Juan José Saer - La Grande

In the tragedy, it is suggested that Laius may not have been the father of Oedipus, that some nymph on Mount Cithaeron, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, what the myth suggests, constantly, is that returns, not to mention “regressions” tend to be catastrophic. All returns contradict the physical laws of the universe, which is always, or almost always, expanding. Swimming against the current, and so on. Call me when you get these notes, to talk them over. Carlitos.

PS. This Sunday I’m going to a monstrous cookout at Gutiérrez’s. Many ghosts of the past and a few tenuous silhouettes of the present will be in attendance. I’m a hybrid of the two. Kisses to Babette and the kids.

The next morning he woke up early and, because the weather was nice, sat down to drink some mates while he read on the sunny terrace. The mild, eight-thirty sun announced the return of the summer. Enormous, dispersed white clouds, static, with vast blue spaces between them, decorate the sky. Tomatis’s gaze passes over them gladly, thinking they foretell good weather for the days ahead. The mass is at nine thirty, and the burial is scheduled for eleven, but because it’s for a local person of certain importance, Tomatis knows that there’s no point in rushing, and since he’s decided to go straight to the cemetery, avoiding the church, he still has an hour to kill before he has to get ready. When he arrived at the cemetery, the mourners had only recently set up around the family mausoleum, transferred from the municipal cemetery, too exposed to the floods of the Salado river, which every so often, before joining the Paraná, overflows and inundates the whole western flank of the city. Oasis de Paz, a private business, though it offers its own mausoleums, also accepts transfers, corps et biens , from the families who can pay for it. Concealing his skepticism, Tomatis listened to the eulogies: from an advisor to the governor who’d once been a guerrilla and who after living abroad for a few years had returned to the city, to serve the democratic process, as they say, although since the return of democracy the problems that had supposedly inspired him to take up arms not only persist but are in fact worse than ever; from one of the current publishers of the paper, an heir of the other family of owners; and from one of the editors, a sports writer, who recalled that the publisher had also been president of a soccer club, and that during his presidency the club had played in the first division. Tomatis, out of curiosity, has approached the wreaths and bouquets of flowers to read the violet cards: everyone’s there, the government, the church, the banks, the industrialists, the two main soccer clubs, the television channels, the law school, the charitable organizations, the university. Seeing the crowd around him, analyzing the rhetoric of the eulogies, Tomatis realizes just how long — since his adolescence at least — he’s been living with his back to the city that in turn regards him with considerable suspicion: Without a formal declaration of war, without explicit violence, his disdainful irony toward what the pages of La Región at one time had the habit of calling the life blood of the city had been reciprocated with suspicion and distrust. Nevertheless, when the ceremony finished and the guests began to disperse, a small group of employees and ex-employees of the paper, from editorial and the print shop, called him over as they made their way to the cemetery exit. At first they talked about the publisher, but soon they moved on to other things: dead or retired colleagues, the imminent move of the newsroom and print shop to a new location, modern and larger, in the north end of the city, and finally a discussion about the Clásico that the two local soccer teams would play that Sunday. The sports writer who had given the eulogy offered to drive him downtown, and they distributed themselves into two cars — there were nine of them in all — and Tomatis said goodbye at the cemetery gate to the five who were going in the other car. Tomatis was uneasy about making conversation with his ex-colleagues all the way downtown, but two blocks later the driver and the two in the back had already returned to the discussion of Sunday’s match, analyzing the rosters, the fact that they were playing on such and such a field, and the recent history — trades, wins and losses, physical condition of certain players, and so on — of the two teams. Early on, when he’d just started at the paper, at twenty years old, the sports writers laughed at his affinity for literature, and so Tomatis took his vengeance on them by ridiculing sports and proclaiming, in all sincerity, that he’d never set foot on a soccer field, and now, listening to their heated discussion during the drive, he thinks that he could still make the same claim, but that his situation won’t allow it — what from a twenty-year-old would have sounded like a provocation they’d take, today, as an insult, though it wouldn’t stop them from letting the Sunday match take up the entire conversation, let alone ask themselves if the person they’d invited to travel with them was interested in the topic or not. None of us have changed a bit in all these years, and we won’t change any in the years that we have left to live , Tomatis thought when he got out of the car on the corner of Mendoza and San Martín, at the Siete Colores, the bar where he had a one o’clock date with Violeta. She was working on an urgent project that was due that same afternoon, so they drank a coffee and made another date for seven at the Amigos del Vino, and when Tomatis showed up at seven on the dot, he saw that Violeta, refreshed and calm, was already there, and five minutes later, Soldi arrived. Tomatis had spent part of the afternoon correcting and expanding the letter to Pichón, and before coming to the bar he’d stepped over to the post office to mail it.

Gabriela, recovering from her indecision, instead of sitting down takes a few steps to the right and approaches the counter, just as Nula, turning his back to the room, has started to prepare something, his posture so similar to the way he looked in the dream that, elbowing Soldi, she whispers:

— Watch him serve us a live fish, realizing as she says it that Soldi is only laughing to be polite, because, as is to be expected, he hasn’t understood where the joke is in what she’s saying, and much less what she’s alluding to. But Nula doesn’t have a live fish in his hand when he turns around, but rather a dish of green and black olives.

— You got here in time for the first bottle, Nula says.

— I was thinking a while this afternoon about the question of becoming, Gabriela says point-blank. What does this sentence mean to you? What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is?

— Timaeus 27, Nula says. An important but easily refutable moment of the dialogue on the topic.

— It suddenly smells like school in here, Tomatis says.

— Yeah, Diana jumps in. Finishing school.

— Key moment? Gabriela ventures. Obviously it’s just a riddle to please an old fag whose corruptive political fancies forced him to flee Syracuse dressed as a woman, like some vulgar tranny.

Given the value of the joke, which has been told at Plato’s expense a thousand times in similar or different ways since the third century before Christ, her listeners respond with a moderate smile, surprised at Gabriela’s mysterious peals of laughter, unaware that what makes her laugh so much isn’t the joke itself but rather the fact that she’d previously attributed it to Nula during an inexplicably hostile daydream, not realizing, when she did so, that it was not Nula but rather she herself that had made it.