La Grande (29 page)

Gabi dear, they're coming for me at one thirty, and we get back on Monday afternoon. I left a few things for you in the fridge, the two bottles of white wine and the chicken too, in case José Carlos comes for the weekend. Put it in the freezer if you go to Rosario, and don't worry, I'll make it for you Monday night when you get back.

You-know-who called this morning wanting to talk about your work on Brando & Co. He insisted again that his name shouldn't appear anywhere in the book. He doesn't mind that you've given a copy to Gutiérrez, but the fact that Tomatis has a copy too has him very worried. I tried to reassure him that Carlitos could keep the secret and told him that
otherwise you and Pinocchio wouldn't have given him the manuscript. But he's afraid that Carlitos, if he thinks about it, will realize who the author is. I reminded him that Tomatis was still playing with blocks when the things he writes about were happening, which calmed him down a little, but, to be honest with you, I think our friend's fears are perfectly justified. The moment he takes one look at it, Carlitos won't have any doubt about who the author is. If he insinuates anything, you have to ask him to please be discreet.

Well, I should finish packing so I don't make the girls wait. Big kiss till Monday from your auntie.

Gabriela stands by the table with the note in her hand, thinking. With a preoccupied air, she takes a glass from the cabinet, pours herself some seltzer from the fridge, and picking up the sheet that she's just put down on the table, rereads it while she sips the seltzer. Though there's no one else in the kitchen or in the rest of the house to provoke her level of worry, Gabriela's expression, consisting of pinching her lips and slowly shaking her head in a vaguely circular way that isn't negative or affirmative, while she rereads the note and for several seconds afterward, is unmistakably doubtful. She and Pinocchio should have kept Carlitos from knowing who the author of the text was, which means it was without a doubt a mistake to give him a copy. But she doesn't think that he'd reveal it, and though it's true that he's been known to flirt with indiscretion for the sake of a joke, he only does so at the cost of people he considers undeserving of courtesy, Mario Brando for example. He does make cruel jokes about people he knows, but he's just as capable of making them about his best friends or about himself. Some of his jokes are legendary, like the one about the writer who'd been accepted to the Academy of Letters, and who they said had been a prostitute and who'd gone to sadomasochistic orgies when he'd first moved to Buenos Aires as a kid; Carlitos once said that he personified all three philosophical schools at once,
the Academic, the Peripatetic, and the Stoic. But no, there's no way he would comment publicly on what he knew, given that she and Pinocchio had asked for his discretion. And besides, is there anyone left to listen? Gabriela's face brightens, her head stops its doubtful movement, and her lips, softening, recover their normal shape. She finishes the last sip of seltzer, leaves the empty glass in the sink, and, taking her aunt's note, walks to her room, opens a blue cardboard folder, and files the note inside along with several other papers. When she closes the folder, she freezes again and now it's her forehead that's pinched: And the wine salesman? Wasn't it irresponsible of her and Pinocchio to reveal so many details about the fourth informant? Although he doesn't have (nor will he have) access to the text before it's published, Nula knows more about its author's personal life after their conversation this afternoon than Tomatis and Gutiérrez combined, at least relative to what as she and Pinocchio have told them. His friendship with Pinocchio, though not very intimate, does validate the confidence, but his profession, which puts him in contact with many sorts of people over the course of the day, could offer many temptations, simply as a means for bragging—his overblown self-esteem is obvious a mile away—to prove his relationships in intellectual circles, or out of vanity, because those supposed relationships could help him close a sale or even engineer a sexual conquest. Gabriela sees the dark green station wagon again, moving slowly down the sandy road, turning at the intersection and parking some twenty meters ahead, alongside the white bars of the gate. Now she sees Gutiérrez and the wine salesman sitting in the lounge chairs next to the pool, drinking a coffee, and she thinks she hears Nula tactlessly telling Gutiérrez everything that he's just learned about the anonymous author of the novelized history of precisionism, which creates a double layer of complication, the first relative to the author of the fragment and the second relative to Gutiérrez himself, because
they've told Nula more about the fourth informant, not because they doubted his judgment but rather because they aren't close enough to Gutiérrez to discuss certain things. She's tempted to call Soldi and tell him all of this, but she realizes that he's probably still not home, and, feeling suddenly more tired than usual—she might be a little hungry, because the two catfish with salad actually turned out somewhat thin for three people—she lets herself fall softly, face up, on the bed, and stretching out contentedly, careful to keep her feet over the edge of the bed, she uses her feet to slide her shoes off at the heels, letting them fall with a loud thud against the lacquered parquet floor. Sliding to the center of the bed, she spreads her legs, stretches her arms alongside her body, and assuming a satisfied expression (like everyone else, Gabriela is in the habit, which by now is unconscious, of displaying her inner life with gestures and expressions, especially when she's alone), she smiles happily and half closes her eyes.

