Juan José Saer - La Grande

THE FIRST TWO WITHOUT PULLING OUT! GUTIÉRREZ THINKSat the moment he wakes up, even though more than thirty years have passed since that summer morning, so similar to the one in which he’s just opened his eyes, when he slept with Leonor naked at his side for the first and last time, because every other time they saw each other it was always in the afternoon, the appropriate time of day of adultery. But there’s no virile pride or arrogance in the thought, only incredulous happiness, retrospective excitement, gratitude. Ever since that distant, scorching Sunday, somewhat unreal because of the excessive heat, the multiplicity of sensations up till then unknown to him, the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, until that peaceful April morning, almost as hot as the first, Gutiérrez has been convinced that his life began that night and ended a few weeks later, when he took the bus to Buenos Aires and disappeared from the city. He thinks he owes this to Leonor, and is prepared to pay that infinite debt forever: You get seventy years for a few hours, a few minutes, of life, and then there’s nothing to do with the rest; it’s just killing time.

After spending a while in the bathroom, shaving, defecating, taking a warm, meticulous shower, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, dressing — underwear, a white undershirt, dark blue pants, sandals — and getting the thermos and the mate in the kitchen and eating a few buttered buns that Amalia picked up at the bakery, Gutiérrez is walking from the kitchen to the courtyard, and moving away from the pavilion, and beyond the swimming pool, stepping off the white slab path that leads from the house to the pool — believing he would move in to that house after retiring from his many activities, Doctor Russo thought big — he steps onto the stretch of lawn that, still wet from the dew, dampens his feet through the opening of the sandals, producing, in the warm morning, a delicious sensation. At a distance, Faustino leans attentively over a hibiscus, possibly searching for dry branches or flowers, withered during the night, to prune.

Gutiérrez empties the gourd in two or three energetic pulls through the straw and falls still. The entire lawn around him is covered in multicolored drops into which the morning light decomposes. That immense, unique, often colorless substance that is incessantly scattered over even the most remote corner of the visible world rests at his feet now in a shimmer of yellow, green, orange, red, blue, and indigo drops that, if he moves his head slightly as he looks at them, seem animated, change color, grow more luminous, emitting iridescent sparks. The humidity of the night, condensing in the morning cold, was deposited into colorless drops over the green leaves of grass, and now the sun has risen to a certain height, a precise location in the sky, and its rays, striking the drops at a certain angle and at no other, refract into a manifold iridescence, as if a rainbow had exploded and its splinters continued to shine around him, tiny and multiplied, on the wet ground. This intimate, domestic enchantment gives way to a momentary and fragmented sensation, an abstract certainty about the common essence that circulates among every part of the whole, connecting them to each other and to everything else, and the at once astonished and estranged impression of always being somewhere larger than where our systems of habit mistakenly accustom us to believing we are. Gutiérrez takes two or three steps and stops at a spot where the grass is somewhat higher, and when, after having stepped on the leaves, separating them, his feet are once again motionless, they close over his sandals once again, causing them to disappear into a kind of cave of green grass in which, every time he moves, sparkling iridescently, a reflective surface of multicolored drops shimmers.

Yesterday morning at around nine, Amalia had come in to tell him that there was a man looking for him. It was Escalante. He was passing by to let him know that he wouldn’t be coming to the cookout after all.

— I figured you were here for the flashlight, Gutiérrez said, laughing.

— The flashlight?

— The one that Chacho loaned us when we went looking for you at the club.

And he went into the kitchen and returned to the courtyard with it.

— Thanks, Escalante said, and for a moment neither one knew what to say.

— I knew you wouldn’t come to the cookout, Gutiérrez says finally. But I never thought you were so sensitive that you’d come tell me the day before.

They started walking slowly around the courtyard, stopping every so often for no apparent reason, shooting the breeze, with ironic indolence but also with long intervals of silence that were no longer uncomfortable. They didn’t talk about their mutual past, but rather seemed to include it, tacitly, in the present. It was obvious that, unlike so many others, including Gutiérrez, Escalante was impervious to nostalgia. A few months before, Rosemberg, somewhat maliciously, had said, It’s hard for Sergio to admit his altruism and it horrifies him that others might speculate about his thoughts and feelings. And on top of that he has a personal ethic that no force in the world could deviate even a millimeter.

