La Grande (58 page)

Amalia relaxes, and Faustino, still excited by the success of his story, collapses into his chair, satisfied. And then Marcos Rosemberg interjects from the other end of the table, using the cigar as a kind of pointer with which he underscores his words. He once had
to go to some military official—a sort of legal advisor to General Negri who had the rank of colonel, celebrated for his bad faith and his dangerousness and his evil nature in particular—to get some information about a disappearance. The colonel asked him in and ordered him to sit down on the other side of the desk, and without speaking to him again he continued doodling on a paper for several minutes, deliberately forcing him to wait as a way to assert his authority. He finally looked up and gave him a studied look somewhere between inquisitive and severe, and so he, Marcos, started to inform him that he was there as an attorney, trying to get some information on the whereabouts of someone who'd disappeared three days ago, but the colonel, pounding the table, shouted that no one had disappeared in the country, only subversives who'd fled abroad to escape justice and that to pretend otherwise amounted to an insult to the armed forces and to the government. The problem was that, with the violence of the punch that he'd given to the desk, his wig had shifted slightly on his head, and his supposed assertion of authority was contradicted by the incongruence of the poorly pasted wig against his scalp. Drunk on his own words, the colonel continued to pontificate and threaten, but Marcos wasn't listening any more, and was instead making a tremendous effort not to start laughing, fearing, simultaneously, that if the colonel's state of excitement didn't subside his wig would fall off his head, and as the situation continued, it became increasingly obvious to Marcos that if the colonel realized it,
he was a dead man, he'd never walk out to the street again
. And so, in the middle of the colonel's speech he stood up, making to leave, muttering that they'd never see eye-to-eye, but with two energetic strides the colonel walked around the desk and stopped thirty centimeters from his face, giving him the most threatening look available in his repertory. But with his sudden movements the wig had shifted even more and was now almost hanging over his left ear. Split between laughter and fear,
Marcos decided to exaggerate his fear, thinking that if he didn't manage to contain himself and started to laugh the colonel would think it was out of nervousness. Suddenly the colonel gave him his most underhanded insult, addressing him as
tú
, and shouted,
You'll walk out that door or it'll cost you dearly!
and Marcos turned toward the door just as the first wave of laughter started to shake him, just like a retching before vomiting, and the colonel, seeing him from behind, must have thought that he was shaking so much out of terror, and ratcheting up his insults as Marcos was crossing the doorway, he muttered,
Bolshevik shitbag!
But Marcos continued laughing, so much so that the soldier who was on guard, without knowing the reason, started laughing too, infected by it. And when he got in his car and started driving along the waterfront toward his house and remembered that the colonel had called him a
Bolshevik
even though he hadn't been a communist for years, because he'd become a socialist, he told himself that, for a security agent, he seemed very poorly informed, and this detail redoubled his laughter, though he didn't know, ultimately, if his laughter was humorous or nervous.

Now it was José Carlos's turn. He'd also lived through an experience that was at once hilarious and agonizing. Like many other members of the university, students, staff, professors, he'd received several threats over the telephone, and at first he hadn't taken them seriously, until someone told him that some army commandos were looking for him, and that he would be kidnapped, and he was forced to leave the city and go to Buenos Aires, where it would be easier than in Rosario for him to go unnoticed. A friend loaned him an apartment in an isolated neighborhood, and to avoid being recognized he decided to change his appearance: he shaved his beard, dyed his hair blonde, and changed his hairstyle. He also dressed differently, less formally, more in keeping with the current fashion, but in a subdued way so as to not call too much attention to
himself. When José Carlos says that he dyed his hair blonde, there's laughter among the listeners, and Gabriela grabs his arm, smiling tenderly, and rests her head on his shoulder. It's clear that she's heard the story many times before, but his past troubles, though she enjoys hearing about them, knowing the ending already, also move her because of the real danger he faced during those dark times. Almost immediately she releases José Carlos's arm and sits back up in her seat. And José Carlos continues: during a February siesta, when the heat was unbearable, because he was drowning in his friend's apartment, he decided to sit a while under the trees of a nearby plaza, where it would be cooler. Though he never went out, while he was in Rosario, without a suit and tie, he put on a sleeveless shirt, what people call a
muscle shirt
, board shorts, and sandals, and picked up a leather satchel and went out into the street. He thought that the long, curly blonde hair, his summer tan, and his lack of a beard would make him impossible to recognize, but as he was walking into the plaza, which was practically deserted at that hour, he saw a man sitting on a bench near the corner, watching him openly, but hesitant, unsure if he knew him or not. When he was approaching the bench, José Carlos recognized him immediately: it was a staff member of the department in Rosario, who hadn't seemed very trustworthy to him, and who must have been passing through Buenos Aires. He tried to act nonchalant as he passed him, but feeling the other man scrutinizing him, trying to decide if it was or wasn't the assistant professor of economics whom he saw every day at school. Rather than sitting on a bench as he'd imagined he would, José Carlos continued across the plaza at a diagonal, but before disappearing down an adjacent street he turned around visibly and saw that the man had stood up alongside the bench and continued to watch him, intrigued.

