La Grande (30 page)

Gabriela unrolls a piece of thread from the spool, some thirty centimeters more or less, brings the spool to her mouth, cuts the thread with her teeth, and, taking advantage of the movement, puts the end of the thread she's just cut into her mouth and moistens it on the tip of her tongue. Dropping the spool back into the tin, she prepares to thread the needle. The end she's just moistened is rigid and ends with an extremely thin filament that could easily pass through the eye, but the eye is so narrow that the filament bends as it touches the metal, without passing through the hole, and Gabriela has to bring it to her mouth and moisten it again. Like the first, the second attempt also fails, the filament colliding against the metal without sliding through, and Gabriela, remaining patient, once again moistens the end of the thread and attempts to pass it through a third time. Now, the filament passes through the eye, but it's so thin that even Gabriela's
free sample fingers
can't grasp it; her index finger and thumb, on several occasions, think they've gripped it, but when they pull at the rest of the thread the fingers come away empty, as if the filament, which is clearly visible on the other side of the eye, were an immaterial object, a mirage, or an illusion; the tips of her fingers appear to grasp it, though no sensation is transferred to them, and nevertheless the extremely
delicate and in fact all but invisible tip of the thread has changed, twisted, coiled in on itself, as if the incursion of her fingers had produced a tiny catastrophe of a single miniscule point. Finally, on the fourth attempt, she grasps it, but when she pulls—now she can really feel the thread, dampened because she's put it back in her mouth in order to straighten and sharpen the point—the rest of the thread, rather than passing through, gathers at the entrance to the eye, because of an infinitesimal accident, but enough, in the present situation, to block its passage. The filament has undone the thread, unraveling it, and only this single filament of the thread's braid has passed through the eye, and the rest of the thread, come apart, furrowed and compressed at the eye, increasing its diameter, now wider than the eye of the needle and slightly undone, gathers at the entrance. Gabriela makes an irritated face, its exaggeration diverging profoundly from her calm interior (she's content, actually, and the difficulty of threading the needle, rather than annoying her, is in fact amusing), and she pulls out the thread, and deciding to change ends—the former has clearly suffered irreparable damage in the previous attempts—she moistens it carefully, rolling it several times over her tongue to infuse it thoroughly with saliva, and, concentrating, performs the same movement, slowly, carefully, but fails again. She has to try twice more, and on the third attempt, finally, she succeeds: the end that has crossed the eye is solid against her fingertips, and seeing and feeling how the thread passes cleanly through the eye of the needle produces a pleasure that is at once physical and mental. The yellowish thread ends up distributed across the needle in two unequal parts; Gabriela makes a knot in the longest end, the one that was undone by the failed attempts to pass it through the eye, picks up the mother-of-pearl button, puts it in place, and pierces the fabric from the back to the front, passing the needle through one of the holes of the button, which ends up hanging in the air, suspended along the thread that tenses
as Gabriela expertly and gently pulls the needle outward until the knot at the back of the fabric hits it, and in doing so begins the first turn of the stitch; placing the button again, Gabriela passes the needle through, in the opposite direction, from the outside in, with the thread following and tightening the button against the fabric, and then passes the needle through the first hole again, inside out; after repeating this maneuver twice more in both directions she checks that the button is firmly stitched, and, removing the needle, vigorously wraps the end of the thread between the button and the cloth to ensure that there's enough space between the button and the fabric to allow it to pass through the buttonhole without wrinkling the fabric; finally, Gabriela ties off the end and, lifting the blouse, snips the thread with her teeth, and checking that she's done this almost at the edge of the knot, decides she's satisfied and carefully lays out the blouse on the tan suit again.

