La Grande (51 page)

The highway crosses empty fields now, and in some parcels, where the corn and sunflower have already been harvested, the truncated stalks remain, brown, ragged, and scorched, like a field
of ruins. But the grass is green along the shoulder and on the strip of ground that separates the two sides of the highway. Against the pale, cloudless sky, there's considerable agitation among the birds, coming and going, landing on the ground, on the posts, on the barbed wire, on the trees, then taking off again and landing again, as though, intuiting that the light is fading, they are accelerating the rhythm with which they live out the last hours of the day, trying to get ahead of the night. Inside the bus, the angle of the rays that filter through the edges of the curtains is less severe, declining to the horizontal, without reaching it of course, and while sometime earlier they projected onto the floor, in the middle of the aisle, now they touch the seats on the other side. Tomatis checks his watch: it's six sixteen. After forty minutes on the road, the dusty afternoon light is now concentrated in the rays that, all at the same angle, indifferent to the movement or the displacements of the vehicle, and despite the vibrations that the force of the engine and the inconsistencies of the road transmit to the bodywork, impassively cross the penumbra of the bus, only changing position because they're changed by the distant, flaming disc from which they come. A momentary estrangement comes over him, the sense of being in two planes of space and time at once, the first in a typical bus driving down the highway between Rosario and the city on a Saturday afternoon, and the second in an embalmed stretch of time in which motion is stillness and all known, familiar space is a universe in miniature, enclosed in a crystal ball, cast about, without its inhabitants noticing, within an igneous whirlwind swirling in a infinite blackness. It's an estrangement without panic, a possible image of what, wrapping us in its cocoon of flammable gasses and fusing metals, accompanying us from our imperceptible birth to our imperceptible death, is our true home. He's pulled from that daydream by an external contingency, a slightly more conspicuous bump tells him that they're passing over the Carcarañá, in La
Ribera, and he turns toward the window in order to see it better, narrow, turbulent, and swift between the pale banks populated by shrubs and weeds, and higher up, in the surrounding area, by weekend houses built in the shade of the trees. The river is revealed and then disappears, a flash of moving water that, because it flows at the bottom of a bank, enters into shadow long before the flat, exposed earth dominated by the overwhelming afternoon light. Tomatis leans back against his seat again, and for about a minute he doesn't think of anything, his hands crossed at his belly, his eyes open but not looking directly at any object, his expression calm and empty. Now he's aware that he's getting hungry: the salad he had that afternoon, despite the indisputable variety of ingredients laid out on a table, meant to give the clients complete freedom to serve themselves as much of whatever they choose, in fact reveals an deft sophism, because it's obvious that in order to prepare a salad with some rationality not all of the elements on display are mutually compatible, and only a few make sense to combine, one always chooses between lettuce and chicory, between cured or fresh pork, between hard and soft cheeses, between sardines or tuna in oil, and though he no longer remembers all the ingredients that he chose, he can tell by his sensation of hunger—actually agreeable for the moment—that the salad, though they ate pretty late, wasn't enough to keep him till dinner, at around eight thirty, assuming that the bus arrives at the terminal at eight, and adding the time it takes to get to the taxi stand and then to his house. He could eat something at the grill house or at the outdoor bar across from the terminal, but because he got up early this morning he wants to get to bed soon, then read a while, to be fresh and rested tomorrow morning for the cookout at Gutiérrez's. He remembers that one of the two chorizos that Nula gave him the other day when he picked him up downtown is still in the fridge; he'd eaten part of
the first—exquisite—with his sister that same night, and the rest of it yesterday, but the second was intact. Tomatis hopes that his sister hasn't invited over her friends for lunch or to drink vermouth today, serving them the salami in slices, on a cutting board, with pickles and olives, as she usually does. But he doesn't worry: despite her constant criticizing, his sister always keeps the best food for him, at least when Alicia isn't around, and so, especially because she knows that he'll arrive tired and hungry from Rosario, he's almost sure that, after the praise they showered on the salami that they ate on Wednesday night, his sister will have all or part of the second waiting for him when he gets back.

But would the city still be there? When we are not empirically present in a place, does it still exist, at least in the same way? Though he's well aware that the thought is absurd, that a professional philosopher could easily refute his naive doubt, Tomatis can't help but ask himself the question every so often, though it's more an irrational, almost animal confusion than a philosophical inquiry. Just like thinking too much about breathing can make it difficult to breathe, becoming conscious of living in both space and time at once can make even the most simple things complex and strange, and thus, from the time he left the city early that morning until he returns to it that night, its existence, which is completely dependent on his memory, becomes extremely problematic. Though he's actually a fervent defender of the existence of
the external
, Tomatis can never discard the ideas, the impressions, and even the sensations that support the contrary thesis. Only habit, and distraction, furthermore, interfere with the observation or the conclusion that the place that we left some time earlier, decades or seconds ago, is no longer the same when we return, though all the elements may seem identical to how we left them. The passage of time, though imperceptible, whether of a few seconds or a few minutes, leaves
clear traces in the apparent immutability of things; one only has to be conscious that those traces exist in order to perceive them. For the duration of our absence, the places outside of our empirical horizon continue to churn, a continuous, shifting network woven of various threads by a loom that incessantly produces, both archaic and new, the same interconnections: the world continues to spin, along with the solar system and the entire universe, and when we return to the kitchen from the dining room, or to the dining room from the kitchen, in the time it takes to find a clean knife in the utensil drawer, everything has changed, and sometimes we even have the vague or clear sensation of that change. If the same thing happens when we're motionless, and we feel time pass through us, modifying space from within, how can we not feel, after leaving a place for a few hours or a day or a decade, that when we return, that momentary feeling of estrangement which follows our brief ceremony of recognition, is waiting for us? Just now, in the bus, he once again intuits the silent murmur of that change, and one might say that, with every displacement of our attention, the familiar is submerged into the unknown, and when we reencounter it, it's no longer completely the same as it was.

