La Grande (26 page)

Nula and Gabriela Barco wait patiently through those seconds of hesitation, and Nula looks into the distance, to the north, toward the place where the blue sky meets the horizon, an irregular green line interrupted by trees and shrubs, where scattered and apparently static cloud masses emerge, suspended over many points in the vast, blue sky. The sandy road that begins just after the embankment is slightly oblique relative to the bluish horizontal of the asphalt, and some three hundred meters off, more or less, is lost in an organic background, swallowed abruptly by the darkening green foliage, the borders of the yellow strip converging, through the effect of perspective, until they almost meet.
The horizon
, Nula thinks,
paradigm of the external, is in fact the result of a human impossibility: the parallels do not meet at an infinitely distant point, but rather in our imaginations. A good portion of the world exists because I exist. I should note this down but I'll wait till later—I shouldn't forget it—because
if I do it in front of them I'll have to give them some kind of an explanation and if I tell them the truth it might sound pedantic.
But, contrary to what he's just decided, he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulls out his notebook, and opens it. Beneath the last note, which he wrote yesterday in Paraná, at around the same time, after leaving Lucía's—
Sensory deficiency makes chaos seem like harmony. Flight of butterflies
—he draws a horizontal line in the middle of the next space to separate it from the next note, and, with Gabriela and Soldi watching him discreetly, after thinking for a few seconds, as though he's alone, he props the notebook on the transversal rail of the steering wheel and without rushing, writes,
Optical illusion and external reality (Horizon, parallels, etc.)
. When he finishes, he closes the notebook and puts in back in his jacket pocket, and then, clicking the end of the pen so as to make the tip disappear into the metal tube that protects the ink cartridge, inserts it, vertically, into the same pocket, hanging it in place by its clip on the edge of the pocket. Then he looks up and meets the gazes of Gabriela and especially Soldi, whose look expresses a combination of curiosity, surprise, and a vague and inexplicable satisfaction.

—It's nothing, Nula says. I just remembered an order I took on the phone this morning and I had to jot it down so I wouldn't make a mistake later.

Gabriela seems satisfied with Nula's somewhat hasty explanation, but Soldi furrows his brow skeptically, the inside edges of his black eyebrows gathering at the bridge of his nose while the outside edges rise to his temples. Soldi turns to Gabriela.

—Don't believe him, he says. He's writing an ontology of becoming.

—Is that all? Gabriela says.

—The problem demanded a sacrifice, and I offered myself, Nula says softly, narrowing his eyes, theatrically underscoring the humility of the philosophical martyr and apparently delighting his
interlocutors. Though he's flattered by the response, he considers it an obligatory gesture of courtesy to ask Soldi about the fascinating point at which he interrupted his story, the old man who knows so much about those literary skirmishes. How did they find out about him? How'd they contact him? How'd they gain his confidence? How'd they manage to get a copy of the text and how did they convince him that they were really going to protect his anonymity?

—My aunt Ángela, my mother's sister, Gabriela says. They're close friends, and she introduced us. Actually the idea for the history of the avant-garde only came up after we met him, isn't that right Pinocchio?

In the quick look that Soldi and Gabriela exchange, Nula senses a spark of collusion, or complicity maybe, and he's not wrong. Gabriela has left out of her explanation that, decades before, her aunt Ángela was in love with the anonymous author of the precisionist history, but he'd had to explain to her that even though she was the person he loved most in the world, women weren't his strong suit. Her aunt had remained single, and has lived with her friend for years in a platonic relationship. Those facts are only known outside the family by Soldi, who'd never reveal them, which explains why the knowing look that they've just exchanged is followed by a slightly awkward silence. Actually the last few ironic words they've traded conceal the fact that their interest in the conversation is starting to fade. It's difficult to tell the reason why some conversations follow that course, becoming quickly animated, lasting for a while at a certain level of intensity, and then, gradually, and sometimes suddenly, fading away and extinguishing. Talking is, after all, a physical activity, and after a while it gets tiring; the translation of thoughts into words, when they're often fundamentally different, the exercise of the respiratory system, and the muscle movements required by the practice of language inevitably produce a certain fatigue, but most of the tension comes from the effort required to
filter out the internal hum, subduing it and hiding it and adjusting oneself to the external world, those two contradictory and mutually opposed infinities that nonetheless supply each other, existing because their opposite also exists, and at the same time, sooner or later, reciprocally, they annihilate each other.