It's not actually worth getting upset over such improbable complications. Tomatis would never say anything, and as far as the wine salesman is concerned, apart from being overly self-confident, there's really nothing else to fault him for, at least for now—well, one thing, actually, maybe the shameless way he looks at women. Laughing, without opening her eyes, Gabriela shakes her head slowly, summing up, with this gesture, Nula's essential predictability, possibly some automatic program from his early years that's unconsciously set in motion every time he sees a chick. With gentle, condescending indolence, she puts Nula aside. She wants it to be after six already so she can call Rosario; Caballito can wait till tomorrow or even till the weekend, because she wants to be sure that she'll get her father on the phone rather than her mother, if she happens to answer, though she's usually incapable of even stretching her arm as far as the end table, where the phone is kept, and if her father is far from the house, in the garden for example,
he has to run to answer it and usually comes too late. Besides, José Carlos should be the first to know—although he already has two teenage children from his first marriage, Gabriela knows he'll be happy. They've lived together for almost four years, but they've known each other since before she went to New Jersey to finish her degree. Actually, it's been several months since they stopped using protection, and they'd started feeling somewhat disappointed that nothing had happened yet, until finally her period hadn't come, and when it was almost three weeks late she decided to buy a test at the pharmacy; the result was positive, but to be sure she wanted a lab test, which settled all her doubts. Because Holy Week is coming up, she and Pinocchio decided they'd work till Wednesday with Gutiérrez and Cuello, and she'd go to Rosario to see her doctor—this morning, after getting the test results, she'd called for an appointment—and, if the doctor allowed it, she'd take advantage of the holiday and would spend the weekend in Caballito with José Carlos. When had it happened, Gabriela asks herself, when did she and José Carlos get what they were hoping for? After her last period, over a weekend in Rosario, they'd made love twice, the first time on Saturday morning—she'd arrived late Friday, after having spent the whole week working with Pinocchio, and José Carlos had taken part in a conference on economic planning at the university that had lasted two full days—and then on Saturday night, before going out to eat, and after a quiet day at home and then at a party that had lasted till late, they'd started up again. It must have been the second time, that night, Gabriela decides. They'd been talking and caressing each other for a while, mostly naked—it was still hot then—and she'd been getting turned on gradually as he played his fingers softly through her pubic hair, wrapping and unwrapping them and sliding them every so often along the damp edges of her opening. A reddish shadow covered the room, into which the last light of the afternoon filtered. They were happy, and though they
seemed distant from the world, they were unwittingly working in its favor. When José Carlos's fingers dipped a bit more and pushed open the damp edges, she'd had the sensation, in which pleasure mixes with a slight and luckily passing anguish, of not belonging to herself, of losing herself in a remote, forgotten corner of her own body, where blood and tissue and fluids, the silent life of her organs, steered her toward divergent and external shores. She'd experienced that singular feeling from time to time, but never as intensely as that Saturday night. When she touched his penis, it felt silky and tense and quivering against the tips of her fingers and the palm of her hand, and when he entered her Gabriela thought it felt harder, thicker, longer, hotter, and wetter than usual—she'd thought this later, as she showered, because at that moment the sensations filling every corner of her body didn't leave much space for thinking—and the drawn out pleasure culminated during her orgasm in a kind of fury that made her muscles ache for days afterward and left José Carlos with his back covered in scratches. Gabriela had felt him finish with a thick burst of semen, and for a while after he'd pulled out she'd been sensitive there, and had liked the feeling of José Carlos's organ still being inside of her. Yes, Gabriela thinks, it must have been that time, it couldn't have happened in any other way but in the middle of that pleasure, and she happily abandons herself to that thought for several minutes, though of course she's aware that for its self-perpetuation that ancient, opportunistic, and single-minded substance could work under any conditions,
in vivo
or
in vitro
, and as long as contact happens between the two protagonists who must unite in order to guarantee its persistence it makes no difference whether there's pleasure or suffering, design or accident, love or indifference, consent or violation. Gabriela lies still, satisfied, smiling to herself, but suddenly, without warning, the smile is erased and a hard expression takes over her face, and when her mouth opens abruptly, as though her lower jaw had
unhinged, the hardness is transformed into confusion, irritation, anger: she's at Gutiérrez's house, sitting at the table with Pinocchio, and the owner of the house, who has his back to them, is preparing something at the stove, and when he turns around he's the wine salesman, and as a mean joke he's serving her a plate of live fish. Opening her eyes and crying out, Gabriela is suddenly awake and sitting up on the bed. The disorientation of the sudden dream gives way, in her recovered thoughts, to amazement: in the fraction of a second that she was asleep, the dream took disparate fragments of experience and constructed a new world as vivid as the empirical one, and whose meaning is as difficult to unravel. At an infinitesimal intersection of time, a tangential episode, endowed with its own time, unfolds into events that, were they put into the order in which they occur in reality, would take hours, days, weeks, months, years, the way a single sentence of a story can gather together centuries of empirical time.

