La Grande. Juan José Saer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ must have some good left in him, for his friends to treat us like this, he says in a low voice, but loud enough for Nula to hear. Then he turns and walks alongside Nula, who shines the light across the successive fragments of ground they venture over. When they reach the first streetlight, Nula turns off the flashlight, and though a few small, isolated ranches have begun to appear, they keep to the middle of the road. Three horses are pastured in the darkness, near an unplastered brick house. Out of curiosity, Nula turns on the flashlight and illuminates them, but the horses don’t even look up: all three are in the same position, their necks angled toward the ground, their teeth pulling at the grass, their heads still, two of them parallel to the street, facing opposite each other, and a third, who’s only visible at the hindquarters, its tail shaking slightly. Nula turns off the flashlight.

      When they reach the paved road Nula slips climbing up the embankment and Gutiérrez grabs his arm with the hand that carries the plastic bag—the other holds up the multicolored umbrella—to keep him from falling over. They cross the road so as to walk against traffic, and their steps become noisier, but also more firm, against the asphalt paving. For a while, they walk without speaking. They pass a brightly lit, empty gas station on the left, and on their right the main road into town, the illuminated, perpendicular streets that extend from the road toward the town center, the square, the levees built up against the floods, the river. Every so often, the headlights of an oncoming car force them to step onto the shoulder, into the mud and saturated weeds, and when the car passes they step back onto the pavement, moving more easily again. For a good stretch they seem to have forgotten each other, but every time headlights appear against the black backdrop of the lamp-lit, asphalt road, gleaming in the rain, they step sideways in a way that appears practiced and synchronized, without advance notice, deftly and exact, onto the shoulder. In the quickly approaching headlights the invisible rain takes on a fleeting, grayish materiality that is vaguely spectral, dense, and slanting, pierced by the beams, shining, and then, as they pass, is suddenly swallowed again by the darkness. And after the car has passed, Nula turns on the flashlight and the circle of white light, at once steady and mobile, restores it.

      Of all the witnesses from that time, Gabriela Barco said, he’s turned out to be the most useful—he remembers everything. And Soldi: He can recite from memory entire books that the authors themselves don’t even remember writing. After he first met Gutiérrez, by the swimming pool, when he happened to run into the two of them at the Amigos del Vino bar and Soldi hinted that Lucía might actually be his daughter, they started describing their interviews with Gutiérrez on the literary scene in the city during the fifties. His Roman Law professor, Doctor Calcagno—that is, Lucía Riera’s legal father—got him a job at his firm, where he was partners with Mario Brando, a firm that, by the way, was one of the most important in the city at the time, Soldi said. And Gabriela: Brando was the head of the precisionist movement; the precisionist specialty consisted of integrating traditional poetic forms with the language of the sciences. They made some waves at the time. Gutiérrez, though he had nothing to do with the movement, saw Brando constantly, because he worked for him, and while his bosses went about their political and literary lives, he did all the work for the firm. He worked there for a while until one day—it was Rosemberg who first told us this, but Gutiérrez later confirmed it, implicitly—suddenly, without saying goodbye to anyone, and without anyone knowing why, he disappeared. The other day, Gutiérrez explained why he left: besides his three friends—Rosemberg, Escalante, and César Rey—he didn’t have anyone else in the world. Because they were working, Soldi and Gabriela had a stack of papers on the table, and Soldi’s briefcase, as usual, sat open on the chair next to him, within reach, containing papers, books, index cards, pencils, and so on, which he would arrange and rearrange. He grabbed a notepad, and, while he talked, consulted the notes that he’d been taking during the interview, which they’d also recorded: He remembered the first and last names of almost every precisionist because Calcagno had taken him to quite a few meetings and because Brando, who never invited the group’s members to the law firm, would sometimes send him on errands for the group. Brando was a true strategist, and Gutiérrez says that despite his apparent lack of empathy, his talent for publicity and organization was undeniable. And Gabriela: Not only does he remember everything, but the act itself, when our questions require it, seems to cause him incredible pleasure. All it takes is a name, a date, or the title of a book or a magazine, and he starts talking in that calm voice, which doesn’t change even when he’s recalling polemics, betrayals, or suicides. He seems to get the same pleasure from it that someone else might get from describing Paradise, but he doesn’t try to gloss or hide anything, and in that same smooth, even tone, he can be ironic, disdainful, mocking, and cruel. Turning the pages of his notebook, backward, rereading his notes to find what he’s looking for, Soldi continued speaking without looking up: Before leaving, he said, he burned all his papers, stories, poems, and essays, and he left for Buenos Aires intending to commit himself to writing, but he happened to meet a movie producer who offered him a job proofreading screenplays that were about to be filmed. And with what he made from that he left for Europe. As a joke, he recited a few poems that he’d written at the time, and that, in his own words, despite having been burned before he left the city, had been impossible to forget, which illustrated the Buddhist belief in reincarnation: not being able to forget his own poems proved that he was paying for his crimes in another life. I jotted down two verses: “The rigging will never see this port / there will be no other moment for your sadness.”

      Nula’s cell phone, from the bottom of his pocket, announces a call. Lost in thought, he only hears it after the third ring, and, passing the flashlight to his other hand—he only turns it on now when passing cars force them onto the shoulder—he takes it from his pocket and brings it to his ear. Addressing himself to the person on the phone, who calls from some unspecified place, but at the same time to Gutiérrez, who walks beside him silently in the darkness, Nula shouts:

      —Where am I, you say? I’m on the river road, north of Rincón, soaked to the bone under a toy umbrella. It’s raining buckets and for the last three hours I’ve been with a client who decided to tour the landmarks of his far-off youth. Because everyone knows that when it comes to the Amigos del Vino, as the sales manager taught us during the practicum seminar, the customer is always right. Is everything set for tomorrow, both at the same time as today? You’re a genius, Américo. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.

      Nula hangs up the phone and puts it back in his pocket. That was my boss again, he says. He’s perfectly obedient, as you can see.

      —This drenching has earned you a roasted catfish, Gutiérrez says.

      —Are you inviting me over for dinner? Nula says. I accept, if I can bring the wine.

      —Why not? An astonishing country, where everything is free, Gutiérrez says.

      But it is written that tonight they won’t eat together. A light is on in the house when they arrive, and a compact black car is parked next to Nula’s green station wagon. Nula turns on the flashlight and casts the beam over the cars, the front of the house, the trees in the side courtyard, and finally shuts it off.

      —A visitor, Gutiérrez says, and pushes open the gate, the same white gate that, Nula recalls, Gutiérrez locked before they started their hike along the river.

      —Come in, I’ll introduce you, Gutiérrez says.

      —Is it family? Nula says, following obediently, feeling his heartbeat accelerate and trying, simultaneously, to keep his voice steady when he speaks, in such a high-pitched tone that he’s forced to cough in the middle of the sentence in order to recover his usual gravity. But Gutiérrez, who moves toward the door, closing the umbrella, doesn’t seem to hear him.

      —Come in, he says again, even friendlier than before. He’s about to put the key in the lock when the door opens from the inside, so suddenly that Nula jumps, an involuntary, barely audible exclamation escaping from his mouth. But Lucía, smiling, СКАЧАТЬ