Juan José Saer - La Grande

— How are you? Gutiérrez says. Mr. Anoch, wine seller. Mrs. Leonor Calcagno.

Nula is about to hold out his hand to her, but something in her posture, neither suspicious nor aggressive, but rather absent behind a vague smile, either her typical grimace or the involuntary side effect of repeated plastic surgery, tells him that she will not change position, and so he chooses instead a subtle, stiff, but friendly bow.

— Good to met you, he says, and she responds with an imperceptible movement of her head.

— I saw you when I came in, but you didn’t see me. Your wife, I take it, Gutiérrez says, nodding more or less in the direction of Nula’s table.

Thinking that Virginia is my wife is as far from the truth as taking Lucía for his daughter , Nula thinks with unjustified cruelty, but instead he responds in the most neutral tone he can muster: Not at all. She’s a colleague from the supercenter; a typical business dinner.

— Of course, Gutiérrez says. Now that you mention it, it’s obvious a mile away. I hadn’t looked closely.

And he looks, quickly and just as vaguely, at the approximate place in the dining room where Virginia must be sitting at the table, though both he and Nula know, of course, that it’s impossible for him to see her from where he’s standing.

— The other day I tried the viognier with Gabriela and Soldi. Thanks for the recommendation, it’s excellent, Gutiérrez says.

— So I heard. I ran into them when they were coming back from there, happy as anything, after eating my catfish, Nula says, and Gutiérrez receives this allusion with a cackle.

— La forza del destino , he says. And in a kindly threatening tone, he says, Be sure to bring your swimsuit on Sunday. I read that the weather is supposed to be excellent. I already called the others; you were the only ones left.

— I’m sure it’ll be great, Nula says, but, for several seconds, he finds it impossible to turn his thoughts or his eyes from Leonor Calcagno: from between those legs, probably, though he can’t see them under the table, as thin and feeble as her blackened arms, at one point, Lucía Riera had emerged, irritated and bloody, wailing in shock and terror, from the placid lethargy in which she’d been vegetating for nine months, possibly sowed by the very man he’s just spoken to; suddenly, time has started to run backward, and the first cause of his encounter with that attractive, firm body, swaying, dressed in red, across that spring afternoon, attracting him like a magnet, or, better yet, like a promise, is now in front of him, the clandestine hours when in cheap hotels or in some apartment far from the city center, with fury and tenderness, they copulated — if, after all, it’s true that Gutiérrez, and not the author of the still-usable Roman Law Course , is the real father, although the refusal, by all the parties in question, to verify it categorically, something which would be so easy to do, tends to suggest the opposite. Maybe it seems dishonorable to Gutiérrez to believe DNA more than Leonor; in any case, if that demented pact between the mother, the daughter, and the supposed father is inexplicable, it’s no more so than the apparent devotion that Gutiérrez demonstrates for the wreckage he’s taken out to dinner at the Palace restaurant tonight: clearly she has the cerebrum of a bird, and not just its cerebrum, actually. If she was beautiful once, she no longer conserves even the faintest shadow of that beauty; she can’t weigh more than forty kilos; her dark skin, devastated by constant exposure to the sun, or worse yet, to artificial tanning lamps, along with the creams, the diet regimes, the face lifts and skin grafts, the hair transplants and dye jobs, the silicone breast implants and lip fillers, supposedly to make them more sensual, have eroded whatever beauty she ever may have had; her arms, which extend like two dry twigs from the short sleeves of her dark blouse (perhaps following the precept that dark colors are thinning), loaded with bracelets, just like her gaunt fingers with rings, are wrinkled, and a thick layer of makeup disguises the wrinkles on her face, but no face lift could hide the skin on her neck that, as blackened as the rest, collapses into irrecoverable folds, which the two or three necklaces that lay on her flat and bony chest cannot manage to conceal. And now, to top it off, she opens her purse and, removing a makeup case, opens it, looks at herself in the interior mirror, and starts to retouch parts of her face with a small brush. Her skin is so dark, her body so withered, that her eyes, which are large and brilliant and yet inexpressive, look like two artificial lights occupying the place where her eyes should be, shining through their respective orifices in a dark, crumpled, and lifeless cardboard mask. When he turns his head away, Nula’s eyes meet Gutiérrez’s; his eyes are serene, and glow with a lucid and benevolent irony: I know what you’re thinking. But to understand what this is you’d have to live through the entire life of someone else; my experience is untranslatable, so it’s useless for you to waste your time wondering why I ran back to this rotten city after she and I met in Europe and she told me I was the father of her daughter. What do I care if it’s true or not? No matter what, the external always takes your place, the world, with its capricious, impenetrable laws, will always take you wherever it wants. You can’t imagine how beautiful she was, and so different from your associate tonight, and even though she couldn’t follow through to the end, she had more than enough courage for the enormous risk of giving herself to me, a nobody, for several weeks. Wouldn’t it seem terrible to you if I left her now that she’s alone, exhausted from her battle with age, after she’d given me, at the exact moment when I most needed it, what none of the gigolos who have exploited her would ever have? It doesn’t matter to me that she’s gone to bed with a thousand men; frankly I don’t think she gave a single one of them the gift the she gave me and that she herself is probably unaware that she possessed, or in any case that, from the effect that she continues to this day to have on my life, was only meant for me. In fact, Nula can’t tell with any certainty if these are the words hidden in the look that Gutiérrez has just given him, or if it’s he himself who attributes them to him, connecting the fragmentary histories in circulation and projecting onto Gutiérrez what, without knowing it till that moment, he’s thought of him since he first met him. Several curious and even absurd things, if taken separately, acquire a certain sense, not entirely clear of course, but totally coherent: for instance, his insistent declaration that he became a screenwriter and took on a pseudonym in order to disappear better, or on Tuesday, at the fish and game club, when he took out his false teeth, causing him as much surprise and even discomfort as to the man tending the bar, but which nevertheless seemed strangely reasonable to Escalante, so much so that he rewarded him with two live catfish, which, as an immediate consequence, restored the bartender’s respect. Many things escape him, and while there’s nothing actually disconcerting about Gutiérrez, just the opposite in fact, some aspects of his personality seem, in the end, not exactly absurd, but rather enigmatic.

— Well, it’s great to see you both, he says.

— Until Sunday, then, Gutiérrez says cheerfully, infected by Nula’s intensified friendliness.

— Yeah, of course. At what time? Nula says.

— I get up at six, Gutiérrez says. But if you want to sleep in a little, or go to mass. .

— Right, right, Nula says. Let’s say around eleven?

— That’s what I was thinking, Gutiérrez says.