Читать книгу La Grande - Juan José Saer - Страница 13

FOR THEM TO MEET, SEVERAL THINGS HAD TO COINCIDE, a few of which, for their importance, are worth mentioning: first, that an inconceivable singularity led, because of the impossible density of a single particle, to an explosion whose shock wave—which, incidentally, continues expanding to this day—dispersed time and igneous matter into the void, and that this matter, cooling slowly and congealing in the process, according to the rotation and displacement caused by the primitive explosion and owing to a complex gravitational phenomenon, formed what for lack of a better word we call the solar system; that a phenomenon which owing to an utter impossibility of definition we simply call life appeared on one of the variously sized orbs that comprise it, that orb we now call the Earth, cooling and hardening as it rotated around a giant star, also a product of said explosion and which we call the Sun; and finally, that one September afternoon Lucía walked past the corner of Mendoza and San Martín—where the Siete Colores bar now occupies the spot that for years belonged to the Gran Doria—at the exact moment when Nula (who, after finishing his coffee, had been detained for a few seconds by a guy who shouted something from his table about a Public Law textbook) walked out onto San Martín and looked up, seeing her, dressed in red, through the crowd on the bright avenue.

Nula was almost twenty-four. Eighteen months before, the previous March, he’d decided to quit medical school and enroll in a philosophy program, where he studied the pre-Socratics and some classical languages and dabbled in German, intending to read Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, but he felt too isolated in Rosario, where, because he didn’t work, it was extremely difficult to get by, and so he came back to the city often, to his mother’s house (his older brother, a dentist, was already married), where he could get room and board in exchange for occasional work and very little nagging. Medicine, he’d explained to his mother, could only be studied in Rosario, or in Córdoba or Buenos Aires, but with philosophy no particular establishment or diploma were necessary. For a philosopher, any place in the world, however insignificant it might seem, was, according to Nula (and many others before him, in fact), as good as any other.

La India—that was his mother’s nickname, even though her family was from Calabria and her maiden name was actually Calabrese, because her straight black hair, her high prominent cheekbones, and her dark skin gave her the mysterious features of some exotic creature—narrowing her eyes and shaking her head in mock fury, had muttered, And how much will that bit of insight cost me? before cracking up laughing, signaling that she was already thinking of a compromise, which, in broad strokes, was as follows: lodging and meals while he was in the city and some cash for a few hours work in the bookstore until he finished his classes in Rosario, all on the condition that he came home with a diploma, even if it was just a doctor of philosophy. Nula—the Arabic version of Nicolás, which, because of how it’s pronounced in Arabic should probably be written with two Ls to extend and roll the single L sound—accepted, more so to please his mother rather than to take advantage of her credulity, and kept commuting back and forth between the two cities for the next eighteen months. Chade, his brother, who had just started his practice, would also put some money in his pocket every so often. Chade, who was three years older, had been a brilliant, accelerated student, hoping, possibly, to find an equilibrium with his father’s degenerative instability, blown around like a dry leaf by the winds of change and, after years of absence in the underground, murdered one winter night in 1975, whether by his enemies or by his friends it was unclear, in a pizzeria somewhere in Buenos Aires. Nula, meanwhile, who often wavered between enthusiasm and indecision, and who was prone to drifting (both inwardly and outwardly), routinely wondered whether he was having to occupy, in the unmanageable present, the same ambiguous place that his father had twenty years before.

With the legal bookstore across from the courthouse and a kiosk inside the law school itself, which Nula managed every so often and which suggested the comparison that his mother’s business was as advantageously located as a brothel across from a barracks with an annex in the bunkhouse, La India had confronted their father’s absence and had raised them and educated them both, him and his brother. But what kept them together, silencing their complaints and rebukes, was the fact that, though he was almost always gone, their father had never abandoned them. Every once in a while he would show up suddenly, loaded with presents, stay two or three days without once going out, and then disappear again for several months. After he died—Nula was twelve, more or less, when it happened—he was even more present than when he was alive. La India, pulling him once and for all from the clandestine shadow that politics had cast over him, filled the house with his photographs, his artifacts, traces of him, filling her conversation with her husband’s stories, ideas, and sayings. Her refractory insistence on repeating them just as he’d said them would eventually turn them into genuine oral effigies. Nula knew that deep down his brother disapproved of this, but he was too attached to his mother to reproach her. Nula, meanwhile, who’d unwittingly developed an ironic, offhand manner with his mother—possibly so as to gain special treatment—objected every so often to the appropriateness of that cult with an ostensible indifference that to an expert’s ear would have sounded pedantic and not the least disinterested. But it’s just that before the storm our life was a perfect picnic, La India would sigh, often tending to speak in metaphor, her idiosyncratic way of employing the language ever since she’d begun to use it.

When they murdered him, Nula’s father was thirty-eight, he had a deep receding hairline, and though misfortune had turned it prematurely gray, a thick beard, as was the fashion in the seventies, possibly to hint at the surplus virility implied by the political inclination of its bearer. And though the awful tempest of that decade had tossed him around like a dry leaf, the late fifties, while he was still young, was when his personality, or whatever you want to call it, had crystallized, and, at least at first, politics occupied a secondary place there. He left home to study architecture in Rosario, but like his youngest son years later (who, in turn, without realizing the symmetry, traded medicine for philosophy) he’d drifted toward economics, from which he declined into journalism. In 1960, he married La India, four months before Chade was born—La India was nineteen then—and they came back to the city. He studied business in high school, and so he ended up taking a job at a bank, but after a year and a half he stopped going. Handling money was nauseating, he said. No one, least of all him, realized that he was having a nervous breakdown. Nula had just been born, and since there were now four mouths to feed, La India realized the time had come to get her hands dirty, so to speak. She started working at a legal bookstore belonging to a friend of her father’s, across the street from the courthouse. Not long afterward, the owner stopped showing up, not even to settle the register at the end of the day. He preferred bocce over commerce, and he was the president of a club called The Golden Pallino in Santo Tomé, and so he ended up making La India a partner, and when he retired she hardly had to do a thing to become the sole owner. Even before his retirement she’d gotten permission from the university to install a kiosk, a sort of wood shack crammed with legal books, in the courtyard outside the law school. A light bulb went off and I brought the horse straight into Troy was her recurrent, self-satisfied metaphor. Yusef, her father-in-law, had helped her buy the bookstore. Though he never said anything to anyone, he believed the responsibilities that his son, in his point of view (which was nothing like La India’s), did not appear capable of managing, should be for him to take on. His two daughters, who both lived in town (the youngest had already married, but the eldest, who never would, still lived at home), tried, solicitously, to console him. But it was pointless: the boy would be the scourge of his old age, and though he outlived him by several years, the ceaseless brooding over his son’s incomprehensible life and death was what drove him to the grave. His grandchildren adored him.

He’d arrived from Damascus in the late 1920s, to work for one of his uncles in the fields outside Rosario, on the banks of the Carcarañá river. He hadn’t yet turned sixteen. One day, a few months after he’d arrived, his uncle called him to the back of the courtyard, and, lowering his voice and looking around to make sure they were alone, took a knucklebone from his pocket and explained that there was going to be a game that night and that he was going to throw the knucklebone into the back of the courtyard, in the dark, and that he was going to tell him to go get it, and all he had to do was switch the knucklebones and instead of bringing back the one he’d thrown, bring back the one he was showing him, the one he’d just taken from his pocket. But Yusef, despite sincerely loving his uncle and owing him everything, had said no. It wasn’t that he was scared, he said, and though he would have loved to please him, it just wasn’t something he could do. His uncle seemed to understand his reasons and told him not to worry about it. Something must have happened with the knucklebones that night, Yusef realized, because his uncle was shot eleven times. He didn’t die—he lived to be ninety-three with two bullets in his body that they were never able to remove, and died suddenly during a game of tute—but out of caution he left town and moved to Rosario, the mafia capital at the time. The impulsive criollos who drew their knives at whatever pretext or started shooting over a simple knucklebone switch-out did not correspond with what is commonly known as the proverbial discretion of the Sicilian brotherhood.

