La Grande (16 page)

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.

Nula doesn't interpret those last words as a supplementary incentive to accept her invitation, not only because it would be superfluous, but also, and especially, because he's busy interpreting the second thing Lucía said when she got out of the car:
when I came back from Bahía Blanca
, which he takes to mean,
when I got fed up with everything you already know about and moved here with my son.
Despite the fact that, objectively speaking, the decision was a reasonable one, it's difficult, if not impossible, for Nula to imagine Lucía without Riera. In his memory, they're always together, they represent a kind of combined existence, a single entity with two bodies, a complex mechanism whose movements, though difficult to predict, could be mapped out, represented systematically, its behavior described, once its particularities have been observed, repeating continuously, without being necessarily, if the problem does in fact have a solution, unexplainable. When they're inside, Lucía locks the front door, and Nula recalls the first time he saw her and followed her to her house after she'd walked around the block. The last thing he knew about her that spring afternoon was that, after going inside, she'd locked the front door. For the rest of the day the tiny metallic sound of the lock had echoed insistently in his head. And now, after hearing a similar sound, he's inside with her.

—Do you want a drink? Lucía asks.

—No, Nula says, distracted.

Lucía laughs quickly, and Nula, avoiding her gaze, half smiles. He's just been overcome by a question that comes back to him over and over, less a problem than a riddle with no answer or insight or threat: How long does an event last, not as it's measured by a clock? How long is a day for an ant, or, in the material world, how long does the sound of a coin hitting the floor last? Does it last only briefly and disappear forever, or does it vibrate indefinitely, does it have the same inextinguishable persistence common to everything that happens? Or does the totality of existence recommence at every instance of every event, as negligible as it may be, from nothing, its essence composed of perpetual, flashing intervals, infinitesimal and innumerable by any calculus that we know or that can be known? And this thing, which years earlier he wanted so badly to happen, in vain, and which is happening now, does it live and die fleetingly, like a momentary spark, or, to the more refined observer, does it last, at the same cadence and velocity as the birth of a star that burns for an equally fleeting, incalculable moment before it's extinguished forever?

—Come on, let's go up, Lucía says, and turns toward the stairs. Nula follows her, hanging back a step so as to observe, in anticipation, the body already intending to abandon itself to his whims, but she slows down, waiting for him to come up next to her, and as they start up the stairs each knows that the other knows what's about to happen, so they don't speak, or even look at each other. Only when they reach the bedroom, next to the bed, does she say, in a low voice,
I owed you this
, and then starts to undress.

For the first time in his life, Nula enters her, exploring the dark jungle of her tissue as though with a sensitive, vibrating probe, piercing the heavy silence of the organs that with exact and constant discipline, through some inexplicable design, sustain the attractive shapes that, for a given period, before disintegrating
into darkness, giving way for the next wave fighting its way out, shimmer, fugitively, in the light of day. Despite the frenzy, the violent contortions, the pleasure of the skin, the hard and prolonged embraces, the damp caresses and the moans, Nula understands, in the minutes after they finish, when they are lying on their backs next to each other, that Lucía's gift has come too late, and that she's also thinking something similar. But neither one says anything. As a courtesy, Nula represses his usual impulse to jump out of bed, get dressed, and disappear, which takes over whenever he finishes the sexual act, and which is stronger than usual, and though he needs to piss, he refuses to let himself move even for that. His disappointment has been physical too: when he penetrated her, Lucía's cavity offered no resistance, as though he'd entered a hole too large and formless, whose walls were too distended to hug his penis—a vast and empty cave. Ever since the day he saw her for the first time, the impossibility of possessing Lucía's body had mythologized it, and his disappointment, which he tries at all cost to hide, makes him incredibly sad, though he tries to find a rational explanation for it, which translated into words would be more or less the following:
We suffer the illusion of sameness, but five years ago it would have felt different because our bodies, and therefore our sensations, were too. It's possible that childbirth distended the tissue, or maybe I'm accustomed to another kind of feeling compared to what I felt today. But the most likely explanation is that despite the apparent constancy that we take for granted even the most private corners of our being, corporeal or not, have changed and will continue to change till we become unrecognizable, especially to ourselves.

—Are you going to the cookout Sunday? Lucía asks.

—I think so. Either way, I already have the wine I'm planning on taking in the car, Nula says.

—We didn't see each other today, of course, Lucía says.

—Of course, Nula says. But we should call each other
tú
; it would be strange for me to use
usted
with you, Nula says.

Lucía laughs again, the same quick laugh as before, when they'd just come in, but this time Nula senses a hint of resignation, almost bitterness, in it. He presses himself closer to her, wraps his arm over her shoulders, and pulls her in, possibly to compensate for his disappointment but most likely to conceal it, caressing her earnestly, but excessively, because he feels a genuine affection for her. But Lucía seems indifferent to his embrace, already thinking of something else. Nula asks her what, and she answers simply, without any apparent emotion, that she came to Bahía Blanca with her son two years ago, more or less, and she has sporadic encounters with Riera, who comes every so often to see his son, but it's impossible to live with him all the time.
There's no denying it
, Lucía says,
he's a monster
. And, curiously, Nula realizes that when she says this, instead of anger, there's a spark of malicious sympathy in her eyes, which stop for a fraction of a second as they wander over the immaculate ceiling. Nula laughs:
I have no doubt about that whatsoever
, he says, and Lucía laughs too, in a way that makes Nula think that she's still in love with him and that, like the complications of their relationship, the separation must have had multiple interpretations and causes, and now Lucía is telling him that he, Riera, likes Nula so much, that he always talked about inviting him to spend a season with them in Benvenuto when they were still together, but she couldn't take it any longer and it came down to giving in or leaving.
Of course
, Nula thinks, and the images that provoke this rise in his memory, painful as a burn,
but I saw them outside that awful house in Rosario that morning from the taxi
.

