La Grande. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ Gutiérrez, apparently remembering that Nula is with him, returns to his open, slightly urbane manner, and smiles.

      —I was time traveling, he says.

      —And I was riding the present, trying not get bucked off that wild bronco, Nula says.

      —Which luckily can sometimes be a gentle mare, says Gutiérrez.

      —If we keep developing the metaphor, we’re going to end up in the zoo.

      —Screenwriters are contractually obligated to use the primary local material. In London, it’s always got to be cloudy, and don’t dare forget to fill the Sahara with camels, says Gutiérrez, a quick spark of retrospective disdain in his eyes. And, bringing his hand to his forehead, he rubs at something as he raises his head and looks up at the sky. A drop, he says.

      —Two, Nula says, touching his nose while scrutinizing the dark clouds. Looking back down and around himself, he thinks of his red camper, his white pullover, his new shirt, his freshly ironed pants. He looks at his loafers, where a rim of yellow mud has formed along the entire perimeter of their soles and a few stains of the same yellowish substance have stuck to their insteps, and he makes two or three involuntary gestures, at once ambiguous and contradictory.

      Gutiérrez watches him openly, laughing, as if his misfortune amused him, and then, deliberately reaching slowly into an interior pocket of his raincoat, the wide and open kind, like a marsupial pouch, that some of those coats have, he withdraws an umbrella with a short handle, where he presses a metal button, and the canopy of smooth and glowing fabric divided into seven different colored sections unfolds with a sharp sound, sudden and exact, and a perfection that approaches the theatrical. The sections of the canopy represent the color spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, with identical segments, and the composite of the two men and the umbrella form a multicolored blotch that is clear and mobile and that stands out sharply against the gray background darkened by the double effect of the clouds and the dusk.

      Nula, slightly stupefied, takes in the umbrella’s multicolored apparition, but he doesn’t rush to shelter himself under the canopy’s limited circumference, typical of the shelter offered by collapsible umbrellas, despite their price. Nula’s reticence to seek the protection that placing himself shoulder to shoulder with Gutiérrez would offer has two motives: the first is that for now he’s sensed only a few sparse and scattered drops that couldn’t yet be called an actual rainfall or even a spitting one, and the second is that just as the multicolored canopy is unfolding, giving the impression that the two phenomena had been synchronized deliberately, in one of the pockets of his camper his cell phone has started ringing. Moving a few steps away mysteriously, he puts back the cigarettes and lighter that he’d just taken uselessly from his pocket. (He actually smokes very little, but he tends to carry cigarettes to share with clients, though today, he can’t really tell why, he feels a stronger urge to smoke than usual.) Nula pulls the cell phone from his other pocket, and, with a subtle gesture of apology toward Gutiérrez, turns his back to him as he brings the phone to his left ear and answers the call. Gutiérrez observes him patiently but skeptically, isolated within the imaginary cylinder that the umbrella’s circumference projects toward the sandy ground, forming an illusory refuge for surveillance, and when he moves his arm slightly and the multicolored circle shifts onto an inclined plane the ideal shape to contain him becomes a truncated cylinder.

      Although for a man of almost sixty, however well he keeps himself up, youth tends to seem insolent, and although Nula’s full and virile twenty-nine years, the fastidiousness of his clothes, and his apparent self regard seem overly manifest for his taste, Gutiérrez watches him indulgently, almost with pity, thinking that the energy the young radiate—so stimulating that, subjugated by it, they confuse it with the essence of their own singularity—they might not actually deserve. The indulgence is erased when Nula, turning around, raises his voice and makes two or three comical faces in his direction, shaking his free arm as he explains to the person on the other end (later he’ll explain that it was his boss) that, because he’s with an important client (and he extends his arm and wags his index finger at Gutiérrez with an exaggerated and complicit smile) he has to cancel the two appointments he has for later in the afternoon. Apparently, the person on the other end of the line lets himself be easily convinced, and from the things he says, Gutiérrez realizes that Nula, without having to insist much, but by the sheer effect of his communicative euphoria, has induced his boss to call the clients and reschedule their appointments for the same time tomorrow. Nula shuts off the apparatus and, stowing it in his pocket, takes two or three decisive steps toward Gutiérrez.

      —Free as the wind until tomorrow morning at eleven, he says when he reaches Gutiérrez’s side. And he turns his head sharply upward again because suddenly and silently a dense rain has started to fall. With two hops he reaches Gutiérrez, claiming for himself, in a tacit way, a portion of the meager protection offered by the umbrella.

      Without really knowing why, Gutiérrez, who likes every kind of rain, prefers that silent kind, without storm or wind or thunder or lightning, and which forms gradually, almost surreptitiously, of low, dark clouds, so loaded with water that, from this excess, they split, suddenly, and empty themselves upon the world. In general, it will fall in the afternoon, and, often, after the warm spell of a wet day. Indifferent to Nula’s somewhat ostentatious irritation (he’s almost pasted to him, and, shuffling his feet impatiently, seems to want to incite him to keep walking), Gutiérrez watches it, not in the sky, which has brightened a bit and where the drops, despite their size, are invisible, but rather on the plants, on the yellowish ground, on the river, where, as they collide, after an incorporeal flight in which they seem to cross an extrasensory void, they rematerialize. Gutiérrez’s senses perceive the rain across the deserted expanse that surrounds them, while his imagination projects it over the contiguous and distant spaces they have crossed and that, despite their imaginary provenance, are complemented by and confused with the empirical plane that surrounds them. What he perceives from the point in the verdant space where they find themselves, his imagination likewise assigns to the entire region, where, for the past year or so, after more than thirty years away, he has been living. And he thinks he can see, in the leaves that shudder silently as the drops fall, in their impacts with the yellow earth, and, especially, in the agitation that the drops cause as they cover the rippled surface of the river over an infinite number of simultaneous points, the intimate cipher of the empirical world, each fragment, as distant and distinct from the present as it might seem—the most distant star, for example—having the exact value as this, the one he occupies, and that if he could disentangle himself from the grasp of this apparently insignificant present, the rest of the universe—time, space, inert or living matter—would reveal all its secrets. Gutiérrez senses that Nula has guessed his thoughts, or has inferred them from his demeanor, and so has suppressed his annoyed gestures, opting instead for what appears to be sincere patience and calm. He allows himself a few seconds more, and then, giving Nula a gentle push on the elbow, urges him on.

      They advance in silence, a bit faster than before, but, from their demeanor, they don’t seem worried by the effects of the rain on the expensive clothes they’re wearing, and Nula especially, thinks Gutiérrez, after having postponed the mercantile obligations for that afternoon, no longer seems interested in the state of his shoes or the pulchritude of his red camper. Actually, because the multicolored umbrella is too small to cover them both completely, the rain now soaks not only the lower parts of their bodies, depending on their position and according to the rhythm of their stride as they hike over the rough terrain (from which the path has disappeared), but also cascades over the edges of the canopy onto their shoulders. The bright and mobile blotch that travels along the riverbank is startling, because of this very brightness, against the uniform gray of the landscape.

      This is the exact impression that comes across, fifteen minutes later, to the inhabitants of the first ranches that, on its outskirts, a dispossessed stretch of land they seem exiled to, nonetheless marks the edge of the town. Many surprised faces mark their arrival under the rain from the sleepy and СКАЧАТЬ