La Grande (21 page)

—Friday around five is a good time to open the display, Virginia says, looking him in the eyes, probing, despite her professional tone, whether, ultimately, given the moment, she might decide, if Nula is worthy, of accepting her admiration. That's when people start coming in, and it doesn't let up till Sunday, she adds. During the week it's slower. You're staying till the following Sunday, right?

—Yes, Nula says. Too bad we ended up with Holy Week.

—That won't change much, Virginia says. We're open Wednesday and Thursday that week and lots of people come in, and we only close on Friday afternoon. And Thursday is like the night before a holiday.

—So you're saying that in his final moments on the cross, Christ authorized that the Warden hypermarket could open half a day on Good Friday? Nula says, and halfway through the sentence he regrets having opened his mouth.

—I don't think so, Virginia says. But our chain does have special permission from the Pope, and in any case the Vatican is one of our biggest shareholders.

—Heaven awaits us, then, Nula says.

One of the waitresses from the cafeteria walks over with their coffees and leaves them on the table. Nula takes out some money to pay, but Virginia stops him with a quick gesture.

—It's on the house, she says.

—I'll have to pay you back somehow, Nula says.

—You'll get your chance, Virginia says.

They drink their coffee black, and Nula takes advantage, when she narrows her eyes as she brings the cup to her lips, taking short
sips so as not to burn herself, to study her openly, almost hoping that she sees him do it, her attractive, regular features, her skin tanned by the recent summer, her thick, curly hair, her slightly compressed neck holding up her motionless head, her wide, almost masculine shoulders, her breasts bulging from the lapels of her pale green blazer made of a light and silky material. When they finish their coffee, Virginia looks at the time and nods vaguely toward the supermarket.

—Come on, I'll show you the place where the display will be set up, she says.

Nula follows her obediently. They walk side-by-side, unreserved, familiar, like a couple who've known each other a long time, and Nula, completely indifferent to the Amigos del Vino's commercial interests, wonders what the best way would be to advance his personal, and even intimate, relationship with Virginia, what means he might have to make that self-possessed, alert creature, attentive only to the interests of her own desire, fix him, if only for a passing moment, with a look that conveys abandon and submission. And suddenly, she takes the first step in that direction.

—Since you'll be calling me Virginia, I'll want to know your first name.

—Nicolás, but my friends call me Nula, which means Nicolás in Arabic, Nula says, scrambling to respond, hastily, almost servile.

She laughs.

—What a strange name. It sounds pretty feminine. But I like it, she says.

—And in your case, Virginia, is there a discrepancy between the name and the person?

—I have a two-year-old daughter, Virginia says, and though their conversation is light, she continues to look around, verifying, apparently, that everything in the Warden hypermarket, where she has a certain level of responsibility, is or at least seems to be in
order, adding, however,
I think you're big enough by now to know what that means
.

—I'll have to think about it, Nula says, noticing that Virginia's smile widens.

Leaving the cafeteria, they cross a wide passage that leads from the restaurants and the multiplex to the hypermarket itself (the heads of the business, the radio and television commentators, and the daily press call the group of buildings
the supercenter
), where the lights are brighter than in the cafeteria and in the passageway. Despite the windows facing the parking lot, numerous lights illuminate the giant space stocked with merchandise, and the same music, which in the cafeteria and in the passageway was almost inaudible, sounds somewhat louder. Almost all of the registers are closed, and because of this, though the place isn't very crowded, at the few that are open the submissive customers gather in lines. The white plastic bags are emblazoned with a bold and conspicuous W of the Warden brand. From his trips here with Diana, Nula knows that the red ones come from the meat section, the green ones, not surprisingly, from the produce section, and the blue ones from the seafood section, but the yellow, orange, indigo, and violet ones are hard to match with a specific product, though in practice the bags end up combined together at the registers, and are only correctly organized at the sections operated by specialized workers, like the butcher shop and the fish section. According to Diana, who often works in advertising design, that set of colors, which evokes the refraction of light, must have been the designers' effort to suggest, from the publicity office of the Warden firm, which branches into many countries, that the W hypermarkets, with their incalculable diversity, predicting and satisfying the infinite spectrum of human desire, contain the sum of all existence. Nula seems to recall that the bag that Chacho gave them with the catfish had a green W, and though he remembers that the woman who pointed to Escalante's
house through the rainy darkness was holding a couple of bags from the same supermarket, he can't picture what colors the letters were. As they pass behind the registers, the people waiting in line look at them discreetly, and Nula hopes that the men think that his relationship with Virginia is more intimate than it really is, but it's obvious and demoralizing that, at least to the youngest among them, each of which must be wishing deep down that he could possess such a promising body, he, Nula, is invisible next to her. The aisles between the shelves are like streets, and instead of houses with doors and windows there's a series of labels, cans, cellophane, packages, cardboard boxes, jars, that continuously yield to other merchandise with other uses, other shapes, made from cloth, plastic, wood, rubber, metal, and so on. The section of bottles, mineral water, soda, beer, wine, and liquor is deserted, and, at an intersection, Virginia stops suddenly.