Look at any family, Nula would often think, observing them specifically as a material phenomenon, and you’ll see that they’re just fodder for the Becoming—that everything is constantly moving and changing. And, more or less, the thought would proceed like this: Any member of a family is first of all a shapeless substance, and his existence is only probable and random, and later, when he moves away from the virtual, purely statistical stage, he becomes an embryo, and a fetus, and then he’s born. Once outside he becomes a baby, then an adolescent, an adult, an old man, a corpse, and then just matter again. The skeleton lasts the longest but after a certain period of time, as it fossilizes, it transforms. At this point, all that’s left are a few petrified fragments, for which only the designs of the material world remain. In a family, meanwhile, the different ages are always represented; there are always embryos, fetuses, babies, adolescents, adults, and so on. And if it doesn’t seem that way, if all that’s left are adults and the elderly, it’s because, in this case, only a fragment of the process is available for direct observation. Everything contained there appears and disappears, evolves and changes with time. Not for one second do the members of a family cease to enter and exit the world, transforming, changing in appearance, in size, in weight, the length of their hair or their nails, growing and contracting again, being born, and, each in his own decisive way, leaving the world and disintegrating once again. Everything, at every moment, is in motion, but it’s impossible to know the speed at which things happen. Clocks only follow other clocks; what they measure has nothing to do with time. What is happening passes through a mental scheme they call reality, which is impossible to place either inside or outside of any person. One day, Nula said something to Riera that, in short, would be more or less the following: All of existence is like the ship of Theseus, which, according to Plutarch, was conserved by the Athenians for many centuries as a kind of relic because it had transported the young hostages that the hero had saved from sacrifice in Crete. But over time, as it decayed, they would remove the planks that were too old and replace them with new ones, eventually in its entirety. These repairs were made many times. This is why, when the Athenian philosophers debated the concept of growth, the ship of Theseus was a contested example: some argued that it was still the same ship and others that it no longer was. To which Riera, dismissively, as he often did when the topic didn’t interest him, responded Jerk-offs! But Nula wasn’t even paying attention: he was remembering how, during medical school, he would see the dissected bodies, their organs exposed, listening to his anatomy professor lecture, and wouldn’t be thinking of organs or their function, but of more abstract things, like, for example, the fact that even if two bodies of the same sex had the same organs, each one was still unique, and that what really interested him wasn’t the function or the specific pathology of those organs, but rather the relationship between the general and the particular. So it made sense for him to abandon medicine for philosophy. Since then, in public, one of his provocative claims—like all young people, he had a considerable arsenal—was, I’m only interested in the world in general. And when he was in a good mood, or at a party, feeling playful with someone who could hold his own, as they say, blatantly feigning modesty, would announce: Practicing the ontology of becoming is so simple: you just have to be aware of every part of everything and all the parts of the parts in all their synchronic and diachronic states. And so on.

As kids, Nula and his brother would always spend their holidays in the village. They each had their own horse, just like their cousins, who their grandfather—maybe because they’d been born a bit later and didn’t have his surname but rather the Italian one of his son-in-law, or maybe because Chade and Nula were a connection to the son he’d lost long before death, decisively, snatched him away—nonetheless seemed to love a little less. Or maybe because the two brothers who came from the city tended to imagine it this way, hoping, ever since they could remember, to make it true, from the time when that sense of shelter, consisting simultaneously of affection and severity, met the recollection of their first sensations of the plains. Tactile sensations, for example: the hot and quivering contact with the body of a sweaty horse; the sudden coolness on summer afternoons when they stepped into a shady corner of the immense courtyard; the slippery tension of a live frog struggling to jump from the hand that gripped it; the warm water in the pond and the contact with the obscure objects—animals or plants, it was unclear—that brushed up against them under the surface; their bare feet sinking into the dust on the street, when, on hot nights, they’d walk back from a dance with their shoes in their hands; the sudden burning on their calves at the moment when, crossing a field, they got tangled up in a cluster of nettles; the velvety skins of unripe peaches or the sticky feeling from the sap of the fig trees. Or olfactory: the smell of the bitterwood, honeysuckle, and privet in bloom; of the outhouse at the back of the courtyard; of the alfalfa and the corrals; of the fires, woody at first and eventually combined with the meat cooking on the grill; of a kind of edible sawdust called zatar that arrived every so often from Damascus and was eaten little by little, making a small pile on a slice of bread and drizzling it with olive oil; of some chemical substance they couldn’t pinpoint and of wet burlap in the village ice house; of the abandoned nests, a mixture of dry twigs, feathers, and excrement. Or taste: the flavor of a drink made with very acidic green grapes, mashed at the bottom of a jar and mixed with sugar, water, and ice; of the cigarettes made of dried corn husks and corn silk and later the real cigarettes and the first beers taken secretly from the store during the siesta and which they took to smoke and drink in a vacant lot behind the house; of the green, sweet stems they’d pull from the ground near the station and chew for a long time; of the rainwater that aunt Laila kept in a jar to wash her hair; of the mandarins and oranges that on winter nights they’d put to warm on the coals of the fire; of the Syrian food, mint, squash, lemon, eggplant, wheat germ with raw steak and onion, and, in the summer, stuffed with ice flakes; of the mate brewed with milk and sugar for breakfast. Aural: the black space of the night that would erupt into a multiplicity of planes when, for some reason, the dogs in the village started calling and responding in the darkness; the whistles of the trains that passed full speed through the village, or the clattering of the endless freight trains that, also without stopping, passed through slowly; in the fields, the sound of the livestock, the snapping of the grasses or the shivering of the corn when they pulled an ear off to eat it and put the silk to dry; the subterranean knocking of the tuco-tucos, the cries of the lapwings and the crested screamers at the water, and the cooing of the doves at midday in the summers; the hooves of the horses crossing town at a walk or a trot and so rarely at a gallop that when it happened people would come out to the street to see if something was wrong; a complicated, rhythmic sound, the creaking of leather, wood, and metal of the sulkies, wheelbarrows, and pick-ups; the conversations in Arabic between his grandfather and other Syrians or the family members who lived in town or who’d come to visit him from the surrounding villages or even from Rosario or Buenos Aires and once even from Colombia; the unsettling sound of the windmills at the bends in the Carcarañá when the wind picked up; the clatter of the bocce balls in the court behind the store; the Sunday mornings, the radio they’d take outside if the weather was nice to listen to The Syrio-Lebanese Hour on the Rosario station, the mournful voice of Oum Kalthoum filling the sunny courtyard, the house, the orchard, and garden, under the arcades covered with vines or enormous wisteria; the Arabic words: bab (door), khubz (bread), haliib (milk), habibi (darling), badinjan (eggplant), watan (homeland), and so on. And visual too: the empty horizon on the plain, always the same wherever you were; the swarms of yellow butterflies that would land on the damp parts of the street after the sprinkler passed and take off all at once and land in another puddle father off; the planters blooming with dahlias, snapdragons, daisies, and pansies; the outskirts of the village, which already were and also weren’t the countryside; the horse-drawn carts that passed at a short trot and whose driver, without even turning his head to see if there was anyone there, would direct a greeting that consisted of slowly lifting the hand that held the reins toward the corner where the store was located; the signal that dropped suddenly when a train was approaching the village, and the people waiting for it running from their houses and crossing the tracks in order to reach the station before the train; the dirt roads, sloped and dusty on dry days and covered with black mud and mess the rainy days, and always, always, straight, endless, and deserted; the owls perched on the posts of the barbed wire fences, motionless and rigid, as though they were effigies of themselves painted on the wood; the guinea pigs with metallic blue tufts crossing the road slowly when a vehicle or a rider on horseback was passing; the rabbits running full speed from the undergrowth and the whistling ducks flying high, slowly, stretched out, forming an angle; or the motionless dust kicked up by cars and which on still days hung over the road for a long time; the dogs that copulated during the siesta, the male balancing precariously, trembling slightly, over the female; or the foal and the mare that once, at a distance, Nula had been watching, and saw that, as they caressed, stroking each other’s necks and muzzles, the foal’s penis was slowly engorging. (Each time he remembered one of these sensations, Nula put it down in his notebook.)

