Juan José Saer - La Grande

— It’s very good, Moro says, after taking the second sip of wine, his eyes narrowed.

— Would you like to try the red? the girl says.

— No. That’s fine, Moro says.

— Let’s sweeten the deal, Américo says to the girl. Give him a bottle of red to take home, and a receipt for the cashier. And, turning to Moro: With this receipt they’ll let you through. Cool the bottle down a bit before drinking it; it’ll go really well with some tagliatelle.

While Nula and Chela listen to Américo’s recommendations, their eyes meet with quiet sparks, enjoying the imperceptibly theatrical zeal with which Américo displays his promotional talents. Moro takes the bottle and the receipt and is about to say goodbye when a woman of a certain age suddenly walks up to Nula and starts talking to him:

— Aren’t you India Calabrese’s baby? she says in an overly loud and emphatic way.

Everyone freezes, surprised, and Nula blinks a few times, hesitating, before he responds:

— No. I was definitely that baby once, but now I’m not sure what to tell you.

Although Moro, Américo, and Chela laugh when they hear his response, the woman remains serious, and finally introduces herself.

— I’m Affife, do you remember? I was friends with your father and your mother before I moved to Córdoba.

— Affife, of course! Nula says, and kisses her cheek.

— I’m on my way to a movie, and it’s about to start. Give your mother a kiss from me, she says, then turns the corner, almost at a run, and disappears down the next aisle toward the registers.

— She bounced me on her knees when I was a kid, Nula says, to explain himself.

But Moro and Américo aren’t paying attention to him any more, and Chela is talking to the girls at the stand. After Moro leaves, and because several people are arriving to try the wine — the masculine voice interrupting the music has announced the presence of the stand over the loudspeakers two more times — Américo suggests to Nula and Chela that they have a drink at one of the two bars, but Chela says she wants to browse around the hyper and makes a date with them for six thirty back at the stand. They go to the bar near the phone bank, because it’s the most well-lit, and quietest one, although the crowd is increasing, and if there are still some free tables, by six thirty when they leave to meet up with Chela, there are already people waiting at the entrance for a table to open up. While they drink a mineral water, Américo, halfway seriously, tells Nula to be careful, that mixing business with pleasure, especially for a married man, can be dangerous. Nula pretends to be oblivious to the reasons for his advice, but Américo, who has a taste for psychological observations as well as detailed and complex elaborations, practicing these the same way others might fish or do amateur theater on Sundays, interrupts him:

— I was watching you with her: it’s obvious that you’ve got something going. If not, you would’ve said something when she left, and you didn’t move a muscle; you didn’t even say goodbye or turn around. Ignoring her so much can only be explained because you thought it prudent not to call attention to yourself. Let’s see: Have you already made a date? For when?

— Américo. She’s a mother of children. You’ve got me all wrong, Nula says, conscious that his words have been chosen specifically for their false sound, implying to Américo, in this way, that he recognizes the truth of his observation but that he can’t admit it openly, which satisfies Américo, whose supposition and interrogation are not made for ethical, but rather sporting reasons. I’m not buying that , Américo says, waving, in the air, an index finger covered with hair on the back all the way to the phalanx, and, immediately, without transition, he starts talking business: if they sell a hundred and twenty bottles through the hypermarket, give or take, it’ll cover the costs of the marketing campaign, with some profit left over. Nula listens to him with pleasure: for some time, business, at moments, produces a pleasure similar to what he’s experiencing now, a pleasure that comes from a sense of security, of release, of surrender to the world. That pleasure assaults him, tinged with happiness, and the first time he felt it, suddenly and unexpectedly, he spent a while analyzing it in retrospect, until he realized that allowing himself to live like that put him in contact with the world, incorporated him into it, recovering, for a few seconds, the unity that thought, reason, and philosophy, had, from the beginning, understood to be lost. The same way Diogenes the Cynic refuted Zeno’s paradoxes as he walked, he could sometimes refute the contradiction between being and becoming just like that, by being . But he knows it can’t last: if one day he managed to forget philosophy and surrender himself, blindly and completely, to the supposed spontaneity of life, sooner or later, the torment, the division, forcing his return, would find him. And this somewhat literary and in fact extremely naive idea unfolds into a detailed vision of his own future life as a wine salesman who, having completely abandoned his reflections, his notes, his readings, now hopelessly addicted to the opium of being , as per the expression that he discovers in the midst of the images that define his new condition, would be reduced to what you might call an existence confined forever to the external: a family man, traveling salesman, with a graphic designer wife; in a few years, Américo retires and he, who’d taken on a partnership with Américo a while back, becomes the new manager of the branch; Diana, meanwhile, because of her agency work, will be forced to give up painting, but she’ll be a successful designer, often hired by agencies in Buenos Aires, and when the kids are older, he and Diana will start to travel frequently to Buenos Aires, to Rosario, and even abroad; he’ll have to be away more and more often, and for longer periods, not only to Buenos Aires, and Mendoza especially, but also to Paraguay, to Corrientes, to El Chaco; he’ll frequent the international wine fairs in Europe, in New Zealand; the kids will finish school, they’ll get married, they’ll have kids of their own; he and Diana will be left alone in the house; La India and Diana’s parents will have died by that point; they’ll retire and the days will seem endless; they’ll wander aimlessly in their slippers around the empty house until, finally, they’ll turn on the television and eventually fall asleep with it on, until their servant turns it off and takes them to bed; there haven’t been books in the house for years, except for a small collection of books on wine, cookbooks, graphic design manuals, and some books on painting, which Diana will use every so often for ideas to use in her jobs; Diana will never again describe her theories about the real world as abstract form , and he, Nula, will have forgotten even the existence of the riddle that Gabriela asked him last night at the Amigos del Vino bar, and to which he immediately replied, Timaeus 27: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? Everything will be over, but without their really knowing why it’ll seem unfinished to them; from the outside, their lives will give the impression of comfortable achievement, but they themselves will be harassed, continuously, secretly, by a muted and constant sense of disquiet; others will think that in their old age they display an enviable serenity, but they’ll actually live in a state of monotone bewilderment, with a sense of drowning in a rough magma; later, though they’ll still be together, they’ll start to forget each other’s name, and then, though they spend all day sitting on the same couch, even the other’s very existence; they’ll no longer recognize the faces of their children, or their grandchildren, when they lean in to give them a quick kiss on the cheek; and finally, one afternoon, one night, one morning probably, in summer, in winter, what’s the difference, everything will come to an end.