—What do you think? she says, gesturing to the shelves around them. To one side are bottles of wine, and ahead of them the snacks and the liquor, but in the rows that start again after the intersection there are more bottles of wine, more snacks and more liquor, the same rainbow-colored profusion of labels that despite representing, in many cases, specific objects and shapes, seem abstract in repetition and lose their representative quality and seem more like a pattern or an ornamental design. Nula stares into the distance, but he can't quite make out the end of the room through the infinite convergence of overloaded shelves that, beyond the food sections, hold the kitchen supplies, the tools, the clothes, the stationary, and, far off, hanging from the ceiling, a mist of wheelbarrows, colored globes, signs, and bicycles.

—A tactical position, he says.

—Starting tomorrow, they'll be announcing the wine tasting over the loudspeakers, Virginia says. And you had some signs you were going to bring?

—Everything will be here tomorrow, Nula says.

—Tell me about the product you're promoting, Virginia says. I was on vacation when everything was set up.

—It's a high quality table wine, Nula says. White and red. Our company is trying to launch more mainstream products.

—That sounds good, Virginia says.

—If the launch on Friday is a success, how about if we have dinner together? Nula says.

—Why not? Even if it isn't, Virginia says. I finish at eight. My daughter always goes out on Friday nights, anyway.

—And her father? Nula says.

Virginia laughs.

—What father?

—Oh right, Nula says. I'd forgotten that in your case the name and the person corresponded.

—That's still to be determined, Virginia says. In any case, if we have dinner on Friday I'll tell you a secret.

—About you? Nula says.

—About you, actually, Virginia says, smiling mysteriously. And suddenly, glancing at her watch, her professional demeanor returns.

—Tell your
friends of wine
, she says, that when they come tomorrow, ask for Virginia. Until Friday, then . . .

She hesitates a second.

—Nula, Nula says, fascinated by Virginia's promise and her enigmatic smile.

—Nula, of course, Virginia says. She turns around and walks down another aisle loaded with bottles, and when she reaches the next intersection she turns right and disappears. Nula stands motionless for several seconds, thinking about the promise that has suddenly rubbed Friday night tantalizingly against his imagination, and skipping over the nominal hours that in reality happen in a single block of time, and have done so since the beginning of the
world and will continue to do so indefinitely, he leaps over the monotonous sequence of events, arriving at the possibilities invented by his desire, which, though still incorporeal and fantastical, are more intense and gratifying than the uneven and fragmentary pieces of existence. Suddenly, the vivid anticipation that, however immaterial, is capable of triggering more than a few organic regions of his body, is completely erased, and the present moment, the brutal actuality of everything, at once transparent and impenetrable, engulfs him like a thick and hardening liquid into which things around him sediment, and where the things that move, like the hand that Nula lifts without knowing why, seem to decompose into infinite layers that only through an immense effort overcome their medium, a kind of soft glass, for a millionth of a second, before they disappear. Nula's utterly estranged gaze passes over the illuminated space, and he tells himself,
It's like the bright space in the mind into which our thoughts flow
. Even the background music seems to have stopped: its pervasiveness melts into the assemblage, and though it needs movement, change, tempo, its formulaic shape built of predictable developments and melodies, so similar to so many others, seems to pause it, a sonorous binding that halts its advance.
It's like the static nucleus of an atom of the becoming
. And then, in accelerating and colliding images, which translated into words would be more or less the following:
Otherwise, the clear part of the mind resembles that fragment of the exterior. It's like a fish tank. At the top, the brightly colored fish move silently through the light, quickly, then disappear, and some, brilliant and insistent, return again and again. But farther down, among the plants and the moss-covered rocks, the water is less transparent, clouded by old sediment, crisscrossed by vague, unrecognizable shadows, sometimes thrashing so violently that the water loses clarity all the way up, muddled by suspended silts that have been furiously agitated. Between the clear zone and the dark zone, between the bright, familiar layer and the unstable, murky depths, there's
no line of demarcation but rather an uncertain, mutable border where both layers blend together and overlap, transforming each other. The lower one forks out and is lost in the depths of the body, seeking in the remote corners of the tissues and the organs the liquid that, decanted, clarifies at the bright surface, populated by the colorful, silent fauna of our waking thoughts.

