La Grande - Juan José Saer

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about him in the city is fragmentary. Everyone knows something that doesn’t quite coincide with what everyone else knows. The ones who knew him before he left—Pichón Garay, Tomatis, Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, for example—had lost touch with him for more than thirty years. One day he just disappeared, without a trace, and then, just as suddenly, reappeared. From that group, the first to make contact with him, and completely by accident, had been Pichón Garay. I was on the afternoon flight back to Buenos Aires, and he asked the man sitting next to me to change seats, he wrote to Tomatis a week after returning to Paris. (Pichón had spent a couple of months in the city, liquidating his family’s last holdings, and in mid April Tomatis and Soldi had taken him to the airport, where he caught the afternoon flight to Buenos Aires, which at that time connected with a direct flight to Paris.) Before sitting down, he introduced himself. Willi Gutiérrez, did I remember him? It took me a second to place him, but he remembered everything from thirty years ago—El Gato’s stories more so than mine, actually—and I’m still not sure if he knew which of us he was talking to. He said he saw us with Soldi at the airport, but he couldn’t come over because he was checking a suitcase. He said you looked the same as always. For the fifty minutes the flight lasted he did practically all the talking, spouting off about Europe, and I learned that he’s living between Italy and Geneva, but that he travels all over. His trip to the city lasted a day, of three in the country altogether. The afternoon before, he’d landed in Buenos Aires from Rome, slept at the Plaza that night, and the next morning had skipped up to the city to visit a house in Rincón that he was looking to buy (I didn’t offer mine because it was all but sold), saying that he planned to settle in the area. That night he was staying at the Plaza again, and then back to Italy the next day. Our destinies, as you can see, are contradictory: he’d come back to buy a house, and I was there to sell one.

      According to Tomatis, the first people Gutiérrez had contacted when he moved into the house in Rincón had been the Rosembergs. The first that I know of, he’d clarified, because from what I can tell, he lives in several worlds simultaneously. And Nula, who’d met up with Tomatis for coffee and to sell him some wine, had responded: Just like everybody else. And Tomatis, in a falsely severe tone, said, Don’t get cute, Turk, I’m serious. He lived a double life before he left, one that even his closest friends didn’t know about, and now he’s come back to it. Tomatis’s suggestive tone apparently implied that he might know more than he was saying, and when, about a month later, after his first trip to see Gutiérrez, Soldi, in the Amigos del Vino bar, reluctantly hinted that Gutiérrez might not be lying when he said that Lucía was his daughter, Nula remembered the suggestion, but for now nothing quite makes sense as he stands on the riverbank, watching the leaden, rippled surface of the water, and his hand reaches into the camper’s inside pocket for his cigarettes and lighter.

      The real estate agent (who in fact was representing an agency from Buenos Aires in the transaction), a guy named Moro, was also one of Nula’s clients. His assignment consisted in picking Gutiérrez up at the airport and taking him to see the house in Rincón, or rather on the outskirts of Rincón, at the north end of town, on the floodplain opposite the highway, where some new money had moved early in the 80s because they hadn’t been able to buy in the residential section of Guadalupe, which other, wealthier people had bought up first and transformed into a kind of fortress, with private security and everything, blocking so many roads that the buses were forced to change routes. Moro figures that Gutiérrez must be very rich. Leaning toward Nula over the desk in his office on San Martín, like he was sharing a secret, a large map of the city hanging on the wall behind him, riddled with different colored pins no doubt distinguishing the current states of the diverse property that his agency administered, Moro, rocking his comfortable swivel chair slightly, looking over his shoulder to check that no one was listening, though there wasn’t anyone but them in the office, narrowing his eyes and lowering his voice, had hissed, admiringly, I figure you’d have to measure it in palos verdes, that is, by the millions.

      The house had belonged to a cardiologist, a Doctor Russo, a public health secretary in the government that followed the military dictatorship. According to Moro, this Doctor Russo, who now lived in Miami, had been implicated in the disappearance of funds allocated to improving hospitals and the Public Assistance program, not to mention a shady story concerning bribes to pharmaceutical labs, and even as a businessman he’d been blemished in the eyes of the law, having served on the board of the Banco Provinicial, where, after his tenure, something like a hundred million dollars turned up missing, and not to mention the fact that the board members had passed around low-interest loans that were meant for poor people to buy a modest house somewhere, but which the board used to build mansions for themselves, some in Mar del Plata, and abroad even, in Punta del Este, in Florida, and in Brazil, north of Río de Janeiro, with the end result, according to Moro, that between the board and their rich friends all the funds for the preferential loans had been spent, and the hundred million dollar discrepancy caused the bank to go under, so none of them had to return the money they’d taken. A judge took an interest in the case, but the investigation went nowhere and anyway the responsible parties were already living in Marbella or Punta del Este or Florida. This had been the case with our Doctor Russo, who’d sold the house in Rincón and a bunch of others around the country, bought, according to Moro, with the money he’d made as a cardiologist and the dividends from his private clinic, and had left for Miami.

      According to Moro, Gutiérrez’s visit to the house didn’t last more than ten or fifteen minutes. He walked through the interior rooms first—the six bedrooms plus the large living room, the bathrooms, the kitchen, practically bigger than the living room, all of it on a single floor—and then, at the same speed, went out to explore the grounds, the grove at the back, the pavilion, the tool shed, and the swimming pool with nothing at the bottom but a puddle of muddy water where several generations of dead leaves were putrefying and in which a copious family of toads had taken residence. Gutiérrez spent the whole trip back to the city interrogating him about painters, about people specializing in cracked swimming pools, about the chances of finding a woman to take care of the cleaning, and a gardener and caretaker, about someone who could fix the thatch roof over the pavilion, and so on, and so on, like the house was already his, and without uttering a single word for or against it—a place which he, Moro, knew hadn’t been signed for in Buenos Aires—Gutiérrez spoke of it as though he owned it. To Moro he’d seemed like a nice enough guy, though slightly off: he was calm, quiet, polite even, and he always had this friendly and somewhat distant smile pasted on his face. Moro said that he ended up feeling slightly uneasy, in any case, because everything he said or did, the usual stuff you do when you’re settling a deal, seemed to confirm something for Gutiérrez, something he’d come searching for, and that ultimately he, Moro, realized that Gutiérrez was looking at him like some kind of museum piece or some exotic fish in an aquarium that he’d traveled thousands of kilometers to see firsthand. Moro told Nula that he’d been told by the Buenos Aires office to take Gutiérrez out to a fancy lunch at a place on Guadalupe where all the celebrities in the city, starting with the mayor, took important visitors, but that Gutiérrez said he didn’t want to take up any more of his time, that he wanted to spend some time alone before the flight and would prefer to be dropped off near the grill house on San Lorenzo, a place that had its fifteen minutes back in the fifties, but which had turned into just another dark neighborhood dive. Nula knew the place well; in his last year at the university he and a group of classmates would go there to learn to get plastered. The place wasn’t actually that bad, just like the fancy place on Guadalupe wasn’t that good. But he stopped himself from saying this because Moro was already saying that he’d seen him again that afternoon. At around four, he’d passed the estate agency without coming in, walking slowly along the shady side of the street, like people from the area did, gazing at the storefronts, the houses, and the people with a discreet look of indulgent satisfaction. According to Moro, he’d seemed happy, and since just then he was walking south out of the agency to visit a property they wanted to put up for sale, and since this was the direction that Gutiérrez was also walking, totally by happenstance and without meaning to he ended up following him for several blocks. Moro said that finally he, Gutiérrez, after looking at his watch, had gone into the arcade—even though there are five or six others, everyone calls it that, the arcade, quintessentially, because it was the first in the city to open, in the late fifties, and all the others,

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