Juan José Saer - La Grande

— And in your case, Virginia, is there a discrepancy between the name and the person?

— I have a two-year-old daughter, Virginia says, and though their conversation is light, she continues to look around, verifying, apparently, that everything in the Warden hypermarket, where she has a certain level of responsibility, is or at least seems to be in order, adding, however, I think you’re big enough by now to know what that means .

— I’ll have to think about it, Nula says, noticing that Virginia’s smile widens.

Leaving the cafeteria, they cross a wide passage that leads from the restaurants and the multiplex to the hypermarket itself (the heads of the business, the radio and television commentators, and the daily press call the group of buildings the supercenter ), where the lights are brighter than in the cafeteria and in the passageway. Despite the windows facing the parking lot, numerous lights illuminate the giant space stocked with merchandise, and the same music, which in the cafeteria and in the passageway was almost inaudible, sounds somewhat louder. Almost all of the registers are closed, and because of this, though the place isn’t very crowded, at the few that are open the submissive customers gather in lines. The white plastic bags are emblazoned with a bold and conspicuous W of the Warden brand. From his trips here with Diana, Nula knows that the red ones come from the meat section, the green ones, not surprisingly, from the produce section, and the blue ones from the seafood section, but the yellow, orange, indigo, and violet ones are hard to match with a specific product, though in practice the bags end up combined together at the registers, and are only correctly organized at the sections operated by specialized workers, like the butcher shop and the fish section. According to Diana, who often works in advertising design, that set of colors, which evokes the refraction of light, must have been the designers’ effort to suggest, from the publicity office of the Warden firm, which branches into many countries, that the W hypermarkets, with their incalculable diversity, predicting and satisfying the infinite spectrum of human desire, contain the sum of all existence. Nula seems to recall that the bag that Chacho gave them with the catfish had a green W, and though he remembers that the woman who pointed to Escalante’s house through the rainy darkness was holding a couple of bags from the same supermarket, he can’t picture what colors the letters were. As they pass behind the registers, the people waiting in line look at them discreetly, and Nula hopes that the men think that his relationship with Virginia is more intimate than it really is, but it’s obvious and demoralizing that, at least to the youngest among them, each of which must be wishing deep down that he could possess such a promising body, he, Nula, is invisible next to her. The aisles between the shelves are like streets, and instead of houses with doors and windows there’s a series of labels, cans, cellophane, packages, cardboard boxes, jars, that continuously yield to other merchandise with other uses, other shapes, made from cloth, plastic, wood, rubber, metal, and so on. The section of bottles, mineral water, soda, beer, wine, and liquor is deserted, and, at an intersection, Virginia stops suddenly.

— What do you think? she says, gesturing to the shelves around them. To one side are bottles of wine, and ahead of them the snacks and the liquor, but in the rows that start again after the intersection there are more bottles of wine, more snacks and more liquor, the same rainbow-colored profusion of labels that despite representing, in many cases, specific objects and shapes, seem abstract in repetition and lose their representative quality and seem more like a pattern or an ornamental design. Nula stares into the distance, but he can’t quite make out the end of the room through the infinite convergence of overloaded shelves that, beyond the food sections, hold the kitchen supplies, the tools, the clothes, the stationary, and, far off, hanging from the ceiling, a mist of wheelbarrows, colored globes, signs, and bicycles.

— A tactical position, he says.

— Starting tomorrow, they’ll be announcing the wine tasting over the loudspeakers, Virginia says. And you had some signs you were going to bring?

— Everything will be here tomorrow, Nula says.

— Tell me about the product you’re promoting, Virginia says. I was on vacation when everything was set up.

— It’s a high quality table wine, Nula says. White and red. Our company is trying to launch more mainstream products.

— That sounds good, Virginia says.

— If the launch on Friday is a success, how about if we have dinner together? Nula says.

— Why not? Even if it isn’t, Virginia says. I finish at eight. My daughter always goes out on Friday nights, anyway.

— And her father? Nula says.

Virginia laughs.

— What father?

— Oh right, Nula says. I’d forgotten that in your case the name and the person corresponded.

— That’s still to be determined, Virginia says. In any case, if we have dinner on Friday I’ll tell you a secret.

— About you? Nula says.

— About you, actually, Virginia says, smiling mysteriously. And suddenly, glancing at her watch, her professional demeanor returns.

— Tell your friends of wine , she says, that when they come tomorrow, ask for Virginia. Until Friday, then. .

She hesitates a second.

— Nula, Nula says, fascinated by Virginia’s promise and her enigmatic smile.

— Nula, of course, Virginia says. She turns around and walks down another aisle loaded with bottles, and when she reaches the next intersection she turns right and disappears. Nula stands motionless for several seconds, thinking about the promise that has suddenly rubbed Friday night tantalizingly against his imagination, and skipping over the nominal hours that in reality happen in a single block of time, and have done so since the beginning of the world and will continue to do so indefinitely, he leaps over the monotonous sequence of events, arriving at the possibilities invented by his desire, which, though still incorporeal and fantastical, are more intense and gratifying than the uneven and fragmentary pieces of existence. Suddenly, the vivid anticipation that, however immaterial, is capable of triggering more than a few organic regions of his body, is completely erased, and the present moment, the brutal actuality of everything, at once transparent and impenetrable, engulfs him like a thick and hardening liquid into which things around him sediment, and where the things that move, like the hand that Nula lifts without knowing why, seem to decompose into infinite layers that only through an immense effort overcome their medium, a kind of soft glass, for a millionth of a second, before they disappear. Nula’s utterly estranged gaze passes over the illuminated space, and he tells himself, It’s like the bright space in the mind into which our thoughts flow . Even the background music seems to have stopped: its pervasiveness melts into the assemblage, and though it needs movement, change, tempo, its formulaic shape built of predictable developments and melodies, so similar to so many others, seems to pause it, a sonorous binding that halts its advance. It’s like the static nucleus of an atom of the becoming . And then, in accelerating and colliding images, which translated into words would be more or less the following: Otherwise, the clear part of the mind resembles that fragment of the exterior. It’s like a fish tank. At the top, the brightly colored fish move silently through the light, quickly, then disappear, and some, brilliant and insistent, return again and again. But farther down, among the plants and the moss-covered rocks, the water is less transparent, clouded by old sediment, crisscrossed by vague, unrecognizable shadows, sometimes thrashing so violently that the water loses clarity all the way up, muddled by suspended silts that have been furiously agitated. Between the clear zone and the dark zone, between the bright, familiar layer and the unstable, murky depths, there’s no line of demarcation but rather an uncertain, mutable border where both layers blend together and overlap, transforming each other. The lower one forks out and is lost in the depths of the body, seeking in the remote corners of the tissues and the organs the liquid that, decanted, clarifies at the bright surface, populated by the colorful, silent fauna of our waking thoughts.