La Grande (11 page)

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.)