La Grande (10 page)

That summer, Calcagno and Brando had gone to a poetry festival in Necochea, and that trip had given them, him and Leonor, some space. They could see each other at any time of day without their time being limited, as it tended to be otherwise. They were at a point in their relationship when, no matter the subject, their opinions always coincided, something which they noticed every so often, euphorically, always with a renewed sense of astonishment. Gutiérrez still hadn't expressed his feelings in any straightforward way, but the increasing precautions they took not to be seen together revealed, though they didn't seem to realize it, the nature of their intentions.

They went out to a restaurant, a secluded place near the waterfront whose owner Gutiérrez knew. Since it was summer, there
was hardly anyone there; if they weren't on vacation, most people still preferred to eat outdoors, at grill houses or beer gardens, to escape the suffocation of the hot nights. The owner sat them in an annex at the back that only fit a handful of tables, all empty but for theirs. When they were alone, their hands caressed on the table, unselfconscious, almost distractedly, and at one point Gutiérrez had stood and stepped around the table, leaning over to kiss her, just when the owner, who, because he knew him, was serving them himself, came in unexpectedly with something, and pretended not to have seen anything. Soon after that, when Gutiérrez got up to go the bathroom, the owner called him over and told him there was a room behind the restaurant that could be rented by the hour, but that he could have for the whole night and even the next day if he wanted, since it was Sunday and the restaurant would be closed, and that he could stay as long as he wanted since the room was actually separate from the restaurant and had its own entrance through the courtyard, and that he could return the key on Monday morning.

When he returned to the table, Gutiérrez already had the key in his pocket, but he waited a while before asking Leonor to the back room. He was afraid that she'd be angry and that the night would be cut short. He was sure she wouldn't accept, and he'd already decided that if she said no he wouldn't insist—he couldn't bear the idea that Leonor would be offended and stop seeing him—but when he finally suggested it, he was surprised by the open and straightforward way she considered the idea, interrogating him at length about the owner's discretion and not about the intentions that a young law student might have regarding the wife of the professor who'd given him a job as a clerk in his firm. Actually, it was like Leonor hadn't understood that the point of going to the back room was to make love, and simply wanted to clarify the owner's ethics and his discretion, first of all, along with his sense of honor, his
habits, and his family history. After discussing all of these points with Gutiérrez, Leonor seemed satisfied and accepted but said that they should wait until the patrons and two or three employees in the front of the restaurant had left. She would only go to the back room when, with exception of the owner, who would lead them through the dark courtyard and disappear, no one was left in the place but them. So they went on talking as before. About an hour passed, more or less, and the conversation was so animated that for a while Gutiérrez forgot that eventually they'd be going to the back room, and he was almost sorry when the owner interrupted them, around midnight, to lead them first through an old tiled courtyard with a large refrigerator, a covered balcony, and two or three half-open doors, then through a kind of storage room where, in the weak light, wine racks, sacks of flour, several folded chairs and tables, a soda machine, and two or three dozen bottles stacked around it were just visible, and then through another courtyard, with trees and brick path through flowerpots and vegetable beds. Finally, after opening the door to a small room attached to the back wall of the garden, whispering,
The switch is to the left when you go in
, and discreetly taking the money Gutiérrez had already prepared to give him when they reached the room, he disappeared silently into the dark courtyard that they'd just crossed, where the only thing that caught the weak light was the brick gravel path that had led them there.

