La Grande (56 page)

—It's so great to see you, she says with a happiness that is paradoxical, given that it's the first time in her life that she sees Diana, and that, five days before, in front of Gutiérrez, she'd pretended not to know who Nula was.

Nula is confused, and even somewhat worried. Lucía's dependence on Riera could motivate her, with the hope of recovering him, to exceed her husband's allusions and ostensibly humorous insinuations, especially with regard to their encounter Wednesday afternoon in Paraná. But after her excessive comment, Lucía falls silent and her expression turns serious and slightly disoriented, and Nula's alarm takes on a hint of shame and compassion. It seems to him that Lucía is more lost in the world than she was the morning he first saw her, dressed in red, when he started following her, eventually penetrating her aura, and Riera's, for months and months. He sees them from the outside now, and though they don't
seem much different, he interprets their words and actions in a way that seems more reasonable to him, though he's unsure if it's more accurate. Diana, meanwhile, smiles, urbane and expectant.
I'm going to help Amalia with the salads
, Lucía says finally, and with the gentle suddenness typical to her, she steps around Riera and heads to the kitchen.

—Should we go for a swim? Riera says.

—Why not? Diana says, getting up, and, without saying a word, Nula does the same. They move slowly and lazily toward the deep end of the pool and then, loudly, first Riera and then Diana and finally Nula, they dive in. For several seconds they move under the transparent water that transforms their solid bodies into fragmentary, unstable, inhuman blurs, but when their heads and shoulders emerge, though their faces are wrinkled, their hair disheveled and stuck to their head, and their eyes squeezed shut to keep the water from entering them, they recover a vaguely human appearance, as if the disintegration threatening from below lost efficacy on the surface, even though traces of its corrosive action, capable of deconstructing both the material and the illusion of reality, will linger for several seconds. And the three of them laugh, carefree, happy to be in the water where, paddling skillfully, they stay afloat and come together, in the middle of the pool.

Soldi, from the yellow lounge chair, watches José Carlos, Gabriela, and Tomatis, who, after picking at a few things on the plates distributed over the table, each serve themselves a glass of white wine and, walking slowly, leave the pavilion and head once again toward the back of the courtyard. Soldi follows them with his eyes until they stop under the trees and, turning around and observing from their position the house, the courtyard, the pavilion, and the pool all together, they begin to talk. They must be very far back, in the shade; he, on the other hand, lying lazily in the yellow lounge chair, feels the sun, which has dried him completely in a
few minutes, causing the skin on his stomach to itch, and making him drowsy.

The operation seems complicated, but for Diana it's easy: she does it several times a day with a variety of similar artifacts each designed for a different function, and though some in the group consider it polite to pretend they don't see her, whether or not they do doesn't matter to Diana or Nula; it consists, simply, of strapping a leather wristband to her left arm, over which a metal hoop, probably of stainless steel, is attached, and which extends into the shape of a fork. Once this maneuver is carried out, Diana, just as casually, picks up the glass into which Nula, with affectionate deference, has just poured a considerable quantity of white wine, and takes a long drink. Across from her, on the other side of the table, Soldi wonders whether it wouldn't have been better to sit down to eat with the prosthetic already in place, but eventually he decides that to Diana it must seem more natural to put it on in front of everyone.

Before sitting down at the table, the bathers, after drying themselves off with a few minutes of exposure to the sun, have gotten dressed again, the men in a shirt or an undershirt and the women in their light dresses, easy to take on and off, and which they now wear over their one- or two-piece swimsuits. Though Faustino announced the cookout several minutes ago, and all of the guests including Amalia are sitting at the table, the two empty seats, one next to the other, delay the service for a few moments. A taxi has just stopped in front of the white gate without turning off its engine, and Gutiérrez has hurried outside to meet Leonor Calcagno. Walking slowly, they cross the gate and, with a satisfied look, turn toward the table. Just as he was that Friday night at the Hotel Palace restaurant, Nula is once again astonished at the fragility that radiates from Leonor's body, from her arms and legs, scrawny and blackened by the sun and by tanning lamps, from her face, ravaged,
along with her chest and buttocks, in all likelihood, by surgeries as useless as they have been recurrent, from her reddish dyed hair, from her upper lip, swollen from an injection of silicone; her skeletal fingers, almost as black, are covered with rings, her wrists with bracelets, and several fantasy necklaces attempt to conceal the recalcitrant wrinkles on her neck. And yet, despite the impression of fragility, Leonor moves with a litheness that suggests an indifference to her surroundings, and when they reach the pavilion, her free hand (in her other hand she carries a white purse that matches her white dress and her white, high-heeled sandals, made of chunky jute, and knotted around her ankles) lifts to her head to straighten her hair, and she offers a distant smile when Gutiérrez, raising his voice, presents her to his guests:

—For those who don't know her, Mrs. Leonor Calcagno! and he makes a quick and vaguely circular gesture with which he attempts to encompass the large, rectangular table. The others offer a variety of conventional responses that no one hears because, in being spoken all at once, they annihilate each other. Amalia, who is sitting at the end of the table closest to the house, starts to get up, but Gutiérrez, shaking his head, tells her with a friendly look that it's not necessary. The two empty chairs are just to the left of Amalia, and Gutiérrez invites Leonor to sit next to her, while he occupies the other empty chair. Marcos and Clara Rosemberg are sitting across from them; Marcos leans over the table, standing up slightly from his chair, and, grabbing Leonor's free hand, gives it a quick squeeze. Next to Clara is Soldi, who's sitting next to Gabriela, who's next to José Carlos, who's next to Violeta. The opposite end of the table, at the back of the pavilion, is occupied by Tomatis, who's to the left of Lucía, who's next to Riera, who's next to Diana, who's next to Nula, who's next to Gutiérrez, who's next to Leonor. The only one standing is Faustino, next to the grill, tending the meat and the offal that are browning over the fire, and on a tiled side
table that extends from the grill, which is separated from the coals and the reserve fire by a short wall, he has a plate already prepared, a dish of salad that Amalia brought him, and a half-full glass of white wine. Suddenly, with a long fork in one hand and a substantial knife in the other, he turns, his face flushed and his graying beard matted with sweat, and, in a solemn and professional tone, whose irony is not lost on any of the guests, he asks:

—Ready, don Willi? Shall we proceed?

Half standing up, with parodic gravity, offering a gesture of consent, Gutiérrez responds:

—You may proceed, don Faustino.

Electrified by the mini-farce they have just attended, the audience breaks into applause. (Diana clinks her metal fork against the edge of her plate and Leonor Calcagno merely hints at a few silent claps with her bony hands that resemble little blackbirds' feet.) Browning on top of the generously proportioned, and for now, entirely covered grilling surface, are strings of chorizo and blood sausage, equally crisp spirals and tubes of chitterlings and tripe, golden clusters of whole sweetbreads, split kidneys protected by their own grease, and three long and wide strips of ribs, which have already been cooked on low heat on the bone side, display it now while the meat receives its share of the fire in order to reach the proper level of doneness. Given that their passage over the fire is a simple formality, the blood sausage is the first thing served, followed by the chorizos, and Faustino cuts a number of each on a dish, with the number of guests in mind—fifteen including himself—and then passes the dish to them, starting with Violeta, the one closest to the grill, while those sitting nearby take the opportunity to serve themselves as well. One inconsistent detail in the bountiful table calls Soldi's attention: the asceticism of the salads. Being in love with celery, grated carrots, radishes, and beets, he's intrigued that at the table of Gutiérrez, with such an imposing
cookout, there're only two kinds of salads that, while certainly of an abundant quantity, are unquestionably monotonous: mixed greens and chicory with a dash of chopped garlic. And suddenly he realizes that it reveals a conservative purism on Gutiérrez's part, a bookish purism to which even the two classic salads might seem like a concession, because he considers the colorful plethora of complex salads an urban corruption that betrays the original asceticism of the cookout.
He seeks an imaginary perfection in everything, not realizing that the myths he yearned for over those thirty years had changed, eroded by contingency, while he was away
, Soldi tells himself.

