La Grande (54 page)

He's overcome by a kind of ephemeral rage, of indignation possibly, against the whole universe, against the red disc that now begins to dip into the horizon, condensing the shadow inside the bus. But almost immediately he calms down. He doesn't think about anything. Now, as the horizon swallows the red disc more and more quickly, the night, rising from the east, submerges the plain. At around eight thirty he'll be at home, and in order to rest from the long day, the early morning trip, the walk with Alicia along the downtown streets, the return trip, and wake up refreshed and ready for the Sunday at Gutiérrez's—as long as it isn't raining in the morning—he'll get into bed with a book at around ten and will try to get to sleep early. With any luck, his sister will have cut up some slices of the second cylinder of delicious mummified meat, the local chorizo that Nula gave him the other day. He's safely guaranteed the luxury of death, Tomatis thinks, ironically, all he has to do is keep on living. In the waning, reddish splendor, erased by the growing shadow of the bus, he checks the contents of the briefcase to make sure he has everything and then closes it after pulling out the
alfajor
and dropping it into his coat pocket, in order to give it, along with some coins, as he usually does, to one of the kids begging at the entrance to the terminal, near the taxi stand.

Where the circle was there's now a red stain spread across the horizon, and the entire plain is black except, here and there, in the puddles, in the marshes, in the lakes, there's an equally red surface that, with a bit of imagination, could seem to be the sun, which has disappeared, tinting the water from below, from the antipodes. But in fact it's the unpredictable trajectory of the light
that, from the horizon, lingers on whatever surface will reflect it, resisting the invasion of the night. As the minutes pass, the red stain contracts, like a wound that closes little by little, leaving only the final bloody fissures, until finally the even blackness covers the entire space, and the diverse shapes that the world assumes are erased completely, deconstructed by the smooth, abstract, uninterrupted blackness. Artificial lights restore them at moments, in vivid, fragmentary, and fleeting bursts of reality into which, almost immediately after lighting up, improbably, they dissolve. The vehicles coming in the opposite direction are just as phantasmal, and their headlights sweep across the shadow of the bus as they pass, allowing him to see, for a few seconds, the motionless or swaying heads that extend beyond the upper edge of the seats, the grandmother's, Tomatis remembers, though the grandson's is invisible just now, the middle-aged couple who, judging by the labels hanging from their suitcases that he saw on the platform before they were loaded, seem to be returning from a long trip. At the last toll, before the exit for the airport, the bus was forced to slow down and stop, reintroducing, for several moments, the rough present that, when the bus starts to move again, accelerating, is left irrevocably behind, circulating endlessly in a past ever more archaic and distant until it finally drifts into the night of time. Soon, in the distance, the lights of the city will be visible. Abandoning the highway, the bus drives into the suburbs of Santo Tomé. From his seat on the upper deck, Tomatis looks down on the poor houses of the outskirts, as if the night, the melancholy streetlights, and the poverty especially, miniaturized them. But when they reach the center of Santo Tomé—several houses, occupied or empty, display the ubiquitous sign
ANOTHER MORO PROPERTY FOR SALE
—he notices its liveliness: the bars, which are still empty, have set up tables on the sidewalks, and many stores, groceries, bakeries, ice cream shops, and even offices still have their doors open and their
shop windows illuminated. The fever of the hot night is visible on people's clothes and faces, but some kids, recently showered and changed for the Saturday night, talk and laugh on the corners, or walk in groups along the main street.
Though they seem to still be ignorant of it, and though some of them may pretend not to know it, every one of them already bears that crushing, agonizing burden. For now they move, healthy and careless, through the quiet of the evening, confusing their desires and their dreams with the unexamined reasons for their existence. They think they exist for themselves, but all they are is bait, tempting the thing that makes them exist. They think they're displaying themselves, but what they don't know is that they're being displayed by the archaic design that brings them to the world, gives them an attractive shape, and then, without cruelty or compassion, casts them into the abyss.
The bus leaves Santo Tomé and turns onto the road bridge over the two branches of the Salado, glowing briefly under the lights of the bridge before it disappears. The city is on the other side. Tomatis sees its lights, unfolding in long rows of brilliant points, and imagines himself coming off the bridge, entering the avenues, arriving at the terminal. The anticipated exhaustion of the return suddenly overcomes him, and his home becomes a place at once strange and familiar, immediate and remote, where the living carry the dead on their shoulders, only liberated of the burden by their own death, and so on until the end of time, which is not at all infinite, but rather condemned to end with the final exhalation of the last human breath.

