La Grande (6 page)

—Who are you? she finally shouts.

Gutiérrez steps up to the fence and shouts back, I'm a friend from abroad, coming by to say hello.

Suddenly, and inexplicably, the silhouette in the doorway starts to laugh.

—I know who you are, she says. Sergio's at the club. Sorry not to come out but I'm washing my hair. Good to meet you. Celia, honey, can you show them where the club is?

—Look, says the first woman. Go past the church and turn right. It's three blocks, on the river side. The sign says
El Amarillo
.

—Thank you, Nula and Gutiérrez say in unison, acting much more polite than if they were speaking to a man, somewhere more crowded, and in the middle of the day. They turn back the way they came, then right on the second corner, pass the church, and walk a block parallel to the square. After crossing the street again—Nula sees the same iridescent vapor haloed over the light at the intersection that covered the white globes in the square—they enter another street, darkened by the trees that border the sidewalk, but also by the night that has now fallen completely. To the west, behind them,
Nula imagines, the curtain of darkness must have already lowered completely, erasing the last fringe of blue light that hung on the edge of the horizon. They don't speak now, and despite the constant rubbing of their shoulders, forced together by the meagerness of the shelter and the irregularity of the sidewalks, their steps splash with the same rhythm. And though both, for different or possibly even opposite reasons, are impatient to arrive, each seems to have forgotten the other. In fact, they're only strangers, and despite the ease with which they exchange the words that the other finds suitable, precise, smart, and so on, both are unsettled by what they might come to learn when the respective opacities that mutually attract them are finally illuminated. It's possible this discomfort is caused, as often happens, by not fully comprehending that the curious attraction they feel comes from unwittingly associating the other with something they both want to reclaim, and which they've long kept hidden in some remote corner inside themselves. They cross the street again, onto another dark sidewalk. Halfway down the block, a wide strip of light, which divides the darkness in half, suggests that they've reached the place they sought. And, in fact, a tin sign hangs from a bar that extends over the sidewalk from the brick wall:

EL AMARILLO

F
ISH AND
G
AME
C
LUB

A rough, childish drawing of an elongated fish, painted the same bright yellow as Gutiérrez's jacket, decorates the metal rectangle under the name.

—We're here, Gutiérrez says, and, apparently forgetting Nula, who is left outside the umbrella's protective cylinder, takes a few steps toward the open door and inspects the interior. Nula walks up and does the exact same thing, with very similar movements,
not realizing that, because Gutiérrez has his back to him and can't see that Nula's movements so closely resemble his own, someone watching them from behind would think that Nula is deliberately aping him. Suddenly, Gutiérrez closes the umbrella, turns around, and shakes it over the sidewalk to release some of the water. Through the space he opens as he backs up, Nula can see inside the club. It looks like a newly built storehouse, made of unplastered brick, and while the thatch roof is in perfect shape (having been built pretty recently), the floor, by contrast, is simply tamped-down earth. Two small lamps hang from one of the roof beams, and a few lamps are attached to the walls, but only two or three are lit up. Three small tables and their respective folding chairs, arranged somewhat at random, a bit lost in a space that could contain many more, are scattered around the room. Two long planks, some collapsed trestles, and a stack of folding chairs is piled up against a wall. At the back there's a counter and a set of shelves loaded with glasses and bottles, and next to that a yellowed household fridge with a larger door below a smaller one to the freezer, which, Nula thinks, some member of the club probably donated after buying a new one. When they appear in the doorway, a man with a full, smooth beard, standing between the counter and the shelves, stops in the middle of drying a glass, watching them with an inquisitive and somewhat severe expression. At the only occupied table, four men are playing cards and three others are standing behind them, following the course of the game. None of them appears to have noticed their presence yet.

The severe look of the barman at the unexpectedness of their sudden intrusion doesn't seem to intimidate Gutiérrez, who, Nula thinks somewhat anxiously, walks in with the same ease and self-assurance with which one of its founding members or even its president could have. Nula, following him submissively, wavers
between disapproval and confused admiration, and is so surprised by Gutiérrez's determination that he's not even conscious of what he's thinking, which, translated into words, would be more or less the following:
Or maybe this is all so familiar to him, it's such an intimate part of himself that despite the thirty-some years away the words and gestures come on their own, reflexively or instinctually, or rather—and it would be offensive if this were the case—he thinks that the millions that Moro attributes to him give him the right to walk in this club as though he were actually its president.

Without even glancing at the barman, Gutiérrez, scrutinizing each of the players at the table and the three men following the game behind them, walks slowly toward the table. He stops suddenly, staring at one of the four players, who is receiving, his eyes down, the cards that the player to his left is dealing. The man's hair, a slicked-back shell pasted to his skull, is thick and smooth; it's patched in white, gray, and black, like the hair of an animal. A cartoonist would represent it by alternating curved black lines with corresponding white gaps of varying width between them, and a few black, white, and gray blotches interrupting the lines to mark the spots where the black and white separate. Two hollows amplify the forehead that, along with his nose, comprises the most protrusive part of his face, which narrows into a triangle toward his chin. His skin is a dark and lustrous brown, its similarity to leather accentuated by the wrinkles on his neck, on his hands, and around his eyes, whose half-shut eyelids obstruct the view to his eyes themselves, which closely study the two cards he's been dealt as he prepares to pick up a third, just thrown across the greasy table, itself a brown only slightly darker than his hands.

—Sergio, Gutiérrez says.

—Willi, says the other man, his tone neutral, not even looking up from his cards.

