La Grande (57 page)

Although Diana seems to be intensely concentrated on the conversation with Riera, her right hand places the knife on the edge
of the plate and, sliding it under the table, she grabs Nula's left thigh, and he in turn reaches down and grabs her hand. Their fingers remain interlaced for several seconds, and the few quick squeezes they give each other seem to signal the ratification of a secret complicity that persists despite their mundane obligations. Then Diana's hand releases his, reappears on the table, and picks up the knife; not once has she picked up her head to look at him, nor has she interrupted for a single instant her conversation with Riera. Lucía, meanwhile, is talking to Tomatis about the majestic look of the river when seen from the hills above Paraná, while Violeta is in an exchange with José Carlos about the architecture in Rosario. It may be the food, the proximity of the fire, the intensity of the conversation, and in particular the hour of the siesta, and while the shade of the pavilion protects them, their sweaty faces have lost a good portion of the freshness that they displayed that morning, and though the wine must also have contributed to their exhaustion, the alcohol's artificial energy paradoxically redoubles, in all of them, their enthusiasm. Nula observes its effects among the guests: their faces glow from the sweat, and their eyes from the wine that burns in their intense and alert gazes. Amalia brings out three more bottles of red wine from the room attached to the pavilion and distributes them around the table, and, from the kitchen, she brings a dish of salad. For most of the time, she's been talking to the Rosembergs and watching her husband, who, because of the wine, is speaking more and in a slightly higher register than usual, something which seems to cause Gutiérrez a great deal of satisfaction; it may not only be the wine, but also the familiar atmosphere oozing from the gathering that provokes Faustino's expansiveness. Even Leonor, who hardly speaks, not even to Gutiérrez, seems to feel at ease at the table. Gabriela, who's discussing the provincial avant-garde with Soldi, as they've been doing for months, in a low voice, smiles enigmatically, which causes Soldi to give her an
inquisitive look, but Gabriela shakes her head, signaling that she won't say anything: because Soldi doesn't know that she's pregnant, it would be difficult to explain to him that what made her smile was the thought that the other guests must have thought that she wasn't swimming because she had her period, when in reality the complete opposite was the case.

Suddenly, interrupting her conversation with José Carlos, Violeta takes a Polaroid camera from the bag lying at her feet and, standing behind the table, turns toward Faustino and asks him to pose next to the grill, which Faustino agrees to with intense pleasure. After preparing her shot, Violeta takes the photograph, and the camera, with its characteristic sounds, produces through a horizontal slot across its base the print which Violeta removes and extends to Tomatis, who shakes it gently as it dries, glancing every so often at the faded image until eventually he stands up and puts it in his pocket so that the darkness that reigns there will accelerate its development. Gutiérrez, at the other end of the table, stands up just as Violeta is preparing to take a photo of the whole table. Crossing the lawn with a quick step and then continuing along the white slab path, while the Polaroid starts to develop the second photograph, Gutiérrez disappears into the house. A moment later, the second print appears in the slot and Violeta, withdrawing it, extends it to Tomatis, who starts shaking it while with his free hand he withdraws the first one from his pocket, examines it, and, smiling with satisfaction, shows it to Faustino, who looks at it briefly and then hands it to Violeta. The color image passes from hand to hand, and each guest, more or less attentively, gazes at it, studies it, interrogates it perhaps, marveling, after having lived it a minute before through the confusion of their limited senses within the intricate network of the event, at the sight of an infinitesimally thin cross-section of time on that glossy paper square. When Tomatis finally takes it from his pocket and passes it around
the table, the second photograph produces and even greater effect than the first: every one of the guests recognizes themselves in it while simultaneously rejecting themselves, resenting the image that differs so harshly from the one that, a minute earlier, idealized by a kind of credulity, they'd had inside. Everyone is looking at the camera except Gutiérrez, who, with his back to it, in the background, behind Amalia's erect head, is on his way to the kitchen.

Violeta takes several more photos from various positions, as if she were hoping to reconstruct the multidimensional totality of the courtyard through those one-dimensional fragments. Because Gutiérrez is taking a long time to come back, Tomatis asks for the camera in order to surprise him the moment he reappears outside, but when, after a couple of minutes, he finally does, Gutiérrez is holding a video camera and is already filming the table of guests, and when Tomatis presses the shutter release, the two men capture each other reciprocally, which produces a possibly excessive outburst at the table, more a result of the wine than the actual comedy of the scene. While Tomatis withdraws the print, shakes it momentarily, and then puts it in his pocket, Gutiérrez approaches the table, still filming, and walks down the length of it, focusing on each person, and then, passing behind Tomatis's empty chair, films the other side as he walks back to the other end.
He'll keep us embalmed in his video tapes, in the office he calls the machine room, the same way he kept embalmed for over thirty years the memory of his youth and everything his youth represented
, Soldi thinks, and, though he's unsure why, a faint but unbearable and devastating sense of pity for Gutiérrez, for himself, for the whole universe, seizes him.

