La Grande (20 page)

And then he was inside, a clean and tidy office, and Riera gestured to a chair, just in front from the one he sat in, on the other side of his desk. He took a blue index card and a fountain pen from a drawer and transcribed Nula's answers to his questions, his name, birthday, marital status, residence, and a few details about his medical history. Then Riera stopped writing and examined him, first with his gaze, then with the ritual question he must have asked every new patient, but in which Nula thought he detected a slight hint of scorn.

—What seems to be the problem?

Nula invented some sort of allergy, an itch on different parts of his body that came and went over the past few months. Riera looked at him for a few seconds and then, as they stood up, he said:

—Alright, you can get undressed.

—All the way?

—Not yet, Riera said. You can leave your underwear on.

He had him sit down on the examination table and took his blood pressure, then listened with a stethoscope, or directly with
his fingers, on his abdomen, on his chest, and around his back. Then he told him to stand up and take off his underwear.

—Where does it itch? he said.

Nula gestured vaguely around his hips, his belly, his thighs, his head. While he put on a pair of rubber gloves, Riera started examining the skin more closely, murmuring
I don't see anything
. Separating his hair with his fingers, he quickly studied his scalp; with the tip of his index finger he rubbed his eyebrows against the grain, straightening the hair in order to examine the skin more closely. Then he told him to lay down again on the table, face up. He sat on a black leather stool and sank his fingers into his pubic hair, slowly and carefully separating the hairs in order to see the skin beneath. After a moment he stopped and then said:

—It's not lice. You can get dressed.

Nula stood up.

—Hold on, one second, Riera said. With two fingers on his left hand he lifted his penis and with his right hand palpitated and weighed his testicles, then with the same two fingers folded back the foreskin and studied it closely, even going so far as to squeeze it, expanding the orifice in order to see into it. Then he told him to turn around, and separating his buttocks he examined his anus for several seconds. While he took off the gloves and threw them in a cylindrical, metal receptacle, whose lid opened by pressing a pedal that stuck out from the base, Riera announced that he couldn't find anything in particular.

—It must be psychosomatic. How've you been sleeping lately? he asked. I can prescribe a tranquilizer if you want.

—No, not at all. I sleep really well, Nula said.

Riera watched him closely while he dressed, and when he finished, and their eyes met, it seemed to Nula that despite the gravity of his expression and his professional tone when he spoke to him, there was, in Riera's eyes, a tenuous spark of mockery.

—How much do I owe you, doctor? Nula said.

—Nothing, Riera said. When you're really sick I'll charge you. For now I'd rather not think of you as a patient.

He followed him to the door but their eyes never met again. The ten fifteen patient was already in the waiting room, reading a magazine, and he stood up when he saw them come in, deferential to the medical authority, like a private who comes to attention when a superior officer enters the room. Nula said goodbye without turning around and went out to the street. He was so preoccupied that rather than walk down San Martín, as he'd imagined he would, he returned home. He grew more worried the more he thought things over. He threw himself on top of his bed but the very moment he collapsed onto it, as if he'd bounced, he stood back up. A kind of anxiety was taking over him without his even realizing it completely: the visit to Riera's office, like the profanation of a sanctuary, produced both pride and fear, and he replayed over and over, in a fever, the doctor's gestures and words. Everything felt saturated with meaning, but a kind of multiple meaning, impossible to specify, one which changed direction each time he tried to force an interpretation through it. The couple that had just come into his life was taking on a disproportionate prestige, representing, with their physical beauty, their tact, their enigmatic behavior, a side of the world that his dark and tragic family life hadn't allowed him to know existed. Those two attractive, singular people, endowed with a glow more intense than anyone else he knew, appeared sheltered from contingency, from the vulgar details that underscored the mutability of perfection, a kind of gift, at once immediate and inaccessible, offered up by the external world. Even though it had its darker side, like the vaguely mocking look he'd given him after the examination, Doctor Riera's behavior nevertheless seemed more rational than his wife's, but his last words, with their irregular feel,
seemed to contain a coded message or a warning. Nula spent the rest of the morning going over his questions, waiting for La India, who closed the bookstore at noon and would be on her way back soon after, but at twenty after twelve, when he went to the kitchen to pick at something because he was starting to get hungry, he saw that La India had left him a list and some money to go to the store on the boulevard to buy three or four things they needed for lunch. And so he didn't open the fridge, and instead hurried out to the street.

