Juan José Saer - La Grande

— Fantastic, Diana says. Like a numbered joke.

— Propp may have been inspired by them, Tomatis says. And, standing up, he adds, Before the next bottle arrives, I beg your leave to relieve myself of the first.

He makes a gesture to the waiter, who is behind the register, that consists of pointing at the table and spinning his finger, and then, passing behind Nula, opens a door and turns on a light in the next room, illuminating the abandoned cinema whose bar Amigos del Vino rents out to use as their promotional location. The glass doors that lead to the street are shut, as are those that would lead him to the theater itself, and the staircase that once led to the mezzanine is blocked by several rows of stacked-up chairs. On the opposite wall stands the ticket window, intact, but the ceiling lights, which Tomatis has just turned on, don’t allow him to see what’s behind the glass. The bathrooms are to the right of the door, contiguous with the bar. Sometimes, during the intermission, when he was a teenager, Tomatis remembers, when he went to the bathroom to piss, if he was alone, he’d try to listen to the conversations and the sounds that came from the women’s room, convinced that, because they came from an intimate place, they were sure to be exciting. After pissing, and after looking around to make sure no one is coming in to catch him enjoying that humiliating pleasure, he farts, and then goes back out to the hall, but rather than returning to the bar he approaches the theater doors and, through the circular window, like the eye of an ox, in the center of the upholstered surface — in the fifties, when it opened, it was a luxury theater — he tries to see, through the dust that covers it, the dark interior of the large theater, hoping to hear or perhaps see, lingering in the darkness, the oversized, magnetic ghosts, black and white or in color, the simulacra of life that, night after night, were turned on and shuffled for a couple of hours across the bright screen, and then suddenly turned off, deposited in a circular metal container until someone decided to pull them out again to resume their repetitive, mechanical lives.

Rather than going straight to his seat when he enters the bar, Tomatis leans in toward Soldi and resting his hands on his shoulders informs him, in a weary and patient tone:

— By August of 1945, Brando was an avant-garde poet, but in April of that same year, as you can verify in the archives of La Región , he was still imitating Amado Nervo.

And because the waiter is standing with the bottle, waiting for him to taste it, he gestures for him to pour a drink, then lifts the glass and drinks it, holding it a while in his mouth and pursing his lips into a wrinkled circle again, and after a few seconds declares:

— Perfect.

Violeta and Soldi exchange a quick smile: they can already see that the bird will enter the cage. The waiter serves another round of wine and puts the bottle in a bucket of ice — the bucket, which sits on the counter and can hold two more bottles, was a promotional gift from a champagne brand — and then picks up a small plate of salami, one of prosciutto, and another of bread slices, all of which were waiting next to the bucket, and distributes them around the table. The place is so narrow that, standing next to Tomatis, he can pick things up from the bar and place them on the table without moving his legs, leaning to the left and to the right with professional elasticity in order to carry out the task. When his eyes meet the waiter’s, Nula, tapping his index finger and thumb, indicating a certain size — which is to say, of the cheese empanadas — he asks the waiter, with a mundane look of course, to bring some, to which the waiter responds with a nod.

— Mario Brando, the biggest fraud ever produced by this fucking city, Tomatis announces with a sententious air, after which he grabs a piece of prosciutto with a toothpick and brings it to his mouth. And not only when it came to literature, he continues. Even his own father, who was a friend of Washington’s, detested him. He was so cheap that when he organized the dinners for the precisionists he’d arrange beforehand with the owner of the restaurant not to charge him his share, arguing, rightly, that thanks to him every Thursday night there was a table with fifteen or twenty people there. And he was the one who profited, despite the fact that many of his disciples were dirt poor. And even though he was a millionaire, in ’56, during the Revolución Libertadora, they forced him out of the government because he was a crook. Gutiérrez should know about that. One thing to note: there were no communists or open homosexuals or Jews among the precisionists. You, Turk, wouldn’t have been accepted, he says to Nula.

— Me neither, Diana says, but for different reasons.

— I wouldn’t join a literary movement that would have me as a member, Nula says, adapting the quote to the circumstances.