The first minutes of the lunch, with the exception of a few approving comments meant to bolster the satisfaction of the cook, transpire in silence. Gutiérrez, chewing a bite of food, stands up suddenly and walks to the small room attached to the pavilion, where the gardening supplies along with every species of tool and maintenance product are kept. From where he's sitting, Nula sees through the open door that it also contains a small, supplementary fridge meant to prevent unnecessary trips to the house, from which Gutiérrez removes a few bottles, with which he returns to the table; they're three bottles of cabernet sauvignon that he himself sold Gutiérrez, and that he put to cool, already uncorked, in the fridge. Gutiérrez distributes them around the table and sits back down between Nula and Leonor.

—Red! Just what I'd been missing! Violeta declaims, adopting a masculine and undeniably vulgar tone, making three or four people laugh or smile, Clara Rosemberg among them, unless her smile has been caused by some intimate stimulus, memory, or association. Violeta matches her words with actions and immediately throws back the rest of the white wine that was in her glass and, grabbing a bottle of red, serves herself generously. Then she puts down the bottle, picks up the glass, and tastes the wine.

—It's cold, beautiful, she says.

Simultaneously, Nula, whose glass is empty, serves himself a glass of red from the second bottle, without serving the people around him first because they still have white wine in theirs. Nula takes a drink and puts the glass back on the table.
He knows how to handle wine
, he thinks.
It must be over thirty today, and this red should be consumed at fifteen or sixteen, so it needs to be kept longer in the fridge, given that the bottles will be on the table a while, which means that they need to be colder than they otherwise should be because the temperature of the wine will increase as it comes into contact with the outside air. And that's what he did.
As though guessing his thoughts, Gutiérrez, gesturing to the glass with a movement of his head, asks him:

—How is it?

—Exactly how it should be, and it'll improve over the next few minutes, Nula says.

—Your professional opinion is very reassuring, Gutiérrez says with a calculated modesty that Nula takes as a gesture of deference. And then, after a moment of silence, leaning closer, confidentially: And how's the metaphysics coming along?

—Always both more and less arduous than the sale of wine, Nula says after thinking it over a second.

Nodding, Gutiérrez issues one of those loud and open peals of laughter, uncommon from him, that tends to produce curiosity and even, out of sympathy, laughter among those who hear it. Everyone sitting around the table looks at him with expectant surprise, hoping for an explanation, but when Gutiérrez, with a negative gesture of his hand signals that he won't offer one, they return to their conversations. Nula, who didn't think that his mundane comment would cause such a visible impact, smiles, satisfied, though slightly disoriented by the man sitting to his right, Willi Gutiérrez, who seems to him, as he sees him more frequently, deserving of friendship of course, but increasingly incomprehensible and strange. His
laughter just now, disproportionate to the comment, seems to reveal a certain familiarity not only with metaphysics, but also with the consciousness of what's necessarily abandoned in order to survive in life.
What must have been the parabola traced by his life from the town north of Tostado to Rome and Geneva to make him who he is today, and who really is the person who he appears to be? What strange people he and his oldest friends and Lucía's mother are!
Next to him, Diana is talking to Riera, and no one is paying attention to him now, but when he sees Soldi scrutinizing him openly from across the table, Nula realizes that he must guess what he's thinking about. Their eyes meet and Soldi nods very slowly, and it seems to Nula that his dark eyes display a conniving smile.

With the wine and the food, the conversation is electrified. After the blood sausage and the chorizo, Faustino serves the offal and switches, in turn, from white wine to red, under Amalia's reproving gaze from the other end of the table, which Nula glimpses quickly. The conversations move, in loud voices, from one end of the table to the other, or are whispered among neighbors, and are punctuated frequently with exclamations and laughter. Everyone seems content, if not happy, with the possible exception of Leonor, who, preoccupied with her appearance, repeatedly takes a mirror from the white purse hanging from the back of her chair and touches up her makeup, fixing the places she thinks need it. No one seems to notice her, but Nula is sure that many of them watch her disapprovingly. When the meat is ready, Faustino asks each of the guests the ritual question:
Well done or juicy?
And when Tomatis enthusiastically replies
Juicy
, Soldi's voice rings out, droning sententiously as though in an echolalic fit,
Juicy immanence, the universe incarnate
, which causes Gabriela, Violeta, and Tomatis to laugh, along with Gutiérrez, at the other end of the table, who looks at him, surprised.