La Grande (60 page)

Gabi, Soldi, and José Carlos, sensing some movement around the pool, stand up and walk to the front part of the house. They've seen Violeta and Tomatis, who for a while now have been taking a siesta, resting in the shade of the trees not far from the bench where the three of them have been sitting, do the same. They've been discussing a little of everything, politics, economics, literature, in particular the local avant-garde, which has occupied Soldi and Gabriela's time for months, but also the personality of the owner of the house, his not at all ordinary life, his mysterious past, his tact, and his slight eccentricity had filled a good part of the conversation. All three agree that there's something elusive about him, and that in some of his apparently inconsequential actions there's nevertheless something deliberate, an effort to show things in a different light. His elusiveness, Soldi has said, is definitely a result of that tacit exercise. It's like he's trying to say something, but without words, and that's what feels disturbing. The three of them also wonder about the unique relationship that Gutiérrez has with Leonor and Lucía Calcagno, but out of discretion none of them comment on it. The arrival of Leonor, whom none of them had ever seen, surprised them, but what was immediately obvious wasn't mentioned by any of them: she and Gutiérrez couldn't have been more different, and it seemed impossible that they could ever understand each other or even maintain a conversation, and yet he left everything he had in Europe to move into that house, near her, and had accepted the idea that Lucía was really his daughter without demanding any serious proof of it. Of course, when they were alone, Gabriela and José Carlos would talk about it, and she and Soldi would bring it up as soon as they saw each other again, but doing so in Gutiérrez's
own house seemed, to all three of them, though they never discussed it, sordid and disloyal.

When they reach the area between the pavilion and the pool, they realize that almost everyone is there: Nula, Diana, and Marcos are sitting in adjoining lounge chairs; Diana, Soldi observes without saying anything, is sitting in the yellow one; Faustino arrives from the front of the house, carelessly shaking his clothes, because he's been lying on the ground, in the shade of the trees out front, taking a siesta; Clara, Violeta, and Tomatis are talking in the sun, standing on the white slab path that leads from the house to the pool and the pavilion; Riera swims noisily through the rectangle of blue water; and Amalia takes in, politely but without too much interest, from the doorway to the room attached to the pavilion, the tableau vivant that they seem to represent:
Sunday in the country: Afternoon
. When he arrives, Faustino deviates slightly from his path and walks up next to her. Amalia, seeing him, notices that he still has some branches and blades of grass sticking to his shirt and pants, and she brushes them off, passing an expert hand over her husband's back and buttocks. Riera starts to climb slowly up the metal ladder in the shallow end and steps out of the pool, shaking water, concentrating, absent from his surroundings, like an animal passing from one element to another, adapting to the change, not realizing that everyone present is looking at and perhaps admiring him, the forty-year-old man without a single gray hair or a single wrinkle, tall, without a belly, his damp hair sticking to the tanned skin of his arms and legs and chest. Surfacing from his animal self-absorption, he notices the others' gazes and brandishes, without an ounce of affectation, the wide and slightly degenerate smile that, as paradoxically as it may seem, awakens the immediate sympathy of both men and women, so much so that, because of his inexhaustible energy, his frank and open amorality, several women he tossed aside still talk about him with a tolerant smile, and a few husbands
whose wives he seduced, or, in his own words,
corrupted
, are still his friends today. Hesitant, unsure what to do, he finally decides to sit down in one of the unoccupied lounge chairs on the other side of the pool, immediately across from the ones occupied by Diana, Nula, and Marcos. Almost at that exact moment, dressed to leave, carrying a bag in her hand, Lucía comes out of the house followed by her mother and Gutiérrez. Seeing her walk out, the three guests who occupy the adjoining lounge chairs stand up simultaneously, but Riera continues sitting; because Lucía has given him a conspiratorial gesture, Nula gathers that he's preferred to remain sitting so as to not have to run into his mother-in-law. Lucía begins her circuit of goodbye kisses with Diana, marking her fondness with a few caresses and pats on her naked back, then Marcos, and finally Nula, an extremely fleeting brush against his cheek, as if her lips had rebounded when they touched it. Looking around, Lucía decides to move on to the door of the utility shed, and gives Amalia a kiss and Faustino a handshake; she crosses under the empty pavilion and approaches the two groups of three: José Carlos, Soldi, and Gabriela, and on the other side of the pool, standing on the white slab path, Clara, Violeta, and Tomatis, whom she avoided a moment ago when she turned toward Diana. Once the round of kisses is finished, Lucía walks toward Leonor and Gutiérrez, who wait for her near the door. Gutiérrez pats her affectionately on the shoulder and, waiting for Leonor to give a general farewell to the group, consisting of an imperceptible smile and a slight movement of her head, accompanies them to the white gate, but after taking two steps he stops suddenly, causing the two women with him to do the same, and pointing toward the middle of the front courtyard at a flowering bush, lowering his voice, but not so much that they can't hear him, and then moving his extended index finger and placing it vertically against his lips to urge them to be silent, he says:

—Look. The hummingbird.

Everyone stops speaking and turns their heads toward the yellow-flowered bush; even Riera, who had been sitting with his back to that section of the courtyard, twists around and looks: flapping continuously, the bird's tiny body hovers in the air in front of a yellow flower while its beak is inserted into it. Its vertiginous flapping creates a doubly surprising effect, in contrast with the utter stillness of the courtyard, the trees, the lawn, the blue water in the pool, now that no body or breeze disturbs it, and in particular of the human figures, frozen in various positions, their gaze directed at the yellow bush and the tiny body frantically shaking its wings to neutralize the force of gravity. The people, alive as of a few seconds and now transformed into petrified effigies of themselves, the garden, and the house with all its rooms, and what is beyond its limits, streets, paths, towns, rivers, cities, the world, which issue no sound, no movement, are like an elaborate backdrop, worthy of the legendary magic of the hummingbird, which appears suddenly, with the regularity of the constellations, in their gardens and disappears again just as quickly, like a mirage or a vision. The totality of the world seems to be concentrated, for several minutes, in one of its parts, winged and bright, and yet, despite its fame, all of the energy that it draws with its beak from the yellow flower is consumed at the very moment it's obtained because of the exhausting flapping with which it fights against the terrestrial pull. The curious stillness of the bipeds who have conquered verticality nevertheless contains an element of cruelty, as they delight, from their comfortable position on the ground with their vigorous feet and legs, in the beauty of the spectacle. As indifferent to the pain of others, Tomatis thinks, as the Roman masses, which included the emperor, before the portentous blood of the gladiators and the martyrs. But the desperate effort of its wings and the eagerness with which its beak enters and exits the yellow flower give that beauty a tragic element that overcomes its decorative futility.

As though its movements were discontinuous, their trajectory escaping the human eye, the bird moves from flower to flower without needing to obey the laws of space to do so, or as though it had been allowed to travel by means of sudden temporal cuts as compensation for the entropy produced by its constant flapping, until, suddenly, it shoots up into the sky and disappears among the trees. The statues into which its admirers had been transformed take on life again, once again endowed with movement, with the gift of speech, of laughter, of surprise. They seem to congratulate each other for the fleeting apparition—already an image of dubious reality in their memories—that they've just seen. Gutiérrez tells his guests:

—He appeared earlier than usual today.

—Because a storm is coming, Tomatis says.

Faustino concurs with an affirmative gesture of his head, after which the visitors from the city, through the silent confirmation of a representative of the rural zone, allow themselves to take Tomatis's sententious assertion seriously, knowing that his taste for parody, for comic effect, for witty retorts, which have become a kind of second nature for him, are by now so intrinsic that sometimes not even he himself seems to have access to the less predictable corners of his infinite internal jungle.