Tomatis, tangled up in the vagueness of his thoughts, jumps when he sees one of the two boys from the back standing in the aisle next to his seat, smiling.
That's last night's La Región
,
isn't it? Could we borrow it a while?
Tomatis, reacting quickly after the surprise, notices the copy of
La Región
that he bought that morning because the Buenos Aires papers hadn't arrived yet; as he was taking the manila folder from the briefcase to finish reading the history of precisionism, he'd taken out the paper as well, and because the vibrations of the bus had caused it to fall to the ground twice, he'd put it under the briefcase to keep it still, intending to leave it on the bus when he reached the city. Tomatis hurries to pull it
from under the briefcase and extends it, politely, thinking that if what they want is to deepen their knowledge about the Sunday match, they'll be happily surprised to find that the sports page contains two large color photos of the local teams, in addition to a detailed history of every
Clásico
over the last fifty years, with the results, team rosters, and highlights of the matches, which Tomatis of course didn't read, but which from having worked at
La Región
for years, as a section editor and intermittently as an editorialist, he knows the paper has an unfailing tradition of publishing two or three days before the game. The outcome is important: the winner keeps a spot in the first division, while the loser is forced to move down,
Or something like that
, Tomatis thinks, having not been to the stadium for a soccer match once in his life.
You can keep it, I've already read it,
Tomatis says.
Thanks
, the boy says, and returns to his seat, but as soon as he opens the paper he stands back up and walks back to Tomatis's seat.
Are you sure you aren't collecting it? Did you see the color photos of the teams?
he says.
Don't worry,
Tomatis says,
I have another copy at home
. And the boy returns to his seat, walking backward, bent forward, reverent, in disbelief over the gift he's just received.
He's probably a medical or architectural student,
Tomatis thinks.
Or maybe electrical engineering, degrees that our university doesn't offer, at least not to the highest level. Maybe, if it's the first of these, he gets his medical degree, he'll take on a specialization, gastrointestinal surgery, for instance. And if some day, because of my inclination for white wine and gin on the rocks, my chronic gastritis becomes an ulcer or a cancer and they take me to the operating room and I see him walk in, smiling, and he pats me on the shoulder to reassure me about the operation just before they give me the anesthesia, I'll remember that he collects color photos of the local soccer teams, and just as I close my eyes I'll know that I've put my life in the hands of a dangerous man.
Tomatis laughs to himself, trying to maintain an impassive, absent
expression, though he knows that the two of them, concentrating on the sports page, have already forgotten that he even exists.

His right hand rests on the open briefcase, his fingers playing along the vertical, soft leather dividers that separate the four compartments, which, in fact, contains very few things: the manila folder containing the treatise on precisionism, which he finished reading a while ago, adding a few annotations in the margins, another folder, this one of light green card stock, containing an old article from
La Región
, with an even older photo picturing several well-known collaborators on the first volume of precisionism, during a dinner at La Giralda, along with a few other papers, in particular a letter that Pichón had sent him from Paris the month before, and to which, for lack of time, he'd only responded to the day before yesterday. In another compartment of the briefcase is the gift for his sister, a fantasy bracelet that Alicia picked out, wrapped in metallic paper, which he bought that morning on Calle Córdoba, and finally, in the fourth compartment, an
alfajor
given to him by the driver as he was getting on the bus, compliments of the house and included with the price of the trip, and next to the
alfajor
, a book about Hujalvu, the butterfly painter, which he'd been thumbing through on the way there, and whose French introduction “
Vie et mort des papillons,
” he'd begun to read (the book is a gift from Pichón, which he'd sent him from France for his birthday). Finally his fingers, and not Tomatis himself, decide to grasp the green folder, half-opening it, shuffling through the papers that it contains, and picking out Pichón's letter and opening it in the light, unfolding it, to reread it:

Carlitos. How's the March heat treating you? We're still in the middle of winter here. You must be surprised to be getting a letter from me after our phone call on Sunday, but that night, after dinner, I came up with a poem that, from a distance, has to do with our conversation. So I'm sending it to you. It's a vague parody of La Fontaine.

                 
MAÎTRE CORBEAU

                 
Maître corbeau là-haut perché

                 
rien de bon n'annonçait,

                 
ni d'ailleurs, rien de mauvais.

                 
Il se tenait là-haut, neutre et muet.

                 
Aucun présage ne l'habitait.

                 
Aussi extérieur que l'arbre, le soleil, la forêt

                 
Et aussi privé de sens que de secret:

                 
forme noire sans raison répétée

                 
tache d'encre dans le vide imprimée.

                 
Maître corbeau là-haut perché
.

What do you think? Don't tell me anything right away. The question begs reflection. What, on the other hand, I want you to send me soon is a detailed explanation, on paper, of your thesis on Oedipus. Certainly in this century Oedipus has become a stereotype, a two-dimensional caricature like Batman or Patoruzú, but one of his characteristics, his blindness, still fascinates me. Hugs to everyone. Pichón. P.S., What do you think of Hujalvu? A western specialist says that he'd specialized in a single species of butterflies
(Inachis io)
, but one of his students wrote, in the mid-eighteenth century, that he always painted
ONE SINGLE
butterfly.