La Grande (13 page)

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.