Juan José Saer - La Grande

The first minutes of the lunch, with the exception of a few approving comments meant to bolster the satisfaction of the cook, transpire in silence. Gutiérrez, chewing a bite of food, stands up suddenly and walks to the small room attached to the pavilion, where the gardening supplies along with every species of tool and maintenance product are kept. From where he’s sitting, Nula sees through the open door that it also contains a small, supplementary fridge meant to prevent unnecessary trips to the house, from which Gutiérrez removes a few bottles, with which he returns to the table; they’re three bottles of cabernet sauvignon that he himself sold Gutiérrez, and that he put to cool, already uncorked, in the fridge. Gutiérrez distributes them around the table and sits back down between Nula and Leonor.

— Red! Just what I’d been missing! Violeta declaims, adopting a masculine and undeniably vulgar tone, making three or four people laugh or smile, Clara Rosemberg among them, unless her smile has been caused by some intimate stimulus, memory, or association. Violeta matches her words with actions and immediately throws back the rest of the white wine that was in her glass and, grabbing a bottle of red, serves herself generously. Then she puts down the bottle, picks up the glass, and tastes the wine.

— It’s cold, beautiful, she says.

Simultaneously, Nula, whose glass is empty, serves himself a glass of red from the second bottle, without serving the people around him first because they still have white wine in theirs. Nula takes a drink and puts the glass back on the table. He knows how to handle wine , he thinks. It must be over thirty today, and this red should be consumed at fifteen or sixteen, so it needs to be kept longer in the fridge, given that the bottles will be on the table a while, which means that they need to be colder than they otherwise should be because the temperature of the wine will increase as it comes into contact with the outside air. And that’s what he did. As though guessing his thoughts, Gutiérrez, gesturing to the glass with a movement of his head, asks him:

— How is it?

— Exactly how it should be, and it’ll improve over the next few minutes, Nula says.

— Your professional opinion is very reassuring, Gutiérrez says with a calculated modesty that Nula takes as a gesture of deference. And then, after a moment of silence, leaning closer, confidentially: And how’s the metaphysics coming along?

— Always both more and less arduous than the sale of wine, Nula says after thinking it over a second.

Nodding, Gutiérrez issues one of those loud and open peals of laughter, uncommon from him, that tends to produce curiosity and even, out of sympathy, laughter among those who hear it. Everyone sitting around the table looks at him with expectant surprise, hoping for an explanation, but when Gutiérrez, with a negative gesture of his hand signals that he won’t offer one, they return to their conversations. Nula, who didn’t think that his mundane comment would cause such a visible impact, smiles, satisfied, though slightly disoriented by the man sitting to his right, Willi Gutiérrez, who seems to him, as he sees him more frequently, deserving of friendship of course, but increasingly incomprehensible and strange. His laughter just now, disproportionate to the comment, seems to reveal a certain familiarity not only with metaphysics, but also with the consciousness of what’s necessarily abandoned in order to survive in life. What must have been the parabola traced by his life from the town north of Tostado to Rome and Geneva to make him who he is today, and who really is the person who he appears to be? What strange people he and his oldest friends and Lucía’s mother are! Next to him, Diana is talking to Riera, and no one is paying attention to him now, but when he sees Soldi scrutinizing him openly from across the table, Nula realizes that he must guess what he’s thinking about. Their eyes meet and Soldi nods very slowly, and it seems to Nula that his dark eyes display a conniving smile.

With the wine and the food, the conversation is electrified. After the blood sausage and the chorizo, Faustino serves the offal and switches, in turn, from white wine to red, under Amalia’s reproving gaze from the other end of the table, which Nula glimpses quickly. The conversations move, in loud voices, from one end of the table to the other, or are whispered among neighbors, and are punctuated frequently with exclamations and laughter. Everyone seems content, if not happy, with the possible exception of Leonor, who, preoccupied with her appearance, repeatedly takes a mirror from the white purse hanging from the back of her chair and touches up her makeup, fixing the places she thinks need it. No one seems to notice her, but Nula is sure that many of them watch her disapprovingly. When the meat is ready, Faustino asks each of the guests the ritual question: Well done or juicy? And when Tomatis enthusiastically replies Juicy , Soldi’s voice rings out, droning sententiously as though in an echolalic fit, Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate , which causes Gabriela, Violeta, and Tomatis to laugh, along with Gutiérrez, at the other end of the table, who looks at him, surprised.

Although Diana seems to be intensely concentrated on the conversation with Riera, her right hand places the knife on the edge of the plate and, sliding it under the table, she grabs Nula’s left thigh, and he in turn reaches down and grabs her hand. Their fingers remain interlaced for several seconds, and the few quick squeezes they give each other seem to signal the ratification of a secret complicity that persists despite their mundane obligations. Then Diana’s hand releases his, reappears on the table, and picks up the knife; not once has she picked up her head to look at him, nor has she interrupted for a single instant her conversation with Riera. Lucía, meanwhile, is talking to Tomatis about the majestic look of the river when seen from the hills above Paraná, while Violeta is in an exchange with José Carlos about the architecture in Rosario. It may be the food, the proximity of the fire, the intensity of the conversation, and in particular the hour of the siesta, and while the shade of the pavilion protects them, their sweaty faces have lost a good portion of the freshness that they displayed that morning, and though the wine must also have contributed to their exhaustion, the alcohol’s artificial energy paradoxically redoubles, in all of them, their enthusiasm. Nula observes its effects among the guests: their faces glow from the sweat, and their eyes from the wine that burns in their intense and alert gazes. Amalia brings out three more bottles of red wine from the room attached to the pavilion and distributes them around the table, and, from the kitchen, she brings a dish of salad. For most of the time, she’s been talking to the Rosembergs and watching her husband, who, because of the wine, is speaking more and in a slightly higher register than usual, something which seems to cause Gutiérrez a great deal of satisfaction; it may not only be the wine, but also the familiar atmosphere oozing from the gathering that provokes Faustino’s expansiveness. Even Leonor, who hardly speaks, not even to Gutiérrez, seems to feel at ease at the table. Gabriela, who’s discussing the provincial avant-garde with Soldi, as they’ve been doing for months, in a low voice, smiles enigmatically, which causes Soldi to give her an inquisitive look, but Gabriela shakes her head, signaling that she won’t say anything: because Soldi doesn’t know that she’s pregnant, it would be difficult to explain to him that what made her smile was the thought that the other guests must have thought that she wasn’t swimming because she had her period, when in reality the complete opposite was the case.