Juan José Saer - La Grande

Soldi stops speaking and thinks, as though he were searching for something to add. His curly, closely trimmed black beard, which starts at his sideburns and covers his entire face and part of his neck, leaves a small opening for his mouth, which despite its owner’s silence has remained half open, possibly remaining available for the use that he may want to put it to once his search through the shifting, unstable, and highly deceitful corners of his memory yields the appropriate conjunction to his previous subject and the command arrives from the organs that transform memories into words, into sonorous material, and it can propel them into the external world. But actually Soldi has been distracted from the story because an unusual thought, but which he’s had before, has crossed the narrow but brightly lit stage of his mind, filling it completely. In the midst of the literary conversation that Nula apparently listens to carefully, Soldi thinks of the extra-literary consequences that they might have had for the people implicated, as they say, by all those conflicts, ruptures, betrayals, all the enmity, hatred, verbal and even physical aggression, the slander and denunciations, the acts of cruelty, the suicides, and all caused by disputes over vocabulary, form, themes, and exposure in print and on the radio. Soldi knows that there was something between the son of a friend of Cuello’s, a young engineer, and the daughter of a precisionist, and that their respective families had done everything they could to break up the relationship. One of the editors of Espiga , who people said was sexually attracted to children, had ended up committing suicide, though it was never clear if it was because of the guilt or the rumors that, because of indiscretion or malice, were circulated among other literary groups, and even within his own. Gutiérrez told them about a time he accompanied a precisionist to a radio show, and as they left the studio two neoclassicist poets who’d been waiting to come in after them started beating down the precisionist and had to be pulled off him by the radio staff, and because Brando had introduced him, in an ambiguous way, as a member of the group, when in fact he was just a clerk at the law firm, Gutiérrez himself had received several threats and insults over the telephone. Cuello claims that Brando anonymously denounced the social realists as communists, and Tomatis, who admits that he doesn’t have any other proof apart from what Cuello said, confirms it, because if Cuello had been capable of that kind of slander he wouldn’t have been friends with Washington Noriega for over forty years, and besides, to him, Tomatis, those denunciations (most likely indirect and no doubt anonymous) seem like something Brando would’ve done. If their informants hadn’t been as trustworthy, Soldi wouldn’t have believed all those stories. The author of the text, who by now is very old, and who’s made them promise a thousand times not to mention his name, talks about Brando and his friends in a sarcastic way that reveals a contained resentment, and fifty years of mulling over the same insults and meanness doesn’t seem to have been long enough for him to say everything he has to say. But neither he nor Gabi enjoy those stories, they depress them, actually. By temperament, Soldi’s own life is solitary and private — Tomatis is the only person who knows that he’s had a long-running sexual relationship with a much older married woman — his inclination toward literature doesn’t include the contingencies of its personalities, and is made exclusively of texts, ideas, and forms, and there isn’t room for anecdotes or gossip, not even for biographies. Within that almost abstract relationship, it’s hard for him to see how a difference in aesthetics could produce hatred rather than dialogue, or how a truly accomplished work could produce anything but admiration. He’s ashamed of all the slag they’ve been collecting over the course of their investigation, and though he sometimes relates those stories to another person, each time he does so he feels exposed, as though he too had committed a base act, betraying himself first of all, but especially those dazzling, steely objects, made so curiously of the deft association of words, and seeming more permanent than the accidental, mutable, and empty transience of the material world.

Nula and Gabriela Barco wait patiently through those seconds of hesitation, and Nula looks into the distance, to the north, toward the place where the blue sky meets the horizon, an irregular green line interrupted by trees and shrubs, where scattered and apparently static cloud masses emerge, suspended over many points in the vast, blue sky. The sandy road that begins just after the embankment is slightly oblique relative to the bluish horizontal of the asphalt, and some three hundred meters off, more or less, is lost in an organic background, swallowed abruptly by the darkening green foliage, the borders of the yellow strip converging, through the effect of perspective, until they almost meet. The horizon , Nula thinks, paradigm of the external, is in fact the result of a human impossibility: the parallels do not meet at an infinitely distant point, but rather in our imaginations. A good portion of the world exists because I exist. I should note this down but I’ll wait till later — I shouldn’t forget it — because if I do it in front of them I’ll have to give them some kind of an explanation and if I tell them the truth it might sound pedantic. But, contrary to what he’s just decided, he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulls out his notebook, and opens it. Beneath the last note, which he wrote yesterday in Paraná, at around the same time, after leaving Lucía’s— Sensory deficiency makes chaos seem like harmony. Flight of butterflies —he draws a horizontal line in the middle of the next space to separate it from the next note, and, with Gabriela and Soldi watching him discreetly, after thinking for a few seconds, as though he’s alone, he props the notebook on the transversal rail of the steering wheel and without rushing, writes, Optical illusion and external reality (Horizon, parallels, etc.) . When he finishes, he closes the notebook and puts in back in his jacket pocket, and then, clicking the end of the pen so as to make the tip disappear into the metal tube that protects the ink cartridge, inserts it, vertically, into the same pocket, hanging it in place by its clip on the edge of the pocket. Then he looks up and meets the gazes of Gabriela and especially Soldi, whose look expresses a combination of curiosity, surprise, and a vague and inexplicable satisfaction.

— It’s nothing, Nula says. I just remembered an order I took on the phone this morning and I had to jot it down so I wouldn’t make a mistake later.

Gabriela seems satisfied with Nula’s somewhat hasty explanation, but Soldi furrows his brow skeptically, the inside edges of his black eyebrows gathering at the bridge of his nose while the outside edges rise to his temples. Soldi turns to Gabriela.

— Don’t believe him, he says. He’s writing an ontology of becoming.

— Is that all? Gabriela says.

— The problem demanded a sacrifice, and I offered myself, Nula says softly, narrowing his eyes, theatrically underscoring the humility of the philosophical martyr and apparently delighting his interlocutors. Though he’s flattered by the response, he considers it an obligatory gesture of courtesy to ask Soldi about the fascinating point at which he interrupted his story, the old man who knows so much about those literary skirmishes. How did they find out about him? How’d they contact him? How’d they gain his confidence? How’d they manage to get a copy of the text and how did they convince him that they were really going to protect his anonymity?