La Grande. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ in front of the wooden cases and scrutinizes them for a moment, as though he were trying to guess what they contain, then he opens the fridge, eats two or three grapes from a plate, and, after pouring a glass of water, takes it to his office and leaves it on his desk. He takes a few sips, and then, from a metal box in the second drawer, he pulls out a black and white photograph.

      It’s an enlargement of a photograph of Leonor Calcagno, from the late fifties, when she was twenty-three or twenty-four. It was taken by a street photographer in front of the suspension bridge, the major tourist attraction in the city—along with the Franciscan convent, built by the natives in the seventeenth century—since 1924, the year it was built, until 1983, when the flood knocked it down. In the desk drawer, in the same tin box from which he’s just taken the enlargement, Gutiérrez has the original photo, in which he, in a light summer suit, is standing next to Leonor. The enlargement shows the blurry edge of his left shoulder, against Leonor’s, covered by her flower-patterned dress. Gutiérrez knows every detail of the photo from memory, and every time he would look at it, during his first years in Europe, he would concentrate on Leonor’s face, its features, its gaze, its expression. The idea for the enlargement came from thinking that, in the original photo, everything surrounding Leonor’s face was superfluous, and the enlargement, ultimately, was a way of fixing, optically and chemically, on a specific point, not the image itself but rather the unstable attention of the viewer, the enlargement, at once benign and insistent, presenting the brilliance of a detail cleansed of the useless detritus of the surroundings. A photo of Lucía sits in a glass frame on the desk. Gutiérrez holds the photo of the mother up to the one of the daughter and compares them. Their similarity is apparent, but they’re also very different. Lucía’s features remind him of someone he knew or still knows, though altered, but despite how hard he tries he can’t figure out who it is. He concentrates on the photo of Leonor again. It was the summer of 1958/59 and nothing had happened between them yet. They’d go for walks sometimes, pretty much out in the open. At the end of that summer, Calcagno, her husband, had gone on a trip.

      Even though Calcagno was partners with Mario Brando, and was probably richer, and enjoyed a greater reputation as a lawyer, and was at least ten years older (and at least twenty years older than his wife), his admiration for Brando as a literary figure had practically enslaved him, something that happened with every other member of Brando’s precisionist movement. Despite having been a cultural attaché in Rome during the first Peronist government, Brando had shifted to the opposition in 1953, and after the Revolución Libertadora he began occupying official posts in the provincial government. But it was his literary reputation, which overflowed the borders of the province—validated by his regular publications in La Nación and in various magazines in Córdoba, Chile, Lima, and Montevideo—that ultimately subjugated Calcagno, an expert in Roman law, an excellent litigator, and the one who did practically all the work for the firm. To his followers, the founder of precisionism was simply charismatic; to his enemies, he was an autocratic tyrant who demanded selfless devotion to the precisionist ideals, not to mention complete obedience to the leader of the movement. According to César Rey, who once threw a glass of wine in his face—this was sometime around 1957, when he was drunk at a dinner party—Brando was a talentless puppet who used his alleged literary gifts to charm the rich into giving him legal work or official posts regardless of who was in power. But there were many people who believed the opposite, and the precisionist movement and its leader enjoyed a considerable reputation. To Gutiérrez, Brando was a good writer of sonnets who tried to pass himself off as avant-garde. What bothered him was when Brando would give him work that had nothing to do with the firm, which fed a certain ambiguity that made people think that Gutiérrez, who was still very young and too financially dependent on him to protest, was one of his disciples. What at the time made him uncomfortable seemed useful in retrospect, since thanks to his work at the firm he made connections with the literary scene. Gutiérrez valued Calcagno, not only because he’d been a good professor or because he’d found work for him, but also because he was intelligent and sincere. But, along with other personal reasons, his strange devotion to Brando, who was inferior to him in every way, ultimately brought out Gutiérrez’s contempt for him.

      That summer, Calcagno and Brando had gone to a poetry festival in Necochea, and that trip had given them, him and Leonor, some space. They could see each other at any time of day without their time being limited, as it tended to be otherwise. They were at a point in their relationship when, no matter the subject, their opinions always coincided, something which they noticed every so often, euphorically, always with a renewed sense of astonishment. Gutiérrez still hadn’t expressed his feelings in any straightforward way, but the increasing precautions they took not to be seen together revealed, though they didn’t seem to realize it, the nature of their intentions.

      They went out to a restaurant, a secluded place near the waterfront whose owner Gutiérrez knew. Since it was summer, there was hardly anyone there; if they weren’t on vacation, most people still preferred to eat outdoors, at grill houses or beer gardens, to escape the suffocation of the hot nights. The owner sat them in an annex at the back that only fit a handful of tables, all empty but for theirs. When they were alone, their hands caressed on the table, unselfconscious, almost distractedly, and at one point Gutiérrez had stood and stepped around the table, leaning over to kiss her, just when the owner, who, because he knew him, was serving them himself, came in unexpectedly with something, and pretended not to have seen anything. Soon after that, when Gutiérrez got up to go the bathroom, the owner called him over and told him there was a room behind the restaurant that could be rented by the hour, but that he could have for the whole night and even the next day if he wanted, since it was Sunday and the restaurant would be closed, and that he could stay as long as he wanted since the room was actually separate from the restaurant and had its own entrance through the courtyard, and that he could return the key on Monday morning.

      When he returned to the table, Gutiérrez already had the key in his pocket, but he waited a while before asking Leonor to the back room. He was afraid that she’d be angry and that the night would be cut short. He was sure she wouldn’t accept, and he’d already decided that if she said no he wouldn’t insist—he couldn’t bear the idea that Leonor would be offended and stop seeing him—but when he finally suggested it, he was surprised by the open and straightforward way she considered the idea, interrogating him at length about the owner’s discretion and not about the intentions that a young law student might have regarding the wife of the professor who’d given him a job as a clerk in his firm. Actually, it was like Leonor hadn’t understood that the point of going to the back room was to make love, and simply wanted to clarify the owner’s ethics and his discretion, first of all, along with his sense of honor, his habits, and his family history. After discussing all of these points with Gutiérrez, Leonor seemed satisfied and accepted but said that they should wait until the patrons and two or three employees in the front of the restaurant had left. She would only go to the back room when, with exception of the owner, who would lead them through the dark courtyard and disappear, no one was left in the place but them. So they went on talking as before. About an hour passed, more or less, and the conversation was so animated that for a while Gutiérrez forgot that eventually they’d be going to the back room, and he was almost sorry when the owner interrupted them, around midnight, to lead them first through an old tiled courtyard with a large refrigerator, a covered balcony, and two or three half-open doors, then through a kind of storage room where, in the weak light, wine racks, sacks of flour, several folded chairs and tables, a soda machine, and two or three dozen bottles stacked around it were just visible, and then through another courtyard, with trees and brick path through flowerpots and vegetable beds. Finally, after opening the door to a small room attached to the back wall of the garden, whispering, The switch is to the left when you go in, and discreetly taking the money Gutiérrez had already prepared to give him when they reached the room, he disappeared silently into the dark courtyard that they’d just crossed, where the only thing that caught the weak light was the brick gravel path that had led them there.

      They went in. At twenty-four, Gutiérrez was still a virgin. When he reached puberty, he’d masturbated just like everyone else, but in boarding school, where he’d been until he was eighteen, he hadn’t had either the occasion or the СКАЧАТЬ