La Grande (22 page)

But first he has to go see his brother's dentist friend. As the car leaves the bridge and enters the city, a ripple of despair passes over him and immediately vanishes, not giving him time to think about it or even to realize that it's happened. But in any case his mood changes, and the euphoria provoked by his imagined Friday night dwindles and leaves him feeling neutral, subdued, governed by financial matters, a thin varnish that covers, provisionally and laughably, the thing itself. The city is withered, in ruins. Nula sees its defects before anything else, but what he thinks he sees in the city, though he doesn't realize it, is actually a projection from inside himself. He arrives at the dentist's exactly on time. A nurse opens when he rings the bell and takes him to the waiting room, where two women and a man are reading old magazines. Five or ten minutes later, the dentist says goodbye to a patient who was in the examining room and gives Nula a friendly gesture to come in. He's
a little older than Chade, but more candid and friendly; he seems more at home in the world than his brother.
Maybe his father was also a dentist and died in bed of natural causes, not riddled with bullets in a pizzeria
, he thinks, but no matter how much he tries he can't dislike him. Just the opposite: at some point during the meeting, which doesn't last more than fifteen minutes, Nula starts to think that the man could have a positive influence on his brother, drawing him from his constant, intense standoff. He, Nula, couldn't be friends with him: he's too transparent; he'd be the ideal company for a casual chat in a bar or on the bus to Rosario—Buenos Aires or Córdoba would be too much—for a wine tasting at the Iguazú hotel, or something like that, but not much more. He's apparently a pre-metaphysical being, without fears or regrets, the lack of the first sheltering him from the second, or, ultimately, Nula thinks, it might be the opposite. That more or less unconsciously open disposition is what's lacking in his brother. The dentist tells him that he's bought a wine cellar for his apartment with capacity for a hundred and fifty bottles and that's he's giving Nula free rein to stock it, thirty percent with white and seventy percent with red. He tells him the amount he's willing to invest, a considerable sum, and gives him a ten percent deposit. And as he follows him to the door he tells him that his brother is an excellent dentist, that he's well-respected by his colleagues and that he'll go far in the field.
He's a scrupulous professional, and liked by everyone, despite his reserved nature
, are his exact words. It's clear he doesn't have much time to waste because, Nula realizes, there are now five patients flipping through old magazines in the waiting room.

The meeting with the advisor lasts much longer. The governor's aide doesn't seem in a hurry to buy wine, as though all he really wanted to do was talk about vague, fragmentary, disconnected things with him. Every so often he mentions
Beto
—that's the governor's nickname, which everyone uses—gesturing with a slight nod
toward somewhere on the first floor where his office must be, and once in a while smiles ironically when he refers to him, possibly to demonstrate his familiarity with
the supreme leader
, as they call him in
La Región
, or possibly for the opposite reason, to suggest to Nula that even though he holds an eminent post as political advisor to the government, he hasn't sacrificed his right to critique it. He's dressed with the conventional elegance of a politician, suit, striped shirt, tie, and has on his desk a stack of printed pages which he was in the middle of correcting, with an expensive pen, when Nula interrupted him. He's affectionate, candid, and doesn't appear to give much weight to his current position; he apparently doesn't even seem to realize the contradiction with his past, much less to be embarrassed by it, and though all his gestures, his words, his actions, and his allusions seem to indicate that his situation is the most natural thing in the world, a damp glow in his eyes, which alternate, in conflict, between steady and evasive, betrays a disharmony, a lack of resolution, a wound that refuses to heal. Wrapped up as he is—and as he always will be—in his family history, Nula is unable to translate everything written in his look. All he sees is an effort to conceal, and implied by this same effort, the shame of still being alive, from the son of his murdered friend. But his father's execution is only a detail in a larger picture: with neither cynicism nor indifference, he thinks that he'd be able to tolerate the advisor if some ulterior interest had justified it. His look says more than one, two, or a thousand murders could. It says,
We thought we were out there to change our lives but it turned out we were seeking death. And the victims forget the taste of oppression when, little by little, and almost without realizing it, they become the executioners.
It's possible that even he himself doesn't know what he's thinking. The province of happy mediums in which he now survives, languishes, and drifts aimlessly, is comfortable enough and doesn't demand the kind of moral bargain that he's convinced he'd never
accept anyway, though he doesn't deny that his political reversals obey philosophical positions that could be considered relativist, eclectic, and above all realist. But if his interior life were compared to an electrical system, one might say that, although on the surface everything seems to be working fine, in the damp, weak spark in his eyes, the glow too steady or too unstable, to an attentive observer, the constant threat of a short circuit is obvious. But Nula's suspicions aren't political, they're personal, because if the opposite were the case (and Nula is unaware of this), they'd apply to his father too. What's clear is that, while the advisor continues to feel suspicious, and though he still doesn't want to give him anything, he no longer wants to deceive him, and probably didn't even want to before going up to see him, because he'd forgotten the false chorizos that he was planning to give him. At the end of the visit he sells him a small quantity of wine that he'll deliver to his house next week. Nula packs up his brochures and the deposit check and walks out into the street.

