Juan José Saer - La Grande

Since they called him at La Región yesterday at noon to tell him about the publisher’s death, Tomatis has been running around, from the paper to the wake, and this morning to the private cemetery, Oasis de Paz, in the north end of the city, more than half an hour by taxi. The publisher had retired years earlier, long before he decided to leave, but Tomatis would see him every so often and had even visited him the year before at the hospital where he was admitted a few days and from which no one thought he’d come out alive, but he lasted another year, until that Wednesday morning, the day after turning eighty-three. Although he’d edited the Sunday literary page for a long time, Tomatis didn’t publish a single line in it after he started at the paper. In the first few weeks, he tried to include a few less-conventional authors than the usual group of contributors, all from the city and the surrounding region, and who were only read by each other, he even decided to invite some writers from Buenos Aires of differing political and literary tendencies to contribute, but about a month later, Tomatis and two other journalists with some literary sense were called in to discuss the upcoming issues of the supplement when suddenly the publisher appeared with a copy of the previous week’s literary page and told them, in a way that, despite being friendly and cheerful didn’t allow any room for objection, more or less the following: Look boys, this is a mediocre city and La Región is a mediocre paper. Which means that the literary page has to be mediocre too.

Thirty years later Tomatis still laughs, somewhere between incredulous and in awe, when he tells someone about it. And he’d admired the relationship they’d had too. The publisher, who’d been retired for a while, when he found out that Tomatis had decided to leave the paper, called him up to tell him it was a mistake, and when Tomatis told him that he’d already wasted too much time putting lipstick on a pig just to watch someone else butcher it, the publisher understood that his ex-employee, for some reason that he was unaware of, had lost the quality that had been so necessary to his work: his cynicism. And because his retirement had pushed him to the margins of power, because his children and the children of his partner, who’d died years before, had taken over the business, he said that it was good to leave, that it wasn’t worth looking after such trivial things. He didn’t say it out of cynicism: his was an average intelligence, his values were as relativistic as they come, and if old age and death hadn’t existed he would have gone on defending those values and judging the world according to them. Tomatis was fascinated by that sincere, slightly myopic mediocrity that nevertheless forced him to be a shrewd deal maker. His father, who founded the paper, had been an anarchist, and he was a member of the Jockey Club. From that combination he’d retained a taste for the popular, which made him feel more comfortable at cookouts with the print shop staff or at parties thrown by the newspaper carriers union than at ceremonies with the Archbishop, with the governor, or with military officials (although, while he was running the paper, he never missed one). The ideals that turn out lucrative become loathsome or sinful according to the moral resources of those who, disinterestedly at first, insist they can live by them. He spent his free time laboriously translating Shakespeare in order to improve his English, and writing, even more laboriously, stories about the peasants who lived along the river and the islands, and at the end he would shut himself up in his office to write them, ignoring everything at the paper, and eventually the heirs forced him to retire. He never doubted for a second that Tomatis’s worldview was the exact opposite of his own, but he trusted his cynicism more than the sincerity of the other journalists, the ones who thought like he did but who were incapable of measuring exactly what had to be said and how to say it, as Tomatis could, thanks to his energy and his education. When he’d stop by Tomatis’s desk, especially early on, he always, out of curiosity, tried to see what books he was reading, and if Tomatis, when he showed up at the paper, or before he left, passed by his office for some reason, most often to ask for an advance on his wages, he’d quickly swipe the book that he carried under his arm or in his pocket, looking carefully at the cover or thumbing through it slowly, knowing that their authors, of which he was totally ignorant, came from a world that he’d never be allowed into. In the obvious and natural indifference with which Tomatis treated the ostensible seriousness of the paper, and in the scrupulous and slightly humiliating (for the other journalists) facility that he had for doing his job, the publisher, who was aware of the strict limits to what he could demand, saw less an employee than a sort of counterpoint to himself.

Yesterday, Tomatis made the trip to the funeral home and stood a while before the publisher’s impassive, sharp, and now pale face, unable to suppress, at first, the clichés that death occasions, like What if he’s faking it? What if he suddenly opened his eyes and sat up? or maybe, It won’t be long before I’m in that box , or, Does cerebral activity continue briefly postmortem, in a confused, delirious way, at first neutral or increasingly painful, or less painful, until it becomes pleasant, which those who’ve come out of a deep coma or a long period of inertia have ended up calling limbo, inferno, purgatory, and paradise? But then he remembered the call he’d gotten from the publisher when he found out that he was planning to leave the paper, and how he tried to make him understand, by his tone, that he, Tomatis, was the only one he still trusted to do things the way he understood them, because the new generation of publishers and administrators, under the pretext of “internal restructuring,” as they say, had ceded control to the military dictatorship. Even for the publisher’s visceral mediocrity, that control was dangerous — its hungry opportunism lacked the weapons of his kingdom, which were cunning and negotiation. And he, Tomatis, was the only one who knew how to use them, and though he didn’t share those values, even disdained them, and actually worked constantly against them when he wasn’t at the paper, while he was there he was the only one who could understand the need for them and integrate them to the work.

