Juan José Saer - La Grande

— My aunt Ángela, my mother’s sister, Gabriela says. They’re close friends, and she introduced us. Actually the idea for the history of the avant-garde only came up after we met him, isn’t that right Pinocchio?

In the quick look that Soldi and Gabriela exchange, Nula senses a spark of collusion, or complicity maybe, and he’s not wrong. Gabriela has left out of her explanation that, decades before, her aunt Ángela was in love with the anonymous author of the precisionist history, but he’d had to explain to her that even though she was the person he loved most in the world, women weren’t his strong suit. Her aunt had remained single, and has lived with her friend for years in a platonic relationship. Those facts are only known outside the family by Soldi, who’d never reveal them, which explains why the knowing look that they’ve just exchanged is followed by a slightly awkward silence. Actually the last few ironic words they’ve traded conceal the fact that their interest in the conversation is starting to fade. It’s difficult to tell the reason why some conversations follow that course, becoming quickly animated, lasting for a while at a certain level of intensity, and then, gradually, and sometimes suddenly, fading away and extinguishing. Talking is, after all, a physical activity, and after a while it gets tiring; the translation of thoughts into words, when they’re often fundamentally different, the exercise of the respiratory system, and the muscle movements required by the practice of language inevitably produce a certain fatigue, but most of the tension comes from the effort required to filter out the internal hum, subduing it and hiding it and adjusting oneself to the external world, those two contradictory and mutually opposed infinities that nonetheless supply each other, existing because their opposite also exists, and at the same time, sooner or later, reciprocally, they annihilate each other.

Soldi, changing the topic, says he has a date with Tomatis that night at the Amigos del Vino. Would he, Nula, like to join them? Why not, he’ll call Diana right now and ask her to come along, if she’s free. Nula pulls out his cell phone from the side pocket of his jacket, but Soldi nods and waves goodbye — Gabriela has leaned back against her seat — and, turning the ignition key, pulls away. Nula, surprised, is frozen with the phone in his hand, and smiles hesitantly and inquisitively at Gabriela, who, turning around, shrugs and makes a helpless gesture, and as the car turns onto the asphalt, gives him a friendly wave.

— What’s the hurry? she says.

— Hurry? Soldi asks, unsettled, surprised.

— Your friend didn’t think we were leaving so soon, Gabriela says.

— I was trying to be polite and didn’t want to listen in on a conjugal conversation, Soldi says. And besides, we’ve been blocking the street for a long time.

Turning around all the way in her seat, she sees that the dark green colored station wagon, or long hatchback, has started its descent toward the sandy road. Straightening up, absent for several seconds from her surroundings, she holds in her imagination the dark green shape moving slowly up the street and, when it gets to the first corner — in reality, one side of the street is all countryside and the other is dotted with two or three wooden houses in the middle of a wooded plot — it turns right, drives about twenty meters, and stops next to the gate outside Gutiérrez’s house. Like an image projected by an external source, extraneous to her will, the scene, materialized briefly, without apparent reason, from the darkness, is interrupted suddenly, almost accidentally, despite its clarity, from the same consciousness where it had been projected, and Gabriela once again observes, with a kind of muted euphoria, the landscape that rolls past or that rushes to meet them as the car gradually picks up speed. Beyond the dusty weeds that grow on the embankment along the edges of the road, modest unplastered brick houses alternate with a few ranches and, every so often, with more-finished houses, plastered and whitewashed, with carefully installed thatch or tile roofs, with small gardens alongside or out front, with fruit trees or other larger shade trees, eucalyptus or acacias, mulberries or bitterwoods that have made it through the summer with their dense foliage still intact. All the vegetation, even the willows, abundant near the river, and which fade before the rest, is still green, and in the gardens the red hibiscus flowers, and those of other species of the same color, shimmer in the afternoon light, which the enormous masses of scattered clouds do nothing to block, fleeing from the sun (which is still high) and dissolving into a sky that’s been cleansed by the previous days of rain. Every so often she sees people sitting at a table under the trees, finishing their meal in the shade. Many, and not necessarily the most finished or comfortable ones, are weekend houses, and some of the cottages, whitewashed and carefully looked after, reveal a kind of rural elegance, produced by the intricate, diverse, and ancient vegetation that protects them, adorns them, and distinguishes them. Small, azure-colored swimming pools (the large ones only appear in Rincón itself, or in the residential neighborhood above the floodplain, where Gutiérrez lives), made of plastic, oval, or less traditional shapes, cloverleaf for example, show up every so often in the back yards, along with spherical mud ovens resting on a square brick base and grills in the open air or sheltered under a pavilion, clotheslines loaded with motionless, shining clothes, a motorcycle leaning against a tree, an old car or a light truck parked at the entrance, between the road and the front garden, chicken coops, corrals, vacant lots where a horse or a cow grazes, birds flying between the trees, or which appear from the foliage and land on the power lines or on the posts that spring up at regular intervals along the road, then taking off suddenly and flying off, shrinking in size and disappearing somewhere in the direction of the river. This section of the coast was less populated when her parents and her parents’ friends, Tomatis, the Garay twins, Pancho Expósito, were young, and excluding Rincón, was considered inhospitable wilderness. The region, for years deserted and poor, had slowly been developed, first by small ranches scattered randomly over the countryside, then by industrial chicken farms, by brick factories, by otter hunters, shell miners, and fishing outfits, and later by union-owned recreational centers, by fish and game or bocce clubs, summer camps, and finally by people from the city who’d buy a small plot for pocket change and, as the story goes, would build a small cottage or a cinder block house or even a fancier, tree-shaded cabin with their own hands, or they’d hire someone else to do it. In New Jersey, where Gabriela had gone to finish her literary studies, opulence and poverty were only juxtaposed in large urban centers, in contrast to the coastline, at least around Rincón, which they’re driving toward, where dilapidated cottages and ostentatious weekend houses coexist apparently without antagonism. After Rincón, the sandy roads that branch out from the asphalt into the countryside or toward the river, to the left or the right of the highway, are more and more populated, and every two or three kilometers, in La Toma, in La Bena, in Callejón Freyre (where the La Arboleda motel is located), there’s a rash of businesses, butcher shops, bakeries, corner stores, tourist stands, nurseries, cigarette kiosks, phone banks, groceries, and drink stands. And all along the route, to La Guardia and even to the entrance to the bridge over the lagoon, crude tin or plywood signs advertise fruit, fresh fish, or meats. Through her euphoria, Gabriela sighs inwardly: that mythical place described in texts and in oral traditions, which her parents had often visited ever since her childhood, had become an overpopulated suburb of the city, so much so that they’d had to widen the asphalt road and put up traffic lights at the busiest intersections. According to Soldi, heavy bottlenecks formed on Sunday nights with people coming back to the city. To top it off they’d filled in and cleared the swamp around La Guardia and, virtually overnight, the loud anachronism everyone calls the supercenter had sprung up. But smiling and narrowing her eyes, feeling the sun through the windshield warming her face, she thinks that luckily they can’t change the pleasant weather, at least not yet.