La Grande (25 page)

From his privileged position, having had erotic contact with two beautiful young women the day before, Nula congratulates himself on his impartial and disinterested assessment of Gabriela Barco as a sexual object. It doesn't occur to him to think that Gabriela experiences something similar, and that she might have even more compelling reasons to consider herself authorized to it: having achieved the principal object of all amorous practice, she's momentarily indifferent to its secondary benefits, and the countless number of men who could have provided them to her are clumped together in an asexual mass, not counting José Carlos, her partner, an economist in Rosario who at one point in the two or three thorough and affectionate embraces the month before had managed to plant the seed of what, this morning, once she had the results from the second test, has begun to enchant and fascinate her, enveloping her for the duration of the process that has been initiated, a transitory and autonomous system inaccessible to others from several different points of view. The recollection of this fact flushes her tea-colored irises with a glow so different from the introspective fury that just now inflamed them that Nula, disconcerted, turns his eyes from Soldi to look at her, while Soldi himself, having been watching Nula, tries to look at Gabriela from the corner of his eye without surrendering his perpendicular position, his back upright against the seat so as to not block their visual field, without being able to see anything in particular in her face. And when Nula finally meets her eyes, from which, by now, any trace of emotion
has disappeared, Gabriela continues. According to Gutiérrez, she says, Calcagno had given him the job at the law firm to help him with his own work, but less than a month into the job, Brando was already giving him work that had to do with the precisionist movement generally, and with his own career in particular, and so often that he soon became a sort of private secretary. Not only did he edit the magazine and set up meetings and arrange the movement's activities, but he also typed out its leader's poems and articles and sometimes even wrote his personal correspondence. Gutiérrez claims that Brando wrote lots of poems that had nothing to do with the precisionist aesthetic and which were better, as far as he could tell, than the ones he published, but she and Soldi hadn't been able to confirm this because the family—his wife was still alive and his two daughters, who'd both married naval officers, had moved to the south—refused to collaborate with them or even to see them, and except for a few pre-precisionist poems written during his adolescence and published in
La Región
's Sunday literary page and in some student magazines, there was no trace left of his traditional poetry. Every so often, Gutiérrez would quote the first line of an alexandrine sonnet that, according to him (and he seems to be the only one who read it), was called “To a pear,” and which went, Gabriela says, concentrating a second to remember the exact phrasing of the line she's about to quote:
Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate
. When he hears the line, Soldi, relaxing and turning toward Nula, as though he'd just woken from a dream, filled with a light and emphatic euphoria, interrupting Gabriela Barco without taking the trouble to ask, in a voice raised a bit too much by his sudden excitement, interjects:
Gutiérrez also remembers the first hendecasyllable of a precisionist sonnet
—he practically shouts, in the tone of someone proffering a revelation—
that apparently he never published or even finished. The line, according to Gutiérrez,
Pinocchio says,
goes, The scalpel scratches the epithelium
. And shaking her head
and laughing, not at all put off by Solid's sudden interruption, Gabriela repeats,
The scalpel scratches the epithelium
. With a short, almost inaudible sarcastic laugh, Soldi flattens himself against the seat again and falls silent.

For Carlitos—Nula, who knows him less intimately than his interlocutors, after an infinitesimal hesitation deep inside himself, translates his name to
Tomatis
—Gutiérrez's claim that Brando, despite his intransigent declarations and his authoritarian manifestos, wrote non-precisionist poems in secret is plausible enough, first of all because a duplicitous discourse was innate to him, and also because if the ship of precisionism capsized, overburdened by all the neophytes that the movement had attracted, he'd have his lifeboat of traditional poetry ready. As Tomatis sees it, Brando was the most dubious experimentalist anyway, because despite his professed renovation of poetics through scientific discourse (first theoretical postulate of precisionism), he spent all his time denigrating free verse and insisting that traditional meter and rhyme should be the principal instruments of precisionism because, like music, they comprised a synthesis of harmony and mathematics. Tomatis says that the precisionists were the only avant-garde poets in the whole world,
and probably in the whole solar system and even in the known universe
, he'd sometimes add with a vague and disoriented look around him,
who between 1949 and 1960 claimed that the renovation of the sonnet was the fundamental task of any literary revolution
. He'd often laugh at them, saying that their canonical texts were
Popular Science
and the rhyming dictionary. And even today he refuses to take Brando or his followers seriously, and even though he doesn't admit it, allowing himself a momentary concession that could be interpreted as a veiled critique of the intellectual champion of precisionism, “Carlitos” Tomatis
is incredibly annoyed that Pinocchio and I are giving the movement so much space in our book
.