When he was almost back at his building he had to stop suddenly: he'd seen Doctor Riera climb out of a double-parked gray car, step between two cars parked against the curb, cross the sidewalk, and easily mounting the three steps that led to the apartments, disappear inside. Nula started walking again. When he reached the entrance he saw that Riera was standing with his back to the street, a few steps away, looking carefully at the two rows of apartments and the narrow, tidy garden between them, and not wanting to run into him, decided to keep walking to the corner, and because he didn't quite know what to do he stepped into the ice cream shop, which was empty just then, not even the owner was there, just a girl who worked the counter every so often when the owner was out, and who greeted him inquisitively.

—I forgot my key and have to wait for my mother to come home, Nula explained, but at that very moment he saw Riera's gray car turn the corner slowly and he gave the girl a look that could mean several things at once, or rather none, and in two steps, two leaps practically, he was on the sidewalk, just in time to see Riera double-park the car again halfway down the block, climb out, quickly cross the sidewalk, and enter his office. Nula started walking under the trees, uncertain if he should walk fast or slow, or whether or not he wanted to run into Riera, if he should or shouldn't ask him for
an explanation—though he wasn't actually sure that his visiting the apartment building had anything to do with him—but when he reached the office and saw that the door was open and the gray car was still running, he sped up, and when he reached the next corner, weaving through the traffic, which was heavy at that hour, he crossed the street and stopped at the next corner, in front of the hardware store window. Every so often he glanced furtively toward the office, until finally, though he hadn't seen Riera come out, he saw the gray car pull away slowly, practically rubbing against the ones parked against the curb, intending to turn, surely, which in fact it did, stopping again, this time in front of the mysterious house that apparently provoked in Lucía, every time she passed its door, a kind of theatrical disapproval. Riera got out of the car and rang the bell. He didn't have to wait, because the door half-opened immediately, and though he couldn't see who'd opened it, because the person wasn't visible from where he was standing, Nula presumed it must not have been the kid from the night before because Riera's gaze, though it was directed slightly downward, was nevertheless inclined at the height of an adult, or in any case someone much older than five or six. For about a minute, Riera talked energetically with the person who'd answered, and eventually, smiling, he passed his hand through the doorway and made a quick gesture, and turning around, crossed the sidewalk and got in the car, at the exact moment that the door behind him closed. Riera pulled out again, slowly, and turned left at the next corner. Nula crossed to the other sidewalk and walked to the end of the block, intending to turn as well, and saw that the gray car was now parked in front of the house—now all that was missing, when he passed by, was to hear the small metallic sound of the lock that Riera turned from inside, but no, this time his prediction was wrong, too much time had already passed since the car turned the corner and stopped
halfway down the block, and no matter how much he focused, slowing down considerably but not daring to stop as he passed the door, unsure why he'd been struck by an intense desire to hear it, that small, familiar sound didn't reach his ears.

Crossing his utensils over the few fries scattered across his plate, over the traces of egg yolk and toasted, oil-soaked bread crumbs, Nula leans back against his chair and, taking a drink of mineral water, decides that his lunch is finished. He smiles at his memories: the explanation for their behavior was much more simple than he'd imagined, and, at the same time, Lucía and Riera never really floated in that inaccessible, mythological space. His relationship with them started, lasted a while, and now, for the last hour, give or take, is once again unfinished, has entered that murky zone where, their cynicism exceeding their optimism, contradictory and awkwardly, the incomplete, mortal shadows that live there struggle over each other. His smile disappears and he sits thoughtfully for a minute, at the end of which, in order to move on, he takes his cell phone from his pocket and dials the manager of the supermarket.