His grandfather was one of those assimilated “Turks” who, if he dressed like a farmer or a horseman and didn’t open his mouth, with his straight black hair, his tightly clipped beard, and his skin toasted by life in the open air, could pass, among strangers, as a gaucho or a farm hand from the area, or one of those santiagueños who, in the thirties and forties, came en masse from the villages on the plain to harvest corn. And even when he spoke he didn’t have much of a foreign accent: he’d learned Spanish well, with the exception of four or five hitches that his vocal organs probably couldn’t adapt to, and which betrayed his origins. He was anticonservative, a yrigoyenista, and a bitter antiperonist (that was the epithet he used), and he liked to recall how, during the coup in 1930, a drunk gaucho had ridden horseback into the store, and he’d taken his revolver from the counter drawer and unhooked his riding crop from the wall, and hitting the horse with the crop, had backed him into the middle of the street. And yet he read La Nación and La Capital, and every month received Selections from Reader’s Digest. He dressed in three different ways to fulfill his three main roles: for his work in the fields, where he had a few cows; for his general store, where he sold everything from yerba mate to freezers and at one point even cars, and of course clothes, fabric, paint, and what have you; and finally for his trips to Rosario, for business, family matters, or social occasions like weddings, baptisms, wakes, or parties at the Syrio-Lebanese club. In the sixties, he had a truck for the fields and around town, and a car for longer trips. Nula remembered hearing, without understanding completely because he was still too young and his parents only hinted at it, that after he was widowed he’d taken up with a mysterious lover in Rosario. Laila and Maria, his two daughters, wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of behavior in the village. When Nula was older, La India told him that his father had spotted Yusef once in Rosario, and that his grandfather, who was with his lover, had pretended not to see him, but in any case the relationship between the father and the son had already fallen apart by then. In terms of religion, his grandfather considered himself a fervent Apostolic Roman Catholic, which might have been an implicit way of underscoring his superiority, not over the Jews, of whom he seemed unaware (although, when he played truco he always teamed up with Feldman, the pharmacist, who was one), nor over the Muslims, whom he loathed, but rather over the Maronites and the Orthodoxists, who seemed more skittish than true heretics to him, preferring those extravagant variants despite having recourse to the Roman Church. He attended mass every Sunday and took communion every so often, and if the priest came by for something for himself or for one of the poor people in the village, he didn’t charge him, but he didn’t like knowing he played cards on Saturday night and would keep from going to those games so he wouldn’t have to see it.

They brought his son back to the village to bury, near his mother and an older brother who’d only lived a couple of weeks and who, as was the custom then, had the same name. At first, La India had objected, because she’d planned to cremate him and scatter the ashes, but then she thought it would be better to leave him near his father, to see if the proximity, after the incommensurable separation, could reconcile them. She was left with, as she would often say to her sons in her colorful way, the perfect picnic before the storm. They had killed him in a pizzeria in Boulogne, near the Pan-American highway, and La India passed through the village to drop off the boys and pick up their grandfather on her way to Buenos Aires. The police interrogated them for a full day before releasing the corpse, and at the end of the interrogation a clerk read them the section of the report that referred to the event itself. He’d apparently set a meeting one night, for nine o’clock, but he’d arrived well before that and had changed tables twice. According to witnesses, at ten of nine a car parked outside the door. Three men were inside; the one who was sitting in the passenger seat got out and stood on the sidewalk, leaning against the open door to the car, which was still running. The waiter at the pizzeria said that when his father saw them he stood up too, reaching his hand into his jacket to get his gun ready, not looking away, but the man who took the shot had already been in the pizzeria for a while, drinking a beer at a table behind him and pretending to watch a sports program on the television, waiting for the car that would pick him up after the execution; he shot him four times in the back, shot him again where he’d fallen, and, according to the waiter, ran out and got in the back seat of the car, where someone had already opened the door from the inside, while the guy who’d gotten out of the car sat down again next to the driver, who’d pulled away at full speed, barely giving the others time to close their doors. After La India and her father-in-law were given permission to take the body from the hospital and had seen it to the funeral home’s van to take back to the village, they decided to pass by the pizzeria. It was a winter dusk; an icy rose stained the sky opposite the west, where the sun had almost disappeared behind a bank of clouds darkened by their own shadows, projected by the back light. In the empty pizzeria, the lights and the television were already on. They spoke with the waiter and the owner; when he realized who they were, the cook, who’d been kneading dough near the oven, put down his work, and without opening his mouth once, approached to listen. The owner didn’t seem too happy that they’d come—he must have thought the visit could be compromising—but the waiter, who’d tried to help him, and who seemed truly affected by what had happened, showed them the spot where he’d fallen and tried to console them by saying that he’d died immediately, almost without realizing what was happening. He followed them to the door. Before they left, the grandfather put a few bills in his hand, which he ended up accepting after a brief but sincere resistance. They went back out to the street, onto that anonymous corner of the tortuous outskirts of Buenos Aires, with its little houses of unplastered brick, its cheapjack markets, its narrow, musty courtyards, its small shops and supermarkets, its loud furniture, its gardens, its shanty towns, its warehouses and its factories, its toothless girls, its old mestizos loaded with plastic bags, its vendors from Santa Fe, selling pills and candy, newspapers and soft drinks, at the bus terminals to Córdoba, to Rosario, to Resistencia, to Catamarca, to Paso de los Libres, or to Asunción. In the infinite solitude of the icy dusk the otherness of the world turned more oppressive and enigmatic among the masses that seemed to dissolve, lost, into the darkness.

They arrived in the village at dawn, almost at the same time as the van. They held the wake without even opening the casket, and buried him that same afternoon. Many people came to the cemetery, friends and acquaintances from the village or from neighboring towns: Italian or Spanish farmers who were clients at the store, old Arabs who owned or had owned stores in the surrounding towns, childhood friends of the deceased who’d gone with him to primary school and who’d stopped at that level, staying in the village, because the others, the ones who’d pursued higher studies, with the exception of the notary and the veterinarian maybe, were scattered around the world. The grandfather’s priest friend had been dead for some time, so a young priest gave the mass. La India was about to object to a religious ceremony, but then thought that, having decided to return him to his father, she had to abide by the rules implicit in that choice, and that, in the end, death, which erased so many superfluous things, did so with disputes over religion too, but mostly because while for most of his life the dead man had thought he’d freed himself from it, at his burial, apart from her and his two sons, who were in a sense the only foreigners there, it was clear that the small world he’d escaped was now reclaiming him. His death had wiped away the inconstancy of the inextricable external world, and it was the unyielding procession of his childhood that now accompanied him to the tomb. The turmoil he’d submerged himself into, intending to give it a new order and sense, ended up forcing his return to that preconscious place where, in the shelter of history, in the territory of emotional and sensory immediacy, things were as they seemed despite this or that resistant opacity, which his adult years, with absolute certainty, would reveal. For the grandfather, however, the opposite occurred: his naïveté when he’d left his neighborhood in Damascus at fifteen to conquer the world had allowed him to face, lucidly, everything he’d found himself entangled in, making, at each opportunity, the decisions that seemed most just and which no doubt were, because their succession had brought him steadily closer to what he was seeking. He’d left his family—the mother and sisters with whom he still corresponded regularly at that time, exchanging gifts, like the edible sawdust zatar, and the brothers who’d moved to Colombia and Mexico—had left the oldest city in the world, as he liked to say, with childish pride, when referring to Damascus, and then had crossed the ocean and a good portion of the plains in order to settle in a little village on the banks of the Carcarañá, and, with the little his uncle left him when he left for Rosario after the shooting, had started a family and managed to make a small fortune, nothing exceptional, but enough for himself and for each of the millions of poor bastards who crossed the ocean from Genoa, from Galicia, from Marseille, and even from Dakar and from Tripoli; who came from Spain and from Italy, from Syria and from Lebanon, but also from Portugal, from Morocco, from central Europe, from Serbia or Belarus, from Ireland or from Japan, fleeing from oppression, from war, from pogroms, from the Ottoman Empire, from the secret police, from political or religious persecution, from hunger, from poverty, from their destiny. They scattered across the plains, where new ravages awaited them—violence, xenophobia, exploitation, mysterious illnesses, an early grave in a foreign land—and ended up gathering together on land parsed out by the government, eight square blocks that bordered the railroad, which they called a town and named after the first person to arrive, or whatever name he chose, often the name of a woman, thus marking the end of their epic wandering and the start of their sedentary, agrarian life. Yusef, his grandfather, was among these millions of men, and it hadn’t gone too poorly for him, owing to a few personality traits that popular magazines call ambition, tenacity, rational self-interest, intuition, cunning, perseverance, and so on, and so on, and which they use to explain a posteriori the unfathomable crisscrossing of accidents that determine, from the forms that the fugitive—and by chance purely imaginary—evidence assumes in the dark matrix of any event, the thing they call destiny.