—It was the right decision, not giving in, he says.

Lucía clears her throat but doesn't say anything. She thinks.

—I've never known anyone like him, Nula says.

Lucía shakes her head. I got what I deserved, she says, but with a trace of contradictory pride in her voice.

She was probably thinking about him when she decided to go to bed with me, and she thought about him the whole time we did it, and maybe—maybe—she thinks, with good cause, that I'm too simple for her, too colorless, odorless, and flavorless compared to Riera
, Nula thinks, somewhat surprised, and the idea isn't altogether displeasing, though most likely because it absolves him from not loving her like before. Apparently, what until today was mythologized has suddenly become instinctual and perverted. But he's already moved on to a more interesting puzzle, Gutiérrez,
her father
, and though the question struggles to come out, his tongue and his lips can't manage to speak it, and it's Lucía herself who, without warning, begins the story about Doctor Calcagno (
my father
), about Leonor (
my old lady
), and about Gutiérrez (
Willi
), as though she too assumed that explanations were in order. When she was a girl, she loved Doctor Calcagno a lot, but as she grew up, her father's incomprehensible subservience to Mario Brando, his partner at the law firm and the head of a literary movement that her father was also part of—
precisionism
, Lucía clarifies, sarcastically—distanced her from him, and by the time she was a teenager she despised him. Calcagno was a Roman Law professor and a talented litigator, much more so than Brando, who hardly did a thing for the firm, dedicating himself instead to literature, to politics, and to his social position—but still, Lucía says, her father obeyed him unconditionally. The firm made a lot of money, and they were the only two partners, but despite having a fifty percent stake, Calcagno was the one who did all the work. Brando, with his literary fame and his political campaigns and his family and social connections—his father had been a big industrialist and he'd married a daughter of General Ponce—clearly inspired confidence in the clients of the firm, which specialized in business, trusts, estates, land acquisitions, and so
on. Calcagno ran the firm, and at the same time became a sort of lieutenant to Brando, sometimes even typing up his poems, despite being older and having an international reputation as an expert in Roman Law. (Nula knows that Calcagno wrote a textbook that he often sold when he worked at the kiosk.) But at any hour, day or night, if Brando called, Calcagno dropped what he was doing and immediately did what he was told. Once, Lucía says, just after she'd turned fifteen, Calcagno planned a trip to Europe, but at the last minute Brando demanded that he stay to prepare a book that was supposed to come out in a few weeks. She and her mother were forced to travel alone. It seemed to suit Leonor fine, but she, Lucía, had begun, at that moment, to detest her father. Lucía tells Nula that she cried the entire flight and that her mother, to console her, had said:
You shouldn't hate him, Lucy, he's a good man. But remember this: A man who's good all the time is never enough for a real woman
.

It wasn't until four or five years later that Lucía started to suspect that Leonor cheated on her husband, and moreover that Calcagno couldn't not realize it, meaning, if it was true, that he tolerated it.
I really love her, but my old lady is the stupidest person I know. She has the maturity of a fourteen-year-old, more or less. All she seems to think about is clothes, jewelry, travel, and men. Old age has made her crazy: she spends a fortune trying to stay young, on creams, tanners, treatments, and surgeries. Since her family was already rich and my father left her a fortune, she never worked or had any responsibilities. When I left Benvenuto, I wanted to support myself, but she set up the shop so I wouldn't have to go out looking for work. They didn't teach me a thing. No one even made me study something useful. It was taken for granted that I'd marry a rich man and spend the rest of my life like she had. And I ended up selling clothes.

Because she'd heard that the air in Paraná, on the hillside, was less polluted than in the city, a flat expanse twenty nine meters below sea level, and that pollution damaged
the dermis
, Leonor
sold the house she had in Guadalupe, which Calcagno had built half a block from Brando—on the recommendation of the man himself, who according to Lucía always wanted his slave close by—and moved in to the cottage in Urquiza that she'd inherited from her family. And Lucía came to live with her. At any rate, if you subtracted from the weeks that she wasn't traveling the time she spent at rejuvenation clinics; her amorous liaisons supposedly always with men her age or slightly older (
up till now in any case
, Lucía adds), from good families like hers, though she may have more than one going at a time; her seasons at the
pied-à-terre
she had in Buzios, she barely spends more than two or three weeks at the house in Paraná. Her brother managed her finances from his office in Buenos Aires. If not for the married men who at the last second refused to get a divorce in order to marry her, the airports closed due to bad weather, the decline of Punta del Este, the wrinkles, the aging, the illnesses, and death, and if her daughter, whom she clearly loved, had married someone slightly less repulsive than Oscar Riera, Leonor, in an astonishing correspondence with Leibniz—whom neither she, nor Lucía for that matter, had ever heard of—would have believed that the human species had been given without a doubt the best possible world to live in.