La Grande (7 page)

—You did the right thing, not saying goodbye to anyone, Escalante says. And Marcos, have you seen him?

—He was the one who told me you lived in Rincón, as far as anyone could tell, Gutiérrez says.

—I used to run into him at the courthouse. But then he got into politics and I retired. I haven't seen him for years.

—Well, I came to invite you over on Sunday, Gutiérrez says. You can see him there.

Escalante bursts out laughing, and raises his hand to cover his devastated teeth.

—At Doctor Russo's house? he says. It's haunted. They say the doctor's ghost comes back from hell just to rob the guests.

—He's not in hell, Nula says. Worse, actually—he's in Miami.

—Sorry, Gutiérrez says. But I'm out of touch with the local mythology.

—It doesn't matter, Escalante says. So you're inviting me over? Will many people be there?

—A mixed bag, Gutiérrez says. But you and the Rosembergs are my guests of honor. The rest—forgive me, Mr. Anoch—comprise the glamorous court I've assembled to receive my old friends. The only one missing will be Chiche, but as our young friend would say, El Chiche deserved something better than Miami, and we'd have to fetch him ourselves from the inferno to get him to come.

Escalante's eyes, gleaming ironically under his eyebrows, arched and gathered around his nose, lock on Gutiérrez's.

—Did you know, he says, that I've been sleeping with my maid since she was thirteen and I was forty?

Gutiérrez, slow to find the appropriate response, puckers his lips into an awkward smile.

—I wouldn't expect anything less from you, he says finally. Always the good pastor.

Nula watches them curiously. Since the first words they exchanged, and possibly to conceal their emotions, their demeanor has been remote and caustic, but to Nula it seems that rather than express the reticence of alert, disillusioned maturity, that style has something juvenile about it, adolescent even, as though something
had been suspended in each of them over the thirty years apart that was automatically put in motion again at their first meeting. Calculating the difference in their ages—when Gutiérrez, without telling anyone, and without a trace, left the city, he still hadn't been born—Nula experiences the vaguely disorienting feeling that he's unwittingly crossed an invisible border, and that he's now moving through the territory of the past, perceiving with his own senses a pre-empirical limbo that preceded his birth. He feels like he's crossed into a space where nothing is real, only represented, like some character in the movies who, during a scene that takes place in a false airport, pretends to have just disembarked from a plane that carried him from a distant country, and he speaks of that country as though he'd really just come from there, but his words are empty of experience, they're just simulacra authored by someone else, and when they're spoken, to describe things that never happened, as interesting as these things might be, they must sound bewildering and strange to the actor. With their lightly evoked juvenile irony, the two older men also seem to have been spirited away, and now float in that parallel universe in which, during their first meeting after a prolonged separation, their lives seem to have paused years and years earlier in the other's imagination. The empirical decades that have passed while they were apart are surely an impenetrable and reciprocal mystery that—while they might spend the rest of their lives elaborating them for each other—they'll only manage to recover as a series of vague, irregular fragments. It occurs to Nula that, for now at least, those decades don't interest them: all they seem to want is to renew the interrupted course of shared experience that time, distance, and the temporarily-overpowered inconstancy of their respective lives had steered into the limbo where for now, exchanging measured, ironic lines that carry with them authentic pieces of information, putting the external world between parentheses (
where they've put me along with it
), they try to reunite.
And Nula's conclusion could be summed up as follows:
That's why he came in here like he knew the place. It's got nothing to do with the millions that Moro attributes to him. He's trying to act like he never left
.

The barman deposits the bottles, ice, and glasses on the counter, along with a dish of peanuts and another of green olives. Nula takes out a cigarette but (because he's lost in thought) doesn't offer one around, and, after lighting it, returns the lighter and the red and white packet wrapped in cellophane to his jacket pocket. When they've finished preparing their drinks, Nula holds out his glass, as though he's about to give a toast, and he's just about to add his own ironic comment when he realizes that the other two men, poised at the threshold of old age, have lapsed into thought after taking their first sips (Escalante drinks his orange soda straight from the bottle), and so he keeps quiet. Suddenly, he understands what Moro had been trying to explain to him at the estate agency when he described his meeting with Gutiérrez on San Martín and said that at one point he got the feeling that if he spoke to Gutiérrez the other man wouldn't even have noticed his presence because he seemed to be in a different dimension, like in some science fiction show.
The past
, Nula thinks,
the most inaccessible and remote of all the extinguished galaxies, insists, endlessly, on transmitting its counterfeit, fossilized luminescence.

And yet, Nula realizes, they don't allow themselves, in public at least, either nostalgia, distortion, or complaint. They exchange words that, from the outside, seem formulaic, but which Nula can sense are loaded with meaning. They start talking about Marcos Rosemberg and his political altruism, exchanging a brief smile that Escalante tries to hide with his hand and that signals their tacit recognition of a certain disposition, crystallized some forty years before, that they attribute to Rosemberg and which seems to provoke both sympathy and disbelief. And Nula, who knows Rosemberg well, since he, too, is a client—Rosemberg was the first to suggest
selling wine to Gutiérrez, saying that if he told Gutiérrez he'd sent him, he would definitely buy some—thinks he can guess that the sympathy comes from their affection for him and the sincerity they attribute to his political activities, while the disbelief, modeled after a self-fashioned image of the cynic, reflects their doubt regarding the actual likelihood of the efficacy of those very activities.

—And you? Gutiérrez says.