He felt finished. For a while he went outside as little as possible, and, of course, he never went back to that plaza again. A few
months later, thanks to the intervention of the Italian embassy, which had given him and many other descendants of Italians dual citizenship, he was able to travel and he moved to Milan. One day, a colleague from Rosario came to visit him and he told him the story. But the colleague, laughing, told José Carlos that he already knew it, because the staff member at the department had told everyone that one day, completely by accident, during a vacation in Buenos Aires, he'd found out that José Carlos was a homosexual.

José Carlos's classic and immaculate professorial appearance, almost severe in contrast to the picture the listeners have of the bleached blonde and shaggy man in sandals, carrying a handbag, his legs and shoulders exposed, is probably what provokes the widespread laughter, causing Riera to strike the edge of the table with the palm of his hand, Nula and Marcos Rosemberg to double over in their respective seats, Gutiérrez to remark on the story to Leonor Calcagno, and for the rest of them to revel in the story long after it is finished. Only Tomatis, who'd heard it before, smiles thoughtfully. Suddenly, in a spark of clairvoyance, he realizes why they are together, gathered around the table, relaxed and happy, because, he thinks, no one among them believes that the world belongs to them. They all know that they are apart from the human swarm deluded into thinking that it knows where it's going, and that separation does not paralyze them, just the opposite, it actually seems to satisfy them. Every one of them, not to mention the owner of the house, who guards an impenetrable mystery behind his forehead, insists on being something other than what's expected of them: the wine seller, for instance, who aspires to be a philosopher, or Soldi, the son of privilege who, rather than taking over the family business, prefers to take an interest in literature, or Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, who have been glued together for over thirty years despite the fact that she left him for their best friend and only returned after he threw himself under a train, and he, who'd let her go without a
fight, received her with open arms when she decided to return to him. Or the girl with the stump whose remarkable beauty had been marred before she was even born by that conspicuous deformity to keep her perfection and radiance from overshadowing the goddess after whom she was named. Or the strange woman sitting next to Gutiérrez, whom he came back to the city for and who was no doubt a goddess to many in the past, and who, from an obsession with her supernal past, mutilates herself more every day in the vain hope of recovering it. And myself, who has been given the head of the table at this feast of the displaced as though coincidentally. Tomatis, within the slow smoke of the cigar, lets himself get tangled up in his thoughts, and suddenly an affection tinged with admiration for the people sitting at the table overcomes him: they're right to be the way they are, apart from the crowd, flying solitarily in the empty sky, their destination uncertain, their delirium as their only compass, with no determined path to track along. And while it's true that the ones who will one day wake the drowsy masses have walked among them for long stretches, it's no less true that the ones who live at its margin, sometimes without even knowing it, are the most justified to judge it; they're fodder for their own delirium, it's true, but they're also the color of the world.