At around six, though it was still sunny, and, at least from the courtyard, not a single cloud was visible in the blue sky, the sound of distant thunder could be heard, and because Amalia and Faustino had to leave, Gutiérrez offered to take them, but he insisted that his guests wait for him to return. Shortly before, Soldi had taken José Carlos and Gabriela to the city, because José Carlos was returning to Rosario that night and Gabriela had decided to go with him. Now, when the sound of Gutiérrez's car can no longer be heard, his guests have gathered around (or inside) the swimming
pool, waiting for the storm. And yet, apart from the thunder, which gives no indication of approaching, there's no other sign of it: the afternoon is sunny and peaceful, and there's no breeze at all. None among the people remaining in the courtyard seem at all worried about the development of the weather. The three couples plus Riera have scattered as a result of their conversations and their movements in the following way: Tomatis and Clara Rosemberg sit on the lawn, talking, in the shade projected at that hour by the house over a section of the courtyard; Riera and Violeta are playing in the water, and Diana is showing Marcos her sketch pad. Only Nula is alone, at a distance: he's resting in the shade, in the same chair that, after lunch, Gutiérrez set up for Diana under an umbrella. Though he can see the courtyard, the pavilion, the pool, and can see or hear the others splashing in the water, it's as though, as he thinks about Gutiérrez, he's become absent:
You'd have to include the relationship he has with his employees, even more mysterious because they actually didn't meet that long ago, and yet there seems to be a certain familiarity, if not complicity, between them. It's as though practical matters were also of secondary relevance in that relationship, and he applies the same elusive standards with them as he does for everything else.

He pulls his cell phone from the straw bag on the ground, under the pavilion, rummaging briefly among the clothes, the pencil case, some things of Diana's, and then, looking hesitantly around, walks to the white gate, dialing La India's number as he crosses the courtyard and stopping in front of the gate when she answers.

—It's your favorite son, Nula says when he hears his mother's voice.

—I don't have a favorite son, La India says. But I do have some adorable grandchildren. All four are here, because your brother and sister-in-law went to watch the
Clásico
at seven and then they're coming for dinner.

—So it would be okay if we came by for them a little later than planned? Nula says, aware that the question is actually a rhetorical one for which the response he expects isn't long in coming:

—It would take much longer than a single Sunday for me to educate them properly.

—Despite what a disaster I turned out to be?

—You didn't turn out that badly, La India says. And, after a short pause: And to what do we owe the delay?

—Because it's going to storm, our host, who is a very friendly man, took the gardener and the cook home so they don't get rained on, and he asked us to wait for him so we can have a drink before we go, Nula says. And Diana is showing her sketches to a senator. The house is magnificent; it has an amazing courtyard and pool. He'd make a good match for you,
mamá
.

—If I wanted a boyfriend I'd find one for myself, La India says, laughing intensely.

—Admit that you like the idea, Nula says. So, we could come by later than we thought?

—Get here whenever you want, La India says. The less contact my grandchildren have with their perverse father, the better off they'll be.

—You're a rock, India. I'm sending you a big kiss.

—And I'm dodging it, La India says. Goodbye.

She hangs up. Nula stops moving, thinking, next to the white gate posts, tapping the now disconnected cell phone softly against the palm of his right hand. Finally he decides, opens the gate, and goes out into the street. The cars, shaded by the large trees, seem somewhat more dusty than when they arrived from the city late that morning. Nula travels the few meters that separate him from the corner, and, stopping at the intersection, he looks two blocks down, at the asphalt road, on which, toward the city, numerous
cars are driving, most of them returning from a weekend or a Sunday in the country, but there are also a few trucks, loaded with fans waving the flags of the clubs that will shortly battle over the
Clásico
. Nula disregards the cars and his gaze shifts toward the embankment where, three days before, during the Thursday siesta, he talked a while between cars with Soldi and Gabriela Barco. The weather had been good that day: for the first time in several days the sky was very blue, and there were immense, incredibly white, and apparently motionless clouds scattered among sections of open sky, but by Friday morning they had already disappeared. Nula takes a few steps along the sandy ground in the direction of the road, scanning the sky to the southeast; if there's a storm, it's sure to come from that direction: and he can just make out, beyond some tall trees, on the river side, the tips of dark clouds from which seem to come, precipitous and fleeting, numerous lightning bolts, along with the thunder that they engender, more sharp, prolonged, and audible than the weak spark of the distant flashes.
If the wind picks up, it'll be on top of us before long
, Nula thinks, and as he thinks this he watches the movement of the trees behind which the clouds are gathering. He turns around slowly and, after traveling the meters of street that separate him from it, pushes the gate open and enters the courtyard, closing it behind him. He can now see that Tomatis, Clara, Marcos, and Diana have gathered in the middle of the courtyard, standing, enthusiastically discussing the sketchbook. As he walks up to them, Marcos is saying: