La Grande - Juan José Saer

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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

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