Before getting in the car, he takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and lays it on the back seat. The parking lot of the government offices is hotter than he'd expected. The afternoon has grown spongy and humid, colorless, vague. Despite his two showers, the first in the morning and the second at Lucía's house in Paraná, he feels greasy and exhausted; something, he's not sure what, wraps him up with a sense of indecision, of sadness possibly, of oppression. He'd like to go straight home and not come back till tomorrow. He shakes his head slowly, with a long exhale, and gets in the car and turns the key, but for half a minute, give or take, he doesn't make the decision to move. As the day has progressed, certain regions inside him have grown opaque and confused, spongy like the afternoon light, ambiguous like the day itself, neither overcast nor clear, fall or winter, and finally coming to an end. When night falls, erasing not only the light but also the ambiguity, when he sits within
the bright circle under the lamp, after dinner, reading or drafting a clean copy of the hours that have passed since he last woke, he might feel somewhat better, and the agitated sediment that clouds the fish tank will settle, sinking back to the bottom, and above, in the bright layer, the sharply colored, agile, silent fish will flash again. He pulls out slowly from the parking lot and drives around the Parque Sur, moving down a wide, tree-lined street that curves southwest, but two blocks later he turns again, to the north, once again on a straight, broad avenue that leads to the city center. The sidewalks lined with one- and two-story houses are nearly empty, the houses seeming deserted at that hour—the doors and windows are shut and no one is looking out to the sidewalk, maybe because of the indecisive weather, or the hour, or the fact that there's really nothing interesting to see. Every so often, the first bags of trash appear on the curb. Halfway down the block, three boys, one no more than two or three years old, scruffy and filthy, have opened a bag and are digging through it. Getting a jump on the waste pickers, who've made a way of life from the rational exploitation of garbage, the boys rummage through the bags like animals, trying to satisfy some immediate need, hunger or thirst, or in search of some interesting object, a cardboard figurine, a piece of thread, or a shard of mirror, a lost coin without monetary value but which could become something distinct or a fetish or simply a toy, transporting them for a moment, through its imaginary value, or its precarious and recreational use, from the animal immediacy in which they exhaust themselves, to the tenuous, human expectation that poverty, from birth till death, ceaselessly, confiscates from them.

Two blocks later, he sees a man on the corner, staring south, and when he's about half a block away, Nula recognizes Carlos Tomatis, with his perennial blue jacket and his light-colored summer pants, but this time he has on a white shirt and a dark tie that, cinched
tight around his heck, slightly pinches the tanned skin that hangs below his jaw line. Nula slows down and finally stops next to Tomatis and, rolling down the window closest to the sidewalk, opposite the driver's side, he leans toward the opening just as Tomatis's dark face appears in it.

—I'm waiting for the bus, Tomatis says, but I had to let a few go by because they weren't full enough.

Nula laughs and opens the door.

—Get in, I'll give you a lift.

Tomatis gets in and sits down, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

—I accept, but your good deed has deprived me of one of life's most exquisite pleasures.

Nula laughs again and shakes his head, indicating, with that slow gesture, the legendary incorrigibility of his passenger.