Patiently, Gutiérrez waits. Nula is unaware that recognition, approval, confidence, and mutual history have just been exchanged, tacitly, by the utterance of their names. Gutiérrez hasn't said a thing to anyone else, but the others, who've now understood that they're not being asked for, don't seem at all interested in their sudden appearance. Only the barman stands alert, paused in the middle of drying the glass, but when Nula, to indulge him—because Gutiérrez hasn't looked at him once—makes a friendly gesture with his head, the man, as though the nod triggered a remote control, looks down and keeps drying. Escalante picks up the third card, studies it, places it over the others, and deposits all three, so perfectly aligned that they seem like a single card, face down on the table. He looks up at Gutiérrez. Then he stands up slowly, inspects the three men following the game, chooses the one that seems most qualified, and gestures for him to take his place. He walks around the table, and when he reaches Gutiérrez he doesn't hug him or shake his hand, only looks him in the eyes and gives him a soft nudge on the chest with the back of his hand. Gutiérrez smiles, but with a look of protest.

—I live practically around the corner, and it took me a year to find you, he says.

—I saw you once, in a car, but before I could put two and two together, you were gone, Escalante says. And another time you walked down my street, but you were with someone. How'd you know I was at the club?

—Your daughter told us, Gutiérrez says.

—My daughter? Escalante says. I don't have children. That was my wife.

Opening his eyes wide and biting his upper lip and shaking his head hard, Gutiérrez's face takes on an exaggerated look of admiration.

—It was no great feat getting such a young wife, Escalante says. For her, it was between poverty and me, and she lost: she got me.

It's difficult for Nula to sense the irony in Escalante's words; his tone is so neutral and flat that it seems deliberate. It's like he's talking to himself, Nula thinks, speaking to something inside. And he realizes that he's been thinking about how Escalante's wife laughed when, referring to Gutiérrez, she said,
I know who you are
. That cheerful sentence implied that she and her husband had already talked about him, and that there might be a sense of irony between them when it came to the subject of Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, when Nula sees them face-to-face, it seems impossible—unless they'd been avoiding it on purpose—that they never once met in the past year. Who knows what reason they might have had to delay the meeting, since they must have known that it would happen sooner or later. When they exchanged their names across the table of truco players without looking at each other, Nula realized, without understanding exactly what it meant, that despite their efforts at pretending otherwise, both men had been aware of even the most intimate details regarding the other for all of the past year. And then he thinks that it's not impossible that when he saw Gutiérrez closing the door to his house he wasn't actually planning to come to Rincón, and that only at that moment did he decide to go, because without him, Nula, he wouldn't have dared come looking for Escalante at home. And Nula is so absorbed in these thoughts that Gutiérrez has to say his name twice in order to introduce him.

—Mr. Anoch, he says, wine merchant. Doctor Sergio Escalante, attorney.

The overly formal manner of the introduction, in particular the use of their surnames and professions, underscored by his sober tone, suggests to the two men that Gutiérrez's regard for their
persons goes well beyond these superficial details—antithetically, in fact, to these social characteristics—in the quarter of authenticity and courage, of hard-fought individuality, of nerve, of introspection, and of a fierce marginality. Without much emotion, both Nula and Escalante nod their heads, accompanying the movement with a brief and rather conventional smile to show that they've discerned, approvingly, the irony of the introduction. When he smiles, Escalante reveals an incomplete set of teeth almost at brown as the skin on his face, and, realizing this, he raises a hand to his lips. The teeth must have been missing for a while, because the gesture seems automatic, and its slight delay could be due to his familiarity with the other players, in whose frequent company he thinks it superfluous—his teeth are no longer a secret to them—but now a reflexive modesty has induced him to conceal his mouth, too late in any case, though Gutiérrez doesn't seem to have given the matter even the slightest importance.

As the other players resume the game, Escalante starts walking toward the bar, and Gutiérrez follows, but Nula is delayed by a survey of the damages the walk has caused to what he rightly considers a kind of uniform: the loafers (the left one in particular), as well as the cuffs of his pants, are covered in yellow mud, and a few splatters of this watery substance, which have already begun to dry, managed to reach his fly and even the front of the white pullover, two circles with a tortured circumference and a dense center, like a pair of symbolic bellybuttons drawn on the white material for some cryptic, supernatural purpose. And on the red camper—like on his pant legs—some damp stains around the shoulders illustrate that the shelter offered by Gutiérrez's multicolored umbrella has been less than perfect. But Nula, after assessing the results of the walk, shakes his head with a smile that, for some reason, unknown even to himself, expresses less annoyance than satisfaction, and, with a few decisive steps, joins the others at the bar.

—What'll you have? Escalante says.

Gutiérrez, apparently uncertain, slowly inspects the shelves. The barman, who has left the towel and the glass he was drying on the table, waits, with a calm expression, neither impatient nor servile, for Gutiérrez to decide.

—A vermouth with bitters and soda, on ice, he says finally.

Escalante asks Nula with his eyes.

—The same, Nula tells the man at the bar.

—Orange for me, Escalante says.

As the barman starts to make their order, Nula watches the two men. They've fallen silent, and don't seem in a hurry to talk. Finally, without a hint of reproach, Escalante says:

—You left so suddenly. Swallowed up by the earth.

—I was in Buenos Aires for a while, and then I crossed the pond, Gutiérrez says.

Escalante shakes his head thoughtfully. He's taller than Gutiérrez, but his extreme thinness, and possibly his seniority, make him look foreshortened in comparison. With his hawk-like nose, his brown skin, his prominent Adam's apple, and his dark eyes that despite being evasive (due to some ocular handicap, perhaps) gleam when they settle on something, a person, animal, or object, the cruel epithet
vulture
that people assign to lawyers seems even more apt to him, not to mention the indifference he projects for things of this world, and the self-control—with the exception of the gesture to hide his teeth, a residual concession to aesthetic considerations—so internalized by now that it seems like his natural state, a false cloak against everything that erodes us, ceaselessly, day after day, from the moment we're born to the moment we die.