Soldi, changing the topic, says he has a date with Tomatis that night at the Amigos del Vino. Would he, Nula, like to join them? Why not, he'll call Diana right now and ask her to come along, if she's free. Nula pulls out his cell phone from the side pocket of his jacket, but Soldi nods and waves goodbye—Gabriela has leaned back against her seat—and, turning the ignition key, pulls away. Nula, surprised, is frozen with the phone in his hand, and smiles hesitantly and inquisitively at Gabriela, who, turning around, shrugs and makes a helpless gesture, and as the car turns onto the asphalt, gives him a friendly wave.

—What's the hurry? she says.

—Hurry? Soldi asks, unsettled, surprised.

—Your friend didn't think we were leaving so soon, Gabriela says.

—I was trying to be polite and didn't want to listen in on a conjugal conversation, Soldi says. And besides, we've been blocking the street for a long time.

Turning around all the way in her seat, she sees that the dark green colored station wagon, or long hatchback, has started its descent toward the sandy road. Straightening up, absent for several seconds from her surroundings, she holds in her imagination the dark green shape moving slowly up the street and, when it gets to the first corner—in reality, one side of the street is all countryside and the other is dotted with two or three wooden houses in the middle of a wooded plot—it turns right, drives about twenty meters, and stops next to the gate outside Gutiérrez's house. Like an image projected by an external source, extraneous to her will, the scene,
materialized briefly, without apparent reason, from the darkness, is interrupted suddenly, almost accidentally, despite its clarity, from the same consciousness where it had been projected, and Gabriela once again observes, with a kind of muted euphoria, the landscape that rolls past or that rushes to meet them as the car gradually picks up speed. Beyond the dusty weeds that grow on the embankment along the edges of the road, modest unplastered brick houses alternate with a few ranches and, every so often, with more-finished houses, plastered and whitewashed, with carefully installed thatch or tile roofs, with small gardens alongside or out front, with fruit trees or other larger shade trees, eucalyptus or acacias, mulberries or bitterwoods that have made it through the summer with their dense foliage still intact. All the vegetation, even the willows, abundant near the river, and which fade before the rest, is still green, and in the gardens the red hibiscus flowers, and those of other species of the same color, shimmer in the afternoon light, which the enormous masses of scattered clouds do nothing to block, fleeing from the sun (which is still high) and dissolving into a sky that's been cleansed by the previous days of rain. Every so often she sees people sitting at a table under the trees, finishing their meal in the shade. Many, and not necessarily the most finished or comfortable ones, are weekend houses, and some of the cottages, whitewashed and carefully looked after, reveal a kind of rural elegance, produced by the intricate, diverse, and ancient vegetation that protects them, adorns them, and distinguishes them. Small, azure-colored swimming pools (the large ones only appear in Rincón itself, or in the residential neighborhood above the floodplain, where Gutiérrez lives), made of plastic, oval, or less traditional shapes, cloverleaf for example, show up every so often in the back yards, along with spherical mud ovens resting on a square brick base and grills in the open air or sheltered under a pavilion, clotheslines loaded with motionless, shining clothes, a motorcycle leaning against a tree, an
old car or a light truck parked at the entrance, between the road and the front garden, chicken coops, corrals, vacant lots where a horse or a cow grazes, birds flying between the trees, or which appear from the foliage and land on the power lines or on the posts that spring up at regular intervals along the road, then taking off suddenly and flying off, shrinking in size and disappearing somewhere in the direction of the river. This section of the coast was less populated when her parents and her parents' friends, Tomatis, the Garay twins, Pancho Expósito, were young, and excluding Rincón, was considered inhospitable wilderness. The region, for years deserted and poor, had slowly been developed, first by small ranches scattered randomly over the countryside, then by industrial chicken farms, by brick factories, by otter hunters, shell miners, and fishing outfits, and later by union-owned recreational centers, by fish and game or bocce clubs, summer camps, and finally by people from the city who'd buy a small plot for pocket change and, as the story goes, would build a small cottage or a cinder block house or even a fancier, tree-shaded cabin with their own hands, or they'd hire someone else to do it. In New Jersey, where Gabriela had gone to finish her literary studies, opulence and poverty were only juxtaposed in large urban centers, in contrast to the coastline, at least around Rincón, which they're driving toward, where dilapidated cottages and ostentatious weekend houses coexist apparently without antagonism. After Rincón, the sandy roads that branch out from the asphalt into the countryside or toward the river, to the left or the right of the highway, are more and more populated, and every two or three kilometers, in La Toma, in La Bena, in Callejón Freyre (where the La Arboleda motel is located), there's a rash of businesses, butcher shops, bakeries, corner stores, tourist stands, nurseries, cigarette kiosks, phone banks, groceries, and drink stands. And all along the route, to La Guardia and even to the entrance to the bridge over the lagoon, crude tin or plywood
signs advertise fruit, fresh fish, or meats. Through her euphoria, Gabriela sighs inwardly: that mythical place described in texts and in oral traditions, which her parents had often visited ever since her childhood, had become an overpopulated suburb of the city, so much so that they'd had to widen the asphalt road and put up traffic lights at the busiest intersections. According to Soldi, heavy bottlenecks formed on Sunday nights with people coming back to the city. To top it off they'd filled in and cleared the swamp around La Guardia and, virtually overnight, the loud anachronism everyone calls
the supercenter
had sprung up. But smiling and narrowing her eyes, feeling the sun through the windshield warming her face, she thinks that luckily they can't change the pleasant weather, at least not yet.