Hearing steps approaching, though unsure from where, Nula's left hand, which had been hanging in the air, drops, and he starts walking slowly back to the front of the hypermarket, without seeing anyone till he's far from the beverage section. Since he left the warehouse at noon, he's been planning to buy two cheap salamis, and he knows that near the cheese and cold cut cases there's a basket full of old, dry sausages in which he'll find what he's looking for. Digging through the pile, he picks the driest and, more importantly, the cheapest ones, and after paying for them at one of the registers walks out into the parking lot, having ended up with a plastic bag with an orange W. He senses, most likely in contrast to the air conditioned
supercenter
, that outside the temperature has gone up considerably, and when he looks up at the sky, he sees that the uniform cloud cover, a bright whitish gray, has begun to dissolve at the highest altitudes, leaving sections of a pale blue sky visible. But the sun, on this indecisive and melancholy afternoon, is nowhere to be seen.

In the car, before pulling out, he changes the label on the salamis, or actually, he tears the labels off the salamis that he's just bought, and then, carefully removing the ones from the two local chorizos, originally intended for the political advisor, attaches them to the salamis from the hypermarket, happily noting that they work exceptionally well. He knows that what he's doing is infantile, possibly unjustified and even unfair, but he refuses to give anything to the governor's political advisor, who years before was active in the same clandestine group as his father, surviving him by more
than fifteen years, and who now, rather than trying to change the world like before, writes policy and edits speeches for a governor whose only merit, according to most people,
is that he doesn't steal
, who played in major tennis tournaments, reaching Wimbledon and the Roland Garros once or twice, and who's friends with a Hollywood actor who shows up in the city every so often to take him fishing upriver, at the north end of the province, for golden dorado and tiger catfish. As long as he's unsure about how the political advisor is still alive while his father is dead, Nula doesn't want to give him anything, but less from a mean prejudice than a superstition: while there's no evidence that the advisor is in any way to blame (he did live for a while abroad), it would feel like an insult to his father, a kind of treason, until he had undeniable proof of his innocence, even if the gift is from the company. The advisor himself had stopped him one day on the street, two or three months before, and when he learned that he sold wine he gave him his card and told him to come by the public offices. He sent his regards, more than once, to his mother, but when Nula relayed them, La India's sarcasm sparked his mistrust.
That guy once wanted to make the revolution with your father, and now he writes limericks for the governor to wrap his caramels in
. Nula is aware that sometimes, unfairly, the ones who mourn the dead bear a venomous grudge against everyone with the miserable audacity to go on living when they might have died in their place, but nevertheless he would've preferred that the advisor not have taken the political turn he eventually took, in solidarity with the dead, who were also his own. La India didn't accuse him of anything, apart from being alive maybe, not thinking that her husband, if he'd come out of that nightmarish time unharmed, might have followed the same course. And Nula took his mother's side, but one day La India herself called him, saying that the political advisor had come to see her and had given her some letters that Nula's father had written a long
time ago, while he was an economics reporter in Rosario, in which he spoke about her, and insisting that she convince Nula to visit him at the public offices. La India had been moved by the advisor's gesture, which for Nula had come too late. His mother, most likely without hoping to, had passed her suspicion on to him. A few days later, though, he called him and they arranged the meeting that he'd had to postpone yesterday, and which Américo had managed to reschedule for this afternoon, because he'd suddenly ended up in the middle of the countryside, somewhere near Rincón, half-sheltered by Gutiérrez's multicolored umbrella. Though he didn't think the words, Nula had the vague sensation that what La India considered a touching gesture was in fact a confession of guilt. In any case, the suspicion belongs to him now, and he's decided not to give him the two local chorizos. Of course, he could just not bring anything, but he feels a juvenile need to deceive him, from the suspicion that, if the other is trying to do the same to him, his attempt, through his symmetrical deceit, will be momentarily canceled out.