Juan José Saer - La Grande

Motionless, face up, keeping the towel still, in place, Nula smiles, his eyes closed, and a few seconds after she stops talking, motionless in a similar position, her smile identical to his, he adds:

— The diver that makes you crazy when he touches bottom.

Diana’s fingers caress him softly on his left thigh.

— The battle of the sexes is growing worse, Nula says. How about a truce?

And matching, as they say, actions with words, he extends his hand and places it softly on Diana’s pubis, in the center of the white rectangle formed by the towel. Diana doesn’t even flinch.

— Can’t happen before tonight, she says.

— But I’m getting back late tonight, Nula says, adding with a deliberate but neutral vagueness, which no doubt makes him slightly uncomfortable: There’s a dinner with the people from the hyper. I don’t even know when or where it’ll be.

With her eyes closed, laughing silently, Diana shrugs.

— Tomorrow, then, she says.

Nula doesn’t answer and removes his hand. The conversation, which he would have preferred not to happen, has made him uncomfortable. The lying upsets and disturbs him: on the one hand, Diana deserves the truth, and on the other, in a sense contradictory to the first, to what extent does she believe him? Luckily, the internal flux, made of flashes of lucidity, of autonomous images, of capricious and fragmentary memories and passing emotions, displaces his misgivings in a current that ceaselessly churns that heterogeneous, loose material, replacing it with recurrent, obsessive fantasies and sudden and insistent desires. The sun begins to warm his skin, especially on his belly, on his face, and on his thighs, and an indulgent image of his own naked and tanned body appears, so unexpected and savage that his penis, which was resting peacefully under the towel, begins to harden and swell, something which, beyond the pleasure it produces, embarrasses him slightly: despite his close intimacy with Diana, that untimely erection, just when they’ve decided not to make love, has something coarse and even ridiculous about it. If Diana noticed it, she’d probably laugh. Nula looks for an explanation for that sudden arousal, caused by his own body, and he realizes that he’d caught a glimpse of himself in a strange, empty room, preparing to move through a doorway into the adjacent room — he’s unaware of what might be in that other room, or who might be there, but what he’s sure of is that what aroused him was a gaze , the specter of a gaze, regarding and desiring his naked body, that, because it was absent from the image, he substituted for his own. Now, the solar fullness erases every image inside him, and the last contours of the visible world, persisting under his closed eyelids, change shape and color, becoming more and more abstract on his retina. Drowsy, forgetting his desire, which distends his alert genitals, Nula surrenders himself to the light that flows from the empty, blue sky, refracting at moments and becoming visible, like drops of rain, invisible in the darkness, are made visible — he thinks, or remembers rather — as they cross a beam of light. Groping along the grass, he seeks out Diana’s hand and grasps it softly.

— So, Riera wants to meet you, he says, laughing tersely, skeptically, suggestively. I should warn you that he insists that there are two kinds of men: the kind who wants to reform prostitutes and the kind who wants to corrupt the wives of the bourgeoisie. He belongs, by his own admission, to the second category.

— Actually, both kinds overlap in the middle, Diana says after a few seconds of thought. In both cases the object is a sexually experienced housewife.

— That is not untrue, Nula agrees, cautiously, and releasing Diana’s hand, lets his own fall on the grass, his arm outstretched next to his body, grazing the length of the narrow mat, and he falls silent.

Lying on the ground, motionless, naked, their eyes closed, they’d appear to be their own effigies if their hands were crossed over their bellies, peacefully spending eternity since the Roman or medieval afternoon when death fished them, together, from the agitated and contingent waters of time, the cloths that cover their private parts representing the supplement of some over-punctilious bishop who despite himself preferred to include a realist ornament in the composition so as not to rely on the conventional recourse of a fig leaf. They might also represent Adam and Eve, owing, in fact, to the white towels, forced to cover with these what they noticed immediately after they distinguished good from evil, before falling asleep, cast out into the elemental wilderness under the burning eye of the only sun, scorching them, outside the walls of paradise, contemplating the invisible substance that floods them, disturbs them, and alters them, pulling them gently through the ineluctable and mysterious waves, unknown in paradise, of succession, working against them, toward their ruin, with every heartbeat or breath or flutter, however much they try to protect themselves, sometimes, with a deceitful immobility. They are a married couple in a state of repose, the complementary protagonists that, when they joined, brought into contact the two inert halves of the world, and as such activating the force of the present, casting aside, without brutality but also mercilessly, the past that pretended, chimerically, to continue limitlessly, in a sterile, desiccated, and oxidized limbo. They are themselves a world, a reality, certain to generate, in every action, more world, more reality, they are, moreover, the very present that, as it moves, creates more present. Lying in the sun, naked, smiling, their eyes half-closed, they appear peaceful and eternal, and yet they float in the center of a whirlwind. Turbulent, inchoate, the island of the moment in which they believe they’ve found refuge, incessantly and at once fleetingly, is unmade as they are, and with regard to their surroundings, nothing gives way more profoundly to that corrosive alchemy than what seems permanent, stable, or in repose, rock, metal, diamond, earth, sun, moon, firmament.

Nula feels the sweat beginning to form on his forehead, on his neck and under his nose, and on his upper lip. As he lifts his head slightly and turns to look at Diana, a few drops fall from his forehead, slide horizontally across his cheekbones, under his eyes, and then across his cheeks, leaving tortuous tracks, and eventually falling from the edge of his jaw onto his chest. He knows that Diana has seen him sit up, watching him through half-open eyelids, and lying down again and squinting his own eyes, he begins to speak, certain that, from within her comfortable and alert motionlessness, Diana is listening to him.

— Before I met you, I fell in love with his wife, he says slowly. For months I was insane, but then I got tired of it and went back to Rosario. A year later, I met you and I forgot about them. The three of us loved each other a lot, and we went everywhere together, but I didn’t want to hear from them again. I’d suffered too much. Eventually, I heard that they’d moved to Bahía Blanca; and then I learned that they’d separated. And last month I went to visit a new client in Rincón, Gutiérrez, who was recommended to me by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and she was there. Apparently, Gutiérrez is her real father, but only the mother knew, and even Gutiérrez himself didn’t know about it for thirty years.

Omitting, for understandable reasons, the Wednesday encounter in Paraná, Nula tells her what he remembers. Since Wednesday afternoon he’s known that everything between them has moved, definitively, into the past, and because he knows that nothing will ever happen between him and Lucía again, and since what happened on Wednesday wasn’t anything more than a separation ceremony, he feels less guilty omitting it — according to the singular logic with which he analyzes his sexual life, ethics are only in question when feelings that might resemble those that he considers exclusive to his relationship with Diana come into play, and that is what happened on Wednesday: for the first time, he felt somewhat guilty toward both women, toward Lucía for having pretended to still love her, and toward Diana, because from Tuesday night at Gutiérrez’s, when Lucía denied knowing him, until he went to bed with her the next day, the feelings seemed real. And now, Riera’s call, announcing his arrival to the city, intensifies the suspicion that he’d had on Wednesday afternoon, that Lucía was probably thinking about her ex-husband when she slept with him. And her practically imploring declaration when they said goodbye, You’re my only friend , loses some of its pathos and takes on a distinct meaning, exempting him, naturally, from any affective obligation, as he grows more certain that the moment he left the house she called Riera to tell him what had happened.