In any case, his grandfather had survived that adventure with total certitude of its objective necessity; if he’d had doubts, they were only the practical kind. And when it seemed he’d reached the climax of his ambitions, reality, which often resists an obedience to desire, pulled him, through the conflict with his son, from the legible and linear world he’d made, and submerged him in murky contradictions of an unaccustomed type. What had been clear became tortuous, incomprehensible. The value of sensations and events began to escape him. With the death of his wife, who was younger than him, he’d already intuited that the logic of the world could be cut off or obstructed at times by unexpected clotting; with that of his son, it was the natural order of the universe, which he’d always believed in, that had been disarranged. Over the few years he survived after his son’s death, the world, corroded by his unanswered questions, crumbled little by little into chaotic fragments. Within weeks after the burial, his straight, stiff, black hair and neat black beard, which to strangers marked him as an old criollo, turned completely white. A year later they found several tumors of a cancer that the doctors never managed to pinpoint. They operated in Rosario, and when he recovered after his first treatment his daughters convinced him to go to Damascus to see his mother, who was over ninety years old, but a couple of weeks before the trip he received news that she’d died. He bought a death notice in La Capital, with a photo he’d gotten two or three years before, compensating for his son’s hasty and somewhat shameful burial, and asked the young priest—whom he no longer charged when his servant came by for something—for a mass, which many people attended, of course the Arabs from Rosario and the surrounding towns, many of whom, it goes without saying, were Orthodox or Maronite, the Jewish pharmacist, the Italian and Spanish farmers, clients, friends of his daughters and his son-in-law, Enzo’s family, and, of course, Nula, who was already shaving by then, with his mother and his brother. After the mass, the family received their guests in the courtyard, under the arbor—this was in October—and once the formalized condolences had been carried out, the guests tried to change the conversation and animate their host, but his grandfather, whose lips permanently wore a pained but courteous smile, would not open his mouth. He canceled the trip to Damascus, of course, though he still had his sisters, and his health kept up for a while longer, but eventually it declined again, imperceptibly for those who saw him daily, but alarmingly for those who saw him only once in a while. He no longer went out to the fields or attended the business, and though early in the day he paced the courtyard giving orders to the two boys in charge of the house and the garden, later on, after lunch, which he barely touched, his daughters would make him change clothes, and, washed and well-combed, would sit him in a straw chair in front of the store.

Across the broad dirt road stood the rail line and its sheds and station house. The villages on the plain liven up a little at the end of the afternoon, most of all on hot days when the sun, from which there isn’t, in the fields, any defense, declines to the west. The sprinkler truck waters the roads and damps down the dust so that when cars pass, or sulkies, or even bicycles or men on horseback, they aren’t forced to suffer a dust cloud. The grandfather, his eyes dim and absent, would watch the passage of the trains, cars, and people who sometimes stopped to greet him. Very infrequently, his eyes would light up, weakly, with a fleeting spark: he’d think he recognized an old friend in the driver’s seat of a passing car, but it would take him so long to raise his arm in greeting that when he managed to wave his hand a little, at a certain height, the car was already two blocks away. A pretty horse at a trot was also pleasurable for him, because he’d always liked horses; and it was also pleasant sometimes to watch the children who, after being washed and scrubbed by their mothers, their older sisters, or their aunts, went out to play, still chewing on enormous chunks of homemade bread slathered with butter, dusted with powdered sugar, and smeared with dulce de leche. But that was it. At first, he’d get up every so often and take a few steps along the uneven brick sidewalk, but toward the end he never moved from the chair. By the next fall, he started refusing food, and since he barely weighed fifty-two kilos, they had to hospitalize him and feed him through a tube. One cold morning he stopped breathing.

When he saw him in the coffin, shrunken by death and by his suit and shirt, oversized because of the illness—his uncle Enzo had shaved him and tied on a blue necktie with colored stripes, its bulging knot resting on his Adam’s apple, disproportionately large because of his thinness—Nula was able to observe, for several minutes, the discreet, blue tattoo on the back of his right hand, which covered his left hand, over his abdomen, consisting of three dots arranged in a horizontal line. It had always intrigued him, and though as a boy he’d asked his grandfather what they meant, he’d never gotten a satisfactory response, making it seem like one of those topics that, because of the evasive responses they get, children resignedly consider themselves unfit for. Many of the Arabs who visited his grandfather had similar discreet, blue tattoos on their hand, their wrist, or their forearm. Growing up, Nula had grown so used to seeing them that he ended up not noticing them. But seeing the tattoo on the back of his hand again, he had the confused sense that their location, and whatever reason he’d had for having them imprinted on his flesh, in death, those three blue dots, however enigmatically, betrayed an authentic need. He knew that those three dots were a sign, a message, but he couldn’t tell to whom they were directed. And although two or three years later, when he thought of them, he still believed that they were a custom of another time and place, archaic and mysterious, where ritual and taste favored those marks on the body, by strange mandate or simple habit, it was only much later—he was already married and had abandoned his philosophy studies in Rosario to earn his living selling wine in the city—that he realized what the tattoos signified. One night, he was watching a Monteverdi opera on television, The Return of Ulysses, and at the recognition scene, when Eurycleia, the old nurse, realizes that the beggar, from the scar on his thigh, is Ulysses, who has returned incognito to Ithaca, Nula, hitting the open palm of his left hand on the back of his right hand, shouted so unexpectedly that Diana, concentrating on the music, jumped. Nostoi! he practically screamed. And then, lowering his voice, as though in apology, I’ve been trying to remember that word for so long. They continued listening in silence, and, when the opera finished, Nula went to the library and returned with a copy of the Odyssey opened to the start of Book XIX. “Nostoi” means “the returns” in Greek, he said. They were a series of epics that recounted the return home of the Greek heroes who’d fought in the Trojan war. But almost all of them were lost; only the return of Ulysses survived, and a few loose fragments of the others. I’ve been trying to remember the word for days, because I felt like it had some connection to my grandfather’s life. And now I know why. First of all, because of Ulysses’s scar from a tusk wound he got when he was a boy, when he went boar hunting once with Autolycus, his grandfather, like my brother and I used to hunt with our grandfather Yusef. But it wasn’t just about him, about his childhood memories of his grandfather taking them out to the fields to shoot partridges and wild ducks, but rather about his grandfather, about the recognition of Ulysses by the scar on his thigh, and if he shouted suddenly it was because he finally understood the purpose of those blue tattoos, on their hands, on their wrists, on their forearms, and possibly on other parts of their bodies that weren’t publicly visible: those signs inscribed on their flesh anticipated the nostos, the return, which they assumed would be so far from the moment of departure that their bearer would return to his place of origin so disfigured by inclemency and disillusion, by the silence of distance and the contempt of time, by the frayed rags of experience and of being, their only conquest, that they thought it prudent to mark themselves with an indelible sign so that they could be recognized by those who’d seen them off, and who still awaited their return, patiently, in their homes or in Hades.

After his grandfather’s death, Nula took fewer trips to the town, though later, when he started medical school in Rosario, he would sometimes go up for the weekend. He didn’t need to catch the bus at the terminal, because his apartment was close to school, and the bus, before leaving the city, had to take several loops through the one-way streets near the terminal, and one of those loops passed right by his house. Sometimes he’d run into a family friend who recognized him, and other times he’d travel with his eldest cousin, who was studying to be a veterinarian—his youngest cousin was still at the Jesuit school—and who always told Nula that when they graduated they’d open a joint practice for gauchos: one of them would treat the horse while the other one examined the horseman. But, little by little, without knowing why, they grew apart, and when Nula dropped out of medical school and took up philosophy, they stopped seeing each other altogether.

