La Grande

by Juan José Saer

  Slowly, almost without Tomatis realizing it, all of these stories become soft and fragmentary, unraveling, and finally, like a trail of smoke losing its cohesion, thinning, they disappear. He remembers his brother, who had the same name as him, but because he died when he was seven days old, a year later, when he, Tomatis, was born, they gave him the same name, but inverted: his brother had been called Alberto Carlos, and he was Carlos Alberto, but the Alberto only appears on official documents, he never uses it. Despite everything, it’s pleasant, now, to see him play, run, ride a horse. He seems so happy! The problem is that they both have the same name, their parents should have prevented this. Maybe they should give the name to his brother now, because, with the passage of time, through one of those ironies of chance, he, Tomatis, now an adult, has become the older brother. He’s overcome by an immense sense of shame, an intolerable sympathy, and he feels like he’s drowning, and so, shaking his head, confused and sweaty, he opens his eyes. When he sees the sun, he realizes that he’s been asleep and he checks the time: it’s ten of seven. For the first time in over fifty years, he’s had a mircodream, as he calls those sharp and momentary images that, without too much development, visit him in dreams, and in those two or three instants of dreaming he saw his older brother, whom he never knew, but for whom, all the same, he still suffers a painful compassion now that he’s awake. Tomatis realizes that, though it didn’t look like him, the boy in the dream must have been himself, as he’d been—or as he would have liked to have been, he can’t remember any more—when he was eight or nine. Seven days old! You might say that, almost literally, more than anyone else, he was born to die, Tomatis thinks, a bit more calm now that the overwhelming confusion he’d felt a few moments before, thankfully, has abated.

