Juan José Saer - La Grande

Drying the sweat from his face with his forearm, Nula turns over; above him, in the blue sky turning white in the intense light, the sun, declining from the zenith, blazing, a metal yellow fusion that splinters and overflows from the circular nucleus, is impossible to look at directly. When he closes his eyelids, he brings with him several golden blotches, vibrating and shifting on his retina, and which take a long time to diffuse into the reddish darkness that protects his pupils. Groping at the lawn, he picks up the towel and covers his genitals again. With his eyes narrowed, his forehead slightly wrinkled, and his mouth half-open, exposing his clenched teeth, his face has a look of suffering, but no thought, neither unhappy nor joyful, reaches a state of consciousness inside him, and his expression is rather the result of lying in the sun, exploiting its energy and at the same time suffering the flame that, indifferent and almost disdainfully, scorches him, but which with the slightest act of carelessness would consume him. After a while, he takes a drink of water and pouring a small amount in his hand splashes it on his face and then he puts the almost empty jug of water under the shade of the chair again and turns back over. But less than a minute after turning into that position Diana reappears, clean, dressed in a flowered skirt and a white linen jacket the starched lapels of which conceal her prominent chest, crossing just below the very low, angled side pockets that allow her to bury her stump in the left side and hang her purse from her forearm. The upper straps of her relatively high-heeled white sandals are tied above her ankle bone. She carries Nula’s cell phone and a scrap of paper. Nula turns over and sits up slightly on his elbows.

— Are you sure you’re going to work? he says.

Without needing him to continue, Diana takes the suggestive question as a positive assessment relative to her appearance, and she smiles, condescending, enigmatic.

— On judgment day all will be revealed, she says. Here’s your cell phone and your friend’s number in Bahía Blanca. And, seeing his somewhat helpless nakedness, his face darkened by sweat and by the heat that has reddened sections of his skin, plus the horizontal wrinkles formed on his belly by the position of his half-upright body, plus his penis and testicles, submerged in a layer of soft, amorphous skin below his curly pubic hair, plus his sweat-dampened thighs and his bony knees, which appear older than the rest of his body, plus his curled toes and the wrinkled and dirty soles of his feet, Diana says, You look like you’re all set to receive them .

Diana leaves the paper on the chair, and though there isn’t a hint of breeze she puts the cell phone on top of it to keep it from flying off. Nula watches all of her movements with deliberate, excessive attention. Without looking at him, she knows what he’s doing, and when she straightens up she hides her smile. She’s happy , Nula thinks. Maybe because of the secrets I’ve just told her, or maybe the idea of meeting them on Sunday makes her think she might learn something new about me even though they’re not important any more. Diana, without saying a word or dropping her mysterious air, waves goodbye silently, her palm turned toward him, with her fingers. Though he doesn’t lie back down, Nula, with a distracted movement, covers his genitals again and watches her walk away: her flowered skirt, undulating at her knees, her straight back, now, because of the cut of the linen jacket, forming a white rectangle from her shoulders to her hips that hides the true geometry of her body, the inverted trapezoid of her torso, her semispherical, pointed breasts, the dark triangle of her pubis, the curvy, pronounced bulge of her circular hips, which safely transported to the world the two little animals who right now must be taking a nap at the day care, as opposed to her, who, because her umbilical cord had been wrapped around her wrist, is now forced to hide her stump in the angled pocket of her jacket and to hang her leather purse from her forearm. An unexpected emotion seizes him, a mixture of affection and guilt, of distress and happiness for his luck that lasts a few seconds and then passes, after which he lies back down face up, closes his eyes, and tries to erase the last traces of that unbearable emotion, which has extracted him suddenly from his neutral state, neither painful nor pleasurable, in which the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, and the years slide by. Eventually, he calms down, and the sweat that touches his lips every so often tastes something like tears. Sitting on the mat, he picks up the cell phone and the white paper and dials Riera’s number. The phone rings once and Riera answers.

— I was about to leave for the office, he says in a soft, affable, and vaguely paternalistic voice. I didn’t think you were going to call.

— Did she already tell you about our meeting? Nula says. Despite the separation, she’s still under your influence.

— First of all, we’re not separated, we’re estranged, Riera says, without losing an ounce of affability despite the severity of Nula’s tone. Secondly, I’ve been planning this trip, to see the baby, for a long time. It’s Holy Week, remember? And finally, it’s such a pleasure to hear from you after so long, and how enchanting your wife is! Why’d you disappear without saying a word, you son of a bitch?

— I didn’t want to bother you. You two seemed so busy, he says, repressing a smile.

— Now I have to ask your permission to fuck my wife? Riera says obscenely. Despite the time that’s passed, Nula recognizes the overtones.

— There are more important things that you don’t. . Nula starts to say, but Riera, cheerfully, deliberately compounding the vulgarity of his previous question, interrupts him:

— Horseshit! he says, raising his voice slightly. I’ve told you a thousand times: what there is is what is there and what it does, no more no less.

— And I’ve told you a thousand times: vulgar empiricism, or worse yet, bourgeois pragmatism, Nula says, laughing. You’re in decline, Oscar.

What there is is what is there, no more no less : that aphorism contained the entirety of Riera’s materialist monism (though he’d never called it that), and Nula had heard him say it over and over back then, as a way to start or finish any discussion, never losing his grave voice or his cheerfulness. A kind of euphoria seems to overcome him when he expresses that conviction, as if everything, reduced to the primitive, unsophisticated tendency of primary material to diversify through countless combinations revealed its essential transparency, its immediate and distant clarity, its mechanical predictability, facilitating not only his way of being on the physical plane, but also, and especially, on the moral one. (Riera’s worldview, at least as or possibly more crude than the world to which he applies it, is, to Nula, his most enviable trait.)

— You can criticize me in person. I’ll be in the city tomorrow at noon, Riera says.

— At noon? Nula says, incredulous.

— I take off from Bahía Blanca at eight thirty, connect in Aeroparque at eleven, and at twelve, more or less, I land in Sauce Viejo, Riera says.

— Should I pick you up? Nula says.

— Lucía will be waiting for me, Riera says. And we’ll see each other Sunday, in any case — your wife is coming I hope — and I stay the rest of the week. I have to run to the office. Ciao.

When the line goes dead, Nula hangs up the cell phone and holds it cupped in his hand, which shakes distractedly, confused by the conversation he’s just had and whose echoes, empirical traces that resonate, more and more uncertain, until they crystallize, or fossilize, like flowers of experience desiccated between the yellowed pages of a book, move to their place in the dark archive of his memory. Nula leaves the phone on the chair and, throwing the towel carelessly on the grass, he stands up, naked, and takes a few indecisive steps across the lawn. The courtyard is a rectangle of green grass, closed at the back and along the sides by an unplastered brick wall tall enough to prevent the neighbors from seeing him walk around naked; a curved, white slab path dives the rectangle of grass in two; on the path an overturned tricycle bakes in the sun; and on the lawn a small plastic truck full of dried avocado leaves seems to wait for someone to push it away; a few trees grow along the wall, a bitterwood, a very tall avocado tree, and a rose laurel. Suddenly, a butterfly appears a meter away, as if, filtering through an invisible fissure in the air, it had fluttered from nothingness into being, from the impossible other world that Riera consigns to inexistence without the slightest hesitation, to the living interior of the material, taking shape, dense and rough; it flutters a while in the daylight, and then, disintegrating, returns, darkly, to the indifference and muddiness of the diurnal.