—Anoch, he says. How are you? I'm at the cafeteria. I'm on my way to your office. You're coming for a coffee? Even better.

He decides to move to a clean table, and he's just finished settling down when he sees the manager, accompanied by a woman who entices him immediately, a decisive and professional demeanor yet conscious of the effect she produces in men, and who exchanges a probing glance with Nula, a momentary search for recognition which he's unsure if the manager has noticed or even if it's actually happened at all. Suddenly it's like his sexual encounter with Lucía a little while earlier had never happened. It's been discarded in the trash heap of the past, the incomprehensible limbo where, rather than vanishing suddenly, disappearing forever from the strange world in which things take place, we believe the events recently
shuffled from the present go to rest, their tenuous threads unraveling in our memory, like the ghostly, colored silhouettes that linger on our retinas when we close our eyes and which disintegrate slowly behind our closed eyelids until they dissolve completely into the darkness. With an infantile yet detached curiosity, Nula wonders (as he does somewhat too often) if the manager and the woman have just come from doing the same thing that he and Lucía did a little while ago, together or on their own, indulging a different hunger than the one usually satisfied at lunch. And Nula imagines the possibility that just as he called them they were in the middle of an embrace, though they seem too clean, well-combed, spotlessly dressed, and too calm and sure of themselves to have emerged, less than a minute ago, from the paroxysm comprised of spasms, moans, sweats, discharge, and even tears, which shortly afterward, after a brief pause, anticipating the promise of the unattainable, desires its infinite and, if possible, even more intense and emphatic repetition.

—How are you? the manager asks, giving him a brief, vigorous handshake, and adds, Mr. Anoch, from Amigos del Vino. Virginia is in charge of the whole beverage department, alcoholic and otherwise. You're required to get along with each other.

Nula and Virginia exchange a long handshake until her soft, warm hand slides effortlessly from Nula's.

—Should we have a coffee? Nula asks.

—I can't, the manager says. But Virginia has carte blanche to make decisions for the shop.

—Don't take this the wrong way, Nula says, but I think a conversation alone with Mrs. Virginia—or is it Miss Virginia, I hope?—would have its own advantages.

—She's our secret weapon, the manager says. Don't let your guard down.

—And here we see them practicing their beloved national sport, Virginia says.

—You mean chivalry? the manager says.

—No, machismo, Virginia says.

—I dare you to find someone more feminist than me, the manager says, and looking at his watch, getting serious and thinking of something else, an urgent matter somewhere else in the hypermarket, he announces,
With the way I love my women!

He shakes Nula's hand and practically runs away. As they're sitting down, Virginia whispers:

—Every asshole thinks he's a comedian.

Nula laughs and Virginia, satisfied that her comment has been well-received, reclines against the back of her chair, and looks around, smiling languidly, making her breasts rise and stand out from beneath the tight, pale green suit jacket. In her heels she'd seemed taller than Nula, but she must be more or less his same height. Her face is round and full, her lips fleshy, and her hair, dark and thick, curls down to her shoulders. She doesn't seem inclined to show weakness, not at work or anywhere else.

—Would you like a coffee? Nula asks.

—Yes, she says. But don't get up. They'll bring it to us.

And she makes a pair of signs to the cashier, the first consisting of curling the index finger and thumb on her right hand slightly, the fingertips pointing at each other, three or four centimeters apart, and the second of extending her index and middle fingers on her left hand, curling the other three into her palm, and waving the extended fingers in the air, very conspicuously, to specify the quantity, signs that, translated into ordinary language, would signify
two coffees
. Nula follows her gestures admiringly, and though she doesn't appear to notice, it's clear that she's used to being looked at in that way, and the gaze that would have produced distinct
pleasure in someone else apparently slides off her shell, or ricochets against it, falling to the floor without having had any effect, like bullets off Superwoman's chest, or prayers to an indifferent divinity, cloistered in her sanctuary, more self-absorbed than uncaring or contemptuous.