SUNDAY

THE HUMMINGBIRD

THE FIRST TWO WITHOUT PULLING OUT!
GUTIÉRREZ THINKS
at the moment he wakes up, even though more than thirty years have passed since that summer morning, so similar to the one in which he's just opened his eyes, when he slept with Leonor naked at his side for the first and last time, because every other time they saw each other it was always in the afternoon, the appropriate time of day of adultery. But there's no virile pride or arrogance in the thought, only incredulous happiness, retrospective excitement, gratitude. Ever since that distant, scorching Sunday, somewhat unreal because of the excessive heat, the multiplicity of sensations up till then unknown to him, the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, until that peaceful April morning, almost as hot as the first, Gutiérrez has been convinced that his life began that night and ended a few weeks later, when he took the bus to Buenos Aires and disappeared from the city. He thinks he owes this to Leonor, and is prepared to pay that infinite debt forever:
You get seventy years for a few hours, a
few minutes, of life, and then there's nothing to do with the rest; it's just killing time.

After spending a while in the bathroom, shaving, defecating, taking a warm, meticulous shower, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, dressing—underwear, a white undershirt, dark blue pants, sandals—and getting the thermos and the
mate
in the kitchen and eating a few buttered buns that Amalia picked up at the bakery, Gutiérrez is walking from the kitchen to the courtyard, and moving away from the pavilion, and beyond the swimming pool, stepping off the white slab path that leads from the house to the pool—believing he would move in to that house after retiring from his many activities, Doctor Russo thought big—he steps onto the stretch of lawn that, still wet from the dew, dampens his feet through the opening of the sandals, producing, in the warm morning, a delicious sensation. At a distance, Faustino leans attentively over a hibiscus, possibly searching for dry branches or flowers, withered during the night, to prune.

Gutiérrez empties the gourd in two or three energetic pulls through the straw and falls still. The entire lawn around him is covered in multicolored drops into which the morning light decomposes. That immense, unique, often colorless substance that is incessantly scattered over even the most remote corner of the visible world rests at his feet now in a shimmer of yellow, green, orange, red, blue, and indigo drops that, if he moves his head slightly as he looks at them, seem animated, change color, grow more luminous, emitting iridescent sparks. The humidity of the night, condensing in the morning cold, was deposited into colorless drops over the green leaves of grass, and now the sun has risen to a certain height, a precise location in the sky, and its rays, striking the drops at a certain angle and at no other, refract into a manifold iridescence,
as if a rainbow had exploded and its splinters continued to shine around him, tiny and multiplied, on the wet ground. This intimate, domestic enchantment gives way to a momentary and fragmented sensation, an abstract certainty about the common essence that circulates among every part of the whole, connecting them to each other and to everything else, and the at once astonished and estranged impression of always being somewhere larger than where our systems of habit mistakenly accustom us to believing we are. Gutiérrez takes two or three steps and stops at a spot where the grass is somewhat higher, and when, after having stepped on the leaves, separating them, his feet are once again motionless, they close over his sandals once again, causing them to disappear into a kind of cave of green grass in which, every time he moves, sparkling iridescently, a reflective surface of multicolored drops shimmers.

Yesterday morning at around nine, Amalia had come in to tell him that there was a man looking for him. It was Escalante. He was passing by to let him know that he wouldn't be coming to the cookout after all.

—I figured you were here for the flashlight, Gutiérrez said, laughing.

—The flashlight?

—The one that Chacho loaned us when we went looking for you at the club.

And he went into the kitchen and returned to the courtyard with it.

—Thanks, Escalante said, and for a moment neither one knew what to say.

—I knew you wouldn't come to the cookout, Gutiérrez says finally. But I never thought you were so sensitive that you'd come tell me the day before.

They started walking slowly around the courtyard, stopping every so often for no apparent reason, shooting the breeze, with
ironic indolence but also with long intervals of silence that were no longer uncomfortable. They didn't talk about their mutual past, but rather seemed to include it, tacitly, in the present. It was obvious that, unlike so many others, including Gutiérrez, Escalante was impervious to nostalgia. A few months before, Rosemberg, somewhat maliciously, had said,
It's hard for Sergio to admit his altruism and it horrifies him that others might speculate about his thoughts and feelings. And on top of that he has a personal ethic that no force in the world could deviate even a millimeter.