Although it's only ten after five, Gabriela decides it would be a good idea to start preparing now so she's ready by six; she can call Rosario and Caballito before she leaves for their date at the Amigos del Vino, and so, translating her decision into actions, she walks out to the tiled corridor and takes the short walk toward the back of the house, sidestepping the doormat that guards the entrance to her aunt's bedroom, opens the next door, where there is no doormat, and enters the bathroom. Maruca, the girl who's taken care of the house for the past seventeen years—she started when she was single, but by now her eldest son, who's Ángela's godson, is at least fourteen—responsible for the gleaming neatness that dominates even the most remote corner of the house, pays special attention to the kitchen and the bathroom, and when she turns on the light, Gabriela realizes that Maruca must've waited till her aunt left before she finished cleaning, because the mirrors, tiles, railings, shower, tub, toilet and bidet, plastic curtain, medicine cabinet, towels, shower caps and bathrobes, slippers, combs and toothbrushes, shampoo
and soaps (rose-colored for the sink, green in the shower, white on the bidet), lotions, creams, powders, and perfumes are all clean and polished, each one in its place, so carefully scrubbed and arranged that as she enters, and as often happens in certain places, Gabriela perceives less the bathroom itself, which is displayed, overwhelmingly, before her senses, than the ideal that inspired its style, its arrangement, its cleanliness down to the millimeter, as though it were decoration, a hyperrealist illusion or some sample display at a trade show. It wouldn't be smart to take a bath under the circumstances, and so, after undressing and urinating, and before entering the shower, she turns on the tap and tests the temperature with the back of her hand as she adjusts the mix of cold and hot water, opening and closing the respective taps until she finds the appropriate level, and when she finds it she steps into she shower, closes the flower-patterned plastic curtain to keep the water from splashing out, and lets the warm rain soak her. Washing her hair carefully keeps her in the shower a long time, and when she finally comes out she dries herself off energetically, wraps her hair in a towel, puts on a bathrobe, slips on a pair of plastic and wood clogs, gathers her dirty clothes, and puts them directly into the washing machine in a small room behind the kitchen, in the rear courtyard. When she's back in her room, she opens the bathrobe and slowly examines her body in the dresser mirror. Are her breasts any larger? Apparently yes. And her belly? Gabriela looks at herself face on and then, turning sideways, gathers up the white bathrobe and studies the contours of her belly, unable to decide if it is or isn't slightly more prominent than usual. By the time she finishes drying her hair, dressing, putting on makeup, it's twenty after six. No one answers when she calls Caballito, which means her father hasn't come home yet, and José Carlos's cell phone goes straight to voicemail. Gabriela doesn't leave a message, and as she's hanging up an unexpected realization strikes her, a feeling that, paradoxically,
combines defiance and pain:
In the end, this is happening inside my body, and whether anyone else knows it or nor, whether they like it or not, they'll always be outside of what's happening
.

She crosses, calmly, in the warm evening, the blocks that separate her from the bar, and when she arrives, she feels hot on her face and legs and damp on her temples—for several minutes, she's been walking down the street wrapped in a spring-like warmth, the seasons confused on her own skin, which, in contact with the air, has revived her flesh, her organs, and the spark that flickers behind her forehead, sensations related to other days of the year, to October and November. The door to the bar is closed because of the air conditioning, but through the window, sitting at the last table, she sees Tomatis, Violeta, and another young woman who she doesn't recognize. Soldi is standing at the bar, behind Tomatis, talking and laughing with Nula, who, from the other side of the bar, is uncorking a bottle of wine as though he were the bartender. Of the seven or eight tables in the tiny bar, the one at the back is the largest; besides theirs, only three others are occupied, and two young men are at the bar, near the entrance, drinking red wine and snacking on something. The real bartender—Gabriela's already seen him several times before—wearing a white jacket over a red and green check shirt, visible at the collar and at the wrists, who smiles when he sees her come in, is arranging some salmon slices on a plate. As she enters, a few somewhat loud exclamations erupt from the last table, causing Gabriela to check her watch to see how late she's arriving, because her friends' excessive happiness seems to suggest that they're already on their second or third glass of wine. But it's only seven fifteen, and there's nothing on the table yet, not a bottle, or glasses, or plates, nothing apart from an ashtray, a metal stand that, vertically, contains a stack of napkins, and a glass toothpick container. Gabriela leans in toward Violeta and Tomatis and kisses each of them on the cheek. Tomatis asks:

—Do you know Diana? The wife of our friend Nula, who as you can see is opening a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, which honors us this night at the Amigos del Vino.

Gabriela steps aside and leans in to give Diana a kiss, and as their cheeks quickly and delicately graze, Gabriela's gaze lands on the stump on the end of her left arm; she controls her surprise in time, pretending not to have seen anything, but her face burns suddenly, and she hopes that her summer tan hides the blush. But from Diana's vaguely mocking expression—
How incredibly beautiful you are!—
she suspects that she must've noticed the look and is amused by her distress. Diana, possibly to calm her, raises her left arm and, with a slow and natural gesture, slides her hair behind her ear with the stump and then returns it to her lap, under the table. Hesitating, Gabriela continues standing next to the table, staring at the wall behind them, and after a few seconds the memory of the previous moments returns, as she crossed the threshold and closed the door, the tableau that has become fragmentary and confused by her intrusion, the bartender in the white jacket, smiling as she comes in, arranging, at the end of the bar near the door, oval salmon slices on a plate, the two people drinking red wine at the bar, the blurry patrons at the small tables near the entrance, and her friends at the last table, Tomatis at the head, his back to the bar, and to his left, their backs to the wall, Violeta and Nula's wife, and behind Tomatis, on either side of the bar, Nula and Pinocchio, talking and laughing as Nula uncorks a bottle, the noisy greeting from her friends, like actors sitting around a table on a stage, performing the arrival of an actress who plays the role of the friend, in a typical bar scene with some extras who play the parts of the bartender and of the patrons pretending to have a conversation, all forming a scene so external to her that Gabriela feels nostalgia for its loss in the bottomless abyss where it collected with the more remote past, the previous week, the years of her childhood, the centuries
buried forever, the innumerable masses dispersed over the world and eventually erased, the first moment of the universe, despite the fact that it occurred only a few seconds before.