They went in. At twenty-four, Gutiérrez was still a virgin. When he reached puberty, he'd masturbated just like everyone else, but in boarding school, where he'd been until he was eighteen, he hadn't had either the occasion or the stimuli for it, unlike his classmates, who, despite the vigilance of the faculty, never did without it, alone, in groups, in the bedrooms or the bathrooms. In college, he had to work to pay for his classes (in fact, two years passed before he could produce anything, since all the temporary jobs he found
didn't leave him time to study) and after trying to go to bed with a prostitute a few times and failing, he'd stopped trying. The year before, César Rey, unaware of his virginity, had taken him to a brothel, and he was with one of the girls for a while, to no effect. The girl had gone about her work with complete earnestness for almost a full hour, every so often saying,
It's not getting up, honey, no matter how much I suck it and tug it, it won't get up
, and finally they'd given up and just talked until Rey came looking for him. But Gutiérrez knew he wasn't impotent—prostitutes just didn't turn him on. A few times he'd been with a friend, dancing or caressing her against a tree, in the shadows of a park, in a dark hallway, and his erection and orgasm had come, but that was at a time when women generally didn't sleep with their friends or boyfriends, and they all knew that by letting him rub up against her or put his hand up her shirt, and even helping to masturbate him, letting him finish against her thigh, or, what was less risky, in her hand, they would keep him calm and help him to wait for their wedding night. He was a virgin not because he wanted to stay pure or because he was impotent, but only because he'd never been inside a woman. After a few months had passed since he'd gone out with anyone, he started to think, with a sense of defeat, that he'd been denied the vitality that sex incarnated and that could allow him access to what at the time he called normality and real life.

The opposite was actually happening. That vitality, as he called it, that mythic force that the young seek out, was in fact contained inside him, and had been waiting, with exacting patience, for the chance to manifest itself. That night with Leonor he had five orgasms,
the first two without pulling out
, he thinks whenever he remembers it—not with a sense of pride or self-satisfaction for his virility, but rather with gratitude for something he hadn't realized was his, something that, unlike what happens to so many others, could only be manifested by a particular feeling (later, when the
thing he'd felt during those months had vanished, he would realize that sympathy, admiration, friendship, and even respect, combined with a certain type of physical beauty, could allow him to periodically cash in his backlogged sexual quotas).

The availability of naked bodies produced at once a sense of euphoria and a sort of disbelief—it seemed inconceivable that the two wild animals who explored the most hidden parts of the other's body, not only shamelessly but in fact ecstatically, with ease and dexterity, with their lips, tongues, teeth, hands, fingers, and nails, gladly swallowing and sharing their fluids, who coaxed spasms and agonizing pleasure from each other, who communicated with breaths, murmurs, moans, screams, and insults were the same people who moments before, over a relaxed meal, had described their work, their artistic tastes, their small pleasures, their travels, their childhoods, and who, for months, had barely dared to look at each other, to let their hands touch, allowing themselves, even when they were alone, only polite conversation. Gutiérrez couldn't have imagined the double revelation that what was happening produced: a forgetting of the self and, paradoxically, the sudden awareness of being someone different from who he'd thought. Even now, as he examines the enlargement of her face, despite all her faults and failures, he has to acknowledge his debt to Leonor. For Gutiérrez, the person who could provoke that flood of ecstasy that at once transforms the person who feels it and the world he lives in, as imperfect as she may be, inevitably takes part in that splendor. Still, his continued devotion is directed less to the person than to the capacity, which, by some intricate design in the matrix of events, she, unaware of being a carrier, may have ignored or at least misinterpreted.

They copulated from midnight until the next morning, dozing off, half waking and starting up again, rubbing against each other with violence and tenderness. For the rest of his life, he thought
about what happened that night. It taught him that love is filtered through desire, its own source, and that the parentheses of ferocity in which it traps its victims, who are also its chosen, are built of the illusion that in the wet embedment of their bodies the sense of solitude, which only increases in the act, is momentary extinguished. And it was this illusion that allowed the universe to seem transformed. When they turned on the light to the room, which was modest but clean and neat, they saw that in the bunk bed, the kind you find in certain family homes, there was a doll lying on the pillow, and, next to the bed, a bicycle against the wall. Before undressing, Leonor took the doll from the bed and placed it carefully on a chair. All night, every time his eyes found the doll, Gutiérrez got the feeling that she was looking back at him, and it seemed like in her frozen and at once vivid gaze there was a strange complicity with what was happening. The bicycle, meanwhile, provided him with what he called, mocking himself, as he often did, his
taste of the infinite
. In the subsequent decades he would sometimes get the sense, in the minutes that followed a satisfying sexual experience, that he was still in the room with the bicycle, and that a sort of continuity, or unity, rather, had synthesized his life, merging at once innumerable and fragmentary and disparate experiences that he'd for the most part forgotten. A sensory certainty of permanence, of rootedness on the edge of the ceaseless disintegration of things, of an indestructible, unique present, reconciled him, benevolently, with the world.

