Juan José Saer - La Grande

Suddenly, interrupting her conversation with José Carlos, Violeta takes a Polaroid camera from the bag lying at her feet and, standing behind the table, turns toward Faustino and asks him to pose next to the grill, which Faustino agrees to with intense pleasure. After preparing her shot, Violeta takes the photograph, and the camera, with its characteristic sounds, produces through a horizontal slot across its base the print which Violeta removes and extends to Tomatis, who shakes it gently as it dries, glancing every so often at the faded image until eventually he stands up and puts it in his pocket so that the darkness that reigns there will accelerate its development. Gutiérrez, at the other end of the table, stands up just as Violeta is preparing to take a photo of the whole table. Crossing the lawn with a quick step and then continuing along the white slab path, while the Polaroid starts to develop the second photograph, Gutiérrez disappears into the house. A moment later, the second print appears in the slot and Violeta, withdrawing it, extends it to Tomatis, who starts shaking it while with his free hand he withdraws the first one from his pocket, examines it, and, smiling with satisfaction, shows it to Faustino, who looks at it briefly and then hands it to Violeta. The color image passes from hand to hand, and each guest, more or less attentively, gazes at it, studies it, interrogates it perhaps, marveling, after having lived it a minute before through the confusion of their limited senses within the intricate network of the event, at the sight of an infinitesimally thin cross-section of time on that glossy paper square. When Tomatis finally takes it from his pocket and passes it around the table, the second photograph produces and even greater effect than the first: every one of the guests recognizes themselves in it while simultaneously rejecting themselves, resenting the image that differs so harshly from the one that, a minute earlier, idealized by a kind of credulity, they’d had inside. Everyone is looking at the camera except Gutiérrez, who, with his back to it, in the background, behind Amalia’s erect head, is on his way to the kitchen.

Violeta takes several more photos from various positions, as if she were hoping to reconstruct the multidimensional totality of the courtyard through those one-dimensional fragments. Because Gutiérrez is taking a long time to come back, Tomatis asks for the camera in order to surprise him the moment he reappears outside, but when, after a couple of minutes, he finally does, Gutiérrez is holding a video camera and is already filming the table of guests, and when Tomatis presses the shutter release, the two men capture each other reciprocally, which produces a possibly excessive outburst at the table, more a result of the wine than the actual comedy of the scene. While Tomatis withdraws the print, shakes it momentarily, and then puts it in his pocket, Gutiérrez approaches the table, still filming, and walks down the length of it, focusing on each person, and then, passing behind Tomatis’s empty chair, films the other side as he walks back to the other end. He’ll keep us embalmed in his video tapes, in the office he calls the machine room, the same way he kept embalmed for over thirty years the memory of his youth and everything his youth represented , Soldi thinks, and, though he’s unsure why, a faint but unbearable and devastating sense of pity for Gutiérrez, for himself, for the whole universe, seizes him.

When he reaches the head of the table, Gutiérrez passes behind Amalia and starts backing up, still filming, to capture the gathering at the table again, moving away, panning out, until finally, when he’s several meters from the pavilion, in the middle of the courtyard, he stops, lowers the camera, which had hidden his face, and because the demands of the filming had caused him to be slightly hunched over, he straightens up, displaying a satisfied smile. From the pavilion, Tomatis, taking advantage of Gutiérrez’s distraction and his isolation in the middle of the courtyard, at the right distance for the camera to capture his whole body, lifts the camera to his face, closing his left eye and resting his right against the eyepiece, but when he presses the release there’s no reaction from the machine, empty because the ten prints on the roll have been used up. Attempting to disguise the catastrophe, feeling slightly ridiculous, Tomatis lowers the camera, not realizing that Nula, from the table, has seen what happened and is grinning mockingly, and then returns to the other end of the table, puts the camera back in Violeta’s bag as he passes, and lets himself fall into his chair.

No one serves themselves any more meat, though there’s still a full strip left on the grill, along with some chorizos and blood sausage. Considering the cookout finished, Faustino stacks everything on the edge of the grill so that it doesn’t overcook while staying warm in case someone changes their mind and decides to take another piece. But a short while later, seeing that no one seems to want another round, he removes the leftovers from the grill and arranges them on a dish. Amalia stands up and starts to clear the table, and, seeing her, Violeta and Clara Rosemberg do the same, and the three women walk in a line toward the kitchen and disappear into the house. Diana removes the prosthetic fork, keeping the leather wristband in place, and sets it on the table, and Nula, without hesitating, picks it up along with an empty salad dish and its corresponding wood utensils, walks across the courtyard, and disappears into the house. As he walks away, Gabriela, discreetly watching his movements, thinks, He must love her very much, unless he reserves that deference exclusively for the public . But, though she doesn’t know why, she hates herself for the cruelty of the thought; she took a dislike to him because of an absurd dream in which Nula served her a live fish as a mean joke, when the poor guy isn’t at all responsible for her dream. Gabriela forgets that her antipathy preceded the dream, and that when they were talking between the cars, when they were on their way back from lunch at Gutiérrez’s and he was on his way there to drop off some cases of wine, she was already bothered by his over-confident womanizer attitude. But Gabriela immediately forgets Nula and remembers that Thursday afternoon, the blue sky after the rain the led up to it, and the giant, bright white masses of scattered clouds that seemed motionless but which by the afternoon, when she was walking to the Amigos del Vino bar, had already disappeared.

Nula comes out of the house before the women, bringing Diana’s fork, now washed and dried, and walks to the large, straw bag, where they’d carried the wine and where he’s kept his neatly folded pants (he put his shirt back on before sitting down at the table), and from which he now takes a long cardboard box containing two or three metal prostheses with various functions, and puts the fork in it. The bag also contains a sketch pad and a box of colored pencils that Diana always carries with her whenever she travels or goes out the countryside for an afternoon or attends an unusual event, and which could be considered her tools, visual rather than textual, for taking notes. Just then, of the three women in the house, Violeta is the first to come out: she carries a rag to clean the table and a stack of dessert plates, and almost immediately, following her closely, Clara appears with another stack of plates, and when Violeta finishes cleaning the table and starts distributing the plates, Clara does the same with hers, placing on each of them a small desert fork that clinks faintly against the white china. Tomatis signals to Violeta, who leans in to hear what he whispers to her, and when Tomatis finishes speaking, Violeta nods in a way that makes her look like an obedient young girl, and goes back inside. Before she walks in, she steps aside for Amalia, who’s carrying the two alfajores . Marcos, in a serious tone, says, They’re from this morning , pointing when Amalia places them, one next to the other, in the middle of the table. They’re wrapped in white paper that for now Amalia does not unwrap. And, directing himself to the table at large, with the same seriousness of his first qualification, Marcos adds, They couldn’t be any fresher . Amalia returns to the house, but when she’s about to go inside she has to step aside, exactly like Violeta had to do several moments before in order to let her pass, thinks Tomatis, who watches them from the end of the table, and who was watching the door with some anxiety, asking himself if Violeta had found what he’d sent her in the house to look for, smiling with relief when he sees her come out of the house with the supermarket bag emblazoned with the red W that corresponds to the meat section and which contains the mysterious object that Violeta hands over discreetly when she reaches Tomatis, who places it carefully on the corner of the table, between himself and Lucía. Finally, Amalia comes out of the house with a special knife and a cake spatula that, as she moves across the courtyard toward the pavilion along the white slabs and then the grass, catches the sun.