Juan José Saer - La Grande

Nula looks for his cell phone in the side pocket of his jacket as he steers the car through the park, toward the tunnel, but when he accelerates downhill, he decides to call Diana after he gets out of the tunnel, so he leaves the phone on the seat. He feels like a cigarette, though since he started selling wine he’s been smoking somewhat less so as not to distort its taste and smell, as they recommended during the mandatory wine-tasting courses, but, because of the air conditioning, he doesn’t light one. Ten minutes later he’s crossing the tunnel behind an interurban bus, and after the toll on the opposite side he passes it. On the island highway he doesn’t see a single other car, but on the bridge over the Colastiné he passes a truck and two cars that follow it toward the tunnel. While he’s crossing the bridge — the river is smooth, the same pale gray as the Paraná, in fact the source of its waters — he calls home, but Diana’s voice picks up on the answering machine. It’s me. How are you? I’m just about at the hypermarket. Kisses. Talk to you soon , Nula says and hangs up, relieved not to have to speak to Diana, since it makes him uncomfortable to lie when the adventure is still recent, which some nights forces him to wander around in the car or sit in a bar for a while before going home, to make sure that Diana will already be asleep when he gets there. At the exit for La Guardia he turns toward the city, and as he reaches the hypermarket, before pulling in to the parking lot, where there are a few more cars than in the morning, he can just make out the old waterfront clustered across the opposite shore of the lagoon, with its chic cottages whose tile roofs emerge sporadically from between the foliage. He gets out of the car, noting that the afternoon is hotter but unsure whether to attribute it to the climactic differences between the cities, one at altitude, the other on the plain, or to the contrast with the air conditioning, but as he enters the hypermarket its own air conditioning returns the sense of coolness to him.

Although he almost never buys anything, except on the days when he and Diana are stocking up (but even then she’s the one who actually does the shopping), he likes to wander through supermarkets, possibly because it once occurred to him that they represent a grotesque version of his grandfather’s general store. The principles are the same, like the water vapor that on a small scale agitates the lid of a kettle when the water boils, and on a large scale moves a locomotive. As a child he believed that it was the abundance and variety that attracted him to his grandfather’s store, but as an adult, wandering through supermarkets, he realized that what affected him was actually the repetition. The stacks of cigarette packs, all the same brand, the rows of vermouth or gin bottles, all the same shape, their contents the same color as the glass, with the same black label, filling an entire shelf, or the pyramids of cans in the center of the store, which his aunt or his grandfather had built, patiently and meticulously, the night before, after dinner, produced a visual effect that he confused with abundance, not realizing that what attracted him to the jars filled with orange jellies wrapped in transparent cellophane, all the approximate shape and color of an orange slice, was the cumulative effect, further enhanced by their loose disorder inside the glass jar, which in itself had both a decorative and philosophical aspect, though as a child he was still too young to realize this, because the repetition, even of manufactured objects, is the thing that’s most familiar and at the same time the most enigmatic: Abundance can be oppressive or sublime, but repetition is always aesthetic, and its effect always mysterious , he sometimes thinks. In the hypermarket, even the background music that most reasonable people are sensible enough to loathe seems necessary to him because it underscores the environmental shift that’s produced when one passes from the disarticulated and contingent external world to the internal one, a change as stark as the one we feel when, as we dive in the river, we cease to hear the sounds of the surface world and move, half-blind, through the underwater silence. Nula thinks of the excessive lighting inside the hypermarket — and all artificial light, for that matter — as a prosthesis of our visual organs, and that even the building’s construction obeys the same principles that combine abundance, variety, and repetition, because the complex, manifested spontaneously from the primordial swamp, contains not one but eight movie theaters. At the self-serve cafeteria, meanwhile, the repetition is sustained: the carefully-arranged, small round plates filled with mixed salad, tongue in vinaigrette, hearts of palm with ham, chicken salad, are displayed in sets of three, and the white rim of the plate frames in each instance an approximate design whose individual elements are arranged more or less in the same way. Nula picks out a chicken salad, a mixed salad, and at the hot section asks for a milanesa with egg and fries, and after serving himself a piece of bread, a carbonated mineral water, and some packets of mustard, salt, and pepper from alongside the register, he pays and sits down at a table near the window that faces the stream, beside which the Warden hypermarket, which everyone calls the supercenter , in such contrast to the swampy, impoverished landscape that surrounds it, seems like a magical illusion, a colorful mirage in a desolate, gray desert.

The thing that hadn’t happened five years before, now, only recently, because she thought it would repay a debt to him, suddenly, still perplexingly, and so different from what he’d always imagined, and so unexpected, had happened. If he’d pushed up his trip to Paraná in order to see her sooner it was merely out of curiosity, rooted in what had happened the night before at Gutiérrez’s, and he hadn’t even been sure, if he found her, that Lucía would speak to him. The coincidence of seeing her there had unexpected consequences, as it did five years before, when despite his best efforts, after the first time he met her, to see her again, he only saw her by accident one afternoon, at the corner of his block, not the one with the ice cream shop but the next one, where his street met the street with the house she’d gone into (her own house, in fact), locking the door from the inside while Nula, from the sidewalk, listened to the metallic sound of the key turning. Because he was still dazzled by the red dress vibrating intensely in the midday sun, he couldn’t imagine her dressed any other way, and so he always searched the neighborhood, or in the crowd downtown, for the bright red blur, the vigorous cluster of organs, skin, and muscles, enclosed like an organic capsule by its meaty and velvety skin, splitting the balmy September air. Since they first met, he’d passed her house more than twenty times and had taken an unreasonable number of walks around the block, posting himself for hours on the four corners in order to see if the girl dressed in red who he still didn’t know was named Lucía would reappear, not only at the one that he rightly assumed must’ve been her house, but also at the three other symmetrical points that he’d seen her examine, including La India’s apartment, along the four streets that formed the block. Any red dress, seen from a distance, startled him and triggered his approach with the hope of seeing her again, but it was never her. And so when one afternoon, on his way back to his house after having watched the kiosk at the law school all day, he bumped into her again, he was so absorbed in thinking about her that at first he didn’t recognize her because she was dressed in white. She had on an immaculate linen suit, stiff and recently pressed, and her hair was pulled up, stretched tight at her temples and the base of her neck and spilling out at the crown of her head above the dark ribbon that held it together. She looked calm, freshly bathed. From the opposite sidewalk, he watched her cross the street at a diagonal, enter the pastry shop, and sit down at one of the tables facing the window, at the corner farthest from the door. Just like the first time when he started following her without knowing why, not thinking about it even for a fraction of a second he crossed the street at a diagonal, veering off from the straight line that was taking him to his house, and went into the shop. There were several empty tables, but without hesitating even to discuss it with himself he took the few steps that brought him to a stop in front of her. She looked at him a moment, without surprise or curiosity, like an actress during the first reading of a play, waiting for the actor next to her to finish reading his lines before giving hers.