La Grande (32 page)

Given the value of the joke, which has been told at Plato's expense a thousand times in similar or different ways since the third century before Christ, her listeners respond with a moderate smile, surprised at Gabriela's mysterious peals of laughter, unaware that what makes her laugh so much isn't the joke itself but rather the fact that she'd previously attributed it to Nula during an inexplicably hostile daydream, not realizing, when she did so, that it was not Nula but rather she herself that had made it.

—Pass those glasses to the table, Nula says to Gabriela and Soldi, who pick up three each, each glass destined to one of the six friends, and distribute them around the six seats that are either occupied or empty. Gabriela sits down to the left of Tomatis and Soldi, who also brings the dish of olives and places it in the middle of the table and then sits down next to Gabriela, across from Diana. Nula, who has been delayed a few seconds writing two or three
quick symbols on a white receipt pad, arrives after them with the bottle and shows it to the group.

—In the arid lands at the base of the mountains, a chardonnay will become ponderous and will lose its fruit and lightness. A slightly more acidic grape holds up better. Ladies and gentlemen, he says, raising the bottle, Sauvignon Blanc from Mendoza! On the house.

And he starts to serve, expertly, carefully, a small amount of wine in each glass. Violeta reaches for the olives and Nula stops short and shouts:

—No! Wait till after you've tried the wine.

And when he finishes serving, before he sits down at the end of the table opposite to Tomatis, he raises a glass and gestures for a toast. The rest make a similar gesture, and Nula tries the wine, concentrating on the flavor so as to get the best description.

—White flowers, Diana says.

—And grapefruit, Violeta says.

—The summer sun wasn't able to over-sweeten it, Nula says. Clover. It's my favorite.

He sits down. Gabriela and Tomatis are taking a second sip, holding the wine on the tips of their tongues. Tomatis purses his lips and his mouth takes on a wrinkled and circular shape resembling a chicken's asshole. Satisfied, with his glass elevated, Nula looks around at the group, and then, leaning toward his wife, passes the back of his free hand over her cheek. Gabriela, for whom all that rhetoric (not without irony in the present case, of course) is slightly nauseating, notices Nula's gesture and is pleasantly surprised: she didn't expect that kind of spontaneous expression from the person whom, after the conversation they had between their cars this afternoon, and because of certain unmistakable looks that betrayed excessive confidence in his seductive powers, she considers the world champion of pretension. The (incredibly
beautiful) Diana, meanwhile, having inspired immediate sympathy in Gabriela, seems to improve, transitively she supposes, her image of Nula, and even Nula himself. And in fact, all rhetoric aside, the wine is exquisite, and when she sees Violeta pick up an olive with a toothpick, she thinks that Nula's insistence that she not eat one before tasting the wine wasn't completely impertinent. Gabriela is hungry, and as she waits for something more substantial—this place serves, among other things, some delicious cheese empanadas and a very good prosciutto—she thinks a few olives wouldn't be a bad idea. But how to begin, with the green or the black ones? Violeta took a green one, left the pit in the ashtray, and now she's taking a black one. For Gabriela, the mixture of green and black olives in the dish constitutes a chaotic situation, and it befits a rational being to introduce order among the chaos: this is what Violeta appears to have done, unless she was choosing randomly with the toothpick. What's more likely is that she has some reason for choosing as she did. Before serving herself, Gabriela decides to wait for Violeta to pick a third olive—it's a green one—and decides to do likewise, rationalizing her selection in this way: the black ones tend to be stronger than the green ones, which means that it makes sense to eat a green one first, in order to taste it better, followed by a black one, whose stronger flavor will saturate the palate. The problem comes with alternating back for the second green olive, whose flavor would be neutralized by the persistence of the black one's much stronger flavor. Maybe, Gabriela thinks, plucking a green olive and bringing it to her mouth, the proper method consists of eating three or four green ones in a row and then switching to black. And when she bites into the smooth pulp of the green olive, she decides that this is the method she'll use from here on out.

