La Grande (12 page)

His grandfather was one of those assimilated “Turks” who, if he dressed like a farmer or a horseman and didn't open his mouth, with his straight black hair, his tightly clipped beard, and his skin toasted by life in the open air, could pass, among strangers, as a gaucho or a farm hand from the area, or one of those
santiagueños
who, in the thirties and forties, came en masse from the villages on the plain to harvest corn. And even when he spoke he didn't have much of a foreign accent: he'd learned Spanish well, with the exception of four or five hitches that his vocal organs probably couldn't adapt to, and which betrayed his origins. He was anticonservative, a yrigoyenista, and a
bitter
antiperonist (that was the epithet he used), and he liked to recall how, during the coup in 1930, a drunk gaucho had ridden horseback into the store, and he'd taken his revolver from the counter drawer and unhooked his riding crop from the wall, and hitting the horse with the crop, had backed him into the middle of the street. And yet he read
La Nación
and
La Capital
, and every month received
Selections from Reader's Digest
. He dressed in three different ways to fulfill his three main
roles: for his work in the fields, where he had a few cows; for his general store, where he sold everything from
yerba mate
to freezers and at one point even cars, and of course clothes, fabric, paint, and what have you; and finally for his trips to Rosario, for business, family matters, or social occasions like weddings, baptisms, wakes, or parties at the Syrio-Lebanese club. In the sixties, he had a truck for the fields and around town, and a car for longer trips. Nula remembered hearing, without understanding completely because he was still too young and his parents only hinted at it, that after he was widowed he'd taken up with a mysterious lover in Rosario. Laila and Maria, his two daughters, wouldn't have tolerated that kind of behavior in the village. When Nula was older, La India told him that his father had spotted Yusef once in Rosario, and that his grandfather, who was with his lover, had pretended not to see him, but in any case the relationship between the father and the son had already fallen apart by then. In terms of religion, his grandfather considered himself a fervent
Apostolic Roman Catholic
, which might have been an implicit way of underscoring his superiority, not over the Jews, of whom he seemed unaware (although, when he played truco he always teamed up with Feldman, the pharmacist, who was one), nor over the Muslims, whom he loathed, but rather over the Maronites and the Orthodoxists, who seemed more skittish than true heretics to him, preferring those extravagant variants despite having recourse to the Roman Church. He attended mass every Sunday and took communion every so often, and if the priest came by for something for himself or for one of the poor people in the village, he didn't charge him, but he didn't like knowing he played cards on Saturday night and would keep from going to those games so he wouldn't have to see it.

They brought his son back to the village to bury, near his mother and an older brother who'd only lived a couple of weeks and who, as was the custom then, had the same name. At first, La
India had objected, because she'd planned to cremate him and scatter the ashes, but then she thought it would be better to leave him near his father, to see if the proximity, after the incommensurable separation, could reconcile them. She was left with, as she would often say to her sons in her colorful way,
the perfect picnic before the storm
. They had killed him in a pizzeria in Boulogne, near the Pan-American highway, and La India passed through the village to drop off the boys and pick up their grandfather on her way to Buenos Aires. The police interrogated them for a full day before releasing the corpse, and at the end of the interrogation a clerk read them the section of the report that referred to the event itself. He'd apparently set a meeting one night, for nine o'clock, but he'd arrived well before that and had changed tables twice. According to witnesses, at ten of nine a car parked outside the door. Three men were inside; the one who was sitting in the passenger seat got out and stood on the sidewalk, leaning against the open door to the car, which was still running. The waiter at the pizzeria said that when his father saw them he stood up too, reaching his hand into his jacket to get his gun ready, not looking away, but the man who took the shot had already been in the pizzeria for a while, drinking a beer at a table behind him and pretending to watch a sports program on the television, waiting for the car that would pick him up after the execution; he shot him four times in the back, shot him again where he'd fallen, and, according to the waiter, ran out and got in the back seat of the car, where someone had already opened the door from the inside, while the guy who'd gotten out of the car sat down again next to the driver, who'd pulled away at full speed, barely giving the others time to close their doors. After La India and her father-in-law were given permission to take the body from the hospital and had seen it to the funeral home's van to take back to the village, they decided to pass by the pizzeria. It was a winter dusk; an icy rose stained the sky opposite the west,
where the sun had almost disappeared behind a bank of clouds darkened by their own shadows, projected by the back light. In the empty pizzeria, the lights and the television were already on. They spoke with the waiter and the owner; when he realized who they were, the cook, who'd been kneading dough near the oven, put down his work, and without opening his mouth once, approached to listen. The owner didn't seem too happy that they'd come—he must have thought the visit could be compromising—but the waiter, who'd tried to help him, and who seemed truly affected by what had happened, showed them the spot where he'd fallen and tried to console them by saying that he'd died immediately, almost without realizing what was happening. He followed them to the door. Before they left, the grandfather put a few bills in his hand, which he ended up accepting after a brief but sincere resistance. They went back out to the street, onto that anonymous corner of the tortuous outskirts of Buenos Aires, with its little houses of unplastered brick, its cheapjack markets, its narrow, musty courtyards, its small shops and supermarkets, its loud furniture, its gardens, its shanty towns, its warehouses and its factories, its toothless girls, its old mestizos loaded with plastic bags, its vendors from Santa Fe, selling pills and candy, newspapers and soft drinks, at the bus terminals to Córdoba, to Rosario, to Resistencia, to Catamarca, to Paso de los Libres, or to Asunción. In the infinite solitude of the icy dusk the otherness of the world turned more oppressive and enigmatic among the masses that seemed to dissolve, lost, into the darkness.