Before answering, Escalante considers Nula's presence, apparently asking himself whether or not it's the right time to disclose his personal life, and Nula, as he thinks this, and as Escalante looks him over quickly, tries to muster, not altogether convincingly, a look of neutrality and indifference. But the one that appears on Escalante's face after the inspection, when he begins to speak, doesn't indicate a favorable appraisal of his person, but rather something more generalized, a sort of philosophical posture or moral reflection through which he recalls how trivial and revolting anyone's private life is.

—Everything Marcos must have told you about me is true, Escalante says, and Nula remembers thinking, a few minutes before, that despite his apparent curiosity and subtle exclamations of surprise, they've both known everything about each other ever since Gutiérrez came to the city the year before.

—I was married, I was locked up, I gave myself to the game, for years, and then I got together with my thirteen-year-old maid. After I lost everything, I took up the profession again, trying not to exhaust myself, until I was able to retire. But my wife works now. He falls silent, and then, in a murmur, adds,
The perfect crime
.

—Balzac said that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, Gutiérrez says.

—Is that true in your case? Escalante says, and, from under his arched and graying eyebrows, joined at the bridge of his nose, he locks his smoldering eyes on Gutiérrez's.

As his only response, Gutiérrez nods his head slowly, in a pantomime of suffering, and recites:

I am the knife and the wound it deals,

I am the slap and the cheek,

I am the wheel and the broken limbs,

hangman and victim both!

Escalante listens to the verses carefully, motionless, as though they were a riddle, a code, or an oracle, and when Gutiérrez finishes speaking, his expression turns severe and brooding, attempting to interpret, for himself at least, its possible meanings. Then, gasping softly, he concludes, worriedly,
It wouldn't surprise me
, which, for some mysterious reason, or which, in any case, Nula interprets as such, apparently produces an inexplicable sense of satisfaction for Gutiérrez.

When they finish their vermouth, Escalante, who hasn't finished even half of the orange soda, offers them another round, which they decline. Nula, his back to the bar, throws three or four peanuts into the air, one after the other, and, twisting his head and rolling his eyes to follow their trajectory, catches them in his mouth. Then he is still again, and, looking across the room at the front door, watches the rain cross, obliquely, the light that projects onto the sidewalk against the backdrop of the night.

—Are you coming on Sunday? Gutiérrez says, signaling, indirectly, their imminent departure.

—I have to think about it, Escalante says.

—If it's because of your missing teeth, Gutiérrez says—bringing his hand to his mouth and removing a set of dentures from the bottom row and leaving a gap in the middle of his bottom lip—I too can reveal my true face to the world.

Escalante's own face, impassive up until that moment, has become unstable, covered in folds, creases, and wrinkles, on his forehead, around his eyes and mouth, as though he were making a tremendous effort to hide an emotion, and he darkens slightly, possibly because his skin is so lustrous and dark that the blood that flows to his cheeks can't quite turn them red. Finally, the creases on his face disappear and Escalante is able to smile, and when his hand, his fingers curled, starts to move toward his mouth, he notices the gesture and stops it at his waist, hooking his thumb between his belt and the waistline of his pants. Nula, languidly chewing his peanuts, slows the movement of his jaws until they stop completely and his mouth is left half open as he stares at the other men, as the barman does, and who does so with an expression that combines surprise and uneasiness and even anger. Gutiérrez, with a gesture that vaguely resembles a magician or a variety show host, and which consists of holding the dentures aloft for the public, has also fallen still, displaying the false teeth mounted on a bridge of pink substance that resembles the color of his gums, and ends with two metal hooks that must attach to the actual teeth, and when he returns Escalante's smile, his lower lip, sunken into the hole that has opened in the middle of his face, folds and collapses into his mouth, disfiguring the countenance that Nula, over the course of their three meetings, had started to get used to. Slightly agitated, Nula thinks,
And I thought he walked in here that way out of arrogance
.

—Alright, fine, Escalante says. Maybe you convinced me. Maybe I'll come.

While Nula thinks,
What strange people
, Gutiérrez, narrowing his eyes and rolling his pupils backward, reinserts the teeth and stops a few seconds to install them, tapping his upper row against the lower one to make sure they're in place.

—Chacho, Escalante says to the barman. Do we have anything our friends could take back with them?

—Let me see if there's anything in the fridge, the man named Chacho says.

—No, Escalante says. I meant in the water.

Escalante's preference immediately generates a certain regard in Chacho for the visitors—somewhat diminished by the scene he's just witnessed—and a resigned smile decorates the ambivalent manner with which he gazes, through the doorway that leads to the sidewalk, at the slanting rainfall that crosses the light against the dark backdrop of the night.

—I have a couple of catfish, he says. They're the first of the year.

—So they don't leave empty-handed, Escalante says.

A childish, intensely joyful look appears on Gutiérrez's face, which the barman notes with a spark of satisfaction and possibly even malice, and Nula, without hesitating, attributes the look to some idealized image of the local color that, during his years away, Gutiérrez had hoped to recover, and which, at this moment, by some unexpected and benevolent concession granted by the external world, is now really real. Chacho disappears into the back of the building, through a doorway next to the fridge.

—Don't walk past the dump this late, Escalante says. You'll be slaughtered and eaten up.

—Where oppression reigns, its victims are always suspect, Gutiérrez says.

—They came forth for no good reason, and now they squirm around like a bunch of larvae, Escalante says, and, with a hoarse laugh, adds, Just like the rest of us.

—Yet we claim to embody something more elevated, Gutiérrez says. Power, knowledge, wealth, tradition, and, worst of all, virtue.

—Larvae that pontificate, buy cars, and drink fine wine, Nula says, rubbing his hands together. My golden goose.

Chacho reappears in the opening that leads to the other room: he's now wearing a burlap sack shaped into a sort of cloak over his shoulders; he carries an enormous flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other.