When he reaches the head of the table, Gutiérrez passes behind Amalia and starts backing up, still filming, to capture the gathering at the table again, moving away, panning out, until finally, when he's several meters from the pavilion, in the middle of the courtyard, he stops, lowers the camera, which had hidden his face, and
because the demands of the filming had caused him to be slightly hunched over, he straightens up, displaying a satisfied smile. From the pavilion, Tomatis, taking advantage of Gutiérrez's distraction and his isolation in the middle of the courtyard, at the right distance for the camera to capture his whole body, lifts the camera to his face, closing his left eye and resting his right against the eyepiece, but when he presses the release there's no reaction from the machine, empty because the ten prints on the roll have been used up. Attempting to disguise the catastrophe, feeling slightly ridiculous, Tomatis lowers the camera, not realizing that Nula, from the table, has seen what happened and is grinning mockingly, and then returns to the other end of the table, puts the camera back in Violeta's bag as he passes, and lets himself fall into his chair.

No one serves themselves any more meat, though there's still a full strip left on the grill, along with some chorizos and blood sausage. Considering the cookout finished, Faustino stacks everything on the edge of the grill so that it doesn't overcook while staying warm in case someone changes their mind and decides to take another piece. But a short while later, seeing that no one seems to want another round, he removes the leftovers from the grill and arranges them on a dish. Amalia stands up and starts to clear the table, and, seeing her, Violeta and Clara Rosemberg do the same, and the three women walk in a line toward the kitchen and disappear into the house. Diana removes the prosthetic fork, keeping the leather wristband in place, and sets it on the table, and Nula, without hesitating, picks it up along with an empty salad dish and its corresponding wood utensils, walks across the courtyard, and disappears into the house. As he walks away, Gabriela, discreetly watching his movements, thinks,
He must love her very much, unless he reserves that deference exclusively for the public
. But, though she doesn't know why, she hates herself for the cruelty of the thought; she took a dislike to him because of an absurd dream in which
Nula served her a live fish as a mean joke, when the poor guy isn't at all responsible for her dream. Gabriela forgets that her antipathy preceded the dream, and that when they were talking between the cars, when they were on their way back from lunch at Gutiérrez's and he was on his way there to drop off some cases of wine, she was already bothered by his over-confident womanizer attitude. But Gabriela immediately forgets Nula and remembers that Thursday afternoon, the blue sky after the rain the led up to it, and the giant, bright white masses of scattered clouds that seemed motionless but which by the afternoon, when she was walking to the Amigos del Vino bar, had already disappeared.

Nula comes out of the house before the women, bringing Diana's fork, now washed and dried, and walks to the large, straw bag, where they'd carried the wine and where he's kept his neatly folded pants (he put his shirt back on before sitting down at the table), and from which he now takes a long cardboard box containing two or three metal prostheses with various functions, and puts the fork in it. The bag also contains a sketch pad and a box of colored pencils that Diana always carries with her whenever she travels or goes out the countryside for an afternoon or attends an unusual event, and which could be considered her tools, visual rather than textual, for taking notes. Just then, of the three women in the house, Violeta is the first to come out: she carries a rag to clean the table and a stack of dessert plates, and almost immediately, following her closely, Clara appears with another stack of plates, and when Violeta finishes cleaning the table and starts distributing the plates, Clara does the same with hers, placing on each of them a small desert fork that clinks faintly against the white china. Tomatis signals to Violeta, who leans in to hear what he whispers to her, and when Tomatis finishes speaking, Violeta nods in a way that makes her look like an obedient young girl, and goes back inside. Before she walks in, she steps aside for Amalia, who's carrying the two
alfajores
. Marcos, in a serious tone, says,
They're from this morning
, pointing when Amalia places them, one next to the other, in the middle of the table. They're wrapped in white paper that for now Amalia does not unwrap. And, directing himself to the table at large, with the same seriousness of his first qualification, Marcos adds,
They couldn't be any fresher
. Amalia returns to the house, but when she's about to go inside she has to step aside, exactly like Violeta had to do several moments before in order to let her pass, thinks Tomatis, who watches them from the end of the table, and who was watching the door with some anxiety, asking himself if Violeta had found what he'd sent her in the house to look for, smiling with relief when he sees her come out of the house with the supermarket bag emblazoned with the red W that corresponds to the meat section and which contains the mysterious object that Violeta hands over discreetly when she reaches Tomatis, who places it carefully on the corner of the table, between himself and Lucía. Finally, Amalia comes out of the house with a special knife and a cake spatula that, as she moves across the courtyard toward the pavilion along the white slabs and then the grass, catches the sun.