—My father was an architect, my ex-husband is an architect, my first son is in his first year studying architecture in Rosario, and of course I'm an architect, so I think there's still some hope of keeping these old ruins from collapsing; we might even modernize him, Violeta says to Diana, nodding toward Tomatis, who seems to draw extreme pleasure from the declaration, though he must've heard it several times by now.

Since they called him at
La Región
yesterday at noon to tell him about the publisher's death, Tomatis has been running around, from the paper to the wake, and this morning to the private cemetery, Oasis de Paz, in the north end of the city, more than half an hour by taxi. The publisher had retired years earlier, long before he decided to leave, but Tomatis would see him every so often and had even visited him the year before at the hospital where he was admitted a few days and from which no one thought he'd come out alive, but he lasted another year, until that Wednesday morning, the day after turning eighty-three. Although he'd edited the Sunday literary page for a long time, Tomatis didn't publish a single line in it after he started at the paper. In the first few weeks, he tried to include a few less-conventional authors than the usual group of contributors, all from the city and the surrounding region, and who were only read by each other, he even decided to invite some writers from Buenos Aires of differing political and literary tendencies to contribute, but about a month later, Tomatis and two other journalists with some literary sense were called in to discuss the upcoming issues of the supplement when suddenly the publisher appeared with a copy of the previous week's literary page and told them, in a way that, despite being friendly and cheerful didn't allow any room for objection, more or less the following:
Look boys,
this is a mediocre city and La Región is a mediocre paper. Which means that the literary page has to be mediocre too.

Thirty years later Tomatis still laughs, somewhere between incredulous and in awe, when he tells someone about it. And he'd admired the relationship they'd had too. The publisher, who'd been retired for a while, when he found out that Tomatis had decided to leave the paper, called him up to tell him it was a mistake, and when Tomatis told him that he'd already wasted too much time putting lipstick on a pig just to watch someone else butcher it, the publisher understood that his ex-employee, for some reason that he was unaware of, had lost the quality that had been so necessary to his work: his cynicism. And because his retirement had pushed him to the margins of power, because his children and the children of his partner, who'd died years before, had taken over the business, he said that it was good to leave, that it wasn't worth looking after such trivial things. He didn't say it out of cynicism: his was an average intelligence, his values were as relativistic as they come, and if old age and death hadn't existed he would have gone on defending those values and judging the world according to them. Tomatis was fascinated by that sincere, slightly myopic mediocrity that nevertheless forced him to be a shrewd deal maker. His father, who founded the paper, had been an anarchist, and he was a member of the Jockey Club. From that combination he'd retained a taste for the popular, which made him feel more comfortable at cookouts with the print shop staff or at parties thrown by the newspaper carriers union than at ceremonies with the Archbishop, with the governor, or with military officials (although, while he was running the paper, he never missed one). The ideals that turn out lucrative become loathsome or sinful according to the moral resources of those who, disinterestedly at first, insist they can live by them. He spent his free time laboriously translating Shakespeare in order to improve his English, and writing, even more laboriously, stories
about the peasants who lived along the river and the islands, and at the end he would shut himself up in his office to write them, ignoring everything at the paper, and eventually the heirs forced him to retire. He never doubted for a second that Tomatis's worldview was the exact opposite of his own, but he trusted his cynicism more than the sincerity of the other journalists, the ones who thought like he did but who were incapable of measuring exactly what had to be said and how to say it, as Tomatis could, thanks to his energy and his education. When he'd stop by Tomatis's desk, especially early on, he always, out of curiosity, tried to see what books he was reading, and if Tomatis, when he showed up at the paper, or before he left, passed by his office for some reason, most often to ask for an advance on his wages, he'd quickly swipe the book that he carried under his arm or in his pocket, looking carefully at the cover or thumbing through it slowly, knowing that their authors, of which he was totally ignorant, came from a world that he'd never be allowed into. In the obvious and natural indifference with which Tomatis treated the ostensible seriousness of the paper, and in the scrupulous and slightly humiliating (for the other journalists) facility that he had for doing his job, the publisher, who was aware of the strict limits to what he could demand, saw less an employee than a sort of counterpoint to himself.