Juan José Saer - La Grande

— All that show just to avoid telling me what’s wrong, La India says.

— I swear if I knew what it was I’d tell you, Nula says, and without turning around he waves goodbye with his free hand and walks out to the sidewalk after closing the door behind him. Although the sidewalk is still shaded by the houses, the air feels very warm, in contrast to the cool atmosphere inside the bookstore. Across the street, meanwhile, on the courthouse side, the April light shimmers, pervasive, becomes once again summery over the last two or three days. Nula remembers, again, the sky the day before, in which bright white masses of clouds, their curvy edges clean and hard, floated, static, scattered across the blue sky. An unexpected nostalgia for the day before attacks him, and the idea of constant flux, of the becoming , is embodied in those clouds that existed and that, bit by bit, unseen by the eye or by the mind, transforming, scattering, stopped being clouds and disappeared without anyone knowing it. Now, the day before seems like an intimate possession that, suddenly, he’s been dispossessed of: because it’s still impregnated with fresh traces of sensation, of experience, he senses that it’s more his own than the totality of his past, knowing at the same time that, like a dead body, its deceitful presence disguises the immeasurable distance that separates the present moment from its obliterated precursors, the fossilized substance of the memories of the flesh that pulses, sees, hears, touches, feels, and breathes.

Although it’s not yet twelve thirty when he enters the law school, three doors down, the five potential clients, and two more they’ve brought with them, are already there. They invite him into a small conference room with a large, oval table surrounded by numerous chairs, and they sit down to listen to him, as though he were giving a lecture. Nula opens his briefcase and takes out his brochures, magazines, and price lists, yet despite his movements being exact and his words measured, he continues to think about the clouds the day before, so intensely white, the shape of rocks, now disappeared, and he regrets not having written something down in his notebook before coming in, because he doesn’t know how long the interview with these clients will last and whether he’ll remember what, though he never formulated it exactly in his mind, he thought, at some point, to note down. The clients want to buy an assortment of a dozen bottles each, which is why they’d gotten together, in order to buy a few cases of six, of different varieties and from different wineries, and split them up. In total, it’s eighty-four bottles — with the sale he made that morning in Guadalupe, he’s earned enough for the day. But when he explains to the clients the unique characteristics of each wine, the technical terms that he employs and that his clients seem to consider attentively don’t seem at all convincing, suitable, or appropriate. The essential thing, the taste of wine, is unnamable: the metaphors and comparisons are only allusions. The flinty aroma of certain white wines, for instance, is only a comparative, and incomplete, description, predominant at the beginning, but which combines immediately, after the first sip, with the complex flavors that the wine unfolds over the palate. To him, the sensations, from a philosophical point of view, are incommunicable, and so when he explains to a client that such and such a wine is tender or robust, meaty or velvety, it’s impossible to imagine how the client senses those adjectives when he tries the wine. Comparisons are more useful from an empirical point of view than those metaphors, but they don’t describe the flavor of wine itself, only one of its qualities, the sudden recollection of a fleeting spark, smothered immediately by the mass of sensations poorly designated by the abstraction known as the taste of wine . Another obstacle follows that philosophical complication: wine is in fashion. That’s fine enough for Nula, but that somewhat coarse daily novelty, not entirely disconnected from a dogged publicity campaign, easily reveals a sordid contradiction: the fashion for wine gives enthusiasts the illusion of cultivating an exquisite, rationalized individuality, while he, the common denominator among them, knows all the ways they’ve been primed by advertising. What he really likes are the hints of flavor that surface every so often in every bottle, in every glass, and even in every sip, and then evaporate, an empirical spark that precipitates unexpected memories, of fruit, of flowers, of honey, of apricot, of grass, of spices, of wood, or of leather. Unforeseeable and fleeting, those sensorial sparks that, paradoxically, make the taste of wine more strange and unknown, ignite suddenly in the mind, promise a vivid display, but immediately after they appear, surreptitiously, are snuffed out.

He sells them eighty-four bottles, five cases of white and nine of red: among the white, a chardonnay-chenin blend, two chardonnays, a sémillon from Río Negro, and one sauvignon blanc, the same wine they drank three bottles of last night — the first paid for by himself, the second by Tomatis, and the third by Soldi — at the Amigos del Vino bar. Among the reds, he suggested a few varieties, a malbec, a merlot, a syrah, and a few blends, a mixture of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, for instance, which Nula never forgets to describe as a fundamental blend in the production of Bordeaux wine, something which, as a consumer incentive, never fails. At around two, he’s arriving at his house; the kids are at nursery school and Diana is tanning, naked, out back, lying on a plastic mat in the yard. A red bathrobe, glowing in the sun, is hanging from a wicker chair. When she sees him come out, she picks up a small towel and covers her pubis and hips, hiding the triangular patch of pubic hair and the protuberance that marks the beginning of an even more intimate region; the rest of her body, from her head to just below her bellybutton, and from the tops of her thighs to her feet, remains exposed to the sun, and her skin, still darkened by the summer sun, has a light shine, and is dampened, especially on her face and around her breasts. Her arms, stretched out alongside her body, display the only visible asymmetry, product of her missing left hand.

— A Doctor Riera from Bahía Blanca called, Diana announces. His number is next to the telephone.

— A ghost from the past, Nula says. What did he want?

— He arrives tomorrow, and he wants to meet me, Diana says, laughing and sitting up, resting on her left elbow, which makes the forearm that ends in the stump elevate obliquely at her side. She looks at him.

— Tomorrow? Well you’ll definitely meet him in that case, Nula says. I’ll call him back later. Right now, I’m going to eat something and I’ll be right back to get some sun with you.

— Oh, hurry, please! Diana says, shaking her only hand, parodying an exaggerated happiness combined with a simulated desperation. And immediately she stretches out again on the mat. Eventually, Nula comes out, naked, from the front of the house, with a white towel wrapped around his waist that covers him to his knees and a plastic mat under his arm; he carries a jug of cold water and a book: One Hundred Homemade Pasta Recipes . He places the jug under the chair, so that the shade will keep it cool, and covers it with the book to prevent an insect from falling inside. Then, laying his mat out next to Diana’s, he removes the towel and lies down, face up. Finally, he picks up the towel and, laying it between his open thighs, pulls up a corner of the white cloth and carefully, delicately, covers his genitals. Diana, who’s been watching him ever since he appeared through the kitchen door, comments, in a low voice:

— His most precious garment. His identity. The torch that guides him through the darkness. The spear that leads him through the world. The cosmic megalith. Omphalos .