  With the changing position of the sun, the horizontal rays of light that crossed the interior of the bus have disappeared, leaving a pale and porous shadow in which, here and there, because of the vibrations of the bus and the momentary bumps in the road—patches, potholes, or transversal lines of hardened tar that mark the layers of the asphalt—short luminous bursts appear. Outside, in contrast, the sky is veneered a singular, golden copper to the horizon, and more intensely to the east over the flat and barren land. Rain has been forecast for the weekend, even violent storms in certain regions of the plain, and Tomatis leans forward to better observe the sky through the window, but he doesn’t see a single cloud. The sky is now paling to the east, and the disc of the sun, still relatively high, a yellowish green, will redden suddenly, growing, as its fall toward the horizon line accelerates. For the last fifteen days, it’s rained every weekend, and then the weather clears little by little until the moment the sun reappears and the heat returns. The week that’s now ending began with rain on Monday and Tuesday—there was also a brief storm on Sunday morning—and though it dawned cloudy with a light drizzle on Wednesday, by that afternoon the heat was already oppressive, and by the next day the cloud cover had transformed into enormous white clouds that appeared motionless against the luminous, blue sky, clearly visible thanks to the cleansing of the air by the rains; the summer was returning. And yesterday and today there hasn’t been a sign of clouds, and the air has been suffocating. Tomatis thinks that if it manages to rain tonight, the cookout that Gutiérrez has gone to such lengths to organize, gathering his old and his new friends, will be spent under the pavilion, watching the rain fall, or at the large kitchen table, to which Tomatis has already been invited before, the previous winter. He imagines the guests eating and drinking under the pavilion, talking and laughing, but contained within its limits by the rain. Every so often, someone will be forced to cross them, to go to the bathroom or to look for something inside the house—cigarettes, a camera, papers, makeup—stored in their rain jackets or their purses piled up on the sofa in the living room, and they’ll cross the wet lawn at a run before circling the white slabs around the swimming pool and turning onto the stone path that leads to the entrance to the house. It will have been raining all morning, and while the thick and loud storms may transform into a silent, fine rain by the middle of the afternoon, the water will not stop falling, just like this past week, until Monday or Tuesday, and maybe, with that rain, the autumn will finally arrive. The party will end early on account of the weather, and at around three or four the guests will start to leave, especially if the rain cools the air suddenly; used to the summer heat, the guests will have come in clothes that are too lightweight and will be cold, and the teeth of the most sensitive among them may even start to chatter. Like so many other things in his life, apparently, Gutiérrez’s party will probably not turn out the way he expected. Clearly his politeness isn’t faked, and his sense of generosity seems genuine, but there seems to be something darker at work behind them, not against others, but rather against himself. In any case, he doesn’t seem to expect anything from the world or, better yet, Tomatis thinks, he doesn’t seem to desire any of the things that the majority of people desire. His calm and affectionate but slightly distant personality, isn’t it indifference, detachment, unqualified absence? And yet, while the big things don’t seem to interest him, the smallest ones, if not the most insignificant ones, attract and seduce him, like a one- or two-year-old baby whose mother points insistently at a mountain so that it’ll notice it, and meanwhile it’s fascinated by an ant scurrying over the instep of its shoe. Once, Gutiérrez dragged him to the San Lorenzo grill house, a hole in the wall that was last fashionable in the fifties or sixties, but which has been in decline more or less since 1968. According to Rosemberg, since he came back, whenever he takes anyone out he always invites them to the best restaurants in the city, but when he goes out alone he only goes to San Lorenzo—Tomatis wonders if having dragged him to that temple of precooked sweetbreads, of leftover steak, and of dubious empanadas was in fact a gesture of confidence, a sign of deference, almost an homage to his person, a thought that without ever having been made explicit more or less signified, You, Tomatis, who know how much things are worth, will be able to recognize the hidden treasure here. And Gutiérrez, who frequently orders Italian and French wine, along with champagne, through an importer in Buenos Aires, and serves it generously to his friends, drank wine with ice and seltzer at the grill house while eating precooked intestines and greasy, proletarian empanadas. Watching him eat, Tomatis tried to unravel the situation, the enigma of the man who kept the best wines in his cellar and took his friends out to the best restaurants in the city or, he was sure, in Rome or Geneva, but when he went out alone he went exclusively to the San Lorenzo grill house. It’s a frequent topic of deliberation for Tomatis, and the day they went out together, as he watched him put ice and seltzer in his wine, intrigued, adopting a knowing air, but trying to provoke some sort of clarifying response, he told him with a smile that tried to be conspiratorial, For the sake of consistency, you’ll need to do that with your Château Margaux, and upon hearing this, cracking up and shaking his head, Gutiérrez answered, That sounds more like your style! It’s not at all like that for me, which did nothing to resolve Tomatis’s perplexity. He often told himself that he, Gutiérrez, was frozen in his own past, which sometimes seemed evident, and once he even said to Soldi, He confused his youth with where it took place, but the explanation was altogether too simplistic, Gutiérrez was too lucid not to be conscious of that error. No, it had to be something else. And, every so often, Tomatis was stuck wondering, Is it this or that thing, isn’t it actually, or maybe . . . But none of the explanations were consistent with Gutiérrez; there was always some detail, some trait, some hypothesis, that didn’t coincide with him. The fact that he was so similar and yet so different from his friends from the city, both new and old, could not result entirely from his long absence; there was something intrinsic to him that had to explain it. And his friendliness, at once affectionate and distant, wasn’t produced by hesitation or duplicity. What was most mysterious was the infantile pleasure that the most banal things gave him: a word that he’d forgotten after all tha
t time and which someone had spoken as he passed them in the street, or the way some children behaved when they were leaving school, or the tree buds in September, or the suggestive look he exchanged with a girl searching for a rich client from her table in some downtown bar, produced a sort of mild hilarity in him that seemed at once exultant and sympathetic, and which intrigued anyone in his company. They seemed to provoke a kind of recognition in him, and the things that had been like loose threads of unperceived experience within the incorporeal plane of his recollections, after so many years away, suddenly, in the tactile evidence of the present, were actualized. Tomatis shifts in his seat, bothered by a slight agitation, feeling that, once again, his understanding has come up against a limit. It doesn’t seem sufficient to explain him through simple nostalgia and a reencounter with the things of the past. And then, suddenly, after a few seconds in which his mind, unable to think, is submerged into a kind of painful void, he receives, through an association of ideas, the revelation: he hasn’t come looking for anything; he’s come back to the point of departure, but it’s not a return, and much less a regression. He hasn’t come to recover a lost world, but to see it differently. From the series of incalculable transformations, large and small, that he suffered since the day he left, another man has emerged, modified in imperceptible ways, especially to himself, by each change. And the man who now goes into ecstasies over the banalities of the world knows, having paid for it with his life, that every banality is shored up by a brace that flowers on the surface and stretches down into an unfinished, black depth. He seems to have reached the ultimate simplicity, but only after a long tour of the inferno. He, Tomatis, has never heard him raise his voice, and every time he thinks of Gutiérrez, he pictures him smiling vaguely, the slight smile more present in his eyes than on his lips. Even when he starts in on his enumerative diatribe against rich countries, though the terms he employs can sometimes seem too cruel, the gentle irony with which he speaks expresses more disillusion than rage, and, if you pay attention, sometimes, there’s a noticeable trace of indulgence. The world that he celebrates now, with an almost constant and subtle exaltation, is not at all the one of his youth, but rather one that he came to discover over the course of his successive transformations, and the person he’s become is now seeing it all for the first time. He didn’t actually return to his point of departure, but rather to a new place where everything is different. And though he may have lost his innocence, his capacity for acceptance has grown, inclining toward simple things without idealization or disdain. He must’ve thought that if he managed to recognize and appreciate simplicity, he could reconcile himself to the world. The distant, even absent quality that is sometimes evident in him is probably a result of that exercise in reconciliation, the consciousness and effort of it long ago dissolved into the benevolent sincerity with which he regards the world; he even finds a way to qualify Mario Brando. And Tomatis elaborates a formula that seems to give him enormous satisfaction, the multiplicity of meanings it contains only apparent to him: He left his house and had to cross the whole universe to get to the corner, and now he knows the effort required to reach the corner, and the significance of the immediate.