—We can't just ignore it, Soldi says, relaxing in his seat, speaking to Nula but turning back and forth to Gabriela, as though to ask her approval for everything he says. In the forties, he says, the movement created a stir, even on the national level. Brando regularly published articles in
La Prensa
and
La Nación
. Cuello, who is our principal informant for the first period, and who, for political reasons especially, thinks more or less the same of Brando as Tomatis, admits that the cultural life in the province was genuinely shaken by the arrival of precisionism. Like every belligerent avant-garde, they had almost everyone against them, and in particular Cuello's group—what you might call pastoral realists—which practiced a kind of social
costumbrismo
and constantly published polemics against the precisionists in
Copas y bastos
. Curiously enough, after 1946, Cuello and Brando belonged to the same political party that had just taken power, but inasmuch as one was basically proletariat, the other was an elitist bourgeois who some people even called a fascist. Cuello's magazine took its name from two verses in the
Martín Fierro
:
En oros, copas y bastos / juega allí mi pensamiento
, and in the first issue the editorial collective announced (and Soldi laughs as he quotes the line):
Cups to share with friends and clubs for the ones who call us out to the crossroads.
What do you think?

—No more or less aggressive than Breton and his friends, our
criollos
, Nula says, pleased to see that the comparison provokes an involuntary smile not only in Soldi but also in Gabriela.

And Soldi continues: The best literary magazine in the city was
El río
, which Higinio Gómez published in the early thirties, before he left for Europe. Since he paid for it out of pocket, more or less, Soldi says, when he left the city the magazine disappeared, and when he returned a few years later he didn't have a penny, so he stayed in Buenos Aires and went to work at
Crítica
. But in the forties, according to Soldi, of the three important magazines
that came out more or less regularly,
Nexos
, the official organ of the precisionists, was the best.
Espiga
, edited by the neoclassicists, unlike Cuello and his friends' magazine, was in direct competition with Brando. Some time later, in the mid-fifties, a highly experimental broadside called
Tabula rasa
started coming out: About this, Washington, who'd just finished a stay at the psychiatric hospital, had once (in so many words) said,
Drivel without punctuation is still drivel, but in this instance, despite being typed in all lower case, this is Drivel with a capital D.
The other two magazines,
Espiga
and
Copas y bastos
, had preceded
Nexos
, which was first published in 1945, and in a sense its release shook our small literary world from a slumber, an awakening as rude as it was abrupt: Brando and his followers, with their radical and exclusive aesthetic, were trying to show that the others didn't really exist at all. According to Soldi, the defensive rejoinders from the magazines that the precisionists attacked, and even Cuello's present memories, those of a calm and stable old man, all brim with outrage and resentment. The precisionist manifestos were graphic to the point of personal injury, and while the novelty of their theories made them feel disoriented and out of fashion, the absolute certainty with which they were formulated seemed to demonstrate beyond a doubt that up until that moment they'd been living in darkness. That clamorous novelty, widely celebrated and discussed on the radio, glossed approvingly in the press, discussed on conference panels, in university seminars, welcomed assiduously by the papers in Buenos Aires and even in Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, had something offensive about it because it apparently intended to substitute not one magazine for another, not one outdated aesthetic for an innovative one, but rather a provincial and harmonious universe in which each act and each object was indexed and classified, for another, up till then unknown, governed by laws that up till then they'd neglected, and that was there to rearrange their very essence, as if something
brilliant, perfect, and rare had come to unmask them as the disordered, coarse, and antiquated beings they really were. They'd gone to bed thinking they were artists and intellectuals and had woken up ignorant and backward provincials. The precisionists' autocratic doctrines and attacks undermined not only what they wrote, but also what up till that moment they believed they'd been. And, according to Soldi, the overlapping testimonies that he and Gabi had gathered for their investigation were unequivocal: the conflicts and bitterness had lasted almost fifty years, continuing even after Brando's death—from colon cancer in 1981—made plain by Cuello and Tomatis's reactions, and especially the more or less novelized history written by their fourth informant, the old man who'd been caught up in all those conflicts for more than three decades and who now prefers to remain anonymous.