What happened at the pizzeria caused a rift in the family that only widened with time. On one side were his aunt Laila, La India, Nula, and his brother, and on the other side his aunt Maria, his uncle Enzo, and their three sons. The more distant family, their friends, and acquaintances fell to one side or the other. Nula, who couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened, and though he wasn’t sure whether or not to approve of his father, possibly because he often felt their resemblance too closely, couldn’t stand it that anyone else, even his father’s own sister, would judge him.

But there were other reasons for his detachment from the town and his family. He’d drawn a low number in the draft, and because of this escaped military service, which gave him a year advantage at school, a stroke of luck that, from some dark, hidden, machinations inside himself, he refused to take advantage of. It took him more than two years to realize that what interested him wasn’t so much the nomenclature of the individual organs, but rather, as he liked to proclaim every so often, the viscera in general. In fact, it had always depressed him to imagine one day running his own practice, his day filled with actual patients while his thoughts wandered always to their causes, though his perplexed indecision and his erratic imagination never bothered to find a way out of the problem. Around this time, he started seeing his life like an mechanics shop where the cars, the engines, the toolboxes were all in disarray and half-assembled, and though the incessant, fugitive process of becoming never for a single second stopped manipulating them, changing their shape and position, they would always be in that same state of incompletion. The world became contingent, uncertain, and the inextricable threads connecting things, which could be untangled only in certain dark places, began to interest him more than things themselves, simulacra sitting there in plain sight as though that’s all there was to it. The way his uncles and cousins criticized his father bothered him less for its moral or political pretension than for its predictable submission to the world of appearances. After several months of hesitation, of conversations over drinks, of reading, he enrolled in the philosophy program. And, after accepting La India’s conditions—Around here, pal, let he who wants fish dig his own worms—he started commuting between Rosario and the city. When he ran out of money, he’d go back to his mother’s house, and two or three times a week he’d take over for the girl who worked the kiosk at the law school, who, because she was a student, had to close up when she had class or an exam to study for. But Nula didn’t just go back to the city when he was broke. Despite the rude and offhand way that La India treated him, often to parody a threat, Nula knew that, whenever she was close by, though he didn’t quite know the reason, he’d always be protected.

On one of these trips, by chance, he saw the girl in red on the street, just as he was coming out of the Siete Colores bar, on the corner of Mendoza and San Martín, occupied for years by the Gran Doria. As we were saying, it was not only necessary, for the meeting to happen, that an unknown combination of pressure and temperature caused an inconceivably dense point of space and time, which are ultimately the same thing, at a given moment, to explode and scatter, violently, in a stampede; that in certain regions it curdled and stabilized—it’s impossible, we know, for Nula to calculate the velocity of the event with absolute certainty—into the thing we call our solar system, for example, and that on one of those cooling igneous orbs a set of chemical reactions made possible the appearance of something that for lack of a better word we call life, it’s not really clear why, with all the incalculable consequences that brought with it. Not only, as we’ve said, did all that have to happen, in addition to the innumerable series of interconnected events that took place thereafter, these difficult to verify as well, but also, and in addition, as he turned toward the door, when he was just reaching the exit, a student sitting at one of the tables near the windows that faced Mendoza had to shout a question about a specific edition of a Public Law textbook, whether they had it at the main bookstore because they didn’t at the law school kiosk, and by answering him Nula was delayed another thirty seconds, because otherwise, if the student hadn’t called out to him, Lucía wouldn’t have reached the sidewalk yet and he wouldn’t have run into her as he walked out, and might have turned down Mendoza to the west to catch a bus at the Plaza del Soldado, or if, instead, he’d decided to walk back to La India’s house for lunch, he might have turned up San Martín, and since he was more or less thirty seconds ahead of her, would’ve probably walked the twelve or thirteen blocks to his house without once noticing she was there.

Thanks to all of these coincidences, he’d bumped into Lucía as he walked out. It was just after noon, when the shops close and their employees dissolve into the crowd that comes and goes along the avenue and its cross streets. The buses fill up with people going home for lunch, with high school students, with bankers, with public servants. After one o’clock there’s almost no one left on the street, but around noon, and later in the afternoon, in the city center, the crowds swarm anew, as they say. That bright September afternoon already anticipated that intimate and possibly organic, but also painful euphoria provoked in the species, most likely from its affinity with all other forms of life milling around the biosphere, and also from our consciousness of it, by the arrival of the spring. The fibers and tissues, flesh and organs, feeling the multiple effects of the weather appropriate for the needless, and, you might say, ad nauseam iterations of the same invariable, demented shapes, tense up in self-regard, in the fullness of the present, but memory, not necessarily in a conscious way, can’t ignore that the fullness is temporary. The girl in red, tall like him, and clearly a few years older, with whom he almost collided as he walked out of the bar, surfacing from some preoccupation, looked hard at him, as though she was about to say something, but without opening her mouth she stepped aside and walked past. Without even taking the time to think about it, Nula started to follow her. They walked in the shade, which, despite the hour and thanks to the two-story houses, still covered a good portion of the sidewalk, and after a few meters, as she stepped into the street—they were on the San Martín promenade—Nula did the same, immediately feeling the warmth of the air and the light on his face and head. At first, less than four or five meters separated them, but Nula could see, in her posture and in a few uncertain movements of her head, that she already sensed that she was being followed by a stranger, and so he slowed down, to increase the distance between them, but even when he’d been following her more closely, despite the fact that her red dress hugged the full, firm shapes of her arms, her back, her buttocks, and her thighs, Nula didn’t notice her body, ensnared rather by the memory of the quick, inquisitive look she gave him as she surfaced, momentarily—only to sink again immediately—from her thoughts. Later, a kind of sexual fury, more painful than pleasurable, actually, a transferred and rarely gratified salaciousness, would periodically entrap him, but in that first meeting and in others that followed it, the question of sex, though the immediate reaction of his senses indicated just the opposite, seemed secondary.

As they left the city center, there were fewer people in the street, which forced him to extend the distance between them by a few more meters, in case she happened to turn around, because if she recognized him as the man she’d thought she knew outside the bar, she’d realize that he’d been following her ever since. She walked at a steady pace, neither slow nor fast, apparently calm and sure, and her dark brown hair, with the same rhythm as the loud clicks that her heels made against the gray pavement—Nula had observed this when he’d been closer—bounced silently against her nape and the top of the back. After a few blocks, at the end of the promenade, she turned the corner, walked east one block, and, crossing the street, turned on 25 de Mayo, the first street parallel to San Martín. Now they walked on the sunny sidewalk, opposite the cars and the buses that moved south toward the city center. From a distance she seemed taller, and Nula guessed, without checking too closely, that when she made a quick pivot on the sidewalk, or when she stepped for a few seconds into the street, it was to avoid the broken patches of sidewalk he knew by memory, the missing paving stones or the potholes where, despite the week that had passed since it last rained, there still trembled a rectangular, stagnant puddle that had yet to evaporate. The red blur of the dress vibrated in the distance, mobile and vivid in the early afternoon sun that glimmered off the windshields of buses, off the windows and the chrome bodywork of the cars, troubling the soft calm of the air.

Another thing that hadn’t occurred to Nula was that their route was taking him straight to his own house. La India’s apartment building was accessed in the middle of the block through an interior garden, faced on two sides by rows of apartments that divided the block without completely separating the two halves: despite the fact that the garden and the apartments took up the full depth of the block, the building stopped before the next cross street, and there was no other entrance but the main one, on 25 de Mayo. In the late forties, when they were built, the apartments were unusual and expensive—at that time they called them luxury tenements—and if they still conserved a sense of upper middle class dignity, time had mistreated them badly. Most of the residents were owners, and they’d formed a co-op, with La India as vice-president, to keep the complex in good condition and raise funds from the municipality for restoration. The main entrance, dominated by curves, granite staircases, and chrome banisters, evoked both the prosperous years of its construction and the avant-garde flirtations of its local architects.

