La Grande. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ noisy kiss on the cheek. Gutiérrez steps aside, and, with a slightly mysterious half-smile that Nula, stupefied by his emotions, tries unsuccessfully to interpret, assumes the need to offer them an utterly conventional introduction.

      —Do you know each other? Mr. Anoch, enologist and philosopher—but which comes first? Lucía Calcagno.

      Nula is about to stammer something, but Lucía preempts him.

      —No, she says, still smiling, and offers her hand.

      No, Nula thinks, as he holds out his own. She said no.

      —Good to meet you, he says, his voice breaking. They shake hands two or three times and then let go.

      —I had some stuff to do in the city and when I was on my way back to Paraná it occurred to me to come say hi.

      —Great idea, Gutiérrez says, shaking the plastic bag. There’s two catfish here begging for the oven. Come in, come in, he says to Nula again.

      Nula stands frozen in the doorway.

      —No, thank you, I’ll leave you to your family, he says, thinking, constantly, and evermore intensely, as they say, She said no. Another time. Sunday.

      After the door closes behind him and he starts to walk toward his car through the rainy darkness, Nula shakes his head in disbelief. She said no, he thinks, and a dry, sarcastic, inward laugh escapes his lips. The headlights, when he turns them on, illuminate the entire facade of the house, the white wooden gate, the white walls, the space that separates the gate from the front door, the trees growing alongside the house, but the image through the windshield, pearled across its surface by droplets of rain, is disintegrated and luminous. The white surfaces, even the white, lacquered wood bars of the gate, seem paradoxically more irregular, and the contours of things more uncertain, lines seemingly drawn by a seismograph, and the lights from the house, or from the headlights bouncing off the white gate, refract in each of the drops stuck to the windshield, a static flicker that the wiper blades, after he starts the engine, take several passes to erase, a pointless exercise, in any case, since after each pass, new drops fall, luminous, from the black heights of the countryside and cover the glass again. He puts the car in reverse, then goes forward, then reverses again, and finally starts down the sandy path toward the paved road. The glimmer disappears, only to reappear each time the headlights of an approaching car reflect off the drops that, despite the ceaseless arcs traced by the wiper blades, their trajectory accompanied by the same resonant sweep, accumulate repeatedly against the glass. Holding the wheel with one hand, Nula takes the cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his camper, moves the pack to the hand resting on the upper portion of the steering wheel, takes out a cigarette, and, after putting it between his teeth and lighting it and releasing a thin cloud of smoke, returns the cigarettes and lighter to the camper pocket. (He wasn’t wrong when he thought he’d be smoking a lot today.) He shifts slightly in his seat to find a comfortable position, grabs the wheel in both hands, and accelerates slightly by applying unconscious pressure to the gas pedal with his foot. With another short, sarcastic laugh, which makes the cigarette quiver, shaking his head back and forth, he mutters, She said no! She said no! He laughs again, and though he thinks he gets the complexity of the situation—he doesn’t realize yet that the situation might be much more complicated than he imagines—there are, undoubtedly, traces of bitterness in the sarcasm.

      The enormous hypermarket complex appears to his left, its eight theatres, its parking lot, its coffee shops, its cafeteria, and its restaurant all seemingly deserted despite the grandiose display of lights and colors hovering in the darkness of the countryside. The lights shine off the wet bodywork of the fifteen or twenty cars scattered around the parking lot, none of them near the main entrance. A year before, the land that is now occupied by the hypermarket was just a swamp in the middle of an empty floodplain—constantly under water, even when it was dry everywhere else—between La Guardia, where the road splits toward Paraná, and the branch of the river from which the city rises. Nula hesitates a few seconds, slowing down, deciding whether or not to turn into the complex; on Friday, Amigos del Vino starts a week-long promotion there, and he wants to finalize a couple of details with whomever’s in charge, but immediately he changes his mind and accelerates again. The network of lights and colors passes, then reappears for a few seconds, fragmentary, in the rear-view mirror before it disappears completely. Now the road widens into four lanes, and is lit up by tall, downward-curving poles projecting onto the reflective asphalt. The city lights appear overhead, to the right the straight line of lamps on the waterfront, and, to the left, less regularly, the lights on the port, on the avenues converging toward the river, on the buildings of various heights that stand out from the rest, on the regatta club. The car reaches the bridge. It’s so brightly lit that the city, despite its multiplicity of lights, appears dark on the other side. She said no, Nula says again, and, to underscore his disbelief, shakes his head in such a way that the cigarette, which he hasn’t taken from his lips since lighting it, and which he’s consumed a good portion of by now, vibrates in the air, disturbed by the words he says, by the movement of his lips as he shapes them, and by the negative sign, turning his head from left to right and right to left, several times, in the darkness, that expresses his at once ironic and confused bitterness. The combination of these movements causes the smoke that rises from the lit end of the cigarette and from his lungs, though his nose and mouth, to form a turbulent cloud between Nula’s face and the windshield, where the rain drops, swept aside by the wiper blades, rematerialize, obstinately, and it’s through this cloud that Nula, leaving the bridge, with another short, dry, and sarcastic laugh, sees the first rain-soaked streets as the car enters the city.

      Gutiérrez also ended up alone early. Lucía didn’t accept his invitation to dinner, and left for Paraná almost immediately after Nula’s sudden departure. And so Gutiérrez has put the fish away in the fridge, and, to counteract any negative effects of the rain, has taken a hot shower, eaten some cheese and grapes he found in the fridge, and settled into what, with self-directed irony, he calls the machine room (satellite television, videocassette player, video camera, computer, printer, modem, radio, compact disc player, telephone, library, record collection, video collection, and so on), trying to work for a while. The millions that he’s unaware of Moro assigning him are in fact imaginary. It’s true he has some savings, and that the sale of a screenplay for Wolf Man two years before secured him his best fees ever for a movie, even though it was never filmed, but there’s nothing in the world that could get him to stop working, and at this moment he’s editing two other screenplays for which he’s already been given an advance, so he couldn’t abandon them even if he wanted to. Though it may be expensive for the area, the riverside house—the people in Buenos Aires who sold it to him never mentioned Doctor Russo, and he only heard the name after he’d moved in—cost him much less than an apartment in Rome or Geneva would have, and actually its location isn’t inconvenient: if he had to make a Thursday afternoon meeting in Rome, for example, he’d simply have to take the Wednesday morning flight at nine fifteen from Sauce Viejo, connect in Ezeiza three hours later, and he’d be at the Piazza de Popolo for lunch by noon on Thursday. Luckily, the Swiss producer, his longtime employer, is also an old friend; he considers Gutiérrez reliable, his principal collaborator on screenplays, and though he never knew Gutiérrez’s reasons for moving to Rincón, and never completely approved of the decision (for personal rather than professional reasons), Gutiérrez knows that he can depend on him, and while the producer’s business continues to operate they’ll continue to work together. Since he’s been in Rincón, he’s already made two trips to Europe, one to Rome and another to Madrid, but a week later he was already anxious to finish his work and return to Doctor Russo’s house. (Everyone calls it that, and one night Marcos pointed out that, wherever he was, in this world or the next, the doctor had once again managed, nominally at least, to hijack another man’s home.)

      After working a while, almost till midnight, proofreading an Italian screenplay, Gutiérrez gets up and goes to the kitchen for a cold glass of water. Still on the table are the СКАЧАТЬ