La Grande (17 page)

One day, just back from a trip to Europe, she called Lucía in Benvenuto and told her that she had some good news but that she wanted to tell her in person. At that point, Lucía had almost decided to
separate
from Riera (that's the word she used) and figured that spending a few days with her mother would help her make the decision, and by the next day she was in Paraná. And, after lunch, while the baby napped—they'd left early that morning from Benvenuto, changed planes in Aeroparque, and by noon they were already in Sauce Viejo, where Leonor had sent a car to bring them to Paraná—Leonor told her that her real father wasn't Calcagno but another man, the only one she'd ever really loved, and whom she'd
found again in Europe, where he'd been living for more than thirty years. He'd left the city seven months before Lucía was born and never returned. She'd asked him to leave without telling him that she was pregnant, and he'd made the sacrifice of leaving the city without telling anyone. She'd found him by accident, and they'd started to talk again: they spoke on the phone every week. He lived between Geneva and Rome and he was a screenwriter. Leonor had told him the truth and the man wanted to meet his daughter. His name was Guillermo Gutiérrez,
but back then everyone called him Willi
.

—She, who never sacrificed a thing, asked
him
for the sacrifice, Lucía practically screams, sarcastically. And Nula, to give some visible register of his agreement, and to be polite, shakes his head and offers her a scandalized grin. Lucía's directness surprises him; but because Calcagno, whom she didn't respect anymore, had been dead for years, and Lucía was aware of her mother's diverse and complex love life, it wasn't altogether difficult to hear the news with a sense of detached surprise and even of curiosity. The revelation, which she was nevertheless skeptical of, and which came at the same moment as she was deciding whether to leave her own husband, promised her a new perspective on her life. Lucía had met Gutiérrez because he was a law student that Calcagno had hired at the firm, most likely so he could pass off the jobs from his partner Mario Brando, whom he didn't dare confront directly. Gutiérrez was more or less the same age as Leonor, which meant that Calcagno was more than twenty years older than his wife. Putting two and two together, Lucía realized that they were about to run off but at the last minute she, Leonor, had changed her mind, and so at first she didn't really want to meet him because it occurred to her that he'd accepted leaving, making the sacrifice she'd asked for, possibly letting her mother convince him just as subserviently as Calcagno accepted everything that she and Brando forced on him.
But her curiosity was stronger than her suspicion and skepticism, and she agreed to meet him.
I'm lucky I did. He's a wonderful man. I'm not sure he's my real father, but it's like he's the father I never had.

Nula sits up suddenly and emphatically on the pillow, and seeing that Lucía, stretched out naked next to him, doesn't move, letting her eyes drift calmly, thoughtful more than anything, over the immaculate ceiling, his face takes on an inquisitive and peremptory expression, comical in its exaggerated severity.

—So is Gutiérrez your father or isn't he? he asks.

With the same calm detachment, slightly unsettling to Nula, Lucía, after reflecting a moment, lists the possibilities: First of all—
it may sound cruel, so please don't repeat this
—it would be difficult to prove (and to confirm at present) that Willi was her mother's only lover, and even if you accepted that Willi was in fact her
first
lover, it seems absurd to Lucía that Calcagno, if they didn't have sex, would have accepted Leonor's pregnancy. So even assuming that at the time she'd only had sex with Willi and Calcagno, there still remained the problem of knowing which of the two was her father. According to Lucía, Leonor herself couldn't be sure—as with most other things, she had the habit of confusing her desires with reality—though she says that after Calcagno's death she'd started thinking about Gutiérrez again, and Lucía believes that her mother was actually in love with him, but she didn't dare run off because she wasn't prepared to accept the risks it implied. Nula knows that Lucía, for her part, against Leonor's wishes, didn't hesitate to marry Riera, who'd just gotten his medical license and didn't have a penny, so in a way it's like she's her own mother's mother, which is why she describes her as a girl from a rich family married to a rich man, who hadn't been brought up to run off with a poor law student, a clerk in her husband's law firm no less. She'd only developed the romantic mythology in retrospect, despite having already admitted to Lucía that she'd had many lovers over the years—Nula
remembers Riera one day telling him:
Sometimes my mother-in-law goes swimming in the Salado, in Santo Tomé, and even though it's crowded and isn't even sandy, people go there because they say the mud rejuvenates the skin and is good for the joints. Anyway, when the water reaches her waist, the temperature in all the surrounding rivers (remember that the Salado empties into the Paraná) goes up by several degrees
—and she idealized Willi Gutiérrez, declared him the love of her life, and started to imagine, though it may in fact have been true, that he was the father of her child. It was impossible to know the truth because even Leonor herself didn't know what it was, and even if she'd been lying she didn't realize it, so when she said that Willi was her father, she was convinced that it was the truth.

—The truth, Nula says, is incredibly easy to come by.

—No, Lucía says forcefully. No one's interested in the truth. Mother, though she doesn't realize it, is terrified of it not being true. And Willi and I have an understanding. He came into my life just when I needed him. And besides, as absurd as it may seem, he really does love my mother, and doesn't ask anything in return.

Slowly, pensively, Nula slides back down until his body is once again stretched out next to Lucía. The two naked bodes, with their pale regions at similar heights, from their waistline to the tops of their thighs—although when Nula saw her for the first time, coming out of the swimming pool, she had on a fluorescent green one-piece, her large, soft breasts, which are tanned, indicate that the rest of the summer she must have taken the sun topless—are motionless, and their anatomical differences, rather than becoming more apparent through their nakedness, seem to have been blurred by their stillness and moreover the thoughtful expression on their faces, or rather in their eyes, which, like a luminous spring, flows from the two pairs of dark eyes that are more open than usual, and is propelled onto the white ceiling. Suddenly, Nula's hand, stretched out alongside his body, gropes along Lucía's forearm until it finds
her hand and grasps it. Lucía lets him take her hand to his lips and kiss it softly, but her eyes stay fixed upward. Without letting go of her hand, Nula leans over Lucía's breast and starts sucking on her nipple. Lucía rubs his head, but then pushes him softly away.

