Juan José Saer - La Grande

— You were in love with both of them, Diana says, with an echo of retrospective pity in her voice.

— No, Nula says, with the fresh light that they projected over the world.

— Isn’t that basically the same thing? Diana says.

After a thoughtful silence, Nula responds with certainty:

— Yes, but only partly.

That same night he learned the reason, which was much more simple than he’d imagined, behind the four symmetrical points on the four streets of their block that had become so popular recently: Riera had a lover, Cristina, around the corner from his office, and the morning when Nula had followed Lucía from the city center and had seen her peer into the garden of his own house, Lucía, who suspected what was happening, hadn’t known exactly where, halfway down one of the two parallel streets, her husband’s new lover lived, having only heard a couple of vague allusions to it from her husband. She wanted to know who she was and what she was like — every one of Riera’s new lovers, despite the reciprocal liberty that she enjoyed, but which she’d never make use of, could represent a new problem — and when she peered curiously into the apartment building where Nula and his mother lived it was because her calculations suggested that her husband’s lover might live there. After she’d turned the corner and had glanced furtively into the office to verify that Riera was still there, she’d continued around the corner and had walked the half block to the next house, the symmetrical point relative to La India’s apartment, whose features coincided with what she knew about Cristina. Stopping outside the half-open door, to show that she considered herself justified to the privilege, she’d adopted an ostentatious and defiant posture, and when this didn’t yield any results she kept walking and went into her house: Nula had clearly heard the metallic sound that the key made as it turned in the lock. When he saw her the second time, in the evening, sat down at her table in the pastry shop on the corner, and followed her on her walk around the block under the darkness of the trees, he could tell, though he hadn’t solved the enigma, that Lucía was making the same circuit as before and that her walk around the block coincided with the hours, at midday and in the evening, when her husband usually finished work and left the office. In fact, there was nothing mysterious about any of it, and his mistake, as occurs, meanwhile, with almost every mystery, was the result of insufficient information. But the biggest shock came when Riera told him that while he’d been sitting with Lucía at the table next to the window, he, Riera, had passed by in his car with Cristina and had seen them together, and he’d recognized him immediately when he saw him in the waiting room, and because Nula had given him his address on the medical form, Riera, after closing the office at twelve thirty, had gone to see where he lived. He told him this last detail that first night, laughing, after Lucía had gone to bed, saying that he hadn’t wanted to charge him the visit because he didn’t really consider him a patient: on the one hand, it would have felt like he was taking advantage of him, and on the other, he preferred not to mix the exercise of his profession with his private life. He’d been surprised to see him in the waiting room, but he’d understood immediately what was happening: whenever he had an affair with a married woman, he, too, always felt the irresistible urge to see the husband up close and, if the husband was an upright person, to befriend him even. When Cristina’s husband, an electrical engineer who was doing an eight-month course in California, came back at the end of the year, he’d invite them over for dinner one night, if his relationship with Cristina was still going on, an intimate dinner, just the four of them, Cristina, Lucía, Cristina’s husband, and him, Riera, and even five of them, if Nula wanted to come too. Riera accompanied that false declaration, as in other situations and with other declarations, with an open, juvenile, and slightly degenerate laugh that, as Nula saw on several occasions, seemed to open, as they say, every door for him. While he listened to him talk, Nula thought of Lucía, asleep in the large white bed, or possibly listening to him too from the bedroom, through the half-open glass door that led to the garden, and after a while he realized that he was staying so long because he wanted to delay as much as possible the moment when, after accompanying him to the door, Riera would lock it behind him, go back to the bedroom, and lie down naked next to her. But when Riera suggested that it was getting late, because he had to go in early the next day, and Nula got up to leave, Lucía’s sleepy and smiling face appeared in the half-open door, and in a playful voice pleaded, Come find me tomorrow afternoon; we could get something to drink, like the other day .

— They had that number well-rehearsed, Diana says, and kneeling on the mat, propping herself up with her only hand, she adjusts the white towel around her hips, and nimbly, almost effortlessly, she lunges upward, grabs the edge of the mat, steps backward, and ends up standing, the mat in her hand. The story is moving, she says, but I have to be back in the office by three thirty.