— And on top of that, Tomatis says, he was a dictator. He terrorized his disciples, humiliated them in public, and treated them like servants, and anyone who tried to leave the movement he’d prevent, by any means necessary, from publishing in the papers and magazines where he had influence, and on several occasions he got someone fired from their job. His literary talent was mediocre, though, I admit, he had genius for machination, too much, possibly, relative to his pedestrian motives: money, though he’d already inherited plenty from his father, social status, and minor literary recognition. Despite his time as a cultural attaché in Rome and his travels through Europe, he was a bumpkin. Dante was his principal reference, and, because he came from Italians, he thought he had exclusive rights to him. He once wrote an article called “Dante and the little country”—it was published in the literary supplement — where he described Dante’s relationship to Florence, and which in reality was just a comparison to himself, and as such lowered Dante to the level of a noteworthy provincial. According to Washington, when he retired from the pasta factory the elder Brando started writing literary essays about realism that were a thousand times more interesting than his son’s articles.

— That’s all true, but he does have some good sonnets, Soldi says.

Tomatis’s eyes burn for a fraction of a second, but immediately an ironic smile forms on his lips, his eyelids narrow, and his head shakes slightly.

— You’re trying to get me going, Pinocchio, he says, with a solemn and threatening voice.

— He already did, Violeta says.

And everyone sitting around the table, including Tomatis, starts laughing and takes advantage of the moment to take a drink of wine and grab a piece of meat or an olive (Gabriela now opts for two green ones followed by a black one). Putting his glass back on the table, Tomatis thinks for a moment before he continues. And, finally, he says:

— Yes, maybe he had two or three sonnets that weren’t completely terrible. But none of those were precisionist. When he wrote more or less decently it was in the style of his worst enemies, the neoclassical poets gathered around the magazine Espiga . Brando insulted them publicly while he secretly imitated them, and meanwhile he imposed his ridiculous aesthetic, precisionism, on his disciples, who weren’t allowed to publish a word without his say so.

Brando called himself an experimentalist, Tomatis continues, but was a plain-faced bourgeoisie. According to Tomatis, he lived and thought like a bourgeoisie. He married the daughter of an ultra-Catholic conservative general, as opportunistic as himself, who changed his political position with every changing government or circumstance. Brando claimed he had combined poetry and science, but his values and his lifestyle were as traditionally bourgeois as they get: he raised his daughters Catholic, and when they grew up he married them off to navy officers. According to Tomatis, he never went to church more than his social obligations demanded, but his wife and daughter attended the fashionable eleven o’clock mass every Sunday. His brother-in-law, according to Tomatis, was also in the military, and, like his father, gained the rank of general. Starting in the sixties, he’d often visit North American instructors in Panama, in Washington, at the School of the Americas. Because his entire career transpired in the shadow of General Negri, the celebrated torturer, he’d been given the nickname, even in certain military circles, of secondary anticommunist , in reference also to his subdued personality, a possible side-effect of his alcoholism. And, therefore, Tomatis says, because of all of this, he’d once been forced to ask Brando for a favor. Tomatis is quiet for a few seconds, remembering, reflecting maybe. Soldi’s, Violeta’s, and the others’ expressions have also turned solemn. Gabriela lowers her head, possibly so as not to have to look anyone in the eyes, or possibly in order to listen better to what she’s actually heard many times already, from Tomatis, from her parents, or old friends that Tomatis and her parents had in common: the disappearance of El Gato Garay, Tomatis’s friend and the twin brother of Pichón, and Elisa, his lover for several years. She was more or less separated from her husband, who knew about the affair. And though she didn’t live with Gato all the time, she would spend her weekends with him, and sometimes, when she wasn’t busy with the children, whole weeks. El Gato spent practically all his time at the beach house in Rincón that had once been the Garay family’s weekend retreat. El Gato lived on almost nothing, odd jobs from friends mostly, enough for food, for drinks, and for tobacco. He left the town less and less frequently; it was extremely strange to see him in the city. When Elisa visited him, her black car would be parked for days without moving, gathering sandy dust. Every so often they’d walk through the town on their way to the grocery or to the butcher shop, otherwise they were always in the white house, which was starting to fall apart, or in the rear courtyard, which could’ve been cleaned more regularly. They were an unusual couple, polite but not very demonstrative, and at that time being even slightly different from the people around you who put you in danger for your life. (Someone once joked that they were kidnapped because they didn’t have a television.)