It was strange to see them walking around the courtyard, especially Escalante, carrying an enormous flashlight that early in the bright morning. Gutiérrez pointed it out: You’re like Diogenes the Cynic , he said, always looking for someone . Escalante laughed and was about to bring his hand shyly to his lips to hide his ravaged teeth, but he stopped himself, possibly remembering what had happened the previous Tuesday at the fish and game club, when Gutiérrez took out his false teeth to show him that he had nothing to be ashamed of. It may have been that gesture, and not their past friendship, that had inspired the gift of the two fresh rather than frozen fish; the same gesture that confused Nula so much seemed to have an unmistakable significance for Escalante.

Gutiérrez walked him to the asphalt road, and they stood a while longer without crossing. People looked at them curiously, but they didn’t notice. Every so often, Escalante would greet, not altogether demonstratively, an acquaintance passing in a car or a bus, or on foot or on horseback. They seemed used to his distracted laconism, in fact they seemed to consider it admirable.

The first to arrive, just after eleven and even before “the family,” real or imaginary, are Clara and Marcos Rosemberg. They’ve brought two enormous alfajores , made, according to Marcos, that same morning. Amalia picks them up from the pavilion table and takes them to the kitchen, where they’ll stay fresher. Clara and Marcos go into the house and soon return in their bathing suits and sit down in the sun, in the lounge chairs (Faustino unfolded three others around the pool, and the bright colors of the canvas reverberate in the sun), and a few minutes later Gutiérrez comes out of the house, dressed only in shorts and clogs, and sits down to talk with them alongside the large, rectangular pool in which the water, apparently motionless because no breeze is blowing, but in reality an unstable, constantly churning mass, sparkles. Not surprisingly, the first topic of conversation is the visit that Sergio Escalante paid him yesterday. Marcos considers it surprising, but Clara only smiles vaguely, or, better yet, only expands the vague and rather absent smile that, for years, whenever she’s in public, she wears constantly. Her sixty-three years, though they’ve deeply marked the lines on her face and have partially grayed her blonde hair, haven’t managed to thicken her youthful silhouette, her thin but well-shaped limbs, her flat stomach, her delicate, subtle breasts. César Rey, Marcos’s best friend, while he was her lover (the only one Clara had in her life), called her Flaca , which is to say, Skinny. The two of them lived together in Buenos Aires for several months, but one day, El Chiche Rey drunkenly fell, or threw himself, under a train, and she came back to the city and to Marcos. They had a second son, and now devote themselves, with punctilious affection, to their grandchildren. Marcos vibrates with politics, and Clara, who before she was thirty intensely but contradictorily loved two men simultaneously, passes through life distant but friendly, smiling and calm, without anyone, anyone at all, not even Marcos, who trusts her completely, managing to know what she’s really thinking. Her conversation is at once pleasant and evanescent, so much so that it can sometimes seem disjointed and even mysterious. Often what she says sounds like an intimate thought spoken aloud, as though it had escaped her. And her sense of humor is subtle but cryptic; most of the time only her own smile, and not her interlocutor’s, widens. As he talks to Marcos, Gutiérrez observes her discreetly every so often: after two or three minutes, she detaches from the conversation. And suddenly, without losing her vague smile or her calm movements, she stands up slowly and, taking a few steps during which she rearranges her adolescent breasts within the top of the two-piece bathing suit of rough fabric, stops at the edge of the pool, and after a short hesitation, dives in loudly. Marcos and Gutiérrez stop speaking and watch her: emerging from the bottom, after a few seconds of blindness, she opens her eyes and shakes her head a few times; the water, altered by the dive, trembles around her, and as though she’s trying to calm it, Clara falls still. Only her head and part of her shoulders rise above the water; the rest of her body remains submerged. To keep herself afloat in the deep section of the pool, without moving, Clara slowly waves her arms and legs, or better yet, what only at moments appears to have the shape of arms and legs, because the submerged portion of her body seems to have transformed into a series of shapeless, unstable blotches which the majority of the time don’t even resemble human forms, shaking as what they appear to be: exaggeratedly pale, disconnected, fragmentary shapes.