They arrived in the village at dawn, almost at the same time as the van. They held the wake without even opening the casket, and buried him that same afternoon. Many people came to the cemetery, friends and acquaintances from the village or from neighboring towns: Italian or Spanish farmers who were clients at the store, old Arabs who owned or had owned stores in the surrounding
towns, childhood friends of the deceased who'd gone with him to primary school and who'd stopped at that level, staying in the village, because the others, the ones who'd pursued higher studies, with the exception of the notary and the veterinarian maybe, were scattered around the world. The grandfather's priest friend had been dead for some time, so a young priest gave the mass. La India was about to object to a religious ceremony, but then thought that, having decided to return him to his father, she had to abide by the rules implicit in that choice, and that, in the end, death, which erased so many superfluous things, did so with disputes over religion too, but mostly because while for most of his life the dead man had thought he'd freed himself from it, at his burial, apart from her and his two sons, who were in a sense the only foreigners there, it was clear that the small world he'd escaped was now reclaiming him. His death had wiped away the inconstancy of the inextricable external world, and it was the unyielding procession of his childhood that now accompanied him to the tomb. The turmoil he'd submerged himself into, intending to give it a new order and sense, ended up forcing his return to that preconscious place where, in the shelter of history, in the territory of emotional and sensory immediacy, things were as they seemed despite this or that resistant opacity, which his adult years, with absolute certainty, would reveal. For the grandfather, however, the opposite occurred: his naïveté when he'd left his neighborhood in Damascus at fifteen to conquer the world had allowed him to face, lucidly, everything he'd found himself entangled in, making, at each opportunity, the decisions that seemed most just and which no doubt were, because their succession had brought him steadily closer to what he was seeking. He'd left his family—the mother and sisters with whom he still corresponded regularly at that time, exchanging gifts, like the edible sawdust
zatar
, and the brothers who'd moved to Colombia and Mexico—had left
the oldest city in the world
, as he liked to say,
with childish pride, when referring to Damascus, and then had crossed the ocean and a good portion of the plains in order to settle in a little village on the banks of the Carcarañá, and, with the little his uncle left him when he left for Rosario after the shooting, had started a family and managed to make a small fortune, nothing exceptional, but enough for himself and for each of the millions of poor bastards who crossed the ocean from Genoa, from Galicia, from Marseille, and even from Dakar and from Tripoli; who came from Spain and from Italy, from Syria and from Lebanon, but also from Portugal, from Morocco, from central Europe, from Serbia or Belarus, from Ireland or from Japan, fleeing from oppression, from war, from pogroms, from the Ottoman Empire, from the secret police, from political or religious persecution, from hunger, from poverty, from their destiny. They scattered across the plains, where new ravages awaited them—violence, xenophobia, exploitation, mysterious illnesses, an early grave in a foreign land—and ended up gathering together on land parsed out by the government, eight square blocks that bordered the railroad, which they called a town and named after the first person to arrive, or whatever name he chose, often the name of a woman, thus marking the end of their epic wandering and the start of their sedentary, agrarian life. Yusef, his grandfather, was among these millions of men, and it hadn't gone too poorly for him, owing to a few personality traits that popular magazines call ambition, tenacity, rational self-interest, intuition, cunning, perseverance, and so on, and so on, and which they use to explain
a posteriori
the unfathomable crisscrossing of accidents that determine, from the forms that the fugitive—and by chance purely imaginary—evidence assumes in the dark matrix of any event, the thing they call destiny.

