Juan José Saer - La Grande

— Well, Lucía said. Thanks for the tea and the conversation. It was nice to meet you. Now you know the house, so you can visit me whenever you want. No need to call ahead.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Nula, overwhelmed, started to babble something, but she turned around, flipped on the light in the entryway, and closed the door. A few seconds passed before he heard the small metallic sound of the lock which for the last week, and for many years afterward, had echoed in his memory, familiar, translated from the hollowness of pure circumstance to the metonymic ether where things, dissected and reordered, producing both anguish and consolation, restore and represent the flawed and ephemeral experience. He took a few steps down the sidewalk, toward 25 de Mayo and his house, but he stopped suddenly, stood motionless for a few seconds, and then turned and started walking in the opposite direction. He passed Lucía’s house and, without stopping, noted that the entryway light was still on. He reached the corner, turned right, and when he was halfway down the block, in front of the house that Lucía seemed to have a problem with, stopped and briefly studied the door that was now closed but which, like the Persian blinds over the side window, where a few parallel rays slipped through the bars, allowed the light from inside to filter out. Finally he decided to ring the doorbell; he hadn’t been hesitating, actually he’d been standing there for no reason, not really knowing what to do, when suddenly, without thinking about it, and without knowing what would happen if they answered, he rang the bell. Almost immediately, as though he’d been waiting behind the door for someone to ring, a five- or six-year-old boy opened it and looked up at him.

— I think I’ve made a mistake, Nula said. Does the Anoch family live here?

The boy looked at him and without saying a thing closed the door again, possibly because they’d taught him not to speak to strangers, or maybe he’d surprised him in the middle of a solitary game, and unable to distinguish the game from reality, he’d acted in a certain sense deliriously, his abrupt behavior belonging to the character he was playing in the game and not to the normal way he’d act outside of it, or following, on the contrary, an accelerated logic whose intermediate stages he short-circuited, he’d figured that since that family didn’t live in that house there wasn’t any more reason for the door to be open. Shuffling through these possibilities, laughing to himself, Nula continued his circuit. He was deliberately doing things that made no sense to him, he thought, and he remembered a conference he’d attended at school. The speaker had said that humanity, after the death of the gods, forsaken to the magma of the material, had begun to realize that its actions lacked significance, but that each individual could, if he wanted, give them meaning and assign his own value. And he told himself that, in their reproduction, Lucía’s enigmatic intentions would ultimately reveal their meaning. But he didn’t learn anything more about them when he stopped at the nameplate that read Doctor Oscar Riera, Clinical Medicine , which he was able to read thanks to a streetlight between him and the trees. As before, the office was dark and silent, so after trying to peer inside without seeing much, he continued walking, turned at the corner with the ice cream shop without looking inside, and soon reached the entrance to his building. He went up the stairs that led to the entrance and was already walking to the apartment when suddenly the place where he’d lived since he was born looked strange to him, the garden where he’d played as a kid, the two rows of apartments separated by the hibiscus and the rosebushes, the glassy planters and the blooming hedges, fragrant in the evenings. Lucía’s curious gaze had displaced his own, and explained the apparently permanent alienation he felt, which translated into words would have been more or less the following: The strangeness of the world isn’t in its unthinkable or distorted sectors but rather in the immediate, the familiar. It just takes an outside gaze, which can sometimes come from ourselves, however fleetingly, to reveal this to us .

That night, in bed, he came up with several plans, to be carried out the next day, but discarded them all after deciding that none satisfied him. One thing was for sure: he’d taken Lucía’s invitation at face value. The next day, though, he worked from two till eight at the law school kiosk, and it didn’t seem prudent to show up too late at Lucía’s because of the danger that she might not be alone. But by the time he got up his caution had vanished: after showering and eating breakfast, he walked out, turned the corner, and went straight to Doctor Riera’s office. He rang the doorbell, below which a sign read Ring the bell and come in , and pushed through the half-open door.

A woman of a certain age, who must’ve been the secretary, or the nurse, or both things at once, came through the side door that led to an empty waiting room, and with a severe expression asked him his name. When he told her, she must have realized that it wasn’t the name she’d expected to hear, that is, of the patient who’d made an appointment for that time (it was ten exactly), and she was telling him that he’d have to make an appointment for another time when a second door, which also led to the waiting room, opened and Doctor Riera appeared. Seeing him, Nula thought, He’s as beautiful as she is, even more so, for a man: as virile as Lucía is feminine. He’s tall, well-proportioned, with an athlete’s body and an intelligent expression. And his dark, curly hair makes him look younger than her, though he may in fact be older, thirty-five, give or take. His eyes are sharp, his clothes are neat, but because he’s tall and upright, muscular probably, without an ounce of excess fat, even the worst clothes in the world would look good on him. His gestures are precise and natural. He doesn’t seem to have a single defect. Clearly they’re made for each other. They’re like gods and I’m the larva that squirms at their feet and which they wouldn’t even bother to squash. There’s no doubt whatsoever that I’m finished before I even start. And how virile and melodious his voice sounds as he tells the nurse to let me through, that the next patient won’t be there till ten fifteen!

And then he was inside, a clean and tidy office, and Riera gestured to a chair, just in front from the one he sat in, on the other side of his desk. He took a blue index card and a fountain pen from a drawer and transcribed Nula’s answers to his questions, his name, birthday, marital status, residence, and a few details about his medical history. Then Riera stopped writing and examined him, first with his gaze, then with the ritual question he must have asked every new patient, but in which Nula thought he detected a slight hint of scorn.

— What seems to be the problem?

Nula invented some sort of allergy, an itch on different parts of his body that came and went over the past few months. Riera looked at him for a few seconds and then, as they stood up, he said:

— Alright, you can get undressed.

— All the way?

— Not yet, Riera said. You can leave your underwear on.

He had him sit down on the examination table and took his blood pressure, then listened with a stethoscope, or directly with his fingers, on his abdomen, on his chest, and around his back. Then he told him to stand up and take off his underwear.

— Where does it itch? he said.

Nula gestured vaguely around his hips, his belly, his thighs, his head. While he put on a pair of rubber gloves, Riera started examining the skin more closely, murmuring I don’t see anything . Separating his hair with his fingers, he quickly studied his scalp; with the tip of his index finger he rubbed his eyebrows against the grain, straightening the hair in order to examine the skin more closely. Then he told him to lay down again on the table, face up. He sat on a black leather stool and sank his fingers into his pubic hair, slowly and carefully separating the hairs in order to see the skin beneath. After a moment he stopped and then said: