La Grande (50 page)

The shantytowns, an endless collar of poverty that surrounds the city, just like a slip knot around the neck of a condemned man, Tomatis thinks, have a sense of calm, if not warmth, this Saturday afternoon, despite the paralyzing indigence among the precarious shacks that, miraculously, hold each other up; Tomatis senses this from having passed them many times before over the years. Since his first trips to Rosario, the belt of poverty around the city had been growing, until now it surrounds it completely. It's been the stop for everyone who, coming from the depths of affliction, from the northern provinces, from Paraguay, from Bolivia, and even from Peru, thought they'd find some relief or some hope in the littoral cities. For the majority, still blinking from astonishment and
incredulity after discovering the overwhelmingly stupefying proof that they were raw flesh senselessly thrown to the world, forced to survive with only the placenta that nourished them for nine months, poverty was already progress, the inferno of work a gift, their shack a refuge, and the city to which many come to work, seen from a distance, the promised land. For others, poverty perpetuated the scandal, and to them the ones who weren't splashing frantically, the ones who through inheritance, luck, perseverance, merit, larceny, or the exploitation of their neighbor, lived in the legendary aura of a world without privation, were like an alien species to them, serpents, black widows, scorpions, with whom it was impossible to identify and who had to be crushed without hesitation so as to avoid the deadly sting, the bite of the atavistic enemy defending its territory. Others were resigned to rummaging in what the city discarded, among the trash heaps, searching for the gold mine of cloth, of paper, or glass, of metal, that would provide them with a day or two of food. There were those who, from an adolescent body, theirs or another's, sometimes even the one they loved most, where they could have sated their thirst, drawing relief, as from an inexhaustible source of calm, built a chaos of venality, contempt, and perversion, and, from this lifeless decoy, made a business. Some killed or got themselves killed for no reason, inspiring fear not only in their enemies, but especially in their mothers, in their grandparents, in their siblings. And yet, the ones who had come from other places—rural zones lost in the north, impoverished Indian reservations populated with the last representatives of the starving tribes that, had they gone to school, would have learned that there hadn't been any more Indians in the region for many years—thought, rightly, that they had progressed, from nothing to something, a job, a tiny schoolhouse among the ranches, under a blue and white rag flapping in the air, a clinic, a cafeteria, a chapel or an evangelist temple, but also dances, the political events where
the candidates distributed food, clothing, and blankets to buy their votes, or a vacant lot with a white arch at each end where ragged and sweaty kids chased a ball for hours, shouting and gesturing, until they were swallowed by the night. In fact, the bus had earlier passed a group of younger and older kids who were playing a pickup game, and a group of onlookers watched, spread around the edge of the field. To one side, in an open-air courtyard closed at the front by a low mud wall and an unplastered brick arch—the sign above the arch read
La Quema Social and Recreational Club
—preparations were being made for a dance that night. Some sections of the long belt of poverty are worse than others; in the worst ones, the shanties, caves of stick, straw, cardboard, cabinetry, and rusted tin predominate, but in other parts the construction is tidied up with clean adobe, unplastered brick, doors, and windows. Out front of some of those houses there's even an old car, a motorcycle, or a bicycle with a delivery basket behind the seat. A wide strip of grass, split in two by a ditch, separates the ribbon of buildings from the asphalt of the loop road. Around the ditch, the grass is littered with twisted paper, plastic bags, empty cans, broken or mud-stained bottles, and empty cigarette packs; every so often, stands of enormous eucalyptus, of tall acacias, of leafless carob trees with brown vines hanging from their branches, or of bitterwoods recall that at one time that congested strip was countryside, farms, estates, and empty plain. The porous, uniform six o'clock light covers the earth, the buildings, the grass, and the trees in a reddish, pulverized gold patina, its fine dust still floating in the air. The afternoon is so calm that, on one dirt street perpendicular to the avenue, Tomatis saw a cloud of dust, motionless, like an evanescent monument, lifted by some vehicle that had already disappeared, holding together in the warm and windless air without dispersing or falling to the ground. After the turnoff to the road to Córdoba, at the entrance to the highway, two or three kilometers from the
loop road, they passed the dump, surrounding them on both sides with its compact strata of steaming garbage, and men, women, and children bent over the mountain of discards expelled by the city, digging through it, searching for their day's wages. And then the first houses, many of them extremely old, wavering between the country and the city, surrounded by trees, with a horse grazing in the rear pasture, a farm, a rusty, unused windmill, brick smoke floating over the truncated pyramid where they have been stacked. As soon as they left the city, Tomatis started to read the pages that remained, looking up every so often and glancing out the window, and now, after putting away the text, which he'd annotated in the margins, after being struck by a sudden and intense happiness, he has leaned back against the seat and watches the landscape roll past through the window, the only one not covered by a curtain, the others closed to protect the interior of the bus from the setting sun, which is still strong, falling, imperceptibly slowly, toward the western horizon. They left the Rosario terminal thirty-five minutes ago, which means that within an hour and forty-five minutes, at eight on the dot if everything goes well, they'll be pulling in to the terminal in the city.

