La Grande (2 page)

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 at all, he said. What happened is I received an unexpected visit this morning.

Just then Nula realized that although Gutiérrez had left the pool the water sounds continued: someone, invisible from where he stood, was still splashing and swimming around. At that moment, in a fluorescent green one-piece, its shoulders bent, with that same abstracted, preoccupied manner, tanned and maybe slightly more solid than five or six years before, the body of Lucía Riera, which Nula had come to know so well, was emerging up the metal ladder from the side of the pool closest to the house. Without even looking at them, Lucía had thrown herself onto the green canvas chair next to the pool. Gutiérrez had followed Nula's surprised expression
somewhat worriedly, and a shadow there seemed to suggest that an explanation of some kind was called for.

—Don't imagine anything irregular, he said. She's my daughter.

The customer is always right, I get it
, Nula had said later that same night to Gabriela Barco and Soldi at the Amigos de Vino bar, where he'd run into them—they changed bars frequently for what they called their “work dates”—
it comes with the territory and, thanks to my stoic indifference, costs me nothing. But I actually know Lucía Riera, married to the doctor Oscar Riera and separated for some time I believe. It's true that I lost touch with her for several years up until this morning, but I know perfectly well who her parents are, though I never met them. A man named Calcagno, a lawyer, was her father—he died several years ago—but her mother, barring evidence to the contrary, is still alive. It took effort not to punch Gutiérrez in the teeth when he told me she was his daughter, and I wasn't just furious but stunned too, because I couldn't believe he'd lie so blatantly, and I was even a little embarrassed that he'd dare do that to me. He must have sensed something like that in my face because he got serious and polite and solemn and said he'd walk me out. We left it that I would call him to set up another visit, something that, obviously, I don't intend to do.
Nula stopped, satisfied he'd conveyed his indignation, but when he looked up he saw that Soldi was avoiding his gaze. After a few seconds, Soldi looked him straight in the eyes and, somewhat sheepishly, said,
And yet there are those who say that it might be or at least could be true. You should probably look for something else to get indignant over.

And so, out of curiosity, Nula had called Gutiérrez again the following week, and they set a day and time for the second meeting. In a sense, the practically imperceptible incident, which didn't quite mean anything in particular for either, but drew them both for a few seconds from the neutral and conventional territory where mercantile transactions are understood to take place, had made them mutually interesting and enigmatic in their own way,
something that both took silent note of during the short telephone conversation when they set up the second meeting, and which they took pains to conceal when, several days later, they were once again face to face. The wine sale took place quickly—a case (six per) of viognier and two of cabernet sauvignon to start, plus four local chorizos—and once it was settled, the bill and the check signed and the receipt in Gutiérrez's hands, they took up a conversation that lasted more than two hours, on various topics that had little or nothing to do with wine, and during which, every so often, Gutiérrez elaborated his serene, disinterested soliloquies about
them
, the inhabitants, referred to with ironic disdain, of the rich countries he had lived in for over thirty years. They had sat down on a bench at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, after touring the property inside and out, though its details, if they sparked Nula's interest from time to time, seemed invisible to their owner. Their respective biographical details, which certainly interested them, did not form part of the conversation, at least in a chronological way, although every so often some personal element cropped up or was taken into consideration, like for example the medical and philosophical studies that Nula abandoned in succession, and his project, before selling wine, of writing his
Notes toward an ontology of becoming
, or the reasons (never clarified, and cited as a means of formulating an aphorism rather than an actual confidence) that had propelled Gutiérrez abroad:
I left in search of three chimeras: worldwide revolution, sexual liberation, and auteur cinema.

Finally, at around four thirty today, without calling, Nula had brought the wine. He parked the dark green station wagon in front of the white gate at the main entrance, just as Gutiérrez, coming out of the house, was preparing to lock the front door.

—I have the order, Nula said as he stepped from the car. Were you heading out?

—On an expedition in the area, replied Gutiérrez. Looking for an old friend. Escalante. Do you know him?

He'd never heard of him. According to Marcos Rosemberg, he lives in Rincón, on the outskirts of the town, but on the city side, about three miles away, and Gutiérrez had decided to invite him to a party he was planning to throw on Sunday and to which he was thinking he, Nula, might come too. Nula looked at the greenish sky and the dark horizon and, without saying anything, had laughed sarcastically.

—I would also like to order some more wine, knowing the habits of some of my guests.

And so, after carrying the three cases from the station wagon to the kitchen, Nula filled out another order: more white wine, more red, and more local chorizos. When they came out to the front gate, Nula looked at the heavy sky and said:

—Actually, the walk is tempting, even though it's definitely going to rain and I have a couple of clients waiting for me.

In fact, he regretted it the moment he began speaking, but the quickness and frank satisfaction of Gutiérrez's response immediately erased the fear of having shown his feelings too openly: Gutiérrez's sincerity neutralized his own. They still didn't know each other well enough to be spontaneous, and their reciprocal attraction stemmed from what they hadn't figured out about each other: Gutiérrez's dubious paternity and, in addition to the sudden emotion he showed when Lucía emerged from the pool, Nula's singular conversation, blending, sometimes without a clear dividing line, commerce and philosophy.

