Juan José Saer - La Grande

The temperature has gone up a lot since noon, though the sky is still gray, a high and even, almost white gray, and it’s stopped raining; what’s more, the hot air has dried the last traces of damp left by the rain the night before, and which, before midday, were still visible on the streets and on the facades of several buildings. He doesn’t yet feel very hot, possibly because of the recent shower — in the end, they showered separately — but the blue jacket, despite being lightweight, begins to weigh on him. Inside the car it’s hot: the body of the car has been heated despite the fact that the rays of the sun have been sifted through a bank of motionless clouds that intercepts them in the atmosphere. Nula hesitates between taking off his coat and turning on the air conditioning, and opts for the latter for two different reasons: first, because when he gets to the hypermarket, where he’ll have to speak to one of the managers after getting something to eat at the cafeteria, he’ll need to put the coat back on; and second, which is naturally the most important, because the air conditioning will protect the cases of wine and the local chorizos that he picked up at the warehouse. But as he leans over to put the key in and turn on the engine, without knowing why, a memory overwhelms him, and he ends up sliding the key into the ignition without turning it over, leans back in the seat, his eyes in empty space, and for several seconds abandons himself to a sudden insight, a new way of remembering a childhood memory, one among many others of the vacations he spent with is grandfather, in the town.

On summer afternoons, after the sprinkler truck had passed, or when the sun reappeared the day after it had rained, swarms of yellow butterflies would appear, flying in groups of twenty or thirty, landing briefly in the puddles or the damp zones left over on the dirt roads, and then, all together, lifting off and landing a little farther away. He’d also seen flocks of birds that flew together and changed direction all at once; and, when he was older, watching some television show, he’d be astonished by the schools of colored fish, all identical, that slid through the water with the same movements, so synchronized and exact that they gave the impression of being a single body multiplied many times but controlled by a single mind, or whatever you’d call it, difficult to place either in the individual — fish, bird, or butterfly — or dispersed across the group, unifying it through an invisible current of shared energy. He’d been able to observe the butterflies himself many times, and if as a child the group’s precision didn’t catch his eye — what interested him then was hunting them, not with a net or anything like that, but rather with a branch from a bitterwood that he’d use to leave them battered, their wings broken, torn to pieces and dying in the dirt road — as an adolescent it began to intrigue him and after he stopped visiting the town the memory of those groups of butterflies with their uncanny synchronicity, without his knowing neither how nor why, began to represent the image, and the proof even, of a harmonious, rational universe, and which contradicted his conception of a constant and accidental becoming in which, owing to the perpetual collision of things, in the space-time cocktail, shaken alone and ceaselessly, without the help of any barman , as he often said, every event, in spectacular colors no less fleeting or provisional than the afternoon clouds, happens. To the question, sounding very much like a provocation, that Soldi asked him one morning a few months before, when they were drinking a cortado at the Siete Colores, phrased more or less as follows: What if every event, like this one for example, stirring a cortado with a teaspoon, whether contingent or not, since it’s impossible to know the difference in any case, hasn’t been developing since the beginning of the world? Nula responded that there wasn’t a beginning to the world and that strictly speaking there wasn’t a world, since it hadn’t been created and was always in the making and wasn’t any closer or farther from a beginning or an end and would continue to change shape forever, that’s all there was to it, and the integrity of things was just a question of scale; the cortado that Soldi was stirring, for example, was no longer the same one they’d brought him a few seconds before, nor were the two of them, nor anything else that comprised the infinite present.