For the past year, since Alicia started pharmaceutical school in Rosario—the implacable, overwhelmingly determined pressure from her grandmother, which Haydée, her mother, had never been able to resist, had ultimately won out—Tomatis has gone to visit her every so often, on Saturday mornings, with a routine that never changes: at ten o'clock she's waiting for him at the terminal, from which they take a taxi downtown, where they walk along the promenades and the arcades; when Alicia sees something she likes, she goes inside to try it on, and if she decides to buy it, Tomatis, who stays on the sidewalk, goes inside to pay for it. At eleven thirty they drink a quick coffee on Calle Córdoba, and then continue their walk. At twelve thirty they browse through a few bookstores,
Tomatis buys a present for his sister, and at around one thirty or one forty-five they have lunch at some fashionable place popular with young people, where they serve unique sandwiches and salads that you build yourself from an assortment of ingredients laid out on a table. Tomatis orders a beer and Alicia asks for soda. For a while now, Tomatis has been resigned to the idea that Alicia will inherit her maternal grandmother's pharmacy. He would have liked for her to study philosophy, music, fine art, diplomacy, anthropology, physics, any of those romantic careers that certain parents, moved by the chubby little angels they've watched in the cradle since the day they were born, project into their future, one in which all contradiction, adversity, and contingency, at least from a distance, have been eliminated. The day that Alicia told him and his sister over lunch that she was going to Rosario to get a pharmaceutical degree, Tomatis choked on the spoonful of soup that he was eating at that moment, and the discussion that followed was loud and prolonged, especially because the idea seemed excellent to his sister as well, something which in fact meant nothing because she and Alicia were always on the same side anyway—which is to say, against him—when they argued. Tomatis was bitter for a while, but he eventually calmed down, telling himself that, in the end, it was what was best for Alicia, a life planned out in advance, free of any surprises, either beneficial or harmful. All the same, he still catches himself now and then, trying to detect some indication of rebellion in her, however small.

Over the previous week, after having told Alicia on Monday about his visit and having bought the seven forty ticket for Saturday that same afternoon, he has been living, in his own words,
the tedious life of a provincial bourgeois pensioner
, although, as he declared on Thursday night at the Amigos del Vino bar, over a few bottles of sauvignon blanc with Violeta, Nula and his wife, Gabi, and Soldi,
luckily interrupted every so often by a wake, a by palatable story, or by
intoxication
. Apart from Nula and Diana, his wife, everyone knew those lines, and though it was much newer than the one about the buses not being full enough, which they'd discussed that night, it got the usual positive reception, provoking laughter not only in its recipients, but also in the one who uttered them. Only Nula and Diana were unaware that the supposed modesty of describing himself as a
provincial bourgeois pensioner
was actually a sly way of comparing himself to Flaubert, and when now, in the bus, Tomatis smiles again, it's out of empathy with the other three, who always understand the veiled allusion and not the literal sense of the lines. After saying goodbye to the others and leaving the bar, rather than taking him home or inviting him over for a drink, Violeta suggested that they take a drive along the waterfront—she liked to lock herself in her car, put on music, and drive around the city and the surrounding towns all night if she didn't have work the next morning. That inclination in Violeta pleases Tomatis. She put on Beethoven's “Grand Fugue” that night, remarking, after the first few notes, that,
It doesn't sound like anything else
, making her way through the empty streets toward the waterfront, along the avenue, where some trucks were parked but where nothing moved and there was not a single sign of life. Their intermittent affair over the past few years is faithful but without passion, a tiresome excess that they certainly don't miss. And though they fornicate without complexes or taboos, within the limits allowed by their occupations and their physical condition, it's the friendship, the intellectual and affective part of their relationship, that keeps them together. The two are coming off romantic and familial lives (Violeta has two children) from which neither joy nor periodic catastrophes were lacking, and those two extremes have caused them to prefer, each in their own way, a less ambitious and more reflective and calm sensuality for their later years. Despite the fact that Tomatis is ten years older, Violeta doesn't repress her critical faculties, something which delights
Tomatis. According to him, his relationship with Violeta helped refute what all his oldest friends think of him, namely that due to his unrestrained egocentrism he passes through life altogether too pleased with himself, insensitive to the faults that the word justifiably attributes to him. Violeta, aware of this, always makes the same cheerful, self-satisfied observation to the third person,
It's extremely practical because we have everything in common—we're both in love with Carlos Tomatis.
They'd crossed the darkened city, driving up the avenue and turning onto the waterfront, isolated from the external world in the car resonating with the notes of the “Grand Fugue.” The black surface of the lagoon, whose invisible presence could be intuited beyond the trees along the waterfront, became perceptible from time to time when a ripple in the distance, fragile and fugitive, betrayed it. Violeta stopped and parked for a couple of minutes, with the engine still running, and Tomatis took the opportunity to get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk, under the trees, in the warm shadow. Although some twenty meters of wooded terrain separate him from the bank that leads down to the water, Tomatis was able to recognize, after a few seconds, the strong odor of the river, of the silt washing up on shore, a mixture of rotten plants and dead fish, nourishing the paradoxical world that blooms again and again, feeding off its own decomposition, without anyone knowing why, though some can describe how and with that they're satisfied, from the swampy detritus. The notes of the fugue carry into the night through the open door of the car, dispersing in concentric waves until they disappear, swallowed by the silence of the incalculable blackness. Soon, Tomatis got back into the car and closed the door and Violeta steered the car slowly away from the curb, gaining velocity as she moved along the empty waterfront. Finally they arrived in Guadalupe, circled the equestrian statue above the roundabout, and turned to the west, away from the river. They drove the transversal avenues that connect,
from east to west, the poor neighborhoods north of the city, poorer to the west, where, beyond the melancholy shores of the Salado, the last decrepit ranches are scattered, and where the last parcels of the city are confused with the barren plains. Driving through one of these forbidden neighborhoods, which are impossible to enter, night or day, without some specific reason, they saw, along the cross streets, under the trees along the sidewalks, hidden and confused shadows that moved, that shuddered, that froze in the thresholds of houses, behind a half-open door, or among the trees. Farther along, a girl in shorts and a bra, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, smoking a cigarette in a doorway, illuminated by the hallway light, revealed a backlit silhouette that, even to the most excessive desire, would signal more danger than pleasure. And Violeta accelerated when, as they crossed one intersection, they saw a group of human shapes running toward the car, down the middle of the street, shouting and waving their arms, most likely alerted by the sound of the engine, to make them accountable for the invasion of their territory. Tomatis sat up in his seat, looking through the rear window at the intersection they'd just crossed, just in time to see the group pour into it and stop, shouting in the middle of the street, while two or three continued to run, without the slightest chance of catching them, toward the car that moved away, and that, two blocks later, turned again to the east, toward the city center. Violeta dropped him off at the door to his house and went home to her own. And the next morning, at around ten, Gutiérrez called to tell him not to forget his swimsuit, because as long as the weather permitted it the swimming pool, after the select company and the barbecue, would constitute the principal attraction.