Clara and Violeta sit down in their respective seats, and when Amalia reaches the table Gutiérrez asks her for the knife and the spatula and, getting to his feet with an elaborate bow, extends them to Clara Rosemberg; without hesitating a second, Clara receives them and, after Soldi pushes the
alfajores
to her from the center of the table, she picks them up delicately, places them side-by-side, and unwraps them extremely slowly, revealing two bright white circles fifty centimeters in diameter and six or seven thick. The entire surface is covered in a fragile shell of frosted sugar, and when the knife begins to cautiously slice more or less equivalent segments from the circle, neither the three layers of dough separated by a dulce de leche filling nor the solidified white bath that covers the cracks, indisputable proof, as though anyone would doubt the word
of Marcos Rosemberg, of their freshness. Clara places the segments of the circle on the white plates as they are passed to her, and these then move between hands until they reach the seat of their intended recipients. After serving the last slice—there are still four or five pieces of the second
alfajor
left—Clara sits down and, after checking to make sure that she hasn't forgotten anyone, starts to eat her own.

—It's time, Tomatis says after they've finished eating the dessert and an indecisive silence has settled on the table. Opening the plastic bag, he takes out a large box of Romeo y Julieta cigars, his favorite brand, and tearing off the sticker that holds it closed, he lifts the lid and extends the box to José Carlos, who exults at the neat rows of thick cigars before picking one and passing the box to Soldi, who examines them quickly, curiously, before giving the box to Clara Rosemberg. Clara and Marcos study the contents and take out a second cigar. The box passes around the table to Gutiérrez, who seems ecstatic over the situation, and after looking admiringly at the rows of cigars, passes the open box to Nula without serving himself. Nula, studying the box, feigns a look of skepticism, which creates a degree of anticipation at the table, until finally, still scrutinizing the cigars suspiciously, he says loudly,
Che, Tomatis, they swindled you—this box is full of Romeos!
General laughter receives the joke and the box continuous its course, without stopping, to Tomatis, who offers it to Faustino, who rejects it emphatically, shouting,
I don't smoke!
Tomatis takes a cigar for himself, closes the box, puts it back in the plastic hypermarket bag to protect it from the heat, and leaves it on the table.

José Carlos smokes a cigar alone, but Tomatis and Violeta, Clara and Marcos Rosemberg smoke it in pairs: they pass it back and forth every so often, pulling slowly and loudly, and then return it. Clara narrows her eyes, apparently concentrating, before every pull, and discharges mouthfuls of thick, gray smoke into the warm
afternoon air, while Marcos regularly checks the fire at the end. All of them, with the exception of Tomatis, are occasional smokers, what you might call
enthusiasts
, but, under the circumstances, their pleasure is apparently authentic. They are, in fact, happy under that pavilion, outside that house, with that company and that singular host who disappeared from the city one day without telling anyone and reappeared, for good it seems, some thirty years later, with the same economy of explanations as when he left. A gentle mutual acceptance, a surrender to the moment, allows them an unexpected sense of well-being, removing them from the internal murmur, the solitary rumination, that fills the hours of the day, allowing them to find in the external, like a momentary source of relief, an interesting and pleasurable life, if only for a few moments, in the exceptionally hot April Sunday that gives them the illusion of living in an endless vacation. The wine, in particular, has contributed to that sensation, and now the cigars provide the moment with a meditative perfection. Their words are slower, more carefully thought out than usual, and private conversations have disappeared in favor of a collective attention to which anyone who speaks directs themselves. Everyone hopes for something interesting from the others, not a revelation so much as a story, a well-turned series of events that lead to an unexpected conclusion, to a surprising and unforeseen situation, filling the colorlessness of time with a bright glow as they're recorded by the imagination, settling like a layer of sediment in a glass of wine in their at once receptive and deceitful memories. And suddenly, Violeta begins: after taking a pull from the cigar, she hands it back to Tomatis, and while she exhales the smoke she says that during the dictatorship, during the terror, when fear, disgust, randomness, cruelty, and pain occupied everything, in the middle of the contempt and the killing, things happened that were simultaneously agonizing and comical, so absurd sometimes that they ended up being hilarious. Because at that time the military
was hunting out so-called subversive books, people were forced to scatter their libraries, burning or burying suspicious books in the backs of their courtyards. One night she was having dinner at the house of a studious but incredibly naive colleague, and when she commented on a set of books covered in brightly colored striped paper he'd explained to her that they were among the books considered subversive at the time and that he'd covered them like that so if the police came they wouldn't be able to read what was written on their spines.
Good idea, wasn't it?
Tomatis adds to reinforce the effect of Violeta's story, intending to make it more humorous to its recipients. Several people laugh, and Faustino, impatient to tell his own story but somewhat inhibited by the size of his audience and the anxious gaze of Amalia who, from the other end of the table, seems to fear an incongruous comment from her husband, refers to some neighbors in La Toma, public servants who one afternoon were taking some fresh air at their window when they saw a caravan of Ford Falcons, from whose open windows extended the barrels of machine guns, coming down the street, which prompted the woman to say to her husband that they must be looking for someone and that they must be making a raid, and since they weren't guilty of anything they remained sitting calmly in the window. But it was their house that they were coming to. Twelve men got out, all armed, and entered the house, but they didn't touch anything, they simply wanted to terrorize them, and by the next week the couple was already in Barcelona. After the dictatorship they returned, and they still laugh when they remember what the woman said, and tell it to their friends,
They must be making a raid
, and, according to Faustino,
it turned out that they were coming to theirs
.