It was strange to see them walking around the courtyard, especially Escalante, carrying an enormous flashlight that early in the bright morning. Gutiérrez pointed it out:
You're like Diogenes the Cynic
, he said,
always looking for someone
. Escalante laughed and was about to bring his hand shyly to his lips to hide his ravaged teeth, but he stopped himself, possibly remembering what had happened the previous Tuesday at the fish and game club, when Gutiérrez took out his false teeth to show him that he had nothing to be ashamed of. It may have been that gesture, and not their past friendship, that had inspired the gift of the two fresh rather than frozen fish; the same gesture that confused Nula so much seemed to have an unmistakable significance for Escalante.

Gutiérrez walked him to the asphalt road, and they stood a while longer without crossing. People looked at them curiously, but they didn't notice. Every so often, Escalante would greet, not altogether demonstratively, an acquaintance passing in a car or a bus, or on foot or on horseback. They seemed used to his distracted laconism, in fact they seemed to consider it admirable.

The first to arrive, just after eleven and even before “the family,” real or imaginary, are Clara and Marcos Rosemberg. They've brought two enormous
alfajores
, made, according to Marcos, that same morning. Amalia picks them up from the pavilion table and
takes them to the kitchen, where they'll stay fresher. Clara and Marcos go into the house and soon return in their bathing suits and sit down in the sun, in the lounge chairs (Faustino unfolded three others around the pool, and the bright colors of the canvas reverberate in the sun), and a few minutes later Gutiérrez comes out of the house, dressed only in shorts and clogs, and sits down to talk with them alongside the large, rectangular pool in which the water, apparently motionless because no breeze is blowing, but in reality an unstable, constantly churning mass, sparkles. Not surprisingly, the first topic of conversation is the visit that Sergio Escalante paid him yesterday. Marcos considers it surprising, but Clara only smiles vaguely, or, better yet, only expands the vague and rather absent smile that, for years, whenever she's in public, she wears constantly. Her sixty-three years, though they've deeply marked the lines on her face and have partially grayed her blonde hair, haven't managed to thicken her youthful silhouette, her thin but well-shaped limbs, her flat stomach, her delicate, subtle breasts. César Rey, Marcos's best friend, while he was her lover (the only one Clara had in her life), called her
Flaca
, which is to say, Skinny. The two of them lived together in Buenos Aires for several months, but one day, El Chiche Rey drunkenly fell, or threw himself, under a train, and she came back to the city and to Marcos. They had a second son, and now devote themselves, with punctilious affection, to their grandchildren. Marcos vibrates with politics, and Clara, who before she was thirty intensely but contradictorily loved two men simultaneously, passes through life distant but friendly, smiling and calm, without anyone, anyone at all, not even Marcos, who trusts her completely, managing to know what she's really thinking. Her conversation is at once pleasant and evanescent, so much so that it can sometimes seem disjointed and even mysterious. Often what she says sounds like an intimate thought spoken aloud, as though it had escaped her. And her sense of humor is subtle but cryptic; most of the time
only her own smile, and not her interlocutor's, widens. As he talks to Marcos, Gutiérrez observes her discreetly every so often: after two or three minutes, she detaches from the conversation. And suddenly, without losing her vague smile or her calm movements, she stands up slowly and, taking a few steps during which she rearranges her adolescent breasts within the top of the two-piece bathing suit of rough fabric, stops at the edge of the pool, and after a short hesitation, dives in loudly. Marcos and Gutiérrez stop speaking and watch her: emerging from the bottom, after a few seconds of blindness, she opens her eyes and shakes her head a few times; the water, altered by the dive, trembles around her, and as though she's trying to calm it, Clara falls still. Only her head and part of her shoulders rise above the water; the rest of her body remains submerged. To keep herself afloat in the deep section of the pool, without moving, Clara slowly waves her arms and legs, or better yet, what only at moments appears to have the shape of arms and legs, because the submerged portion of her body seems to have transformed into a series of shapeless, unstable blotches which the majority of the time don't even resemble human forms, shaking as what they appear to be: exaggeratedly pale, disconnected, fragmentary shapes.