On the next corner, Lucía changed sidewalks, crossed the street that intersects 25 de Mayo, and started down La India’s block. Nula did the same, but when he saw that she had stopped at the entrance to his own building and was peering inside, curiously, he stopped at the corner to watch her. Lucía walked up the three staircases that separated the garden from the street and looked in, curiously, but also with a slow caution. Then, hesitantly, she disappeared inside. Nula was about to follow her in when she reappeared. She seemed dissatisfied, and also slightly disoriented. She stood thinking on the top step, quickly looked back inside, checked her watch, walked down to the street, took a few steps to the north, then turned around suddenly and started walking straight toward the spot where Nula was standing. He was about to slip into the ice cream shop on the corner, owned by a friend of his mother, but he thought that if she wanted to interrogate him it would be better if it happened on the street, which was empty just then, and so he waited, looking right at her, watching her approach with that decisive step, neither slow nor fast, absorbed in her thoughts, as though she were measuring the words she planned to say when she reached him, but when she got to the corner she glanced up suddenly and gave him the same look she’d given him when they saw each other outside the bar, in which Nula thought he sensed a fraction of a second of recognition, but she sank back, almost immediately, just like before, into her thoughts, and she turned down the cross street. Playing it safe, Nula stayed where he was, and, as she moved down the tree-lined street, was easily able to study her. The pools of sunlight that filtered through the leaves and onto the sidewalk passed quickly over the body in red that advanced through the beams. Halfway down the block, Lucía stopped in front of a door, glanced cautiously inside, then kept walking. Nula started following her again. Just as she was turning the corner, Nula reached the door she’d stopped at and read the brass plate attached to the wall: Doctor Oscar Riera, Clinical Medicine. Afraid he’d lose sight of her, he hurried away, and reached the cross-street almost at a run, but he had to stop suddenly when he turned the corner, because she had stopped again and was staring, with the kind of concentrated attention that could have been called blatant indiscretion, into another house. Nula waited for her to keep walking and then started after her again. The girl’s singular behavior worried him. Beyond its apparently strange, even comical or ridiculous aspect, there was also something slightly unsettling about it. He’d have preferred not to follow her, but at the same time he sensed that in the short half hour that had passed since he started following her, she had traveled deep into his own life. Lucía turned the next corner and Nula sped up again. When he came around the corner he saw that she was stopped outside a house halfway down the block, leaning toward a door and pushing a key into the lock. Nula started walking faster and faster, hoping to exchange another quick look with her, but by the time he reached the door she had already passed through, and he just managed to hear the metallic sound of the lock as the key was turned from the inside.

He must have had a strange look on his face, because La India, who had been waiting with lunch, looked at him inquisitively once or twice, but, pretending not to notice, he only told her, in passing, that he felt like he might be getting sick. So La India prepared him an effervescent aspirin after lunch and he shut himself in his room till it was time to open the kiosk. Lying in bed, he lit a cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling. Lucía’s strange behavior—he didn’t yet know that was her name—must have had a rational explanation, and if what he came up with later had to be discarded, a kind of disquiet lingered. Only the last of the sudden stops in her strange circuit of the block seemed to have a rational explanation, since she’d obviously gone into her own house, or at least a house she had a key to. What intrigued him most was the symmetry of the four points: on the block (a perfect square) the four points where she’d stopped were, in fact, symmetric. The W point (for west), La India’s apartment, was symmetrical to the E point (for east), also halfway down the block on the street parallel to 25 de Mayo; and the S point (for south), the office of Doctor Riera, was halfway down the cross street and symmetrical to the N point (for north), the house into which she finally disappeared. The facts were plain: she’d come to a stop exactly halfway along each side of the square that formed the block. That symmetry, if it followed some specific purpose, could be acceptably rational, but what troubled him was thinking that this specific purpose might be unknown or in fact (and has he began to suspect) nonexistent. He could also reverse the problem and think that it might not be the behavior itself that was troubling but rather the purpose that provoked it. And here Nula started looking for the most calming explanation possible, in which both the ends and the behavior itself were rational.

It occurred to him that the girl in red—oh how he wanted to see her again!—could’ve been an architect or an urban planner. On the one hand, she could have been inspecting the houses out of curiosity, and her strange demeanor was the result of her feeling somewhat guilty for her presumption and fearful of being witnessed. And the same could be said if she was an urban planner: after seeing the unique way the forties-era luxury tenements had been built, that is, with the entrance that, without quite dividing the block in half, nevertheless went the full depth, opening parallel to 25 de Mayo, she may have wanted to verify the effects of that strange construction on the buildings on the other three sides that, with 25 de Mayo, formed the block’s perfect square. But those explanations, in fact, reminded him of Aristotle’s distinction between arguments that are absolutely true and others, in contrast, that only appear to be, and, disheartened, he couldn’t tell which argument belonged to which category. Not including the garden/complex, the houses she’d stopped in front of were three typical middle-class homes from the fifties and sixties, just like so many others on the same block and on every other block in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the girl’s thoughtful expression and her somewhat extravagant curiosity suggested the opposite of rationality. No: after a detached shuffle through the most likely hypotheses, among which was the possibility that she was simply looking for a specific house, but without having much information to go on, Nula, hoping to maintain the self-respect of a rational being, a term he liked to borrow from popular philosophical jargon, he had to discard them all. The most likely answer, as far as Nula could see, of course, was that Lucía, in a manner of speaking, and, to continue with the architectural theme, was missing a few bricks from her terrace. Nula used the expression, he imagined, with detached, wry cynicism, not realizing that he was pinned to the bed by the unease that it provoked, by the profound conviction that even if it were true it wouldn’t change in any way the decision that he’d made the moment that girl came into his life, and by his feverish summary of the events as he tried to make some decent sense of them: the look outside the bar, the compulsive way he’d followed her, the movement of the red blur as it moved along at an even pace, neither slow nor fast, down the bright sidewalk, the four symmetrical stops Lucía made on the perfect square that formed the block.

Now, driving back across the bridge, in the opposite direction as last night, coming back from Gutiérrez’s, Nula, who has recovered his sense of calm after a night of sleep, once again remembers that early afternoon five years ago and the months that followed. The image of the girl in red walking ahead of him down the bright sidewalk is clear but impersonal, like any other distant memory, but the cloudy morning, threatening rain, that he moves through in the present—the station wagon’s clock reads ten twenty-nine—his empirical surroundings, are somehow more elusive and vague than that tiny, red blur, vibrating and shuffling brightly in the center of his mind. Ever since he watched her step out of the swimming pool, and especially after running into her the night before at Gutiérrez’s, when Lucía declared, as calmly as anything, that she didn’t know him, that red blur has taken over his thoughts. The blur but not yet Lucía herself, just the stylized sensation of the red curves in the midday sun, without the tangled pattern of the months that followed.

Last night he stopped by the wine bar, but there wasn’t anyone there he knew, so he went home. Diana, who according to Nula could spot an ink stain on a black wall in a dark room on a moonless night, when she saw the state of his shoes and his pants, and also the two muddy yellow rings on his white sweater, asked him, feigning more surprise than she felt, where he had been, but Nula, who is hardly blind to his wife’s suspicions of the evasive nature of his personality, given to wandering, had offered his usual response—Business—knowing that, while unsatisfying, will disarm her temporarily. She’ll counterattack, as they say, later, when they’re in bed. Then he put the car in the garage and went to play with the kids, since Diana prefers to feed them before he gets home and then put them to bed early. The truth is no one, least of all him, knows when he might get home. At around nine thirty they ate, talked, cleaned up together, and then worked a while in the library, both absorbed in their own thoughts. They were the average middle-class couple of their time—the end of the twentieth century—and though they had some financial support from their families, they had to work for their living, at things that were different from what really interested them. Diana, though she was missing a hand, was a talented illustrator and painter, and designed posters for an ad agency. Nula, as we know, did not pretend the wine selling was anything but a means for financing his philosophical projects. While they were together they performed the ritual of domestic life with ease and even sincerity. At around eleven they brushed their teeth and went to bed, lying next to each other, flipping through the same magazine, and, after turning off the light, after Diana’s hardly systematic and rather parodic interrogation, trying not to make too much noise so as not to wake the kids, who were sleeping in the next room, taking real pleasure from it, though, because of their youth, without yet realizing that when it comes to sex the other’s reality and the thing that resists desire are the other’s ghosts, as they did two or three times a week, tense and sweaty, they copulated.

