La Grande (37 page)

—A Doctor Riera from Bahía Blanca called, Diana announces. His number is next to the telephone.

—A ghost from the past, Nula says. What did he want?

—He arrives tomorrow, and he wants to meet me, Diana says, laughing and sitting up, resting on her left elbow, which makes the forearm that ends in the stump elevate obliquely at her side. She looks at him.

—Tomorrow? Well you'll definitely meet him in that case, Nula says. I'll call him back later. Right now, I'm going to eat something and I'll be right back to get some sun with you.

—Oh, hurry, please! Diana says, shaking her only hand, parodying an exaggerated happiness combined with a simulated desperation. And immediately she stretches out again on the mat. Eventually, Nula comes out, naked, from the front of the house, with a white towel wrapped around his waist that covers him to his knees and a plastic mat under his arm; he carries a jug of cold water and a book:
One Hundred Homemade Pasta Recipes
. He places the jug under the chair, so that the shade will keep it cool, and covers it with the book to prevent an insect from falling inside. Then, laying his mat out next to Diana's, he removes the towel and lies down, face up. Finally, he picks up the towel and, laying it between his open thighs, pulls up a corner of the white cloth and carefully, delicately, covers his genitals. Diana, who's been watching him ever since he appeared through the kitchen door, comments, in a low voice:

—His most precious garment. His identity. The torch that guides him through the darkness. The spear that leads him through the world. The cosmic megalith.
Omphalos
.

Motionless, face up, keeping the towel still, in place, Nula smiles, his eyes closed, and a few seconds after she stops talking, motionless in a similar position, her smile identical to his, he adds:

—The diver that makes you crazy when he touches bottom.

Diana's fingers caress him softly on his left thigh.

—The battle of the sexes is growing worse, Nula says. How about a truce?

And matching, as they say, actions with words, he extends his hand and places it softly on Diana's pubis, in the center of the white rectangle formed by the towel. Diana doesn't even flinch.

—Can't happen before tonight, she says.

—But I'm getting back late tonight, Nula says, adding with a deliberate but neutral vagueness, which no doubt makes him slightly uncomfortable: There's a dinner with the people from the hyper. I don't even know when or where it'll be.

With her eyes closed, laughing silently, Diana shrugs.

—Tomorrow, then, she says.

Nula doesn't answer and removes his hand. The conversation, which he would have preferred not to happen, has made him uncomfortable. The lying upsets and disturbs him: on the one hand, Diana deserves the truth, and on the other, in a sense contradictory to the first, to what extent does she believe him? Luckily, the internal flux, made of flashes of lucidity, of autonomous images, of capricious and fragmentary memories and passing emotions, displaces his misgivings in a current that ceaselessly churns that heterogeneous, loose material, replacing it with recurrent, obsessive fantasies and sudden and insistent desires. The sun begins to warm his skin, especially on his belly, on his face, and on his thighs, and an indulgent image of his own naked and tanned body appears, so unexpected and savage that his penis, which was resting peacefully under the towel, begins to harden and swell, something which, beyond the pleasure it produces, embarrasses him slightly: despite his close intimacy with Diana, that untimely erection, just when they've decided not to make love, has something coarse and even ridiculous about it. If Diana noticed it, she'd probably laugh. Nula looks for an explanation for that sudden arousal, caused by his
own body, and he realizes that he'd caught a glimpse of himself in a strange, empty room, preparing to move through a doorway into the adjacent room—he's unaware of what might be in that other room, or who might be there, but what he's sure of is that what aroused him was
a gaze
, the specter of a gaze, regarding and desiring his naked body, that, because it was absent from the image, he substituted for his own. Now, the solar fullness erases every image inside him, and the last contours of the visible world, persisting under his closed eyelids, change shape and color, becoming more and more abstract on his retina. Drowsy, forgetting his desire, which distends his alert genitals, Nula surrenders himself to the light that flows from the empty, blue sky, refracting at moments and becoming visible, like drops of rain, invisible in the darkness, are made visible—he thinks, or remembers rather—as they cross a beam of light. Groping along the grass, he seeks out Diana's hand and grasps it softly.

—So, Riera wants to meet you, he says, laughing tersely, skeptically, suggestively. I should warn you that he insists that there are two kinds of men: the kind who wants to reform prostitutes and the kind who wants to corrupt the wives of the bourgeoisie. He belongs, by his own admission, to the second category.

—Actually, both kinds overlap in the middle, Diana says after a few seconds of thought. In both cases the object is a sexually experienced housewife.

—That is not untrue, Nula agrees, cautiously, and releasing Diana's hand, lets his own fall on the grass, his arm outstretched next to his body, grazing the length of the narrow mat, and he falls silent.

Lying on the ground, motionless, naked, their eyes closed, they'd appear to be their own effigies if their hands were crossed over their bellies, peacefully spending eternity since the Roman or medieval afternoon when death fished them, together, from the
agitated and contingent waters of time, the cloths that cover their private parts representing the supplement of some over-punctilious bishop who despite himself preferred to include a realist ornament in the composition so as not to rely on the conventional recourse of a fig leaf. They might also represent Adam and Eve, owing, in fact, to the white towels, forced to cover with these what they noticed immediately after they distinguished good from evil, before falling asleep, cast out into the elemental wilderness under the burning eye of the only sun, scorching them, outside the walls of paradise, contemplating the invisible substance that floods them, disturbs them, and alters them, pulling them gently through the ineluctable and mysterious waves, unknown in paradise, of succession, working against them, toward their ruin, with every heartbeat or breath or flutter, however much they try to protect themselves, sometimes, with a deceitful immobility. They are a married couple in a state of repose, the complementary protagonists that, when they joined, brought into contact the two inert halves of the world, and as such activating the force of the present, casting aside, without brutality but also mercilessly, the past that pretended, chimerically, to continue limitlessly, in a sterile, desiccated, and oxidized limbo. They are themselves a world, a reality, certain to generate, in every action, more world, more reality, they are, moreover, the very present that, as it moves, creates more present. Lying in the sun, naked, smiling, their eyes half-closed, they appear peaceful and eternal, and yet they float in the center of a whirlwind. Turbulent, inchoate, the island of the moment in which they believe they've found refuge, incessantly and at once fleetingly, is unmade as they are, and with regard to their surroundings, nothing gives way more profoundly to that corrosive alchemy than what seems permanent, stable, or in repose, rock, metal, diamond, earth, sun, moon, firmament.

