La Grande. Juan José Saer
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Название: La Grande

Автор: Juan José Saer

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература

Серия:

isbn: 9781934824962

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СКАЧАТЬ protrusive part of his face, which narrows into a triangle toward his chin. His skin is a dark and lustrous brown, its similarity to leather accentuated by the wrinkles on his neck, on his hands, and around his eyes, whose half-shut eyelids obstruct the view to his eyes themselves, which closely study the two cards he’s been dealt as he prepares to pick up a third, just thrown across the greasy table, itself a brown only slightly darker than his hands.

      —Sergio, Gutiérrez says.

      —Willi, says the other man, his tone neutral, not even looking up from his cards.

      Patiently, Gutiérrez waits. Nula is unaware that recognition, approval, confidence, and mutual history have just been exchanged, tacitly, by the utterance of their names. Gutiérrez hasn’t said a thing to anyone else, but the others, who’ve now understood that they’re not being asked for, don’t seem at all interested in their sudden appearance. Only the barman stands alert, paused in the middle of drying the glass, but when Nula, to indulge him—because Gutiérrez hasn’t looked at him once—makes a friendly gesture with his head, the man, as though the nod triggered a remote control, looks down and keeps drying. Escalante picks up the third card, studies it, places it over the others, and deposits all three, so perfectly aligned that they seem like a single card, face down on the table. He looks up at Gutiérrez. Then he stands up slowly, inspects the three men following the game, chooses the one that seems most qualified, and gestures for him to take his place. He walks around the table, and when he reaches Gutiérrez he doesn’t hug him or shake his hand, only looks him in the eyes and gives him a soft nudge on the chest with the back of his hand. Gutiérrez smiles, but with a look of protest.

      —I live practically around the corner, and it took me a year to find you, he says.

      —I saw you once, in a car, but before I could put two and two together, you were gone, Escalante says. And another time you walked down my street, but you were with someone. How’d you know I was at the club?

      —Your daughter told us, Gutiérrez says.

      —My daughter? Escalante says. I don’t have children. That was my wife.

      Opening his eyes wide and biting his upper lip and shaking his head hard, Gutiérrez’s face takes on an exaggerated look of admiration.

      —It was no great feat getting such a young wife, Escalante says. For her, it was between poverty and me, and she lost: she got me.

      It’s difficult for Nula to sense the irony in Escalante’s words; his tone is so neutral and flat that it seems deliberate. It’s like he’s talking to himself, Nula thinks, speaking to something inside. And he realizes that he’s been thinking about how Escalante’s wife laughed when, referring to Gutiérrez, she said, I know who you are. That cheerful sentence implied that she and her husband had already talked about him, and that there might be a sense of irony between them when it came to the subject of Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, when Nula sees them face-to-face, it seems impossible—unless they’d been avoiding it on purpose—that they never once met in the past year. Who knows what reason they might have had to delay the meeting, since they must have known that it would happen sooner or later. When they exchanged their names across the table of truco players without looking at each other, Nula realized, without understanding exactly what it meant, that despite their efforts at pretending otherwise, both men had been aware of even the most intimate details regarding the other for all of the past year. And then he thinks that it’s not impossible that when he saw Gutiérrez closing the door to his house he wasn’t actually planning to come to Rincón, and that only at that moment did he decide to go, because without him, Nula, he wouldn’t have dared come looking for Escalante at home. And Nula is so absorbed in these thoughts that Gutiérrez has to say his name twice in order to introduce him.

      —Mr. Anoch, he says, wine merchant. Doctor Sergio Escalante, attorney.

      The overly formal manner of the introduction, in particular the use of their surnames and professions, underscored by his sober tone, suggests to the two men that Gutiérrez’s regard for their persons goes well beyond these superficial details—antithetically, in fact, to these social characteristics—in the quarter of authenticity and courage, of hard-fought individuality, of nerve, of introspection, and of a fierce marginality. Without much emotion, both Nula and Escalante nod their heads, accompanying the movement with a brief and rather conventional smile to show that they’ve discerned, approvingly, the irony of the introduction. When he smiles, Escalante reveals an incomplete set of teeth almost at brown as the skin on his face, and, realizing this, he raises a hand to his lips. The teeth must have been missing for a while, because the gesture seems automatic, and its slight delay could be due to his familiarity with the other players, in whose frequent company he thinks it superfluous—his teeth are no longer a secret to them—but now a reflexive modesty has induced him to conceal his mouth, too late in any case, though Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to have given the matter even the slightest importance.

      As the other players resume the game, Escalante starts walking toward the bar, and Gutiérrez follows, but Nula is delayed by a survey of the damages the walk has caused to what he rightly considers a kind of uniform: the loafers (the left one in particular), as well as the cuffs of his pants, are covered in yellow mud, and a few splatters of this watery substance, which have already begun to dry, managed to reach his fly and even the front of the white pullover, two circles with a tortured circumference and a dense center, like a pair of symbolic bellybuttons drawn on the white material for some cryptic, supernatural purpose. And on the red camper—like on his pant legs—some damp stains around the shoulders illustrate that the shelter offered by Gutiérrez’s multicolored umbrella has been less than perfect. But Nula, after assessing the results of the walk, shakes his head with a smile that, for some reason, unknown even to himself, expresses less annoyance than satisfaction, and, with a few decisive steps, joins the others at the bar.

      —What’ll you have? Escalante says.

      Gutiérrez, apparently uncertain, slowly inspects the shelves. The barman, who has left the towel and the glass he was drying on the table, waits, with a calm expression, neither impatient nor servile, for Gutiérrez to decide.

      —A vermouth with bitters and soda, on ice, he says finally.

      Escalante asks Nula with his eyes.

      —The same, Nula tells the man at the bar.

      —Orange for me, Escalante says.

      As the barman starts to make their order, Nula watches the two men. They’ve fallen silent, and don’t seem in a hurry to talk. Finally, without a hint of reproach, Escalante says:

      —You left so suddenly. Swallowed up by the earth.

      —I was in Buenos Aires for a while, and then I crossed the pond, Gutiérrez says.

      Escalante shakes his head thoughtfully. He’s taller than Gutiérrez, but his extreme thinness, and possibly his seniority, make him look foreshortened in comparison. With his hawk-like nose, his brown skin, his prominent Adam’s apple, and his dark eyes that despite being evasive (due to some ocular handicap, perhaps) gleam when they settle on something, a person, animal, or object, the cruel epithet vulture that people assign to lawyers seems even more apt to him, not to mention the indifference he projects for things of this world, and the self-control—with the exception of the gesture to hide his teeth, a residual concession to aesthetic considerations—so internalized by now that it seems like his natural state, a false cloak against everything that erodes us, ceaselessly, day after day, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die.

      —You did the right thing, not saying goodbye to anyone, Escalante says. And Marcos, have you seen him?

      —He СКАЧАТЬ