Diana was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her wrist. They had to operate, and she lost her hand. Because she was in fact very beautiful, and they were used to talking openly about it, sometimes, when they were alone together, having fun, Nula would sometimes whisper in her year, you’re just five fingers away from perfection. Diana liked hearing him say that, but Nula knew that her jealous nature was a result of the stump. Reality, meanwhile, validated her suspicions: Nula cheated on her often, telling himself each time that he really loved her but was incapable of establishing a direct correlation between love and fidelity. Compassion, which can be a part of love, is alien to sex. Desire is neither compassionate nor cruel; it has its own laws, and Nula let himself be governed by them. His only concession was a compartmentalization of his sex life. Possibly to silence his own misgivings, he often said that it’s absurd to find fault with an act of servitude. And every so often he resigned himself to his disloyalty with the thought that if, as a student of philosophy and wine merchant it was possible to supply his own ethics, when it came to sex the precepts of a moral sensibility ceased to make sense. Sex is the common stock of the scorpion, the sardine, the rabbit, reduced to a solipsistic, repetitive, proliferating mania. It precedes morality infinitely and will infinitely outlast it, he liked to announce, especially in the preliminary stages of a new relationship, though he in fact discussed these matters often with his wife, who watched him closely, at once wary and delighted.

Diana’s stump inspired pathos, but it also excited him. Although she’d gotten used to it, and although a set of positive attributes, beauty, intelligence, talent, among other things compensated for the absence of the hand, Diana felt different, but when she tried to explain it to him, Nula would correct her: Not different, unique. In a sense, that stump, when contrasted with her other attributes, gave her an extraordinary singularity, and it was that singularity that seduced him. Nula, who was used to feeling two hands grasp his shoulders in a hug, felt a singular shudder when the warm, smooth edge of the stump rubbed, softly, against his back. And if he imagined that when he took the stump in his hands and stroked it and kissed it he was showing his love for her, most likely it was out of love for his own sensations that he did it, or rather out of love for the possession of that unique person who belonged only to him.

Nula crosses the bridge and turns onto the highway. The rain from the day before, which continued well into the night, has not yet dried, and the gray air blends into the horizon. The vegetation is still gray, but the low, dark clouds have been replaced by a high dome, a clear, even gray that releases sparks of water against the windshield, but these are so tiny and so scattered that they don’t even manage to coat it. He passes the enormous, brightly colored hypermarket, an eye-catching anachronism at the edge of a swampy expanse, and then La Guardia, before turning onto the road to Paraná. When he crosses the bridge over the Colastiné river, gray like everything else, he sees that the multiplicity of rippled, geometrical waves driven against the current, which he saw with Gutiérrez the afternoon before on the Ubajay, north of Rincón, are gone, and concludes that the southeast wind is gone, and when he looks hard at the low-lying vegetation on the island surrounding the asphalt road, he sees that it, too, is motionless. Before reaching the tunnel he sees, three or four kilometers ahead, above him, in the hills, beyond the main channel of the Paraná, the small, quiet city that, paradoxically, took the name of the excessive, turbulent river. Inside the tunnel, he starts going over the list of things he has to cover with the regional manager of Amigos del Vino, Américo, and when he emerges in Paraná, at five of eleven, he realizes that this trip could have been made the next day, as he’d planned the week before, in order to prepare the promotion at the hypermarket, but it had been impossible to wait that long to try to find Lucía.

If I was as fat as he is, I would’ve gotten out of the habit of working standing up by now, Nula thinks, as he does every other time he walks into the building and sees Américo writing in a ledger open on the tall desk where he works standing up, and which he himself designed for the carpenter, down to the millimeter. Hearing his footsteps, Américo looks up and watches him a moment over the tiny, oval-shaped reading glasses propped on the edge of his nose, and when he recognizes him he looks back down at the ledger as he offers a silent greeting that doesn’t appear to affect his concentration. Behind his desk, at the back of the room, which was first used as a workshop and later as a wine distillery, stacked carefully in piles according to brand and provenance, giving the impression more of a stage set than a commercial enterprise, sit the cases of wine. To the left of the entrance, that is, to the right of Américo (who works facing the entrance), behind a glass wall that heightens the scenic effect of the room, Américo’s wife and his secretary work, in what could strictly speaking be called the office, surrounded by metal filing cabinets, computers, and stacks of documents.

Américo is writing on a sheet of white paper sitting on top of the open ledger, tight lines riddled with strikethroughs, marginalia, and loose words inserted between the lines, above or below the ones he’s crossed out. Concentrating on his work, not looking away from the paper, he gestures with an apologetic smile for Nula to wait a second. Nula puts the briefcase on the floor, next to the desk, and waits. Although everyone calls him El Gordo, Américo isn’t really that fat, especially considering his height (1.80 meters) and his wife’s scrupulous control of his clothing and diet, allowing him a certain agility, nor does he seem old, because his closely trimmed gray beard is lighter than his thick, curly hair, which gives him a youthful look. Only his fingers are truly fat, but the grayish hair that covers them to the knuckles, tangled and solid across his hand, evokes virility more so than obesity. Nula leaves him to his work and walks into the office. Chela and the secretary are surprised to see him.

—We weren’t expecting you till tomorrow, Chela says.

—I’m a workaholic, and also I wanted to buy my wife a gift. I’ve heard about a shop here in Paraná, run by someone named Lucía Riera, Nula says, amazed at his capacity for inventing pretexts and offering them without stopping even for a second to think about it.

—I don’t know a Riera, but there’s a Lucía Calcagno, Mis pilchas, the most posh boutique in Paraná, Chela says. They have everything, Cacharel, Yves Saint Laurent, all the international brands.

—That must be her. Where does one find such a marvel? Nula asks, trying to hide his anxiety.

—Downtown, half a block from the square. I have a card around here somewhere, Chela says, looking through a drawer.

—Now I see why poor Américo has to work day and night, you have a special account there. Thanks, Nula says, and, taking the card and putting it in his jacket pocket, goes back out to the warehouse, just as Américo finishes silently rereading what he’s written, moving his head back and forth, correcting a final word, a line, a comma, and so on.

—Ready! he shouts, satisfied. Should I read it?

—What? Of course—Nula feigns offense—I drove all the way from the outer provinces just for this reading.

—Don’t waste your breath on a mule like me, Américo says, and Nula cracks up laughing, but Américo remains serious, silently re-reading one last time, before doing so aloud, for an expert audience, the brief text he’s been composing. Of the five decades of his life, Américo has dedicated more than half to the sale of wine, first as an importer until the crash under the dictatorship, when hyperinflation and the volatility of the market busted him. With Chela’s inheritance they transformed their current space, an abandoned warehouse, into a table wine distillery, bottling their own brand—Aconcagua—a name that according to his detractors referred to the liquid additive that Américo introduced into a Mendoza wine, but that business, also because of hyperinflation, failed as well. Some time later, one of the owners of Amigos del Vino, whom he’d worked with in the seventies, offered him the distribution rights for the northeast part of the country. And with the collusion, on the national level, of publicists and cardiologists, and the fortuitous global fashion for wine, through conventions, indirect publicity, and the inevitable rhetorical advancements that from time immemorial have accompanied the embarrassing consumption of alcoholic beverages, and wine in particular, things managed to turn around. In the regions that border the banks of the Paraná, as far north as Paraguay and south to Brazil, the Amigos del Vino, which, it goes without saying, found favorable ground, and without major obstacles, quickly prospered. And though the two previous failures had forced him to keep his current success in perspective, Américo, who attributes his good nature to having had the privilege of his mother’s breast till the age of seven, is happy enough with the present, but this doesn’t stop him from developing survival tactics in case everything falls apart again, as has happened periodically.

—Everyone in Entre Ríos is either a poet or a gangster, he says, as a preface, and ignoring the vaguely ironic but nonetheless friendly smile of his only listener, he starts: Wine, the measure of civilization, a precious nectar in every land, contributes to the good health of its faithful companion, the human being. Independent authorities have by now proven many times over that wine reduces stress, dissolves harmful fats in the blood which imperil the cardiovascular system, and contains vitamins, minerals, and enzymes that are beneficial to the body. But, above all, wine satisfies the palate, strengthens friendships, and multiplies and perfects moments of celebration. When he finishes, Américo pushes the tiny glasses to the end of his nose and, over the oval lenses, interrogates Nula with a look.

