La Grande (31 page)

Yesterday, Tomatis made the trip to the funeral home and stood a while before the publisher's impassive, sharp, and now pale face, unable to suppress, at first, the clichés that death occasions, like
What if he's faking it? What if he suddenly opened his eyes and sat up?
or maybe,
It won't be long before I'm in that box
, or,
Does cerebral activity continue briefly postmortem, in a confused, delirious way, at first neutral or increasingly painful, or less painful, until it becomes pleasant, which those who've come out of a deep coma or a long period of inertia have ended up calling limbo, inferno, purgatory, and paradise?
But then he remembered the call he'd gotten from the
publisher when he found out that he was planning to leave the paper, and how he tried to make him understand, by his tone, that he, Tomatis, was the only one he still trusted to do things the way he understood them, because the new generation of publishers and administrators, under the pretext of “internal restructuring,” as they say, had ceded control to the military dictatorship. Even for the publisher's visceral mediocrity, that control was dangerous—its hungry opportunism lacked the weapons of his kingdom, which were cunning and negotiation. And he, Tomatis, was the only one who knew how to use them, and though he didn't share those values, even disdained them, and actually worked constantly against them when he wasn't at the paper, while he was there he was the only one who could understand the need for them and integrate them to the work.

When he walked out to the street and stopped on the first corner to wait for a taxi, Nula offered to take him home, and on top of that gave him a couple of local chorizos that neither he nor his sister could really consider disposable after they'd cut a few slices before dinner. Violeta was having dinner with her mother and her grandmother, and afterward would stay over, so Tomatis went up to the terrace and worked a while in his room, with the window open and the door ajar, allowing a current of air to sneak in. But just now there was no breeze, in fact, and the atmosphere in the room, having been shut up the whole afternoon, in the increasing heat of the day, had become humid and stifling. He got up and went out back to the terrace and looked up at the sky, but neither the moon nor the clouds nor the stars were visible: there was only a hazy, gray dome, fading to black, and the sun that he'd seen, staining red the horizon and the low sky in the west, as he got out of Nula's car, had not dissolved the nebulous, smooth cap that had covered the sky the entire day. And so, when he went back to his room he didn't shut the door as he went in because in the open darkness
of the terrace there hadn't been the slightest hint of a breeze. The night was warm and pleasant. Under the lamplight, Tomatis took out some white sheets of paper from a drawer, removed the cap from a black pen, and on the first page, where the date and location of the correspondence usually appear, he wrote,
Wednesday night
. And after thinking for a second, he began to write his letter.
