La Grande (35 page)

FRIDAY

THE WINE

THAT DAY AND THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, AND FOR
several years afterward, he asked himself whether adults realized that sex existed. It happened the summer before his father's murder, just after he'd turned twelve. He was in a cornfield,
inside
a cornfield rather, during a siesta at the end of January, himself, Benito (his uncle Enzo's nephew, whom Nula thought of as a cousin), La Cuca, and her little brother, El Bebe, a boy who was almost ten, boarded with the Jesuits in San Lorenzo, and who followed Nula everywhere when he spent his vacations in the town. His puppy-dog admiration amused Nula: El Bebe imitated everything about him, agreed with everything he said, and whenever they sat in a field or on the sidewalk outside his grandfather's store or on the benches at the train station or alongside the swimming pool at the town club, and they fell silent, El Bebe stared at him, spellbound. That canine devotion often suffocated him, and, to rid himself of his slightly asphyxiating dependence and to rest, even though he
did like him, he would lie and tell him that he had to go out to the fields with his grandfather or stay home and study for March. Obediently, El Bebe, who believed everything Nula said, resigned himself to not seeing Nula for a couple of days, time he took advantage of to go hunting in the country with other boys his age or slightly older, who smoked in secret, told off-color stories, and claimed a sophistication that Nula was sure he didn't possess, although, to avoid anyone's suspicions, he maintained an ambiguous silence every time the topic came up, hoping that the others would take it as implicit proof of his experience.

They were inside the tall, green cornfield during a summer siesta, him, El Bebe, and Benito's hunting dog, Rosilla, for the following reason: Benito, who was about seventeen, was secretly dating La Cuca, who was somewhat younger, and under the pretext of spending a day in the countryside, he'd invited Nula and El Bebe to bike to the farmhouse that was half a mile from the town, arranging beforehand with La Cuca that she'd be with them
to make sure they didn't get into too much trouble
and that they got home before dark. Obviously no one had explained to Nula the way in which Benito and La Cuca had planned it, but he was aware that that's how it was, that the outing with himself and El Bebe was the last thing on Benito's mind, and that in any case he and El Bebe were able to take care of themselves, something which Benito and La Cuca were more than aware of, because, under the pretext of shooting off a few rounds a bit farther off, they'd left them alone in the cornfield for the last ten minutes. In fact, Nula had felt relieved when they'd left for a while: the conversation they'd been having all morning, full of innuendo, if somehow it seemed that Benito's parents didn't notice it, its childishness disgusted Nula, so much so that, to his experienced ear, the veiled allusions and the ostensibly unstated obscenity sounded obvious. Only to the adults, ignorant of sex, exiled in that melancholic world of domestic chores, of work,
and of morals, did they pass unnoticed. Nula and his band of inveterate smokers and tellers of off-color tales, on the other hand, were like doctors of the law when it came to the matter: they knew every last thing about sex, which despite their sensitivity to its mysterious attraction apparently exempted them from practicing it, like the theologians who, utterly familiar with divinity and fascinated by the possibility of its existence, as a result of thinking about it exclusively, forget, in their remote and tenebrous sanctuary, to ever seek it out. Benito and La Cuca, meanwhile—at the time, Nula wouldn't have been capable of thinking in these terms—were sexual monsters, two strange creatures that lurched in another dimension, separate from everyday places, made of off-color jokes and populated with ridiculous, monomaniacal, and grotesque characters, where the human beings, lost in muddled dramas and tangled in language, coexisted with the beasts that not only spoke but sometimes even had the last word, a dimension where priests had girlfriends or wives, grandmothers behaved like prostitutes, and the men, in their extreme credulity, let themselves be cuckolded by their wives in a blatant, scandalous way, a dimension where one spoke plainly about things, like semen and excrement, which adults were ignorant of. It's not that Benito and La Cuca behaved this way, but it didn't take much effort for Nula to translate their obvious allusions to the language of the stories. For instance, before leaving them alone under the pretext of shooting off a few rounds at a distance where the children wouldn't be in danger, Benito had started talking about the corn with the obvious intention of causing La Cuca to prolong the misunderstanding and to degenerate into all kinds of semantic nuances, of associations, and even of gestures that apparently had nothing obscene about them but which seemed to really alter them, so much so that Benito's voice turned hoarse and labored, and La Cuca's manner, usually open and decisive, became hesitant and serious, bewildered and disconcerted. Benito
insisted that the corn silk was smooth and pleasant to the touch, and then, compelling her to rub it, and pretending it was a joke, grabbed her wrist, trying to force her hand to grab the corn, and La Cuca, resisting sometimes with more and sometimes with less conviction, would let him do it and then would try to pull her hand away, mixing protests with smiles, struggle with surrender, indignation with laughter. They'd made themselves red with excitement, with contained violence, and Rosilla, frenzied by what, with some reason, she must have thought was a joke, in which at times, judging by the nervousness of her bark, she must have intuited an uncontrollable seriousness, started to jump and chase around them. Nula watched them, more incredulous than disgusted, but El Bebe, sitting on the ground, motionless and serious, seemed to have fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then Benito pulled off an ear of corn and showed it to La Cuca after separating the silk and pinching it between his mouth and his nose, pursing his lips to sustain it, pretending it was a mustache, and when the ear was fully unwrapped, showing all its compact, tender, milky white grains, he tried, at all cost, to make La Cuca taste it, but she forced her mouth shut, squealing, laughing, while Benito, under the pretext of getting her to eat the corn, took the opportunity to rub his hands over her arms, her neck, her buttocks, her hips. Nula asked himself how it was possible that Benito's parents didn't realize what was happening, how the adults in general could be blind to everything that had to do with sex (though he still didn't call it that), not realizing that Benito's family not only wasn't ignorant of it, but in fact were thrilled that Benito had chosen to fall in love with the notary's daughter, and hoped that when Benito started agronomy classes in Rosario the following year, things might take a more formal turn than their adolescent holiday fling. But none of that happened: the following summer, before starting agronomy classes, Benito drowned one afternoon in the Carcarañá.

Finally they relaxed and sat down to smoke a cigarette. El Bebe remained motionless. He generally spoke very little, especially in a crowd, but he sang very well, and at parties, with the family or in town, he'd sometimes sing in public. Before the new year they'd held a tango-singing contest to celebrate the anniversary of the foundation of the town, and even though El Bebe was the only child among the fourteen contestants he'd come in second; that external contrast, between private shyness and public exhibitionism, intrigued Nula. After a while, Benito suggested to La Cuca that they do some hunting a bit farther away and told Nula and El Bebe not to move from that spot so they didn't risk catching a stray bullet by accident, and not to let Rosilla follow them, a superfluous assignment because Rosilla, still disoriented by the earlier confusion, needed time to put her thoughts in order, as they say. They'd given her that mare's name, Rosilla, because her coat alternated between white and brick-colored spots, and around her eyes, on her snout, and everywhere else that her hair thinned out, the white skin faded to bright red—she was an intelligent and frisky red head, and Benito always took her along when he went hunting. For a while, Nula could hear the loud snapping that, as they crossed the cornfield, La Cuca and Benito produced as they separated the corn plants or brushed past them. After a while the sound vanished, and two or three minutes later a shot rang out, reverberated, followed almost immediately by another—one from each barrel of the shotgun—and after echoing a few seconds in their consciousness the sound and its echo passed to their memory, where it continued a while longer, while the external silence, interrupted only by organic creaks, the whisper of corn stalks, the passing cry of a bird, closed around them once again.

La India, on the other side of the desk in the bookstore across from the courthouse, recalling the phone call from El Bebe, who'd ordered a set of law books from the town because he'd taken over
the notary practice after his father's death, suddenly caused the memories of that summer day to resurface, maybe seventeen years before, when they biked with La Cuca and Benito to his father's farm, to spend the day there, and during the siesta, because his parents had to go to San Genaro on some family business, the four of them had gone hunting in the fields, or at least that's the pretext Benito had come up with, because soon after they entered the cornfield, after joking and wrestling a little with La Cuca, he'd said they were going away to
shoot off a few rounds
, which immediately awoke Nula's skepticism since, curiously, they didn't take Rosilla, who, in fact, was somewhat confused to see them go, and when she tried to follow them Benito frightened her off by stomping on the ground a few times, the last time in such an exaggerated way, purely as a gag, that his sandal flew off. After they'd disappeared into the corn and the noisy rustling of the leaves and the cracking and the organic murmurs had become completely inaudible to Nula and El Bebe's ears, Rosilla, her ears nervous and erect, apparently continued to receive signals from the direction in which Benito and La Cuca had been swallowed by the corn, and finally, just as she was about to calm down and was coming back to Nula and El Bebe, the two shotgun blasts rang out, with a couple of seconds interval between the first and the second, and when she heard them Rosilla turned back in the direction of the shots, struggling and moaning, running back and forth in such a nervous way that Nula and El Bebe laughed, seeing her so worked up in such a tight space, because she didn't dare pass the line, between two rows of corn, where Benito's sandal had threateningly struck the ground several times. Eventually she calmed down again and came over to them, looking every so often, without apparent anxiety, into the vague point in space, invisible from where they were, from which, every so often, unmistakable signals reached her, more real than for the two boys lying on the ground, who in their sensory realm could only rely on
their memories to verify the persistent and real existence of those evaporated sounds.