—Not bad, not bad, Nula says. But you have to add something about the French paradox, something about the vines, and something about the sawyils, he says. purposefully exaggerating the rural pronunciation of the word. And, if at all possible, he adds, finish with a set of more or less potable quatrains from Omar Kayyám.

—Good idea! Américo shouts, dipping his head slightly into his shirt collar in such a way that his beard covers the knot on his tie, and pointing at Nula with a fat, hairy finger on his left hand. But, he adds, it has to be quick. This draft has to go out next week to Resistencia, Corrientes, and Posadas. We’ll print up colored cards with different stanzas of the lofty poet. Turquito, one of these days I’m making you head of sales and locking you up in the office so you’ll quit your dicking around.

—You mean like this? Nula says, and glancing quickly toward the office to make sure that Chela and the secretary aren’t watching, he forms a circle with his index finger and thumb on his left hand and passes the rigid index finger on his right hand back and forth energetically a few times.

—No comment, Américo says, pushing his glasses back up and signaling that he’s ready to talk business with his salesman. Nula opens the briefcase, takes out a ledger and some loose pages. As he talks, Américo takes notes on a legal pad. Suddenly, Nula interrupts himself and looks at his watch.

—What time do the stores in Paraná close? I have to buy a gift for my wife.

Américo’s only answer is an incredulous snort. He doesn’t look up from the notepad, and stands frozen in the writing position, as though he were posing for a portrait—Américo Scriptori—and when Nula starts talking again, the portrait starts to move, taking quick notes with abbreviations and symbols that, like some private language, will only be legible to him in the future. Nula reads from a list in which he took down, that same morning, while he drank a few mates in the kitchen, the topics he had to cover. Some are straightforward comments that require no response, though Américo, in his private script, writes them down in the notepad, but others demand certain operations, the exchange of the deposit receipts and checks, for example. Their primary topics are the two afternoon appointments, which Nula postponed yesterday because of his walk in the rain with Gutiérrez, with the governor’s aide and the dentist that his brother, Chade, recommended, and whose wine cellar, with a capacity of a hundred and fifty bottles, he has to fill; Gutiérrez’s new order, which he’ll deliver tomorrow; the commission check that Américo owes him from March, if it’s ready (Chela has it in the office); the group sale to the law school for that Friday, if it’s ready; he also wants to order (on his tab) four bottles of merlot and two sauvignon blancs that he’s planning to take to the cookout at Gutiérrez’s, because it doesn’t seem appropriate to drink his own client’s wine; he should also take two local chorizos, for the governor’s aide, which he promised as a sample (it’s a typical gift for new clients); and finally, there’s the promotional sale at the Warden hypermarket, which starts Friday afternoon, culminates on Saturday, and lasts another full week; he, Nula, will be there at five o’clock sharp, making sure the stand is ready and everything is set up; that same afternoon, on his way back from the city, he’s thinking of passing by to finalize the details with one of the managers. When they finish, they go to the office to pick up the March commissions check. Chela takes it from a drawer, has him sign a receipt, and hands it to him. Afterward, Nula loads up the four cases of wine—two cabernet sauvignons and one viognier for Gutiérrez, and one with four bottles of merlot and two sauvignon blancs for himself, plus the chorizos for Gutiérrez and two for the political aide—and before getting in his car he turns back to the doorway and shouts:

—You haven’t heard the last of me!

—I’m expecting some good stanzas from your countryman, for the cards, Américo says.

When he pulls out, it’s ten of twelve. Because his trips to Paraná almost never take him downtown—the warehouse is on the outskirts—he ends up taking several wrong turns along one-way streets and promenades before finding the square. Mis pilchas is just half a block away, like Chela said, but because he doesn’t find a spot, he double parks and leaves the car running. The boutique isn’t very big, but it does seem very fancy for the city, and though it’s already twenty after twelve it’s still open. Lucía is talking with another woman, and when she sees him in the doorway, she starts laughing and comes to meet him.

—I’m so glad you came! she says, and kisses him on the cheek, pressing herself momentarily against him and laughing even harder when she pulls away.

The only thing that occurs to Nula to say is, I’m double parked, and, puzzled and excited at once by Lucía’s unexpectedly cheerful and affectionate reception, and by the at once full and tight curves of the body that was just pressed against his.

—Go park. I’ll finish up with her and wait for you, Lucía says.

Without thinking for a second about the purpose and possible consequences of his behavior, an exceptionally strange posture for a young philosopher—just imagine Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant in a similar situation—Nula obeys and goes out to the car. A pleasurable, hard tumescence tries to force its way through the barrier, over his left thigh, of his underwear and pants, ridiculous obstacles imposed by what we call civilization to the thing, difficult to name despite its many names, that insists on displaying, for all to see, and at all cost, its superabundant strength, the very source of the becoming, as Nula himself calls it, without which that very same civilization, assuming an ultimate end to time and matter, wouldn’t even exist. It’s only when he starts looking, slowly because of the thick midday traffic, for an open parking space, that, behind his forehead, a few thoughts begin to knock around. He wonders, first of all, if sending him out to park the car has been a pretext for disappearing, which would force him to guard the entrance to the boutique all afternoon and cancel, again, the two appointments that he already rescheduled yesterday, something which even Américo, who enjoyed the sedative effects of the maternal breast, shield against all future adversity, until the age of seven, may very well consider inexcusable. As soon as he started to think, the hard tension over his left thigh stopped pushing outward, but Nula is too absorbed in his thoughts to ask himself whether the thinking made it disappear, or if instead its disappearance allowed his thoughts to return to their normal function. He diagrams the complications that Lucía’s reappearance brings with it, and, curiously, realizes that what he wants more than anything is for his emergent friendship with Gutiérrez to stay sheltered from them.

But Lucía hasn’t disappeared. She’s waiting for him, smiling even more broadly than before, which intrigues him to no end, because the Lucía that he knew several years before wasn’t in the habit of smiling so much. When he’s just a few meters away, her smile becomes a laugh and mixes with a conventional expression of irritation, to which she adds a negative shake of her head.

—I had no choice but to say I didn’t know you last night. I was so surprised, she says with a pleading, happy tone of voice that displays no remorse at all.

—Three times before the cock crows, to see me crucified, Nula says when he reaches her. Not to mention the catfish I missed out on, the first of the year.

—I’m serious. Forgive me. It would’ve been too much to explain, Lucía says, taking his hand. And then, giving him a long, suggestive look, asks, Do you forgive me?

Nula doesn’t say anything.

—Come on, let’s go to my place, Lucía says.

Though it’s still overcast, the day, possibly owing to the time, seems clearer and even a little brighter. The little black car that Nula saw parked the night before in front of Gutiérrez’s white gate is around the corner, and by day and up close it looks newer and even more expensive than the first time he saw it, in the middle of the night, in the rain, and in the state that its presence put him in. They leave the city center and head toward the residential district, in Urquiza park, above the city, from which, at any window or balcony in its cottages or apartment buildings, the full breadth of the Paraná is easily visible, far upriver to the north and downriver to the south, where it splits many times into a delta and passes through many channels around tangled islands, forming the estuary at the mouth of the river.

—I did it for him, Lucía says. He’s so kind.

—Your father, Nula says.

Lucía doesn’t answer. In the silence that follows, Nula, though he regrets what he’s just said, also senses a charge of immanence between them. Nula secretly observes Lucía in the rear-view, and in the fragments of face he can see—her eyes, which are on the street, are outside his visual field—part of her right cheek, her lips, her chin, and the portion of her dark hair that covers her ear and half her cheek, he thinks he sees a slightly theatrical expression of determination, something a grave mission, or a sacrifice, would demand. Finally, they arrive. Of the many homes in the highest sections of the park, all surrounded by gardens, Lucía’s is among the largest and the most well cared for, with a good view of the river, and sheltered at the back by a grove of trees.

—It’s my mother’s house, Lucía says when they’re outside the car and she sees Nula staring at the white facade, the balconies, the varnished doors, the tile roof, the white slab path that leads to the house and bisects the immaculate garden and lawn. I moved in with her when I came back from Bahía Blanca. Come in, there’s no one here. She doesn’t get back till Friday from Punta del Este, and the baby won’t be dropped off till five.