Dear Pichón: Guilt always precedes the crime, and is even independent of it. Myths accept no refutation, they just are: thus, in the myth, Oedipus, though he doesn't know it, is guilty. The tragedy, meanwhile, translates the myth to the level of action. As I was saying on the phone Sunday, in this particular tragedy the development of the plot is more ambiguous, and the statements that trigger the disaster are merely verbal assertions and do not contain the slightest proof. Everyone says that Oedipus Rex is a detective story, which means that the rules of the genre force us to ask ourselves who benefitted from the crime and who had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to devise it and make it look like an inevitable misfortune. The plot, as I see it, is as follows: 1.) Oedipus arrives in Thebes, solves the Sphinx's riddle, and marries Jocasta. 2.) Oedipus's clairvoyance puts him in conflict with Tiresias, who'd been unable to solve the riddle and who sees in Oedipus a serious competitor, and also disrupts Creon's plans: after Laius's death he'd planned to overthrow and murder Jocasta and take the throne of Thebes. 3.) The shepherd, who did in fact abandon Jocasta and Laius's true offspring (who didn't survive) on Mount Cithaeron, and who foresaw the death of Laius and his attendants at the crossroads, fled not because he recognized Oedipus after so many years, but rather to save his own life because, as the only survivor and witness to the crime, he figured, rightly, that Oedipus would eventually kill him too. 4.) Creon sends him to Corinth to figure out why Oedipus exiled himself, and he learns that it's because the Oracle at Delphi predicted that he would kill his father and marry his mother, which meant that he had to put space between himself and his family to avoid incest and parricide. It's worth noting that, according to various
traditions, the Oracle wasn't infallible—far from it—and not only was it often mistaken, forcing people to return for repeated consultations, but also its prophesies were generally formulated in such obscure ways that its visitors' interpretations were often mistaken. In this version of Oedipus, we can apply the domino theory to the successive Oracles: if a single one is false, the rest will be too; and if nothing in the tragedy, except the statements of the shepherd and the messenger, proves that Oedipus is actually the son of Laius, the only thing that's proven by the end is that superstition makes more innocent victims among children than among their parents. Oedipus consulted the Oracle because some drunk in a tavern in Corinth called him a bastard, which made him start to doubt his own identity. 5.) Creon plots, with Machiavellian cunning (avant la lettre), to eliminate Oedipus and Jocasta by making them believe that Oedipus was the child that Laius had sent to Mount Cithaeron because an Oracle had predicted that the child would kill him. 6.) Creon relies on the complicity of the shepherd and the messenger from Corinth, who have no choice but to follow his plans. Insidiously, Creon convinces Tiresias—who is old and all but senile and who detests Oedipus for humiliating him by solving so quickly the riddle of the Sphinx that he'd been unable to solve—that Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta and the true source of the curse upon the city. 7.) The false testimonies from the shepherd and the messenger convince Oedipus that he's committed two horrible crimes, parricide and incest, and that the man in Corinth who called him a bastard had been telling the truth: Oedipus is unaware that, while he was certainly a bastard, he wasn't the same child that the shepherd had abandoned on Mount Cithaeron, but another. Creon had exploited the rumor, the false prophesy, the murder of Laius, and the wedding of Jocasta, weaving his own version of the story in order to achieve his goals. 8.) Jocasta hangs herself, Oedipus gouges out his own eyes and exiles himself to Mount Cithaeron, Creon takes power of the throne of Thebes, and the shepherd and the messenger, of course, were never heard from again.