When he walked out to the street and stopped on the first corner to wait for a taxi, Nula offered to take him home, and on top of that gave him a couple of local chorizos that neither he nor his sister could really consider disposable after they’d cut a few slices before dinner. Violeta was having dinner with her mother and her grandmother, and afterward would stay over, so Tomatis went up to the terrace and worked a while in his room, with the window open and the door ajar, allowing a current of air to sneak in. But just now there was no breeze, in fact, and the atmosphere in the room, having been shut up the whole afternoon, in the increasing heat of the day, had become humid and stifling. He got up and went out back to the terrace and looked up at the sky, but neither the moon nor the clouds nor the stars were visible: there was only a hazy, gray dome, fading to black, and the sun that he’d seen, staining red the horizon and the low sky in the west, as he got out of Nula’s car, had not dissolved the nebulous, smooth cap that had covered the sky the entire day. And so, when he went back to his room he didn’t shut the door as he went in because in the open darkness of the terrace there hadn’t been the slightest hint of a breeze. The night was warm and pleasant. Under the lamplight, Tomatis took out some white sheets of paper from a drawer, removed the cap from a black pen, and on the first page, where the date and location of the correspondence usually appear, he wrote, Wednesday night . And after thinking for a second, he began to write his letter. Dear Pichón: Guilt always precedes the crime, and is even independent of it. Myths accept no refutation, they just are: thus, in the myth, Oedipus, though he doesn’t know it, is guilty. The tragedy, meanwhile, translates the myth to the level of action. As I was saying on the phone Sunday, in this particular tragedy the development of the plot is more ambiguous, and the statements that trigger the disaster are merely verbal assertions and do not contain the slightest proof. Everyone says that Oedipus Rex is a detective story, which means that the rules of the genre force us to ask ourselves who benefitted from the crime and who had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to devise it and make it look like an inevitable misfortune. The plot, as I see it, is as follows: 1.) Oedipus arrives in Thebes, solves the Sphinx’s riddle, and marries Jocasta. 2.) Oedipus’s clairvoyance puts him in conflict with Tiresias, who’d been unable to solve the riddle and who sees in Oedipus a serious competitor, and also disrupts Creon’s plans: after Laius’s death he’d planned to overthrow and murder Jocasta and take the throne of Thebes. 3.) The shepherd, who did in fact abandon Jocasta and Laius’s true offspring (who didn’t survive) on Mount Cithaeron, and who foresaw the death of Laius and his attendants at the crossroads, fled not because he recognized Oedipus after so many years, but rather to save his own life because, as the only survivor and witness to the crime, he figured, rightly, that Oedipus would eventually kill him too. 4.) Creon sends him to Corinth to figure out why Oedipus exiled himself, and he learns that it’s because the Oracle at Delphi predicted that he would kill his father and marry his mother, which meant that he had to put space between himself and his family to avoid incest and parricide. It’s worth noting that, according to various traditions, the Oracle wasn’t infallible — far from it — and not only was it often mistaken, forcing people to return for repeated consultations, but also its prophesies were generally formulated in such obscure ways that its visitors’ interpretations were often mistaken. In this version of Oedipus, we can apply the domino theory to the successive Oracles: if a single one is false, the rest will be too; and if nothing in the tragedy, except the statements of the shepherd and the messenger, proves that Oedipus is actually the son of Laius, the only thing that’s proven by the end is that superstition makes more innocent victims among children than among their parents. Oedipus consulted the Oracle because some drunk in a tavern in Corinth called him a bastard, which made him start to doubt his own identity. 5.) Creon plots, with Machiavellian cunning (avant la lettre), to eliminate Oedipus and Jocasta by making them believe that Oedipus was the child that Laius had sent to Mount Cithaeron because an Oracle had predicted that the child would kill him. 6.) Creon relies on the complicity of the shepherd and the messenger from Corinth, who have no choice but to follow his plans. Insidiously, Creon convinces Tiresias — who is old and all but senile and who detests Oedipus for humiliating him by solving so quickly the riddle of the Sphinx that he’d been unable to solve — that Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta and the true source of the curse upon the city. 7.) The false testimonies from the shepherd and the messenger convince Oedipus that he’s committed two horrible crimes, parricide and incest, and that the man in Corinth who called him a bastard had been telling the truth: Oedipus is unaware that, while he was certainly a bastard, he wasn’t the same child that the shepherd had abandoned on Mount Cithaeron, but another. Creon had exploited the rumor, the false prophesy, the murder of Laius, and the wedding of Jocasta, weaving his own version of the story in order to achieve his goals. 8.) Jocasta hangs herself, Oedipus gouges out his own eyes and exiles himself to Mount Cithaeron, Creon takes power of the throne of Thebes, and the shepherd and the messenger, of course, were never heard from again.