—No, she says. That's enough for today.

Nula keeps sucking, as if he hadn't heard her, but he's relieved and glad that she's rejected him, although he insists a bit longer before sitting up. The suction sounds strange in the room, reminiscent of an animal, and Nula's actions, along with the position of their bodies, which have shifted, reestablishes the differences that, a few seconds before, the stillness seemed to erase despite their anatomical differences.

—Are you hungry? Lucía laughs, and Nula exaggerates the suction sound and intensifies his movements, but abruptly he sits up and grabs his watch from the nightstand. And, looking at the time, he lies:

—No. I'm late, he says, and sits up on the edge of the bed. Can I take a shower?

—Does your wife smell you when you come home? Lucía asks, standing up on the other side of the bed.

—Let's shower together, Nula says.

—If it's just a shower, Lucía says.

Lucía takes him in the black car to the dark green station wagon, parked a few blocks from the boutique, and stops a few meters away with the engine running.

—You're my only friend, she says when Nula is about to open the door.

—I hope so, Nula says, pretending not to understand what she means with the word, which has just put up a barrier between them, removing from their relationship, despite the intensity of the statement, any kind of exclusivity. Only when he's outside the car, watching it drive away, while he looks for his keys in his coat
pocket, does he realize that his simulated love, his too sudden relief, his insistence on making her feel more loved than his true feelings would cause him to, are meant for himself, who feeds and expresses them. The months when he suffered most were also the most intense of his life, starting from that September afternoon when, coming out of the Siete Colores, after a student had called out to him, asking about a Public Law textbook, besides many other coincidences that would be tiresome to enumerate, he'd bumped into the girl in red as he stepped out onto the bright sidewalk, and, without knowing why, drawn by the magnet of fleeting shapes that undulate radiantly in the morning sun, before finally disappearing, he'd started following her, caught in her aura for years without ever managing to have her, until an hour ago more or less, when, at the very moment of possession, the aura, suddenly, disappeared.

The temperature has gone up a lot since noon, though the sky is still gray, a high and even, almost white gray, and it's stopped raining; what's more, the hot air has dried the last traces of damp left by the rain the night before, and which, before midday, were still visible on the streets and on the facades of several buildings. He doesn't yet feel very hot, possibly because of the recent shower—in the end, they showered separately—but the blue jacket, despite being lightweight, begins to weigh on him. Inside the car it's hot: the body of the car has been heated despite the fact that the rays of the sun have been sifted through a bank of motionless clouds that intercepts them in the atmosphere. Nula hesitates between taking off his coat and turning on the air conditioning, and opts for the latter for two different reasons: first, because when he gets to the hypermarket, where he'll have to speak to one of the managers after getting something to eat at the cafeteria, he'll need to put the coat back on; and second, which is naturally the most important, because the air conditioning will protect the cases of wine and the local chorizos that he picked up at the warehouse. But as he leans
over to put the key in and turn on the engine, without knowing why, a memory overwhelms him, and he ends up sliding the key into the ignition without turning it over, leans back in the seat, his eyes in empty space, and for several seconds abandons himself to a sudden insight, a new way of remembering a childhood memory, one among many others of the vacations he spent with is grandfather, in the town.

On summer afternoons, after the sprinkler truck had passed, or when the sun reappeared the day after it had rained, swarms of yellow butterflies would appear, flying in groups of twenty or thirty, landing briefly in the puddles or the damp zones left over on the dirt roads, and then, all together, lifting off and landing a little farther away. He'd also seen flocks of birds that flew together and changed direction all at once; and, when he was older, watching some television show, he'd be astonished by the schools of colored fish, all identical, that slid through the water with the same movements, so synchronized and exact that they gave the impression of being a single body multiplied many times but controlled by a single mind, or whatever you'd call it, difficult to place either in the individual—fish, bird, or butterfly—or dispersed across the group, unifying it through an invisible current of shared energy. He'd been able to observe the butterflies himself many times, and if as a child the group's precision didn't catch his eye—what interested him then was hunting them, not with a net or anything like that, but rather with a branch from a bitterwood that he'd use to leave them battered, their wings broken, torn to pieces and dying in the dirt road—as an adolescent it began to intrigue him and after he stopped visiting the town the memory of those groups of butterflies with their uncanny synchronicity, without his knowing neither how nor why, began to represent the image, and the proof even, of a harmonious, rational universe, and which contradicted his conception of a constant and accidental becoming in which, owing to the
perpetual collision of things,
in the space-time cocktail, shaken alone and ceaselessly, without the help of any barman
, as he often said, every event, in spectacular colors no less fleeting or provisional than the afternoon clouds, happens. To the question, sounding very much like a provocation, that Soldi asked him one morning a few months before, when they were drinking a cortado at the Siete Colores, phrased more or less as follows:
What if every event, like this one for example, stirring a cortado with a teaspoon, whether contingent or not, since it's impossible to know the difference in any case, hasn't been developing since the beginning of the world?
Nula responded that there wasn't a beginning to the world and that strictly speaking there wasn't a world, since it hadn't been created and was always in the making and wasn't any closer or farther from a beginning or an end and would continue to change shape forever, that's all there was to it, and the integrity of things was just a question of scale; the cortado that Soldi was stirring, for example, was no longer the same one they'd brought him a few seconds before, nor were the two of them, nor anything else that comprised the infinite present.