Juan José Saer - La Grande

The moment they are living in is peaceful, if not benevolent. They’re young, all three are under thirty, they’re all healthy, and they’ve all bracketed out the darker things in life, the way an orator holds back a forceful objection that he’ll have to confront later on. Gabriela thinks that Pinocchio and Nula’s jousting is meant to show the other how at home they are in the world. The autonomous, savage hum that occupies their thoughts when they’re alone seems forgotten in favor of the conversation, where their concentration produces an exchange of words that are vivid and sharp and which, while apparently spontaneous, were carefully elaborated before resonating in the external world and fading away immediately, leaving an immaterial and approximate meaning in each other’s memories. With the impartial disposition of someone who, for the moment, can be indifferent, but also cautiously, Gabriela studies them: Soldi’s dark profile, severe despite the smile that appears through his beard, contrasts with his childhood nickname, Pinocchio, which his mother, no doubt thinking he was the most beautiful little doll in the world, or at least the most helpless, had given him in the first days of his life. The shape of his nose and ears don’t match up at all to his namesake’s, and with regard to his moral qualities, Soldi is incapable of lying, meaning his likeness to the puppet must correspond to feelings that Gabriela attributes to his mother, unless, spinning even more finely, she supposes that, in giving him the puppet’s nickname (if in fact she was the one who gave it to him), the mother, recoiling from the pain of childbirth, from her worry, from the fear for the son who would be with her till she died, had been tempted, unconsciously, to deny her maternity, and had given her son the nickname of the motherless marionette: Unless the opposite is the case, and she thinks of herself as the kind and beautiful fairy who, with a wave of her magic wand, had given life to the wooden doll , Gutiérrez says perfectly clearly somewhere inside herself, and her lips form an involuntary smile that causes Nula to look at her, confused, from the other car, and for Soldi, because of Nula’s expression, to turn his head toward her with an inquisitive smile, more apparent in his eyes than on his lips, barely visible beneath the dark black beard, which is tangled and metallic though he keeps it meticulously trimmed.

— It’s nothing, Gabriela says, so they’ll go back to their cheerful, contented exchange, allowing her to keep observing them. Even more cautiously, Gabriela studies the wine salesman now: his expression is friendly and open, possibly too much so. Should she remind him that he isn’t with two potential clients and doesn’t need to lay on the charm so much? With some reluctance, Gabriela tells herself that she might be judging him too harshly, that this might be his natural way of acting, and besides he’s an old friend of Pinocchio’s, who talks about him often. Clearly he likes to dress well, although that could be a result of the work rather than a personal inclination. His hair is light brown and clean cut, and his forearm, resting on the edge of the open window, is covered with a fleece somewhat darker than his hair, which the summer sun must have bleached slightly. And though he must have shaved carefully this morning, his cheeks and chin and neck are already darkened by specks of beard that sprout abundantly on his healthy, coarse, and masculine skin — that capillary abundance, though controlled, from his head to his beard, his forearm, and, Gabriela is sure, on his chest as well, is the product of his being turco , which is to say, of Arabic descent. When they met a few weeks ago at the Amigos del Vino bar (he may not run it, but he does come and go behind the counter, serving himself and his friends, though he knows to never touch the register and notes down everything he drinks), he seemed really angry with Gutiérrez for telling him that he was with his daughter, whom he, Nula, apparently knew before, and very well, but when Pinocchio told him that it may in fact have been true, he calmed down, though for the rest of the time he was with them he remained uneasy and pensive. But when they saw him again a few days later, he’d already seen Gutiérrez again to sell him the wine, and by then seemed to have recovered his composure and his good humor — if in fact the cheerfulness that he displays now is not a professional but rather an authentic quality. A tractor trailer that she hasn’t seen coming because of the direction she’s facing passes full speed toward the city and startles her, not only from the sound of the engine and the roar that the enormous, heavy mass produces as it moves, but also from the vibrations, so violent that the two cars parked on the slope that leads from the asphalt to the sandy road shake too. The red trailer is covered with a dark canvas, its loose edges flapping because of the speed, and as it passes them, Gabriela can just make out a suggestion printed in black letters on the rear: VISIT HELVECIA, FOR THE GOLDEN DORADO. All three watch it move away, though Nula, with his back to the road, finds it more difficult, because he has to turn almost all the way around to see it shrink and finally disappear toward the city. Nula checks his watch but doesn’t seem ready to leave yet; after a few seconds of silence that follow the truck’s interruption of their conversation, Nula leans back against his seat, searching for her eyes, and asks:

— What’s new with our local avant-garde?

Gabriela hesitates a few seconds before she responds, because she wasn’t expecting the question and because there’s a hint of irony in it, but finally she explains:

— The testimonies coincide and actually overlap quite a bit, at least at some points. We’ve divided the project into three periods, and have gathered different informants for each of them: the forties, the fifties, and the sixties and seventies. Luckily, there’s a lot on paper.

Nula nods, pressing his lips and widening his eyes to show that he’s giving her his complete attention, at once respectful and reflective. The attitude pleases Gabriela, because it seems to show that Nula is able to behave with some deference and stop himself from acting so arrogantly. Soldi, for his part, also leans back against his seat, making room for the two of them to see each other.

— The main problem is with the head of the movement, Mario Brando. Some people say he was a real artist, others think he was a fraud.

— That’s so often the case, isn’t it, Nula says.

— That’s true, Gabriela says. But there’s some consensus from trustworthy sources toward the latter option.

When she says consensus from trustworthy sources , Gabriela is thinking of Tomatis in particular, who, each time he refers to Brando calls him, somewhat affectedly, that miserable fraud , or, more simply, Brando the Swine . And she continues her explanation for Nula, while Soldi, upright against the seat back so as to not interfere in their visual field, also listening extremely carefully, appears to verify, with his eyes, the things Gabriela is saying. For the second period, the second half of the fifties especially, they have the testimony of Gutiérrez himself, in certain respects invaluable, because he worked at Brando and Calcagno’s firm, where Brando was always assigning him work for the magazine. For the first period, they have Cuello, who ran a criollista magazine in the fifties, Copas y bastos , and for the sixties and seventies, they have, among others, Tomatis, who edited the literary supplement to La Región for a long time, where, by the way, he never published a single line of his own work, but which was a platform that Brando often utilized. There are other informants as well, protagonists or witnesses, or both things simultaneously, at one time or another. Then there’re the magazines, El Río , edited by Higinio Gómez in the early thirties; the three eras of Nexos , the official organ of the precisionists; Tabula rasa , an avant-garde magazine that started to come out in the mid fifties; Espiga , published by the neoclassicists of the ’40s generation, who were the most competitive with the precisionists: like them, they mostly wrote sonnets; and, especially in the sixties, Catharsis , published by the Instituto de Letras out of the philosophy department in Rosario. Of course there had been a thousand other magazines published in the region since the turn of the century, representing every national and international tendency in art and literature, and which she and Soldi used for their general study of avant-garde movements, but all the ones she just mentioned had more or less a direct relationship with the precisionists. And then there were the literary supplements and the other sections in local and national papers. And, finally, a singular document, which they’d given Tomatis a copy of, and which they were thinking of publishing as an appendix to their book, but anonymously, because its author, an older man who still lives in the city, and one of their principal informants, doesn’t want to be named because of his connection to the families of several members of the movement. It’s the fragment of a tentative history, more or less novelized, written at the end of the seventies, the decade , in the words of its author, that condemned so many decent people of both sexes to silence, to hiding, to exile, to torture, and to death.