Suddenly, raising a glass and holding it motionless in the air, in a parodically solemn voice, Tomatis recites:

                 
If the drug called Day is the one you turn to

                 
know that the people you'll buy from here

                 
forget to mention the thing to fear

                 
which, in the end, is that it's sure to kill you

The others laugh, nodding their heads, and Violeta, leaning toward him, congratulates him with a kiss on the cheek.

—
Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate
, Soldi quotes with a smile, as though they were in an improvised musical dialogue, looking sidelong at Tomatis to see what his reaction will be. And, bringing the glass of wine to his lips, he takes a long, meditative sip.

—The idea is copied, and ruined, by the way, from the thirteenth sonnet to Orpheus, Tomatis says, discarding, expeditiously, Mario Brando's verse, and with an air of having countered, many times, in the same way, Soldi's typical provocations. And after having simulated gratification (the former) and categorical triumph (the latter) the two look at each other conspiratorially, celebrating what technically speaking would be called an
inside joke
.

In fact, Soldi is trying, in a very direct way, to provoke Tomatis into talking about Mario Brando. Soldi knows that the subject is unpleasant for him, and Tomatis avoids it if possible or simply, with impatient skepticism or even ostentatious disdain, rejects it altogether. But in general even a minor incident, a phrase that might contradict his intransigent opinion of the person and craft of Brando, an aesthetic or moral judgment, a poorly told anecdote or an ambiguous estimation of the man, and so on, would be enough, notwithstanding his sworn silence and indifference, meant to ignore him into disappearance from the universe of opinion, to set Tomatis off on an interminable monologue from which Soldi, who's already heard it several times, draws fresh pleasure every time he hears it, not to mention the fact that new information which could
be useful to the investigation always comes up. But Tomatis, with a satisfied smile, declares:

—The second bottle is on me, along with the appetizers that, I hope, will add to the experience. Speaking of which, Turk, the salamis—beautiful! My sister couldn't believe how good they were.

—Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature, Nula says.

—Now your Phoenician soul is coming out. I was thinking your joke was designed to brighten our passage, but it turns out that it was just a publicity ruse meant to exploit me as a sandwich board, Tomatis says.

—What joke,
che
, what joke? Violeta says.

—I found him standing on a corner, so I offered to take him downtown, Nula tries to say, but Violeta interrupts him.

—Don't tell me he made that joke about the bus that was too full, she says. He told me that one day when I was still engaged to my first husband and started following me around everywhere expecting me to sleep with him.

—I had to wait years for it, Tomatis says.

—And the one about Propp, did he ever tell you that? Violeta says.

—Yes, Gabriela and Soldi say in unison, but Diana and Nula, with inquisitive expressions, wait for someone to tell them.

—Vladimir Propp invented the structural analysis of folk tales. Every plot element, shared among the stories, he argued, could be reduced to their function, starting from an initial situation (for instance, a king and his three daughters), which is represented with the Greek letter alpha, a sequence of variations follow, each of which represents a function: for instance, the daughters go out for a walk (function β
³
) and they stay longer than they should in the garden (∂
¹
); a dragon kidnaps them (A
¹
); the king calls for help (B
¹
) and three heroes depart in search of them (C↑, to indicate the
departure); combat with and death of the dragon (M
¹
–Y
¹
); liberation of the girls (K
¹
); return (↓); and compensation (W
³
), Soldi recites, pretending to be exhausted when he finishes. The limited variable set, he continues, allows us to abbreviate every combination to an abstract scheme. Tomatis says that in Germany, where modern life is incredibly hectic and time is money, parents are too busy to read their children a story before putting them to bed, so they recite one of Propp's formulas instead. And the German children, who are very intelligent, like them a lot. Nula, don't forget this one tonight: alpha beta three capital A, A to the first B to the first up-arrow. H to the first dash Y one K four down-arrow W cubed. Your kids will love it.

