La Grande. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ Ulysses had made it straight home, the Odyssey wouldn’t exist, Gutiérrez says.

      —Possibly, Nula says. But these days the epic form is an anachronism.

      —As a professional screenwriter, that notion takes the bread from my table.

      —Not just the bread, Nula says. The wine and local salami, too. Which, by the transitive property, takes it from mine.

      They laugh. Their recent troubles seem overcome. Now, farther from the corner, the sidewalk is darker, and their shadows disappear into the darkness. The houses are neither rich nor poor. Some are very old, and abut the brick sidewalk directly; others have a small front garden, separated from the earthen path by a chain-link fence. A woman carrying a plastic bag emblazoned with the W of the hypermarket and loaded with provisions, is about to enter one of the houses, stooping to slide the bolt to the screen door. Nula calls out. The woman looks around nervously.

      —Good evening, Nula says. Excuse us. We’re looking for the Escalante family.

      —You mean Doctor Escalante? she says.

      Nula hesitates.

      —Yes, that’s right, Gutiérrez says. He’s a lawyer.

      —He’s retired, the woman says. That’s them next door.

      The woman points to the next house over. There’s a flower bed out front, behind a fence; an expanse of neat lawn around the side courtyard, with an enormous orange tree at the center; and, at the back, a garden, judging by the cane and wire plant trellises, visible thanks to the light that shines through the windows on the far side of the ivy-covered house. Delicia! Delicia! the woman shouts. After a minute or so the door opens and a feminine silhouette, apparently very young, is cut from the rectangle of light.

      —What is it? she shouts.

      —Delicia, it’s me, Celia. There’s two men here looking for an attorney.

      The silhouette in the doorway hesitates a few seconds.

      —Who are you? she finally shouts.

      Gutiérrez steps up to the fence and shouts back, I’m a friend from abroad, coming by to say hello.

      Suddenly, and inexplicably, the silhouette in the doorway starts to laugh.

      —I know who you are, she says. Sergio’s at the club. Sorry not to come out but I’m washing my hair. Good to meet you. Celia, honey, can you show them where the club is?

      —Look, says the first woman. Go past the church and turn right. It’s three blocks, on the river side. The sign says El Amarillo.

      —Thank you, Nula and Gutiérrez say in unison, acting much more polite than if they were speaking to a man, somewhere more crowded, and in the middle of the day. They turn back the way they came, then right on the second corner, pass the church, and walk a block parallel to the square. After crossing the street again—Nula sees the same iridescent vapor haloed over the light at the intersection that covered the white globes in the square—they enter another street, darkened by the trees that border the sidewalk, but also by the night that has now fallen completely. To the west, behind them, Nula imagines, the curtain of darkness must have already lowered completely, erasing the last fringe of blue light that hung on the edge of the horizon. They don’t speak now, and despite the constant rubbing of their shoulders, forced together by the meagerness of the shelter and the irregularity of the sidewalks, their steps splash with the same rhythm. And though both, for different or possibly even opposite reasons, are impatient to arrive, each seems to have forgotten the other. In fact, they’re only strangers, and despite the ease with which they exchange the words that the other finds suitable, precise, smart, and so on, both are unsettled by what they might come to learn when the respective opacities that mutually attract them are finally illuminated. It’s possible this discomfort is caused, as often happens, by not fully comprehending that the curious attraction they feel comes from unwittingly associating the other with something they both want to reclaim, and which they’ve long kept hidden in some remote corner inside themselves. They cross the street again, onto another dark sidewalk. Halfway down the block, a wide strip of light, which divides the darkness in half, suggests that they’ve reached the place they sought. And, in fact, a tin sign hangs from a bar that extends over the sidewalk from the brick wall:

      EL AMARILLO

      FISH AND GAME CLUB

      A rough, childish drawing of an elongated fish, painted the same bright yellow as Gutiérrez’s jacket, decorates the metal rectangle under the name.

      —We’re here, Gutiérrez says, and, apparently forgetting Nula, who is left outside the umbrella’s protective cylinder, takes a few steps toward the open door and inspects the interior. Nula walks up and does the exact same thing, with very similar movements, not realizing that, because Gutiérrez has his back to him and can’t see that Nula’s movements so closely resemble his own, someone watching them from behind would think that Nula is deliberately aping him. Suddenly, Gutiérrez closes the umbrella, turns around, and shakes it over the sidewalk to release some of the water. Through the space he opens as he backs up, Nula can see inside the club. It looks like a newly built storehouse, made of unplastered brick, and while the thatch roof is in perfect shape (having been built pretty recently), the floor, by contrast, is simply tamped-down earth. Two small lamps hang from one of the roof beams, and a few lamps are attached to the walls, but only two or three are lit up. Three small tables and their respective folding chairs, arranged somewhat at random, a bit lost in a space that could contain many more, are scattered around the room. Two long planks, some collapsed trestles, and a stack of folding chairs is piled up against a wall. At the back there’s a counter and a set of shelves loaded with glasses and bottles, and next to that a yellowed household fridge with a larger door below a smaller one to the freezer, which, Nula thinks, some member of the club probably donated after buying a new one. When they appear in the doorway, a man with a full, smooth beard, standing between the counter and the shelves, stops in the middle of drying a glass, watching them with an inquisitive and somewhat severe expression. At the only occupied table, four men are playing cards and three others are standing behind them, following the course of the game. None of them appears to have noticed their presence yet.

      The severe look of the barman at the unexpectedness of their sudden intrusion doesn’t seem to intimidate Gutiérrez, who, Nula thinks somewhat anxiously, walks in with the same ease and self-assurance with which one of its founding members or even its president could have. Nula, following him submissively, wavers between disapproval and confused admiration, and is so surprised by Gutiérrez’s determination that he’s not even conscious of what he’s thinking, which, translated into words, would be more or less the following: Or maybe this is all so familiar to him, it’s such an intimate part of himself that despite the thirty-some years away the words and gestures come on their own, reflexively or instinctually, or rather—and it would be offensive if this were the case—he thinks that the millions that Moro attributes to him give him the right to walk in this club as though he were actually its president.

      Without even glancing at the barman, Gutiérrez, scrutinizing each of the players at the table and the three men following the game behind them, walks slowly toward the table. He stops suddenly, staring at one of the four players, who is receiving, his eyes down, the cards that the player to his left is dealing. The man’s hair, a slicked-back shell pasted to his skull, is thick and smooth; it’s patched in white, gray, and black, like the hair of an animal. A cartoonist would represent it by alternating curved black lines with corresponding white gaps of varying width between them, and a few black, white, and gray blotches interrupting the СКАЧАТЬ