In the tragedy, it is suggested that Laius may not have been the father of Oedipus, that some nymph on Mount Cithaeron, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, what the myth suggests, constantly, is that returns, not to mention “regressions” tend to be catastrophic. All returns contradict the physical laws of the universe, which is always, or almost always, expanding. Swimming against the current, and so on. Call me when you get these notes, to talk them over. Carlitos.

PS. This Sunday I'm going to a monstrous cookout at Gutiérrez's. Many ghosts of the past and a few tenuous silhouettes of the present will be in attendance. I'm a hybrid of the two. Kisses to Babette and the kids.

The next morning he woke up early and, because the weather was nice, sat down to drink some
mates
while he read on the sunny terrace. The mild, eight-thirty sun announced the return of the summer. Enormous, dispersed white clouds, static, with vast blue spaces between them, decorate the sky. Tomatis's gaze passes over them gladly, thinking they foretell good weather for the days ahead. The mass is at nine thirty, and the burial is scheduled for eleven, but because it's for a local person of certain importance, Tomatis knows that there's no point in rushing, and since he's decided to go straight to the cemetery, avoiding the church, he still has an hour to kill before he has to get ready. When he arrived at the cemetery, the mourners had only recently set up around the family mausoleum, transferred from the municipal cemetery, too exposed to the floods of the Salado river, which every so often, before joining the Paraná, overflows and inundates the whole western flank of the city. Oasis de Paz, a private business, though it offers its own mausoleums, also accepts transfers,
corps et biens
, from the families who can pay for it. Concealing his skepticism, Tomatis listened to the eulogies: from an advisor to the governor who'd once been a guerrilla and who after living abroad for a few years had returned to the city, to serve the democratic process, as they say, although since the return
of democracy the problems that had supposedly inspired him to take up arms not only persist but are in fact worse than ever; from one of the current publishers of the paper, an heir of the other family of owners; and from one of the editors, a sports writer, who recalled that the publisher had also been president of a soccer club, and that during his presidency the club had played in the first division. Tomatis, out of curiosity, has approached the wreaths and bouquets of flowers to read the violet cards: everyone's there, the government, the church, the banks, the industrialists, the two main soccer clubs, the television channels, the law school, the charitable organizations, the university. Seeing the crowd around him, analyzing the rhetoric of the eulogies, Tomatis realizes just how long—since his adolescence at least—he's been living with his back to the city that in turn regards him with considerable suspicion: Without a formal declaration of war, without explicit violence, his disdainful irony toward what the pages of
La Región
at one time had the habit of calling
the life blood of the city
had been reciprocated with suspicion and distrust. Nevertheless, when the ceremony finished and the guests began to disperse, a small group of employees and ex-employees of the paper, from editorial and the print shop, called him over as they made their way to the cemetery exit. At first they talked about the publisher, but soon they moved on to other things: dead or retired colleagues, the imminent move of the newsroom and print shop to a new location, modern and larger, in the north end of the city, and finally a discussion about the
Clásico
that the two local soccer teams would play that Sunday. The sports writer who had given the eulogy offered to drive him downtown, and they distributed themselves into two cars—there were nine of them in all—and Tomatis said goodbye at the cemetery gate to the five who were going in the other car. Tomatis was uneasy about making conversation with his ex-colleagues all the way downtown, but
two blocks later the driver and the two in the back had already returned to the discussion of Sunday's match, analyzing the rosters, the fact that they were playing on such and such a field, and the recent history—trades, wins and losses, physical condition of certain players, and so on—of the two teams. Early on, when he'd just started at the paper, at twenty years old, the sports writers laughed at his affinity for literature, and so Tomatis took his vengeance on them by ridiculing sports and proclaiming, in all sincerity, that he'd never set foot on a soccer field, and now, listening to their heated discussion during the drive, he thinks that he could still make the same claim, but that his situation won't allow it—what from a twenty-year-old would have sounded like a provocation they'd take, today, as an insult, though it wouldn't stop them from letting the Sunday match take up the entire conversation, let alone ask themselves if the person they'd invited to travel with them was interested in the topic or not.
None of us have changed a bit in all these years, and we won't change any in the years that we have left to live
, Tomatis thought when he got out of the car on the corner of Mendoza and San Martín, at the Siete Colores, the bar where he had a one o'clock date with Violeta. She was working on an urgent project that was due that same afternoon, so they drank a coffee and made another date for seven at the Amigos del Vino, and when Tomatis showed up at seven on the dot, he saw that Violeta, refreshed and calm, was already there, and five minutes later, Soldi arrived. Tomatis had spent part of the afternoon correcting and expanding the letter to Pichón, and before coming to the bar he'd stepped over to the post office to mail it.

Gabriela, recovering from her indecision, instead of sitting down takes a few steps to the right and approaches the counter, just as Nula, turning his back to the room, has started to prepare something, his posture so similar to the way he looked in the dream that, elbowing Soldi, she whispers:

—Watch him serve us a live fish, realizing as she says it that Soldi is only laughing to be polite, because, as is to be expected, he hasn't understood where the joke is in what she's saying, and much less what she's alluding to. But Nula doesn't have a live fish in his hand when he turns around, but rather a dish of green and black olives.

—You got here in time for the first bottle, Nula says.

—I was thinking a while this afternoon about the question of becoming, Gabriela says point-blank. What does this sentence mean to you?
What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is?

—
Timaeus
27, Nula says. An important but easily refutable moment of the dialogue on the topic.

—It suddenly smells like school in here, Tomatis says.

—Yeah, Diana jumps in. Finishing school.

—Key moment? Gabriela ventures. Obviously it's just a riddle to please an old fag whose corruptive political fancies forced him to flee Syracuse dressed as a woman, like some vulgar tranny.