—Fantastic, Diana says. Like a numbered joke.

—Propp may have been inspired by them, Tomatis says. And, standing up, he adds, Before the next bottle arrives, I beg your leave to relieve myself of the first.

He makes a gesture to the waiter, who is behind the register, that consists of pointing at the table and spinning his finger, and then, passing behind Nula, opens a door and turns on a light in the next room, illuminating the abandoned cinema whose bar Amigos del Vino rents out to use as their promotional location. The glass doors that lead to the street are shut, as are those that would lead him to the theater itself, and the staircase that once led to the mezzanine is blocked by several rows of stacked-up chairs. On the opposite wall stands the ticket window, intact, but the ceiling lights, which Tomatis has just turned on, don't allow him to see what's behind the glass. The bathrooms are to the right of the door, contiguous with the bar. Sometimes, during the intermission, when he was a teenager, Tomatis remembers, when he went to the bathroom to piss, if he was alone, he'd try to listen to the conversations and the sounds that came from the women's room, convinced that, because they came from an intimate place, they were sure to be exciting.
After pissing, and after looking around to make sure no one is coming in to catch him enjoying that humiliating pleasure, he farts, and then goes back out to the hall, but rather than returning to the bar he approaches the theater doors and, through the circular window, like the eye of an ox, in the center of the upholstered surface—in the fifties, when it opened, it was a luxury theater—he tries to see, through the dust that covers it, the dark interior of the large theater, hoping to hear or perhaps see, lingering in the darkness, the oversized, magnetic ghosts, black and white or in color, the simulacra of life that, night after night, were turned on and shuffled for a couple of hours across the bright screen, and then suddenly turned off, deposited in a circular metal container until someone decided to pull them out again to resume their repetitive, mechanical lives.

Rather than going straight to his seat when he enters the bar, Tomatis leans in toward Soldi and resting his hands on his shoulders informs him, in a weary and patient tone:

—By August of 1945, Brando was an avant-garde poet, but in April of that same year, as you can verify in the archives of
La Región
, he was still imitating Amado Nervo.

And because the waiter is standing with the bottle, waiting for him to taste it, he gestures for him to pour a drink, then lifts the glass and drinks it, holding it a while in his mouth and pursing his lips into a wrinkled circle again, and after a few seconds declares:

—Perfect.

Violeta and Soldi exchange a quick smile: they can already see that the bird will enter the cage. The waiter serves another round of wine and puts the bottle in a bucket of ice—the bucket, which sits on the counter and can hold two more bottles, was a promotional gift from a champagne brand—and then picks up a small plate of salami, one of prosciutto, and another of bread slices, all of which were waiting next to the bucket, and distributes them around the
table. The place is so narrow that, standing next to Tomatis, he can pick things up from the bar and place them on the table without moving his legs, leaning to the left and to the right with professional elasticity in order to carry out the task. When his eyes meet the waiter's, Nula, tapping his index finger and thumb, indicating a certain size—which is to say, of the cheese empanadas—he asks the waiter, with a mundane look of course, to bring some, to which the waiter responds with a nod.

—Mario Brando, the biggest fraud ever produced by this fucking city, Tomatis announces with a sententious air, after which he grabs a piece of prosciutto with a toothpick and brings it to his mouth. And not only when it came to literature, he continues. Even his own father, who was a friend of Washington's, detested him. He was so cheap that when he organized the dinners for the precisionists he'd arrange beforehand with the owner of the restaurant not to charge him his share, arguing, rightly, that thanks to him every Thursday night there was a table with fifteen or twenty people there. And he was the one who profited, despite the fact that many of his disciples were dirt poor. And even though he was a millionaire, in '56, during the Revolución Libertadora, they forced him out of the government because he was a crook. Gutiérrez should know about that. One thing to note: there were no communists or open homosexuals or Jews among the precisionists. You, Turk, wouldn't have been accepted, he says to Nula.