Nula feels the sweat beginning to form on his forehead, on his neck and under his nose, and on his upper lip. As he lifts his
head slightly and turns to look at Diana, a few drops fall from his forehead, slide horizontally across his cheekbones, under his eyes, and then across his cheeks, leaving tortuous tracks, and eventually falling from the edge of his jaw onto his chest. He knows that Diana has seen him sit up, watching him through half-open eyelids, and lying down again and squinting his own eyes, he begins to speak, certain that, from within her comfortable and alert motionlessness, Diana is listening to him.

—Before I met you, I fell in love with his wife, he says slowly. For months I was insane, but then I got tired of it and went back to Rosario. A year later, I met you and I forgot about them. The three of us loved each other a lot, and we went everywhere together, but I didn't want to hear from them again. I'd suffered too much. Eventually, I heard that they'd moved to Bahía Blanca; and then I learned that they'd separated. And last month I went to visit a new client in Rincón, Gutiérrez, who was recommended to me by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and she was there. Apparently, Gutiérrez is her real father, but only the mother knew, and even Gutiérrez himself didn't know about it for thirty years.

Omitting, for understandable reasons, the Wednesday encounter in Paraná, Nula tells her what he remembers. Since Wednesday afternoon he's known that everything between them has moved, definitively, into the past, and because he knows that nothing will ever happen between him and Lucía again, and since what happened on Wednesday wasn't anything more than a separation ceremony, he feels less guilty omitting it—according to the singular logic with which he analyzes his sexual life, ethics are only in question when feelings that might resemble those that he considers exclusive to his relationship with Diana come into play, and that is what happened on Wednesday: for the first time, he felt somewhat guilty toward both women, toward Lucía for having pretended to still love her, and toward Diana, because from Tuesday night at
Gutiérrez's, when Lucía denied knowing him, until he went to bed with her the next day, the feelings seemed real. And now, Riera's call, announcing his arrival to the city, intensifies the suspicion that he'd had on Wednesday afternoon, that Lucía was probably thinking about her ex-husband when she slept with him. And her practically imploring declaration when they said goodbye,
You're my only friend
, loses some of its pathos and takes on a distinct meaning, exempting him, naturally, from any affective obligation, as he grows more certain that the moment he left the house she called Riera to tell him what had happened.

What he remembers: the morning when, coming out of the Siete Colores, he bumped into her and started following her; the incredible coincidence that Lucía walked up to his own house; the mysterious circuit around the block that she made, stopping and examining, with different attitudes, the houses on the four symmetrical points on each of the four streets that formed the block; how he found her for a second time one afternoon at the neighborhood pastry shop and sat down next to her, and how she invited him on a walk and without dissimulating had followed the same route as the time before, stopping at the entrance to Nula's house, at the house around the corner, which was Riera's office, on the cross street around the corner from the office, and finally at the house parallel to the office, which was her own. Nula tells Diana that he was so fascinated by Lucía that, without knowing why, he'd made the same circuit that same night, but in the opposite direction, and even rang the bell at the house on the cross street, and that a boy answered, that afterward he'd passed by Doctor Riera's office, where by that time everything was dark, had peered in, and then had turned the last corner and went inside his own house. He tells her that the next day he went to the office pretending to be sick and had met Doctor Riera for the first time, that Riera had examined him, but that he'd refused to charge him for the
visit, but a while later, that same afternoon, on his way home from doing some lunch shopping for La India he'd seen Riera get out of a double-parked car, cross the sidewalk, and stop at the entrance to the apartments where he and La India lived; Nula had stopped and waited and when he saw him get back in the car and turn the corner slowly he kept walking all the way to the ice cream shop, just in time to see Riera jump out of the car, cross the sidewalk, and enter his office, and so he'd taken the opportunity to walk down the street, noticing when he passed it that Riera's car was still running, and when he reached the next corner had crossed the street and waited there; from where he was standing he could see both streets, the one with the office, where the car had now started to move slowly, and the other one, perpendicular to it, where the mysterious house sat, and where Riera stopped the car, double parked again (his typical method, apparently), crossed the sidewalk, and rang the bell; almost immediately the door opened a crack and Riera carried on an animated conversation with someone inside, invisible to Nula from where he was standing, then reached in, and finally went back to his car, almost at a run, as the slightly open door closed behind him; and Nula followed him (his own typical method, apparently)—Diana laughs somewhat more loudly when he says this—seeing that, as he'd expected, Riera finished the ritual circuit at the front door to his own house.

He would eventually learn that there was nothing strange about any of it, but before this something happened that was so incredible, so dark and singular and at the same time so humiliating and absurd to him, that in the three months that the relationship between the three of them lasted he interpreted it countless different ways, and when he finally thought he'd found the correct one he stopped seeing them, thinking that he'd be able to stop his suffering, though a couple of months later he'd seen them by chance one morning in Rosario, outside a house that, according to a friend
of his, had an abominable reputation, and because knowing this had increased his suffering he'd decided never to see them again; and, eventually, he met Diana, and, as he later learned, Riera and Lucía had moved to Bahía Blanca.