Nula is amazed by the fact that, in the middle of an energetic and friendly conversation with his mother, who's only separated from him by the width of the desk, at the same time, behind his forehead, through the silent flux, like in a dream, of memories that quickly and sharply condense events that in the cloudy material world would take hours, days, weeks, or centuries to complete, are now taking place in the bright space of his mind because of a telephone call that La India has just told him about, things that had once been real, pieces of his own experience that he'd completely forgotten. And he remembers: Rosilla had sat down between himself and El Bebe, lying on the ground, unsure what to do, waiting for Benito and La Cuca to come back. El Bebe, in fact, was always happy to be left alone with Nula, and as soon as the other two disappeared his expression lost the sort of hypnosis he'd been under recently and took on a contained exuberance that Nula, who knew him well and who actually loved him a lot, but with a certain condescension that only just now, as he remembers it, is he aware of, knew was the result of their being alone together. El Bebe's unconditional devotion to his person, which was at times somewhat suffocating and at other times amusing, could also bring out in him a tyranny that, although mitigated, caused him to permit himself a certain self-regard and even to exaggerate the qualities he considered valuable in order to intensify the admiration he received; he liked to think of himself as admirable, and in order to feel the gratification of that sensation he did whatever he could to increase this in El Bebe. It was because of this that, slightly out of curiosity and probably also to show off an admirable quality, and especially because Benito and La Cuca had left behind them and continued to disseminate over the cornfield, over the countryside, over the summer afternoon, and possibly over the whole universe, a sexual fluid
whose existence the adults, Nula believed, were unaware of, and which impregnated everything and transformed them into something different from what they were ordinarily—possibly because of all of this—Nula remembered that once in a while his gang of smokers and tellers of off-color jokes, who boasted uncommon sexual experience, would grab a hen or a dog or some other animal and examine its anal and vaginal private orifices, and if it was a male they'd fondle its penis or its anus or its testicles with a stick. Grabbing a stick from the ground he pinned Rosilla and started poking her vagina, softly, in order not to harm her or scare her. At first she tried halfheartedly to escape, but Nula pushed his forearm against her back to hold her down, and half lying on the ground, continued slowly poking, gently, the rose-colored crevice that, like the other bald terminuses, because of their bright red color, had earned her that mare's name, an attribution which no doubt was at first ironic, given that horses are named by the color of their hair. Rosilla froze, her head twisted slightly up and back, possibly so as to concentrate better on the sensations and, if not to make sense of them, at least to know their cause, to explain to herself why, in an unprecedented and abrupt way, she was receiving the untimely transmission of what, ruthless yet familiar, formed part of the cyclical repertory of her instincts, whose coming and going was the weave of her pulsating presence, assemblage of intricate but precise organs from which emanated, like shadowy exhalations, confused emotions and ritual behaviors that could sometimes be confused for intelligence. Absorbed in this activity, Nula completely forgot about El Bebe until a sort of accelerated murmur, which El Bebe had been emitting for several seconds, distracted him, and when he looked up, in surprise, the stick fell to the ground (Rosilla took the opportunity to run away and, standing apart from them, between alarmed and confused, forgot their presence): El Bebe, intensely pale, had turned onto his knees and was hitting the backs of his fingers on
one hand against the curled-up palm of the other, marking the rhythm with an unintelligible mutter. His eyes were narrowed and his blonde hair shook as his head bobbed in rhythm with his hands and the murmur; two drops of white saliva had formed at the edges of his mouth—he'd remembered this another time, about five years before, when Riera had jumped out of the car, downtown, to treat a boy who'd had an epileptic seizure. Nula, frightened, tried to understand what El Bebe was muttering, something which at that moment had the tone of both a command and a plea:
mifact, mifact, mifact, mifact!
and suddenly, thanks to a sort of hiccup that interrupted the litany, the only word, or two words, in fact, that it consisted of—
fuck me
—were instantly and astonishingly clear, like the moment when the endless repetition of a mantra leads, suddenly, to enlightenment—except at this moment he, Nula, was passing from a summer siesta within the green stalks of a cornfield, where patches of light filtered in, bleaching the dark earth, to a new world, one of confusion, of desire, and of guilt, and from which all certainty, in that instant, had been abolished. Without opening his eyes, as if he were alone in the field, El Bebe pulled down his pants and threw himself face down on the ground, and Nula, after hesitating a few seconds, his mouth dry, half open, pulled down his own pants and threw himself on top of him; his prick, hard, its round tip practically transparent, like a bluish red ball of glass, still half covered by his foreskin, sank into his buttocks, flattening against them, and Nula rubbed himself against El Bebe, not feeling any pleasure or knowing exactly what he was doing, while Rosilla, who must've been absorbing the maximum dose of unaccustomed experience, started jumping and running around them, barking more and more furiously, until Nula stood up and grabbed his pants, but he saw, with fear, that El Bebe's buttocks were slightly bloodstained. El Bebe, meanwhile, calm and quiet again, pulled up his pants and sat back down on the ground, looking at Nula with the same admiring
and beatific smile; but now Nula was the one in a state of intense agitation: it was as though El Bebe, in offering himself, had transmitted the agent of his frenzy to him, unburdening himself of this agent just as quickly, in order to recover his normal state as soon as possible. Benito and La Cuca showed up soon afterward. They must not have been far away, because the dog's insistent barking was what had caused them to hurry back, and they must've had their own cause for shame (Nula thinks now, remembering them) because they accepted the vague and practically absurd explanations for Rosilla's barking that El Bebe, in complete control over himself, had offered them without the slightest hesitation. Only he, Nula, seemed altered, and was mortified, realizing that when El Bebe got home his parents would see the blood stains and would make him confess. He was panicked for the next two or three days, never leaving his grandfather's house, and every time someone knocked on the door to the house Nula was sure that it was El Bebe's parents, looking for answers. The idea that his grandfather would find out about what had happened was terrifying and, more so, shameful. Finally, on the third day, he had to run an errand for his aunt Laila, on the other side of the station, and when he was walking into the pharmacy he bumped into El Bebe and his mother just as they were walking out. His mother not only didn't accuse him of anything but actually bent over and kissed him and invited him over for some milk that afternoon. And El Bebe seemed happy about the encounter. The day before he'd been in Rosario, where he'd gotten fitted for his first communion.