Juan José Saer - La Grande

On the upper deck, barely half a dozen seats besides his own are occupied, and only two at the very back, behind him. There’re two female students in the first row, just behind the panoramic window, above the diver’s seat; a much older woman with a child who, Tomatis gathered when he saw them board, are no doubt a grandmother and a grandson whom she picked up in Rosario so he could spend the Holy Week holiday with his grandparents; two rows in front, a boy with a suitcase whom Tomatis had seen before at the terminal bar, drinking a coffee like himself, at a table close to his, and who caught his attention because he was reading an old translation of A Sentimental Education ; just in front of the boy, a middle-aged couple, forty or forty-five at the most, whom he saw on the platform, giving the porter a large wheeled suitcase covered with stickers from hotels, from other countries, and from airlines, two of which hung from a string attached to the handle, suggesting that they were returning from a recent trip. Finally, in the back row, two boys, probably students as well, making an early trip to the Sunday Clásico , or at least that’s what Tomatis gathered when, after he’d already sat down, he saw them come up the spiral staircase from the lower level, from the fragments of enthusiastic and somewhat loud conversation that he heard as they passed by his seat and sat down in the last row, on the other side of the aisle. From their position relative to himself, they would be the only ones, meanwhile, who could have caught him laughing to himself.

The air conditioning alone isn’t enough to explain the pleasant coolness inside the bus; of course it’s the cause of the sensation, but there’s something more general than a simple sensory detail, the impression of coolness is the result of the fact that all of the passengers sitting on the sunny side of the bus, with the exception of Tomatis, who’s folded it back in order to see the exterior, have kept closed the curtains that shield them from the sun, as they found them when they boarded, probably left that way by the cleaning staff. It hasn’t been necessary, meanwhile, to close the curtains on the other side of the aisle, because the shade from the bus itself protects the passengers from the rays of the sun. And so, between the shaded side and the sunny side, with the curtains closed, with the exception of Tomatis’s, in addition to the air conditioning, a cool penumbra has formed in the bus, pierced at various points by streaks of light that filter through the edges of the curtains, which sometimes don’t completely cover the glass, a penumbra that Tomatis, carrying in his memory, though no longer in his body, the recollection of the heat outside, experiences with a sense of relish. The open curtain attenuates this slightly, but the combination of the heat that the sun, still high in the sky, radiates through the window, and the interior coolness that sticks to his skin, causes him, after half an hour on the road, despite the eighty-five degrees with which, in early April, the late summer is extended, to suddenly feel a physical sense of spring that, by association, returns him over several seconds of unexpected and violent happiness to the person he used to be years before, in what he’s taken to calling his youth, which he’s unsure whether to consider a past stage of his life, an invention in the ceaseless chain of interior images, or an illusion, or, better yet, a legend.

The physical source of the happiness comes, no doubt, from a set of random elements: the temperature of his body and the outside temperature, light and shadow, the traveler’s calm and temporary passivity, the repetition of a situation, sitting on a bus between Rosario and the city, that he’s been in many times since his adolescence, but in the present instance, reading the history of precisionism has recalled memories of other times, starting in the mid-fifties especially, at the end of his adolescence, drawing them from dark depths and making them fully conscious. One repeated memory from that time, apparently singular yet in reality composed of fragments of many similar memories, returns often: his canoe trips with Barco, from the regatta club, across the river. They’d leave very early in the morning, when it was just getting light, and, taking turns on the paddles, would plunge into the labyrinth of channels and islands that they knew well, though not well enough not to get lost every so often at some turn in which the width of the channel, the direction of the current, the vegetation, or the shape of the islands that they came upon were so identical to all the others they’d already passed that they temporarily had the impression of having remained at a fixed point, without advancing a millimeter, across the omnipresent and disproportionate river. More than once they found themselves in some unknown channel; they would stop paddling and let the canoe drift, correcting its course only every so often with a thrust of the paddle, knowing that at any moment they’d find themselves at some familiar point along that vast and empty extension of islands and water. They’d paddle from the dawn, as they watched the sky brighten ahead of them, in the east, well into the morning, sometimes protecting themselves from the sun along a shady bank, resting a while, sprawled out inside the canoe, taking sips of water or eating pieces of fruit in order to trick their stomachs until the afternoon, when it was time for lunch, under a tree inside some island, fleeing from the cruel, blinding white light of the sun at the zenith, radiating its incandescent sparks over the entire visible space, as though there were no longer a sky or an earth, water or vegetation, material gathered into distinct things of different colors and consistencies, but rather a single fluid glimmer replacing the multiform and multicolor diversity of the existent. That moment, Tomatis thinks now with the words of an adult about an experience that was then unnamable, when the diversity of appearances into which the world decomposed was reabsorbed by the flux that, every so often, allowed him to drift for an incalculable lapse into its proprietary space only to be erased almost immediately. That multiple memory, made of many repeated memories, differs from one that’s more intense and unique, the distant but sharp recollection of a November morning when, for a long time, as the canoe drifted through channels in the river that were at once familiar, because they seemed like so many others, and unfamiliar, because it was the first time they’d crossed them, the light flowed in such a way that the whole surface of the water, the air, and the sky transformed into a white, homogeneous, radiant incandescence, while the reddish earth of the islands and the bluish green vegetation seemed suddenly covered in a kind of brilliant lacquer, and the flowers along the riverbanks, both aquatic and terrestrial, both white and bright colored, shone, glazed with a ubiquitous, active light that, paradoxically, even made the spaces in shadow glow. This brand-new world had risen from a deep well of nothingness and now floated in a channel of light, wrapped in its undulating, velvety tunic. Tomatis, lying against the edge of the slowly drifting canoe, observed it, overwhelmed with an intense, inextinguishable happiness. Both the islands and the water were equally still, the liquid surface seemingly veneered in a luminous substance, and the canoe, without the traction of the paddles, slid through it silently, without resistance. The present became a magical illusion in which everything that took effort or caused disillusion or pain — uncontrollable impulses, corrosive memories, the passage of time, the external world, indifferent and even hostile to desire — had been neutralized. In that generalized stillness, the canoe’s drift differed from its typical movement, not only because of the silence, but also from the ease with which this luminous, undulant, and vibrating substance, endowing things with an extraterrestrial halo, allowed itself to be crossed, slowly and calmly, acquiescent and benevolent. Every so often, a bird, flying, suddenly and colorfully, from the interior of some island, crossed the motionless landscape, gliding, compact and quick, over the water, almost without flapping, and disappearing into the vegetation of a nearby island, and yet the movement required to complete that trajectory seemed fictitious and strange, and though the eye absorbed the totality of its flight in a single gaze, in the seconds that immediately followed its disappearance from the senses, when it transformed, imperceptibly, into memory, the uninterrupted flight was transformed into a series of disconnected and ecstatic fragments, frozen in various, discontinuous stages of the flight. Tomatis looked at Barco sitting on the other end of the boat, his eyes narrowed, the paddles gathered up in his hands, and thought that he’d fallen asleep, but later, when they started to talk again, Barco told him that he’d been trying to listen for something that might explain the intriguing silence that had fallen over that section of the river, listening for every imperceptible whisper on the water or on the islands that the current usually prevented him from hearing. Barco’s response, though it didn’t help him understand what had happened, calmed him down, because the unusual silence that Barco had sensed meant that the singular impression that the flux of morning light had caused in him had an objective source and wasn’t merely a hallucination. Cool and glimmering, brought within reach of his senses by that fluid radiance, the visible, by its simple appearance, had transmitted a contagious euphoria that kept him, for several minutes, in a light and peaceful state of exaltation.