— And you’ll meet them on Sunday in any case, Nula says. Seen from below, from the upward angle that transforms the most pathetic jester into an emperor or a mythological hero, Diana appears to become, instead of a local beauty, a young, modern wife, an intelligent, sensible mother, which she usually is, a Venus emerging from the waters, or better yet, a White Goddess.

— I’m dying of anxiety, Diana says, and blows him a kiss.

— From here you’re like a queen, a goddess, Nula says. And between your legs, beneath the golden fleece, there’s a half-open fault line that leads, down treacherous slopes, to the center of the earth, in perpetual flames.

— Voyeur , Diana says, and picking up the red bathrobe from the back of the chair, she turns toward the house. I won’t wait for you tonight, then, she shouts as she walks away, without turning back toward him, as if she preferred, for some special reason, not to meet Nula’s gaze when it comes to the topic of his nocturnal regressions.

— I don’t think so, Nula says. He pulls off the towel that covers his genitals, removes the book that covers the jar, and takes a long drink of cold water. Then he covers the jar again, places it in the shade of the chair, and dropping the towel on the grass, stretches out face down on the mat.

After that October night, for several months, until the following fall, they were almost always together. Lucía didn’t work, which meant she had lots of free time, but Riera went to the office early, and later, during his lunch hour, and in the evenings, he made house calls; Nula worked at the law school kiosk several times a week, and when he stayed home he pretended to prepare for his philosophy exams in November and December, but the thought of returning to Rosario, of leaving the city and Lucía, and Riera too, even for a single day, seemed intolerable: it would have been like stepping out of a magical world, a novel and seductive place, not exempt from sordidness and cruelty, to return to the uncertain, grayish days, with their perpetual seesaw between doubt and serenity, where he’d been treading water, resigned, since his childhood. He wanted to be Lucía’s lover, but he was barely her friend, her confidant, and sometimes he even reached the status of lap dog. Even though it would’ve been enough for him to know her, to sit calmly and silently at her side, she allowed him certain gratifications: every so often she let him touch her, kiss her, put his hand down her brassiere, and even suck on her breasts, and two or three times she’d accepted, submissively, when he guided her hand to his open fly, squeezing his penis in that strange way, squeezing and releasing, but once when he’d put his own hand over hers, forcing her to rub until he finished, she’d jumped up, rearranging her clothes, indignant and flustered, protesting, Oh no, not that, definitely not that! And she’d practically run to the bathroom and the bedroom to clean up and change. But despite that, when she returned she seemed content, with an abstracted, placid smile. After being with them a few times, Nula realized that Lucía and Riera were joined by a feeling, or whatever it was, that wasn’t exactly love, in the altruistic sense of the word at least, but actually something more turbulent that combined with a sort of voluptuous interdependence in which their differences generated a sarcasm more mocking than violent and their affinities a blind, impulsive, almost animal fusion. It was strange to see how the most insulting nonsense from one, verbal or otherwise, first produced indignation and then complicit laughter in the other. Nula felt momentarily excluded in those situations, but they, together or alone, always rushed to recover him. There was always the perpetual enigma: were they manipulating him, were they laughing at him, were they using him for some incomprehensible ends? Or did they really appreciate him and acted like that with everyone? Even now, lying face down on the mat, his chin resting on the back of his superimposed hands, feeling the sweat run down his face and back, even at this very moment, when they’ve reappeared, unexpectedly, into his life, he still doesn’t know. The fact that he’d been with Lucía two days before, finally possessing what five years before he’d sought in vain, and then the coincidence that Riera had called to announce his arrival from Bahía Blanca, restarts the mechanism of the past, and though he knows that he’ll never be trapped by them again, a distant, even vaguely ironic curiosity suggests that he should be alert in the days ahead. With his eyes closed, his face sweaty, pressed against the back of his hand, Nula laughs, shivering expectantly, and he realizes that his affection for them persists, but that its charge has been reversed, that it doesn’t have the same painful dependency of the first period, which had lasted a while after he voluntarily decided to stop seeing them, and has now taken on a paternalistic forbearance, a sympathy without a trace of possessiveness, governed by a completely atheoretical and in fact sporting inclination, to anticipate their curious reactions, for pure entertainment, without inverting any sentiment in the issue. This attitude provokes in him an excessive impatience to see them again.