Soldi is completely oblivious both to Gabriela and to the supposed attractions of the road. He's recalling, analyzing rather, the morning that they've spent with Gutiérrez, first of all the interview, which started inside, continued at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, and was extended by the swimming pool while they drank a glass of white wine before going into the kitchen to eat. With a sort of juvenile haste, he, Soldi, had grabbed the yellow canvas lounge chair, which had caught his eye immediately, and sat down while the others continued standing, because he'd been momentarily stuck by the fear that Gabi or Gutiérrez might take it first, but he'd barely sat down before he felt guilty and stood back up, just as the others were arranging the other two lounge chairs, causing Gutiérrez to look at him quizzically and start back up to his feet, but Soldi, with a cryptic smile, gestured casually for him not to stand up while he pretended to arrange something in his pants pocket, as if he was afraid he'd lost or forgotten something, and sat back down. Of their three principal informants—besides the author of the anonymous text, there are many others, but as sources they're more fragmentary and weren't as close to
the events—Cuello, Gutiérrez, and Tomatis, Gutiérrez is the most impartial and scrupulous. Cuello knew Brando's father, who was also a friend of Washington's, and according to him, and he's not the only one who's said this, the head of the precisionist movement was even hated by his own father, but Cuello, despite his efforts at objectivity, has an excessively negative perspective on the subject. And just hearing the name Brando makes Tomatis furious, and he treats the precisionist aesthetic with the same irritated disdain as he does its author. Only Gutiérrez strikes him as impartial, though Soldi can't suppress a slight doubt that always accompanies that assessment:
Maybe too much so.
Clearly it's pleasurable for him to recall that period of his life, for reasons that probably have nothing to do with precisionism. They'd already discussed that issue several times with Tomatis: first off, it concerns his youth, and the distance from which he remembered it over the years had caused him to end up confusing his own feelings with the place he'd come from and he'd idealized that time without realizing that it's himself and not everything else that he's remembering, blending space and time and the internal with the external. But neither he nor Tomatis feel completely satisfied with that explanation. There's a darker side to it, which Gutiérrez can't talk about openly with people he only knows slightly, and about which he let something slip during Nula's first visit, surely thinking that he was a simple wine salesman with no personal connection to his friends or acquaintances. It's hard to tell if Gutiérrez is aware that, besides the two or three friends he's told, many people he knows already suspect it, and some have even been discussing it, more or less openly, since he came back to the city. But there's something else about his surprising composure, something embedded inside him, disconnected from the external world, a complete seed that needed no cultivation and that sprouted alone, something he's probably not even conscious of, and now Soldi realizes that he'd driven off suddenly in the middle of
the conversation because, behind the urbane banter that the three of them had passed back and forth between their cars, and which he'd of course enjoyed, he, Soldi, had needed to be alone a while to reconsider the various impressions that Gutiérrez had left him with that morning. Two or three times during their interviews over the past few weeks he'd heard him say,
I chose screenwriting because I wanted to disappear better as an artist, because a screenwriter doesn't have his own existence, and to disappear as an individual, I use a pseudonym that apart from my producer no one knows
. That declaration, spoken in a lighthearted, cheerful tone, had intrigued him, and it seems to him to reveal something more than a straightforward professional or private discretion in Gutiérrez, but he can't tell what. Soldi suspects that Gutiérrez's generous but exact critiques are in fact the consequence of the sort of tolerance that doesn't exclude the person who offers them, and if he himself is their first object, he's also the last one he thinks deserves it. But it's a cold tolerance, unburdened of the emotions that inspired it, an ultimate calm that sees the whole universe and all its parts, as infinitesimal as they may be, as lost causes from the very moment when, appearing suddenly and incomprehensibly from out of nowhere, as colorful as they are illusory, they bloom.