In any case, his grandfather had survived that adventure with total certitude of its objective necessity; if he'd had doubts, they were only the practical kind. And when it seemed he'd reached
the climax of his ambitions, reality, which often resists an obedience to desire, pulled him, through the conflict with his son, from the legible and linear world he'd made, and submerged him in murky contradictions of an unaccustomed type. What had been clear became tortuous, incomprehensible. The value of sensations and events began to escape him. With the death of his wife, who was younger than him, he'd already intuited that the logic of the world could be cut off or obstructed at times by unexpected clotting; with that of his son, it was the natural order of the universe, which he'd always believed in, that had been disarranged. Over the few years he survived after his son's death, the world, corroded by his unanswered questions, crumbled little by little into chaotic fragments. Within weeks after the burial, his straight, stiff, black hair and neat black beard, which to strangers marked him as an old
criollo
, turned completely white. A year later they found several tumors of a cancer that the doctors never managed to pinpoint. They operated in Rosario, and when he recovered after his first treatment his daughters convinced him to go to Damascus to see his mother, who was over ninety years old, but a couple of weeks before the trip he received news that she'd died. He bought a death notice in
La Capital
, with a photo he'd gotten two or three years before, compensating for his son's hasty and somewhat shameful burial, and asked the young priest—whom he no longer charged when his servant came by for something—for a mass, which many people attended, of course the Arabs from Rosario and the surrounding towns, many of whom, it goes without saying, were Orthodox or Maronite, the Jewish pharmacist, the Italian and Spanish farmers, clients, friends of his daughters and his son-in-law, Enzo's family, and, of course, Nula, who was already shaving by then, with his mother and his brother. After the mass, the family received their guests in the courtyard, under the arbor—this was in October—and once the formalized condolences had been carried out, the guests
tried to change the conversation and animate their host, but his grandfather, whose lips permanently wore a pained but courteous smile, would not open his mouth. He canceled the trip to Damascus, of course, though he still had his sisters, and his health kept up for a while longer, but eventually it declined again, imperceptibly for those who saw him daily, but alarmingly for those who saw him only once in a while. He no longer went out to the fields or attended the business, and though early in the day he paced the courtyard giving orders to the two boys in charge of the house and the garden, later on, after lunch, which he barely touched, his daughters would make him change clothes, and, washed and well-combed, would sit him in a straw chair in front of the store.

Across the broad dirt road stood the rail line and its sheds and station house. The villages on the plain liven up a little at the end of the afternoon, most of all on hot days when the sun, from which there isn't, in the fields, any defense, declines to the west. The sprinkler truck waters the roads and damps down the dust so that when cars pass, or sulkies, or even bicycles or men on horseback, they aren't forced to suffer a dust cloud. The grandfather, his eyes dim and absent, would watch the passage of the trains, cars, and people who sometimes stopped to greet him. Very infrequently, his eyes would light up, weakly, with a fleeting spark: he'd think he recognized an old friend in the driver's seat of a passing car, but it would take him so long to raise his arm in greeting that when he managed to wave his hand a little, at a certain height, the car was already two blocks away. A pretty horse at a trot was also pleasurable for him, because he'd always liked horses; and it was also pleasant sometimes to watch the children who, after being washed and scrubbed by their mothers, their older sisters, or their aunts, went out to play, still chewing on enormous chunks of homemade bread slathered with butter, dusted with powdered sugar, and smeared with
dulce de leche
. But that was it. At first, he'd
get up every so often and take a few steps along the uneven brick sidewalk, but toward the end he never moved from the chair. By the next fall, he started refusing food, and since he barely weighed fifty-two kilos, they had to hospitalize him and feed him through a tube. One cold morning he stopped breathing.