Their arrivals were scattered, on their own or in small groups or pairs until the lunch gathered them under the pavilion, and now that the long meal has finished they scatter again across the courtyard or into the house. Gutiérrez and Leonor, along with the Rosembergs, have gone inside; Diana is sitting in a white lawn chair, sketching, under an umbrella that Gutiérrez himself set up so she could work in the shade; Riera and Nula are talking, still at the table, which has been cleared and cleaned completely by Clara, Violeta, and Amalia. After putting out the flames and cleaning the grill and taking the leftovers from the cookout to the large
fridge, Faustino has disappeared; he's actually sleeping a siesta in the shade, under a tree, an activity similar to what Tomatis is doing, lying on the lawn, under a tree, his head resting on Violeta's thighs, her back resting, in turn, against the truck of a tree. José Carlos, Gabriela, and Soldi are talking on the bench at the back, and Lucía is playing in the swimming pool's blue water, moving almost without making a sound. For now, she's the only one not seeking the shade, but Diana hadn't intended to either, and if Gutiérrez hadn't set up the umbrella she would have continued sketching with her pencils, lost in her work, the afternoon heat forgotten. After setting up the umbrella, Gutiérrez glanced at the pad of paper on which Diana was sketching: there were fourteen blotches of color in an oval arrangement, plus one, the fifteenth, in which the color orange predominated, somewhat separated from the rest; the blotches, despite their abstraction, could vaguely suggest human shapes. Diana, realizing that Gutiérrez was looking at the sketch, explained, without looking up,
It's your guests sitting around the table. The different colors represent each person's main qualities.
Gutiérrez shook his head, asking, at the same time,
And that orange blotch is the fire?
Diana, still sketching, explained,
No, that's the owner of the house
. Gutiérrez asked again, intrigued,
And why the orange?
And this time, Diana, looking him directly in the eyes, said,
Among certain religions in India, it's the color of surrender
.

The rest of the planet is dying of hunger and all they know how to do is buy things; and they pretend that the whole rest of the world is like them; it doesn't cross their minds that it's possible to live differently from their way of life, which they insist they've chosen freely but which is clearly just a state in which they've been shipwrecked. And they've exported this disaster to the rest of the world, and everywhere they go everything has been left in ruins. And everyone who travels there from the most remote corners of the
world, dazzled by the counterfeit shimmer they can make out from a distance, arrive finally at what they believed was an inexhaustible well of happiness but quickly discover its mistrust, its rejection, its exclusion.
But I'm repeating myself
, Gutiérrez says with an apologetic smile, unsure how he has once again, for the umpteenth time, punished his friends—Clara, Marcos, and Leonor—with his favorite diatribe, always spoken without hatred or violence or anger, but rather with a sense of irony, or reproach perhaps, as though he would have preferred that the place which, in reality, didn't offer him such a bad reception, had been more similar to the idealized fantasy that had been constructed for him long before he entered its noisy and colorful aura.

The four of them are sitting in the darkness of the living room, cooled by the floor fan that hums in a corner, sending them, along its semicircular trajectory, periodic bursts of gentle air. On the low table between their chairs, on a metal platter, there's a pitcher of cold water in which, when they serve themselves, ice cubes clink, along with the four tall glasses that they drank from, and in which there're still some traces of water. The four of them have a common past that at this distance has become legendary, as if, now unchangeable, it had happened in a different dimension from the one they now occupy, made of space and time, of hesitation and uncertainty. And yet they appear to be seated calmly in their chairs, as if they were lodged in a segment of the eternal. That common past distinguishes them from the others, who wander around the courtyard, seeking a place in the shade, in order to let the wine settle maybe, and to recover from the exhaustion of the lunch and the demands of their digestion; or this is how Gutiérrez imagines it from the cool, dark living room, in any case. His friends, meanwhile, and the lover he had for a few now remote weeks, have in fact listened to him, though they've already heard him discuss the same topic many times before, with interest and patience, but also
with a degree of skepticism: Marcos, for instance, who is a senator and has traveled widely and is in frequent contact with European parliaments, while he's not unaware of the brutal contradictions of so-called
late capitalism
, thinks that many of the social gains made by rich countries wouldn't be detrimental for the poorer ones. Leonor finds it inexplicable for Willi to find so many faults with a continent that can boast places as picturesque and pleasant as Saint Tropez, Nice, Liguria, and Marbella, with so many magnificent hotels and such impeccable service—anyone who's seen the dawn in Cadaqués, even though its beaches are small and overcrowded, doesn't have the right to complain about the European continent. Leonor thinks that Willi is too complicated, and that may have been one of the main reasons why she didn't leave with him that time, so long ago now. Clara Rosemberg's skepticism, meanwhile, has a different source than the others': she gets the feeling that Gutiérrez himself, because of his tone, doesn't really believe in the seriousness of his accusations, or that he considers them of secondary importance, in any case, and that he'd like his listeners to do the same, following rather his irony and his rhetorical distancing. Clara asks herself if his cruel critique of Europeans isn't actually a subtle gesture of reverence toward his local friends. And, with her vague and enigmatic smile, she gives Gutiérrez a look of acquiescence, whose cause or significance Gutiérrez, somewhat perplexed, is not able to guess at.