Juan José Saer - La Grande

Now it was José Carlos’s turn. He’d also lived through an experience that was at once hilarious and agonizing. Like many other members of the university, students, staff, professors, he’d received several threats over the telephone, and at first he hadn’t taken them seriously, until someone told him that some army commandos were looking for him, and that he would be kidnapped, and he was forced to leave the city and go to Buenos Aires, where it would be easier than in Rosario for him to go unnoticed. A friend loaned him an apartment in an isolated neighborhood, and to avoid being recognized he decided to change his appearance: he shaved his beard, dyed his hair blonde, and changed his hairstyle. He also dressed differently, less formally, more in keeping with the current fashion, but in a subdued way so as to not call too much attention to himself. When José Carlos says that he dyed his hair blonde, there’s laughter among the listeners, and Gabriela grabs his arm, smiling tenderly, and rests her head on his shoulder. It’s clear that she’s heard the story many times before, but his past troubles, though she enjoys hearing about them, knowing the ending already, also move her because of the real danger he faced during those dark times. Almost immediately she releases José Carlos’s arm and sits back up in her seat. And José Carlos continues: during a February siesta, when the heat was unbearable, because he was drowning in his friend’s apartment, he decided to sit a while under the trees of a nearby plaza, where it would be cooler. Though he never went out, while he was in Rosario, without a suit and tie, he put on a sleeveless shirt, what people call a muscle shirt , board shorts, and sandals, and picked up a leather satchel and went out into the street. He thought that the long, curly blonde hair, his summer tan, and his lack of a beard would make him impossible to recognize, but as he was walking into the plaza, which was practically deserted at that hour, he saw a man sitting on a bench near the corner, watching him openly, but hesitant, unsure if he knew him or not. When he was approaching the bench, José Carlos recognized him immediately: it was a staff member of the department in Rosario, who hadn’t seemed very trustworthy to him, and who must have been passing through Buenos Aires. He tried to act nonchalant as he passed him, but feeling the other man scrutinizing him, trying to decide if it was or wasn’t the assistant professor of economics whom he saw every day at school. Rather than sitting on a bench as he’d imagined he would, José Carlos continued across the plaza at a diagonal, but before disappearing down an adjacent street he turned around visibly and saw that the man had stood up alongside the bench and continued to watch him, intrigued.

He felt finished. For a while he went outside as little as possible, and, of course, he never went back to that plaza again. A few months later, thanks to the intervention of the Italian embassy, which had given him and many other descendants of Italians dual citizenship, he was able to travel and he moved to Milan. One day, a colleague from Rosario came to visit him and he told him the story. But the colleague, laughing, told José Carlos that he already knew it, because the staff member at the department had told everyone that one day, completely by accident, during a vacation in Buenos Aires, he’d found out that José Carlos was a homosexual.

José Carlos’s classic and immaculate professorial appearance, almost severe in contrast to the picture the listeners have of the bleached blonde and shaggy man in sandals, carrying a handbag, his legs and shoulders exposed, is probably what provokes the widespread laughter, causing Riera to strike the edge of the table with the palm of his hand, Nula and Marcos Rosemberg to double over in their respective seats, Gutiérrez to remark on the story to Leonor Calcagno, and for the rest of them to revel in the story long after it is finished. Only Tomatis, who’d heard it before, smiles thoughtfully. Suddenly, in a spark of clairvoyance, he realizes why they are together, gathered around the table, relaxed and happy, because, he thinks, no one among them believes that the world belongs to them. They all know that they are apart from the human swarm deluded into thinking that it knows where it’s going, and that separation does not paralyze them, just the opposite, it actually seems to satisfy them. Every one of them, not to mention the owner of the house, who guards an impenetrable mystery behind his forehead, insists on being something other than what’s expected of them: the wine seller, for instance, who aspires to be a philosopher, or Soldi, the son of privilege who, rather than taking over the family business, prefers to take an interest in literature, or Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, who have been glued together for over thirty years despite the fact that she left him for their best friend and only returned after he threw himself under a train, and he, who’d let her go without a fight, received her with open arms when she decided to return to him. Or the girl with the stump whose remarkable beauty had been marred before she was even born by that conspicuous deformity to keep her perfection and radiance from overshadowing the goddess after whom she was named. Or the strange woman sitting next to Gutiérrez, whom he came back to the city for and who was no doubt a goddess to many in the past, and who, from an obsession with her supernal past, mutilates herself more every day in the vain hope of recovering it. And myself, who has been given the head of the table at this feast of the displaced as though coincidentally. Tomatis, within the slow smoke of the cigar, lets himself get tangled up in his thoughts, and suddenly an affection tinged with admiration for the people sitting at the table overcomes him: they’re right to be the way they are, apart from the crowd, flying solitarily in the empty sky, their destination uncertain, their delirium as their only compass, with no determined path to track along. And while it’s true that the ones who will one day wake the drowsy masses have walked among them for long stretches, it’s no less true that the ones who live at its margin, sometimes without even knowing it, are the most justified to judge it; they’re fodder for their own delirium, it’s true, but they’re also the color of the world.

Their arrivals were scattered, on their own or in small groups or pairs until the lunch gathered them under the pavilion, and now that the long meal has finished they scatter again across the courtyard or into the house. Gutiérrez and Leonor, along with the Rosembergs, have gone inside; Diana is sitting in a white lawn chair, sketching, under an umbrella that Gutiérrez himself set up so she could work in the shade; Riera and Nula are talking, still at the table, which has been cleared and cleaned completely by Clara, Violeta, and Amalia. After putting out the flames and cleaning the grill and taking the leftovers from the cookout to the large fridge, Faustino has disappeared; he’s actually sleeping a siesta in the shade, under a tree, an activity similar to what Tomatis is doing, lying on the lawn, under a tree, his head resting on Violeta’s thighs, her back resting, in turn, against the truck of a tree. José Carlos, Gabriela, and Soldi are talking on the bench at the back, and Lucía is playing in the swimming pool’s blue water, moving almost without making a sound. For now, she’s the only one not seeking the shade, but Diana hadn’t intended to either, and if Gutiérrez hadn’t set up the umbrella she would have continued sketching with her pencils, lost in her work, the afternoon heat forgotten. After setting up the umbrella, Gutiérrez glanced at the pad of paper on which Diana was sketching: there were fourteen blotches of color in an oval arrangement, plus one, the fifteenth, in which the color orange predominated, somewhat separated from the rest; the blotches, despite their abstraction, could vaguely suggest human shapes. Diana, realizing that Gutiérrez was looking at the sketch, explained, without looking up, It’s your guests sitting around the table. The different colors represent each person’s main qualities. Gutiérrez shook his head, asking, at the same time, And that orange blotch is the fire? Diana, still sketching, explained, No, that’s the owner of the house . Gutiérrez asked again, intrigued, And why the orange? And this time, Diana, looking him directly in the eyes, said, Among certain religions in India, it’s the color of surrender .