In truth, the collective precision of the flight of butterflies, the way he remembered it from childhood, which some attributed to a supra-individual instinct, didn’t match up very well with his theories. And now, just as he leans forward to put the key in the ignition, it’s unclear from where, and with such intensity that he’s not turned the car on instead leaning back motionless against the seat, he’s had a realization that he’s now trying to form into words, and as which would be more or less the following: It’s the observer, from a deficiency of perspective, who creates the superstition of a total identity in the butterflies’ behavior. In reality, every swarm struggles to move, and the movements only appear harmonious because we’re incapable of seeing in detail each of the individuals that comprise the group. It’s as absurd to believe that all their movements are synchronized as it is to say that all Asians are the same. Our bodies simply aren’t sensitive enough to make out the differences. A flight of butterflies, if we observed it at the appropriate scale, would look like a clumsy, disorganized and frantic attempt at harmony. We’d see that what from a distance appears synchronized is only a set of individual movements, more or less fast or slow, more or less agile or clumsy, more or less exact or flawed relative to their objectives, we’d see that, for example, their position in the air or on the damp earth relative to the edge of the puddle or the direction of their flight when they take off again are not the same, not to mention the variable efforts of each butterfly, the accidents in flight or on the ground — a collision with some insect or a bird, or even with a car that scatters them or crushes them all, or a miscalculated landing in the water or in a patch of mud from which they can’t manage to take off again, ending up there, in agony, their legs or their wings muddy or broken. If we followed the flight of a swarm along the four main blocks of the town, along the railway, it would be interesting to calculate how many escaped and how many reached the end of the street, no doubt what we call a harmonious dance, universally visible evidence of what certain imbeciles call the wonders of nature, is nothing but a sequence of cataclysms and catastrophes in miniature. Nula shakes his head, as though he’s coming out of a dream, and pulls a slim, black oilcloth notebook from his inside jacket pocket, in which every so often he takes notes, but which serves primarily as a place to jot down details on wine, stocks, brands, quantity, and their primary characteristics. After thinking a moment, he writes, Sensory deficiency makes chaos seem like harmony. Flight of butterflies . He puts the notebook and the pen away, and, after turning the engine over, while he steers the car out from between two others that leave him little room to maneuver, he thinks, satisfied: An orgasm — thank you, Lucía darling — though the act may be disappointing — sorry, Lucía darling — always refreshes the mind , forgetting that last night, after having made love in a satisfying way with his wife, he dropped off immediately, without thinking about anything, and slept the rest of the night.

At an open bend in the park, on the hillside, he parks the car a few minutes with the engine running and looks at the river. A long island, stretched along the same direction of the current that formed it, divides the broad channel, several kilometers wide, into two nearly identical branches. The water is a milky gray, a reflection of the sky, and owing to the invisible sun whose rays nonetheless pierce the motionless clouds, appears to be coated in a brilliant varnish. For anyone who knows its violent rhythms, its treacherous pools, its tides, the brutal countercurrents at its mouth, its unpredictable depths, its droughts, its aggressive fauna, in spite of its deceitful smoothness, as it flows to the south, is more indifferent than calm. Born of ancient, prehuman convulsions, it nevertheless has much in common with humanity, who think they’ve domesticated it, and like a sleeping beast it tolerates them on its back until one fine day, rearing up unexpectedly, swallows them up, and then, a week later, or often never, vomits up the unrecognizable rags that are left behind. The year before, Nula had the opportunity to see it from Diamante, some fifty kilometers to the south of Paraná. It was a bright October morning, around eleven — that hour on sunny mornings when, as he realized when a cold forced him to stay home from school, the silence of empty places increases to an uncanny level. Although Diamante wasn’t in his sales region, Américo had asked him to go see a client who wanted to put in a big order, which had to be taken care of immediately, because the salesman who was in charge of it was in Corrientes. He’d left the city around eight, and by crossing to Entre Ríos on the bridge over the Colastiné and then through the underwater tunnel, not driving into Paraná but instead turning directly onto the highway by the outer streets, he’d arrived in Diamante before ten and by quarter of eleven the sale had been finalized. The day seemed so beautiful as he left the client that morning that he’d been overcome with the desire, without apparent cause in the species, to check out the river before returning to the city. And following the crude signs that pointed the way to the coast, he left the city center and turned onto a dirt road that, after passing a few scattered ranches, ended at a kind of peninsula, at the top of the slope. He got out of the car and walked to the edge; he was surrounded by some sparse grass, and though the slope wasn’t very high, the peninsula projected outward, and the shrubs and short trees that grew along the coast, some almost horizontally because their roots dipped into the vertical riverbank or the steep slope above, not quite reaching the end of the peninsula, allowed an unobstructed view to the north, upriver, where great quantities of water seemed to flow out of the horizon. The opposite shore, somewhere near Coronda, was not visible, of course, though in the flatlands that end suddenly at the river it would have been visible from that relative height if it had been any closer. Nula knew that the shore was several kilometers in that direction, to the west, but from where he was standing its presence was purely imaginary. The river dropped from the north, its vast breadth fractured here and there by green alluvial islands, by banks of sand, by floats of water hyacinths that came from the tropics, or possibly from Paraguay or from Brazil, and ran aground among the islands in the delta. Having carved through colored earth, the water was red, though in some patches the surface, mixing with the clear blue of the sky, it turned a bluish rose. The reddish opacity of the surface was rough in the distance, most likely owing to the current that turned the water and made waves across the heavy masses on the surface, on which, here and there, foamy edges formed. But what struck him were the contradictory impressions it provoked: it obviously advanced, but it appeared static, and though the morning was bright, the surface was not reflective, and though it flowed to the south in silence, the ear, possibly due to the heavy rocking of the surface, seemed to hear a distant roar.