Juan José Saer - La Grande

Seeing the approaching corner through the windshield, Tomatis realizes that he’s reaching his house, and returning to commonplace topics, says, The weather’s supposed to be nice tomorrow. I’ll get off at the corner.

The same pat on the shoulder that he gave him when getting in the car is repeated before he opens the door and steps out, with some effort, onto the sidewalk.

— I can’t wait to try them, he says, shaking the hypermarket bag with the two local chorizos. Thanks. I’ll see you.

— On Sunday, first of all, Nula says. Without having understood completely, or possibly without even having heard him, Tomatis closes the door softly and disappears behind the car. When he pulls a few meters from the curb, a blood red light suddenly fills the rearview mirror, surprising Nula, who takes a few seconds to realize that the afternoon sun, after having been invisible for a few days, has reappeared suddenly, in the west. At the end of the street a red blur covers the sky up to a certain altitude, above which, like a gathered canopy, a uniform ceiling of clouds begins, motionless all day and now starting to fold itself up. The grayish vault is stained red, a brilliant red that, as it washes over the houses, the streets, the trees, its magnetic waves and tones in constant and imperceptible transformation, makes it seem uncanny and remote, as though he were seeing it not from a mobile point, crossing it from one end to the other if he wanted, but rather from the source itself, from the very same red incandescence that stains it. Nula feels at once inside and outside the world, and though, like every other day, he’s on his way home to rejoin his wife and children, whose company is in fact pleasant, he’d like to prolong his trip indefinitely and put off the moment he sees them, fearing that what has suddenly separated and isolated him, outside the world, will invade them when they’re finally together.

Nula thinks of Lucía’s gift, its useless, belated ease, not having left them with anything apart from a kind of void, and, possibly, mutual compassion. That mythical pleasure, so long delayed in entering the laborious, wandering train of occurrence, was snuffed out suddenly that afternoon and disappeared forever from the deceitful and brilliant constellation that, without knowing whether it beats inside us or in some remote corner of the external, we call desire. For years, Nula believed that Lucía continued to incarnate the persistence of that myth, made possible because there’s matter, because there’s a world, because in the beginning there was energy, force, and then mass, expansion, proliferation, from all those inconceivable accidents, making ever more intricate combinations, patiently and ceaselessly, sparking, in a constant flux, within the existent, eventually producing that one spark — him, Nula — and placing it one morning at the bar on the corner of Mendoza and San Martín, where the Gran Doria stood for years, along with that student who, just at the moment when he was turning toward the door, called out to ask him a question about a Public Law textbook, delaying him a few seconds, just long enough that, as he walked out into the street, he bumped into the girl in red and without knowing why, started to follow her.

SOLDI SMILES THOUGHTFULLY, IS THAT WHAT HE TOLD YOU?It must be forty years since Tomatis last took a bus, if he ever took one, but every time someone sees him on a corner waiting for a taxi, because he only ever takes taxis, or something else, or nothing, he always makes the same joke, which, if it makes the other person laugh, has given him the same intense pleasure for the last four decades, more or less: I’m waiting for the bus, but I had to let the last few go by because they weren’t full enough .

Gabriela, sitting next to Soldi, in the passenger seat, smiles too, thinking that, because as unlikely as it might seem, when she emerged from her mother’s womb into the world “Carlitos” was already waiting for her, it’s the first time she’s heard the joke. Soldi, his elbow resting on the steering wheel, half-conceals his interlocutor, the wine salesman who, through the open window of his own car, a dark green station wagon, or a long hatchback maybe, has just relayed his encounter with Tomatis, yesterday afternoon, on that corner at the southern end of the city. The two cars are parked facing in opposite directions, very close to each other, on the slope that leads from the asphalt to the sandy road, because they’d passed just as she and Soldi were returning from Gutiérrez’s and he, Nula, was on his way there to drop off a few cases of wine, and so the two drivers had expertly lined their windows up, and after rolling them down and turning off their engines, had started to talk between the cars, Soldi’s pointing up, toward the asphalt, and the other toward the sandy road. To see Nula’s face, Gabriela would have to lean forward in a way that would feel uncomfortable, not only because it would force her body to contort slightly, but also because her attitude could be mistaken for a sign of excessive interest in the conversation that, in what might be considered a falsely casual ironic tone, Soldi and Nula carry on. And when she hears Soldi say that he and Gabriela actually have a date with Tomatis for seven at the Amigos del Vino bar, Gabriela lets her mind wander, gazing at the sky and at the landscape through the windshield and her own window, thinking, with a sort of gentle disdain, that their gossip is not that interesting, and concentrates instead on the luminous afternoon.

Over the past few days the rain has cleaned the air, which is now clear and warm. The sky is a radiant blue, and far above them scattered plumes of bright white clouds drift across they sky, so slowly that they seem motionless, and the sun shines as if those same rains had cleaned it of all its impurities. The first hints of fall have been hushed, and the early afternoon light has a shade of spring. And Gabriela thinks — possibly because what she learned about herself that morning predisposes her to the thought — that April is preparing to offer them, for next few days, a postscript to the summer, before the fall conclusively arrives. Soldi, Nula, and she herself all have on lightweight and light-colored clothes, and the slight heat that can now be felt, in a few hours, and tomorrow at the latest, will no longer require the diminutive. Even just now, when they were having a drink next to the pool before moving to the table in the large, cool, and well-appointed kitchen, she wouldn’t have disliked going in the water. They’d worked with Gabriela since ten, and at noon, when they were preparing to head back to the city (Gabriela was impatient to call Rosario and Caballito with the news), Gutiérrez insisted that they stay for lunch: he had two catfish ready in the fridge, the first of the year apparently, which he’d been given in Rincón, pulled live from the river in front of him, a little more than twenty-four hours before. Gabriela had decided to stay for a few reasons: first, because clearly the invitation had caused Pinocchio (Soldi) intense pleasure; because the chance to eat those mythic fish this close to Rincón itself sounded really appealing to her too, especially because of how hungry she was; and finally, if they stayed for lunch they could work an hour longer, which would help the project move along, because within the history of the provincial avant-garde that she’d been preparing with Soldi thanks to a shared grant they’d gotten in Buenos Aires, precisionism was already taking too much time, too much space, and too much energy, because its history had ended up blending into their own lives.

When they’d stopped to talk between the cars, the catfish had been their first topic of conversation. You ate the catfish, my catfish? Nula had said in a parody of indignant resentment, hyperbolically emphasizing the possessive and telling them that on Tuesday night, after having walked for hours in the rain with Gutiérrez, just when he was about to be compensated by the baked catfish — the same ones they’d just eaten — an unexpected family visit had spoiled his dinner plans (he, Nula, had already offered to contribute a bottle of white wine from the car). Gabriela thought she sensed, despite the farcical tone, a slight tension in Nula’s reaction, though she was unsure what might have caused it, but decided, finally, that it could be the result of a slight embarrassment, possibly caused by the undeniably pretentious competition between him and Soldi for superiority with regard to their friendship with Gutiérrez, the foreigner who enjoys a manifold prestige thanks to his years in Europe, his apparent wealth, and, especially, his enigmatic life. But the tension in Nula disappears almost immediately, as do the fish from the conversation, when he starts describing his encounter with Tomatis.