not being true. And Willi and I have an understanding. He came into my life just when I needed him. And besides, as absurd as it may seem, he really does love my mother, and doesn’t ask anything in return.

Slowly, pensively, Nula slides back down until his body is once again stretched out next to Lucía. The two naked bodes, with their pale regions at similar heights, from their waistline to the tops of their thighs — although when Nula saw her for the first time, coming out of the swimming pool, she had on a fluorescent green one-piece, her large, soft breasts, which are tanned, indicate that the rest of the summer she must have taken the sun topless — are motionless, and their anatomical differences, rather than becoming more apparent through their nakedness, seem to have been blurred by their stillness and moreover the thoughtful expression on their faces, or rather in their eyes, which, like a luminous spring, flows from the two pairs of dark eyes that are more open than usual, and is propelled onto the white ceiling. Suddenly, Nula’s hand, stretched out alongside his body, gropes along Lucía’s forearm until it finds her hand and grasps it. Lucía lets him take her hand to his lips and kiss it softly, but her eyes stay fixed upward. Without letting go of her hand, Nula leans over Lucía’s breast and starts sucking on her nipple. Lucía rubs his head, but then pushes him softly away.

— No, she says. That’s enough for today.

Nula keeps sucking, as if he hadn’t heard her, but he’s relieved and glad that she’s rejected him, although he insists a bit longer before sitting up. The suction sounds strange in the room, reminiscent of an animal, and Nula’s actions, along with the position of their bodies, which have shifted, reestablishes the differences that, a few seconds before, the stillness seemed to erase despite their anatomical differences.

— Are you hungry? Lucía laughs, and Nula exaggerates the suction sound and intensifies his movements, but abruptly he sits up and grabs his watch from the nightstand. And, looking at the time, he lies:

— No. I’m late, he says, and sits up on the edge of the bed. Can I take a shower?

— Does your wife smell you when you come home? Lucía asks, standing up on the other side of the bed.

— Let’s shower together, Nula says.

— If it’s just a shower, Lucía says.

Lucía takes him in the black car to the dark green station wagon, parked a few blocks from the boutique, and stops a few meters away with the engine running.

— You’re my only friend, she says when Nula is about to open the door.

— I hope so, Nula says, pretending not to understand what she means with the word, which has just put up a barrier between them, removing from their relationship, despite the intensity of the statement, any kind of exclusivity. Only when he’s outside the car, watching it drive away, while he looks for his keys in his coat pocket, does he realize that his simulated love, his too sudden relief, his insistence on making her feel more loved than his true feelings would cause him to, are meant for himself, who feeds and expresses them. The months when he suffered most were also the most intense of his life, starting from that September afternoon when, coming out of the Siete Colores, after a student had called out to him, asking about a Public Law textbook, besides many other coincidences that would be tiresome to enumerate, he’d bumped into the girl in red as he stepped out onto the bright sidewalk, and, without knowing why, drawn by the magnet of fleeting shapes that undulate radiantly in the morning sun, before finally disappearing, he’d started following her, caught in her aura for years without ever managing to have her, until an hour ago more or less, when, at the very moment of possession, the aura, suddenly, disappeared.