Juan José Saer - La Grande

Now she’s the one who laughs, and Soldi, intrigued, looks sidelong at her.

— Carlitos, Gabriela says. One day my old man asked him for a definition of the novel and he answered, The decomposition of continuous movement.

— The decomposition of continuous movement, Soldi repeats, nodding slowly. And after thinking it over a second, says, Of course, in the sense of representing, through an analytic and static form what in fact is synthetic and dynamic.

— That’s more or less it, Gabriela says, except with fewer — ic adjectives.

— Cheeky! Soldi says. Let’s stop by the Piedras Blancas beach before we head back to the city, even though there’re no rocks, and much less white ones, for six hundred kilometers in any direction.

— Just for a minute, she says, because she’s anxious to call Caballito and Rosario with the news, though she knows it’s too early to call because her father must still be at the courthouse and José Carlos still teaching class at the university. She’ll call later, after six, before their date at the Amigos del Vino. Her mother is home of course, probably in bed, where she’s spent most of her time for the last two or three years, after she stopped wanting to get up, or shower, or go out, or do any work for the firm, or go back to the courthouse. She’s not being eaten away by sadness or anguish, which would inspire sympathy, but rather something incomprehensible, which is confusing and at times revolting, a slow and apparently permanent flood of indifference. It’s not worth giving her the news: within minutes of getting it, tangled as she is in her tremulous labyrinth of heavy thoughts, she’ll forget it forever. Though she’d always been quiet, sometimes, in the middle of a party, she’d suddenly pull out some funny observation, some ironic or sarcastic comment whose unexpected elegance and precision always produced laughter in her surprised listeners. And she’d often sing, in an intimate, solemn voice, accompanying herself on the guitar, sometimes to songs she’d written herself by putting her favorite poems to music. During the black years she’d defended political prisoners with almost more courage and tenacity than Barco himself, to the point that on two or three occasions she’d been detained at a police station or at some army post, but because her family had come from Germany, in the southeast, their embassy protected her, and besides she was already too well-known by then to be disappeared. She’d survived so much, calmly and bravely, and one day the thing that had been slithering from the dark and remote corners inside her, probably since the moment she began to take shape in her mother’s womb, burst to the surface and when it had her it dove to the bottom till she blacked out, it confused itself with her and made her hateful by force of its insistence, it, the indifference, overpowering her completely.

In La Guardia, where the river road splits toward Paraná, the traffic is heavier, despite the fact that the road widens all the way to the bridge between the cities, and Soldi is forced to slow down behind a double-decker green bus on its way to Buenos Aires. In the opposite lane, cars, buses, and trucks move along at a slower speed, resigned to the caravan. In the hypermarket parking lot, beyond the countless parked cars that fill the designated spaces, a red tractor trailer, the top opening covered with a dark canvas, is parked near the warehouse entrance, and as they pass Gabriela turns around to see if there’s anything written on the back of the trailer, where to her satisfaction she’s able to read, in large printed letters, VISIT HELVECIA, FOR THE GOLDEN DORADO.

They pass the hypermarket, and before they reach the bridge Soldi turns off to the right, though still in the direction of the city, down a narrow parallel road that ends suddenly at a white curb, forcing them to turn right again, this time parallel to the waterfront on the opposite shore. The paving ends after a few meters and the road turns to reddish dirt — they must’ve mixed the earth with gravel or ground brick to make it harder — at the end of which, some two hundred meters ahead, there are a few cars parked along a recently installed chain link fence. Soldi slows down and maneuvers the car, reversing slightly to straighten it out, and parks facing the same direction as the others, perpendicular to the fence, in the ample space between a white truck and a light green Citroën. The soles of their shoes scratch against the gravel as they walk toward the entrance, and their shadows, which at midday had been compressed and reduced at their feet, have begun to stretch to the east, recovering a more or less recognizable human shape. Hanging on the fence itself, to one side of the gate, a small white sign with blue lettering announces, PIEDRAS BLANCAS TOURIST CENTER. As he passes the sign, Soldi, without further commentary, nods toward it and emits a short and sarcastic laugh.

The sunny beachfront — a section of which, off-limits to swimmers and decorated in white rocks and used as a mooring area, proving that the specifications on the white sign at the entrance were not superfluous — is almost empty, a condition explained by the fact that the season officially ended a few weeks ago, a closure validated by the rain over the past few days. Gabriela and Soldi, though, felt the heat of the sun on their faces, on their naked arms, and on their heads the moment they got out of the car. A good portion of the blue sky is visible over the open beach, over the water, over the low-lying city crowded against the opposite shore, and it’s clear that most of the massive white clouds that had earlier given a deceitful impression of stillness have disappeared, though the ones that do remain, too scattered to block much of the sunlight, seem just as motionless and vast. Several pitched roof buildings sit between irregular-shaped planters covered with shining grass that the recent rains have reanimated; the most important of these houses the bar-restaurant and the others serve as changing huts. There’s a play space for kids, with a curved bridge, painted blue, which ends at a platform with a sort of cabin and a horizontal yellow wheel, elevated on an axle, whose function is difficult to guess. Gabriela and Soldi walk past the bar, where a few tables, sheltered by umbrellas, are occupied, toward the shore fortified with white rocks that possibly serve to keep the water from eroding the sand too quickly. The planter closest to the water, the only one bordered by white-painted cement, is heart-shaped, and a flagless flagpole stands at the upper vertex, where the two halves of the heart meet, and which narrows as it deepens. Soldi emits another short, sarcastic laugh, but Gabriela barely hears him because she’s looking at something in the distance, at the far end of what strictly speaking would be called the beach, two people, a young woman and a two- or three-year-old child who seems to be her daughter, playing, hand-in-hand, mirroring each other’s movements, at the edge of the water: both have straight black hair that bounces over their shoulders, dark skin, not sun-tanned but naturally so, dressed alike in short-sleeve yellow T-shirts and faded jeans, and so identical from a distance, were it not for their size, that the daughter could be taken for a miniaturized reproduction of the mother. Gabriela realizes, meanwhile, that the mother and daughter represent not only a sequential order but also a continuum between the internal and the external. Of course what she’s seeing isn’t repetition, Gabriela thinks, because the girl, though she appears identical to her mother, as she takes shape in the external world, adds something new to it, something that never before existed, because no two splinters of time are the same, and therefore the simple accumulation changes everything, the present, the past, the future. In the external world, the girl interiorizes the mother from whom she’s separated, and one day, because of that same appropriation, she’ll bring her back into the world again. It suddenly seems to Gabriela that the whole universe is being played out in those two people of her same sex spinning hand-in-hand at the edge of the water. A vague happiness, not altogether disconnected from the warm April sun, the clear day, and the nearness of the water, comes over her, and her forgetting that she has personal reasons to feel happy might indicate that with her pleasurable shudder she now incarnates the Whole that is at once outside of her while, generously, containing her.