When they reach the upper right corner of the rectangle they've been crossing at a diagonal, the bright yellow spot and the red one that follows it start up the mountain covered with acacias, at the same pace as before, neither slow nor fast, in a straight line toward
the river. There is no path, but the ground is almost pure sand, so not much grass grows among the trees, and the rain, rather than softening the earth and forming puddles or wet layers of mud, had packed it down, and the two men walk on ground so hardened by the water that their footsteps hardly leave a trail. Clumps of pampas grass, gray like everything but the yellow earth, lay across the sandy ground, though when they reach the river, the vegetation of the island, on the opposite shore, some fifty meters away, seems more green, and the sand on the slope more red, a brick-like red that's almost orange from the sand mixing with the ferrous clay, in contrast to the pervasive grayness: the river, lead-colored and rippled, is darkening with the afternoon at the end of a rainy day that hasn't once seen the sun.

—Southeast, Nula says when they reach the shore, pointing at a downward angle toward the leaden water and the waves that crest its surface in the direction opposite the current. His voice, as though it issued from someone else, sounded strange to him, not during its fleeting sonorous existence, but in the soundless vibration it left in his memory as it faded, perhaps caused by the silence that had taken hold after the sound of the scrape of their steps on the sandy earth had disappeared. The soft breeze from the southeast is only perceptible on the water. Or maybe Nula and Gutiérrez can sense it on their faces, but, accustomed to the inclemency, they don't notice what they feel. Each of them surveys the landscape with the same withdrawn expression he might have assumed had he been alone in this deserted place, the details each observes not coinciding with the other's, each of them assembling it therefore in his own way, as though it were two distinct places, the island, the sky, the trees, the red slope, the aquatic plants at the riverbank, the water. For several seconds, Nula's thoughts are absorbed by the leaden, rippled surface, each of the identical, curling waves, continuously in motion, that swell and form an edge which could
best be represented not by a curve but rather, more precisely, by an obtuse angle, seeming to attend the visible manifestation of the becoming that, by presenting itself through repetition or a counterfeit stillness, permits the coarse heart the illusion of stability. For Nula, who often catches himself observing the same phenomena that once occupied his
Notes
, the island ahead, the alluvial formation, is proof of the continuous change of things: the same constant movement that formed it now erodes it, causing it to change size, shape, and place, and the coming and going of the material and of the worlds that it makes and unmakes is nothing more, he thinks, than the flow, without direction or objective or cause, of the time that, invisibly and silently, runs through them.

—See that? They're all the same, he says.

Gutiérrez looks at him, surprised.

—The waves, Nula says. Each one repeats the same disturbance.

—Not the same one, no, says Gutiérrez, without even looking at the surface of the water. His gaze passes curiously over the island, the air, the sky, darkening from the fading light and from the mass of clouds, a denser gray, that have been moving in from the east.

Gutiérrez doesn't seem to notice that Nula is watching him openly, as though he were concentrating on what he sees less because what surrounds him is particularly interesting than because moving his gaze over the landscape allows him better access to what's happening inside himself. What little Nula knows about him makes him an enigma, certainly, but with a touch of irony Nula tells himself that ultimately even the things that are familiar to us are unfamiliar, if only because we've allowed ourselves to forget the mysterious things about them.
Quantitatively
, he tells himself, without a single word corresponding to his thoughts,
I know as little about him as I do about myself.

Even what they know about him in the city is fragmentary. Everyone knows something that doesn't quite coincide with what
everyone else knows. The ones who knew him before he left—Pichón Garay, Tomatis, Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, for example—had lost touch with him for more than thirty years. One day he just disappeared, without a trace, and then, just as suddenly, reappeared. From that group, the first to make contact with him, and completely by accident, had been Pichón Garay.
I was on the afternoon flight back to Buenos Aires, and he asked the man sitting next to me to change seats
, he wrote to Tomatis a week after returning to Paris. (Pichón had spent a couple of months in the city, liquidating his family's last holdings, and in mid April Tomatis and Soldi had taken him to the airport, where he caught the afternoon flight to Buenos Aires, which at that time connected with a direct flight to Paris.)
Before sitting down, he introduced himself. Willi Gutiérrez, did I remember him? It took me a second to place him, but he remembered everything from thirty years ago—El Gato's stories more so than mine, actually—and I'm still not sure if he knew which of us he was talking to. He said he saw us with Soldi at the airport, but he couldn't come over because he was checking a suitcase. He said you looked the same as always. For the fifty minutes the flight lasted he did practically all the talking, spouting off about Europe, and I learned that he's living between Italy and Geneva, but that he travels all over. His trip to the city lasted a day, of three in the country altogether. The afternoon before, he'd landed in Buenos Aires from Rome, slept at the Plaza that night, and the next morning had skipped up to the city to visit a house in Rincón that he was looking to buy (I didn't offer mine because it was all but sold), saying that he planned to settle in the area. That night he was staying at the Plaza again, and then back to Italy the next day. Our destinies, as you can see, are contradictory: he'd come back to buy a house, and I was there to sell one.