La Grande. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ the other’s inattentive, sure step and constant chatter as he carelessly and noisily sets his muddy rubber boots on the saturated patches of grass bordering the narrow, sandy path or in the sporadic puddles that interrupt it.

      The gray background lends the red and the yellow an almost extravagant, overwrought brilliance that intensifies their presence to the eye in the empty field while paradoxically, somehow, causing them to lose, to the mind, a good portion of their reality. In the desolate poverty of the landscape, the striking garments, possibly because of their price (the yellow one, although it’s European and more expensive, nevertheless looks more worn-out) produce an obvious contrast, or constitute, rather, an anachronism. The excessive presence of singular objects, though they break up the monotonous succession of things, end up, as with their overabundance, impoverishing them.

      Calmly, concentrating on each word, Gutiérrez holds forth with disinterested disdain, half-turning his head over his left shoulder every so often, apparently to remind his company that he’s the one being spoken to, although because of the distance that separates them, the open air, the movements that disperse the sounds he utters and, especially, the forceful sound of the boots against the puddles and submerged weeds, in addition to the concentration demanded by the protection of his loafers and pants, Nula can only fish out loose words and scraps of phrases, but in any case getting the general point, even though it’s only the third time he’s met Gutiérrez and even though their first meeting only lasted two or three minutes. From what he gathered at a previous meeting, as he listened with surprise and curiosity at some length when he brought the first three cases of wine, when Gutiérrez talks, it’s always about the same thing.

      If Nula imagined himself summarizing those monologues in a few words to a third person, they would be more or less the following: They—people from the rich countries he lived in for more than thirty years—have completely lost touch with reality and now slither around in a miserable sensualism and, as a moral consequence, content themselves with the sporadic exercise of beneficence and the contrite formulation of instructive aphorisms. He refers to the rich as the fifth column and the foreign party, and the rest, the masses, he argues, would be willing to trade in their twelve-year-old daughter to a Turkish brothel for a new car. Any government lie suits them fine as long as they don’t have to give up their credit cards or do without superfluous possessions. The rich purchase their solutions to everything, as do the poor, but with debt. They are obsessed with convincing themselves that their way of life is the only rational one and, consequently, they are continuously indignant at the individual or collective crimes they commit or tolerate, looking to justify with pedantic shyster sophisms the acts of cowardice that obligate them to shamelessly defend the prison of excessive comfort they’ve built for themselves, and so on, and so on.

      The vitriol in the sentiment contrasts with the composure of his face each time he looks over his left shoulder, with the calm vigor of his movements, and with the monotone neutrality of a voice that seems to be reciting, not a violent diatribe, but rather, in a friendly, paternal way, a set of practical recommendations for a traveler preparing to confront an unfamiliar continent. His words aren’t hastened or marred by anger, not cut off by interjections or indignant outbursts; instead, they pass easily and evenly across his lips, interspersed here and there with a Gallicism or Latinism, and if they sometimes stop or hesitate for a few seconds it’s because in the three decades living abroad, one of them, relegated by disuse to some dark corner of the basement deep inside himself where he stores the incalculable repertory that constitutes his native tongue, is now slow to rise through the intricate branches of memory to the tip of the tongue that, like the elastic surface of a trampoline, will launch it into the light of day. His discourse is at once ironic and severe, spoken with a distracted intonation, difficult to peg as either authentic or simulated, or if the almost sixty-year-old man who uses it does so to communicate either a contained hatred or rather as a solipsistic and somewhat abstruse humorous exercise.

      With regard to their ages, Nula is in fact twenty-nine and Gutiérrez exactly twice that, which is to say that one is just entering maturity while the other, meanwhile, will soon leave it behind entirely, along with everything else. And although they speak as equals, and even with some ease, they refrain from the familiar tú form, the older man possibly because he left the country before its general use came into fashion in the seventies, and Nula because, as a commercial tactic, he prefers not to use the tú form with clients he didn’t know personally before trying to sell them wine. Their use of usted and the difference in their ages doesn’t diminish their mutual curiosity, and even though it’s only the third time they’ve met, and though they’ve yet to reach a real intimacy, their conversation takes place in a decidedly extra-commercial sphere. The curiosity that attracts them isn’t spontaneous or inexplicable: to Gutiérrez, although he’s as yet unaware of the exact reasons for Nula’s interest, the vintner’s responses the day they first met seemed unusual for a simple trader, and his parodic attitude when they met again, as he mimed the typical gestures and discourse of a merchant, interspersed with discreet allusions to Aristotle’s Problem XXX.1 on poetry, wine, and melancholy, enabled him to glimpse the possibility of a truly neutral conversation, which would be confirmed immediately following the commercial transactions of that second visit.

      The first meeting didn’t last more than two or three minutes. Dripping wet, Gutiérrez emerged from his swimming pool and walked toward him across the neat lawn with the same indifference to where he placed his bare feet, Nula recalls, as he shows now, the rubber boots stepping through puddles that interrupt the path, or onto the wet weeds that border it. Nula had been recommended by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and had spoken to him, Gutiérrez, on the phone the day before to set up the meeting for eleven thirty. Because this took place a few weeks before, in March, it was still summer. In the harsh, radiant morning sun, Nula watched Gutiérrez advance toward him from the white rectangle of the pool, itself framed by a wide rectangle of white slabs on which sat three wood and canvas lounge chairs—one green, one red-and-white striped, and one yellow—all inscribed on a smooth, green landscape bordered at the rear by a dense grove, and flanked, beyond a stretch of green earth, by the white house on the left and on the right by a pavilion with its obligatory grill and a shed that likely contained tools, bicycles, a wheelbarrow, a lawnmower, and so on. I don’t know if it was actually Gutiérrez, but whoever built it must’ve been inspired by those California houses that, from what I’ve learned on television, are made for people who’ve succeeded in life thanks to some righteous or dark arts, suggested Tomatis the day he recommended Gutiérrez as a client. It actually wasn’t such a luxurious house, but in any case it was definitely the most expensive in the area around Rincón, and even though Nula had never been to California he’d seen a lot of the same shows growing up, and so as he took in the assemblage as Gutiérrez, dripping wet, approached him, he realized that, as usual, and possibly for purely rhetorical purposes, Tomatis had exaggerated.

      Instead, what surprised him was Gutiérrez’s physical appearance. He’d expected someone elderly, but this was a vigorous man, with a flat stomach, with proportioned angles, tanned by the sun, and whose gray hair, as neatly cropped as the lawn surrounding the swimming pool, and abundant rusty gray body hair, which must have been black in his youth, sticking, because of the water, to his chest and shoulders, arms and legs, increased rather than diminished the impression of physical vigor, so much so that, considering the contradictory situation—less luxurious house than anticipated and younger owner than imagined—Nula thought for a few seconds that he’d come to the wrong address. The contracted and somewhat deformed shadow that, owing to the height of the sun, gathered at the feet of the approaching man could have indicated, in an indirect way, a somewhat more complex inner life than his appearance and the conventional tranquility of the setting it moved through suggested.

      —I didn’t know how to let you know that I couldn’t meet you today, after all, Gutiérrez had said. And Nula:

      —Clearly it’s the time for taking the water and not the wine.

      Gutiérrez had laughed, shaking his head toward the pool.

      —Not СКАЧАТЬ