Soldi stops speaking and thinks, as though he were searching for something to add. His curly, closely trimmed black beard, which starts at his sideburns and covers his entire face and part of his neck, leaves a small opening for his mouth, which despite its owner's silence has remained half open, possibly remaining available for the use that he may want to put it to once his search through the shifting, unstable, and highly deceitful corners of his memory yields the appropriate conjunction to his previous subject and the command arrives from the organs that transform memories into words, into sonorous material, and it can propel them into the external world. But actually Soldi has been distracted from the story because an unusual thought, but which he's had before, has crossed the narrow but brightly lit stage of his mind, filling it completely. In the midst of the literary conversation that Nula apparently listens to carefully, Soldi thinks of the extra-literary consequences that they might have had for the people implicated, as they say, by all those conflicts, ruptures, betrayals, all the enmity, hatred, verbal and even physical aggression, the slander and denunciations, the
acts of cruelty, the suicides, and all caused by disputes over vocabulary, form, themes, and exposure in print and on the radio. Soldi knows that there was something between the son of a friend of Cuello's, a young engineer, and the daughter of a precisionist, and that their respective families had done everything they could to break up the relationship. One of the editors of
Espiga
, who people said was sexually attracted to children, had ended up committing suicide, though it was never clear if it was because of the guilt or the rumors that, because of indiscretion or malice, were circulated among other literary groups, and even within his own. Gutiérrez told them about a time he accompanied a precisionist to a radio show, and as they left the studio two neoclassicist poets who'd been waiting to come in after them started beating down the precisionist and had to be pulled off him by the radio staff, and because Brando had introduced him, in an ambiguous way, as a member of the group, when in fact he was just a clerk at the law firm, Gutiérrez himself had received several threats and insults over the telephone. Cuello claims that Brando anonymously denounced the social realists as communists, and Tomatis, who admits that he doesn't have any other proof apart from what Cuello said, confirms it, because if Cuello had been capable of that kind of slander he wouldn't have been friends with Washington Noriega for over forty years, and besides, to him, Tomatis, those denunciations (most likely indirect and no doubt anonymous) seem like something Brando would've done. If their informants hadn't been as trustworthy, Soldi wouldn't have believed all those stories. The author of the text, who by now is very old, and who's made them promise a thousand times not to mention his name, talks about Brando and his friends in a sarcastic way that reveals a contained resentment, and fifty years of mulling over the same insults and meanness doesn't seem to have been long enough for him to say everything he has to say. But neither he nor Gabi enjoy those stories, they depress them, actually. By
temperament, Soldi's own life is solitary and private—Tomatis is the only person who knows that he's had a long-running sexual relationship with a much older married woman—his inclination toward literature doesn't include the contingencies of its personalities, and is made exclusively of texts, ideas, and forms, and there isn't room for anecdotes or gossip, not even for biographies. Within that almost abstract relationship, it's hard for him to see how a difference in aesthetics could produce hatred rather than dialogue, or how a truly accomplished work could produce anything but admiration. He's ashamed of all the slag they've been collecting over the course of their investigation, and though he sometimes relates those stories to another person, each time he does so he feels exposed, as though he too had committed a base act, betraying himself first of all, but especially those dazzling, steely objects, made so curiously of the deft association of words, and seeming more permanent than the accidental, mutable, and empty transience of the material world.