Their nakedness, their exhaustion, but also the summer night, the silence that settled in, and the desire that, though it only surfaces sporadically, is by definition infinite, and, like time, whose essence, in a sense, it shares, works unnoticed on those it transforms, brought them to the daybreak, to the morning, to the warm, empty Sunday. Before dawn, in the dark breathlessness of the twilight, a sparrow sang among the trees in the garden, and, with the
first light, the goldfinches came, greeting the sunrise, the new day, with an excited racket that, Gutiérrez now thinks, is as splendid as it is absurd. And he sees himself again, naked in the bed, with Leonor sleeping naked beside him on the white sheet, twisted and soaked in sweat, and he can still hear, thirty-some years later, the clamor of the birds, who've once again forgotten that the same incomprehensible fire had come from the east the previous day, and the day before and the one before that, exhausting the sequence in an intangible past, previous even to memory, and who believe that the radiance that reveals the world and dissolves the darkness is meant for them alone and is happening for the first time, just like someone trapped in the magical halo of desire thinks that the feeling he gets from the rough touch of rough flesh is being manifested, finally, for the first time since the world began.

Of course, Leonor came to his house several times after that night; of course they happily made love again and again; of course they decided to run off to Buenos Aires or Europe or wherever; of course Gutiérrez arranged everything and of course Leonor changed her mind at the last second, choosing to stay with her husband, who heard the portion of the story, described as a strong mutual attraction, that, of course, did not include what they actually did. Of course, when he found out, Gutiérrez, who drank almost no alcohol at the time, got drunk and went looking for a whore to sleep with; of course, as usual, despite the girl's best efforts, she couldn't put him in the right condition. He woke up in an alley, lying in mud, his body aching and bruised. The next day he got on a bus to Buenos Aires, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, disappeared from the city for more than thirty years.

WEDNESDAY

THE FOUR CORNERS

FOR THEM TO MEET, SEVERAL THINGS HAD TO COINCIDE,
a few of which, for their importance, are worth mentioning: first, that an inconceivable singularity led, because of the impossible density of a single particle, to an explosion whose shock wave—which, incidentally, continues expanding to this day—dispersed time and igneous matter into the void, and that this matter, cooling slowly and congealing in the process, according to the rotation and displacement caused by the primitive explosion and owing to a complex gravitational phenomenon, formed what for lack of a better word we call
the solar system
; that a phenomenon which owing to an utter impossibility of definition we simply call
life
appeared on one of the variously sized orbs that comprise it, that orb we now call
the Earth
, cooling and hardening as it rotated around a giant star, also a product of said explosion and which we call
the Sun
; and finally, that one September afternoon Lucía walked past the corner of Mendoza and San Martín—where the Siete Colores bar now
occupies the spot that for years belonged to the Gran Doria—at the exact moment when Nula (who, after finishing his coffee, had been detained for a few seconds by a guy who shouted something from his table about a Public Law textbook) walked out onto San Martín and looked up, seeing her, dressed in red, through the crowd on the bright avenue.

Nula was almost twenty-four. Eighteen months before, the previous March, he'd decided to quit medical school and enroll in a philosophy program, where he studied the pre-Socratics and some classical languages and dabbled in German, intending to read Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, but he felt too isolated in Rosario, where, because he didn't work, it was extremely difficult to get by, and so he came back to the city often, to his mother's house (his older brother, a dentist, was already married), where he could get room and board in exchange for occasional work and very little nagging. Medicine, he'd explained to his mother, could only be studied in Rosario, or in Córdoba or Buenos Aires, but with philosophy no particular establishment or diploma were necessary. For a philosopher, any place in the world, however insignificant it might seem, was, according to Nula (and many others before him, in fact), as good as any other.