—So you're waiting for the bus? Are you heading home? Tomatis says he is, but Nula keeps talking. What brings you to such a remote neighborhood at this hour, and looking so sharp in your white shirt?

—It may sound like a lie, Tomatis says, but I'm coming from a wake. The ex-publisher of
La Región
. He retired a long time ago. But he was the one who hired me at the paper and who somehow avoided firing me for years and wouldn't even let me go when I decided I was finished with all that.

—He was a good person, then, Nula says.

—Bearing in mind that he ran a newspaper, there were still a few ounces of decency left in him, so I guess so, yes, Tomatis says, and after thinking it over a few seconds adds, sorrowfully, But he thought that running a newspaper gave him the authority to have opinions about literature.

—Well, Nula says, I sell wine but I still act like know something about philosophy.

—It's different, Tomatis says, and though he seems to consider the reasons for that difference for a second, he apparently doesn't think it necessary to explain them.

—You caught me in a good mood, Nula says. I have a present for you.

With a curious smile, his head turned slightly toward Nula, Tomatis waits for more details about what he's getting. But Nula, acting mysteriously and moving deliberately slowly in order to prolong the wait and in this way postpone indefinitely the moment of revelation, gestures toward the back seat.

—Back there, the white plastic bag, he says eventually.

With some effort, twisting himself in the seat until his knee is propped up on it, Tomatis leans toward the back of the car, where, alongside Nula's carefully laid out coat, there are two plastic bags, one blank and another with the large orange W of the hypermarket emblazoned on it. He picks up the first one and holds it up to Nula.

—This one? he says, huffing slightly and checking its contents. There's two salamis inside.

—No! Nula shouts. Bad dog! And then, lowering his voice, says, The other one.

Without mentioning that, in his clumsiness, the unmarked bag has fallen on his jacket, though luckily without opening completely, Tomatis picks up the other bag and turns around in his seat, and, somewhere between confused and disappointment, asks, A gift from the hyper?

—Nooo! Nula says. Not on your fucking life. I put it in the wrong bag.

Tomatis peers inside.

—I regret to inform you that some goblin has transformed the gold watch you planned to give me into another couple of salamis, he says thoughtfully, with feigned resignation.

—Those are no mere salamis, Nula says, those are two handmade artisanal chorizos manufactured especially for Amigos del Vino, but because the labels came off I can't sell them. And I can't keep them either, because that'd mean I was skimming off the top. And because I obviously can't give them to just anyone, I take the opportunity offered by this encounter, which transpired thanks to a chain of contingencies that in the end turned about favorably, the death of the former publisher, your noble, compassionate reflection before his remains, a series of insufficiently full buses, and my appearance, to carry out the offering. They're yours.

—
Habibi
, this is so touching, it gets me right in the trigeminal, Tomatis says, exaggerating his emotion and taking on an overly serious expression and even bringing his hand to his chest and resting his palm on his heart. For a couple of handmade chorizos I'd be liable to send my grandmother off to chart the rings of Saturn.

And he's silent for a moment. A few seconds later, without really knowing why, he starts talking about Gutiérrez, about his leaving the city, his complete, definitive, and strange disappearance, and about his sudden and inexplicable return. Tomatis tells him that once, in Paris, he and Pichón had met an Italian girl at a party who said she knew Gutiérrez, that he was working as a screenwriter between Switzerland and Italy, but that he wrote the screenplays under a pseudonym. Gutiérrez had first come to the city because his grandmother, who was penniless—his parents had died years before—sent him to parochial school, from some backwater north of Tostado, thanks to the help of the parish priest. After high school he enrolled at the law school, where he met Escalante, Rosemberg, and César Rey, who were younger than him, and had more money, and for years they were inseparable. His Roman Law professor, Calcagno, got him a job at the firm he ran with his partner, Mario
Brando, the precisionist poet. Tomatis's sister knows a woman who knows the couple who works for him—Amalia and Faustino—that they seem to have a high opinion of him and would take a bullet for him. Suddenly, Tomatis stops talking about Gutiérrez, possibly to create, deliberately, a feeling of suspense that leaves Nula with a slight feeling of frustration.