Gabriela gets out of bed, yawning, waking up. She turns on the light, opens the doors to her dresser, quickly examines the clothes hanging there, and finally takes out a lightweight tan suit and an ivory silk blouse. Holding up the hangers in front of each other, she studies the combination of tones, and then, holding the two hangers away from her, the blouse on top of the tan coat, to see them better, she decides that the contrast works and that she's happy with the outfit. But when she lays the clothes on the bed, she realizes that the third, and most-visible, button on the silk blouse, which would fall in the middle of her chest, hangs by a thread, so she goes to the dining room and takes her aunt Ángela's sewing kit, an old red and black pastry tin, from the bottom drawer of the chest in the dining room. Her delicate yet agile fingers explore the contents of the box, scissors, thimbles, variously colored spools of thread, loose or packaged buttons of different material, shape, and color, a short piece of tailor's chalk wrapped in a rubber band,
transparent boxes full of safety pins and tacks, two green pin cushions from which many different-sized heads emerge, and, at the bottom, several worn-out, greasy coins from past decades, worthless for years because of inflation, currency switches, or political instability. Gabriela sets the box on the table and takes out two or three spools of thread whose colors more or less correspond to the blouse, one white, another a flat yellow, and a third beige, but deciding that she'll have to choose among these for the one that most matches the blouse itself and especially the thread used to stitch the other buttons, she puts everything back in the red and black tin and takes it to her room. Sitting carefully on the edge of the bed so as not to wrinkle the clothes that she's laid out, she leans over the blouse and carefully examines the button, an iridescent mother-of-pearl circle with two holes in the center, and in particular the thread from which it hangs, a beige-like color, lighter than the one from the spool she's just chosen. Leaning closer, she concentrates on the thread, comparing it to the one that holds up the other buttons, which come stitched from the factory, and, in her memory, to the ones in the box. To resolve her doubt, she opens the tin and takes out the beige spool—too dark. The flat yellow, with a vaguely greenish-gray tint, seems better, and the white one clearly won't work. Yes, the yellow one will match the others best, and even though Gabriela knows that no one will be able to tell the difference, the detail doesn't seem at all superfluous, despite the fact that more than one person might laugh at her—she thinks of the wine salesman and his ridiculous joke, serving her a live fish, an idea that seemed plausible for him, even though it was from a dream—she could remind that person that distinguishing the differences in little things is good training for seeing them in bigger ones, like an ontology of becoming, for example. And Gabriela remembers the philosophy class in which they studied Plato, and the question from the
Timaeus
that she'd memorized, and which
had helped her get a really good grade on the final exam:
What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is?
Gabriela imagines herself asking him this question, hoping to crush him—Gutiérrez, Pinocchio, Carlitos, and Violeta are there, and the scene takes place that Sunday, at the cookout, by the swimming pool—but Nula, smiling benevolently, though never losing his theatrical disdain, would respond,
Are we actually going to discuss becoming or are we just making riddles to humor an old fag who fled Syracuse disguised as a woman, like some vulgar tranny?
Laughing softly at his response without realizing that in fact it's her own and not Nula's, Gabriela loses interest in the becoming, and, putting the beige spool back in the tin, sifts though its contents until she finds the yellow one. Between the two, she chooses the green pin cushion that seems to have the thinnest needles, and leaving the needles and thread on the bed, passes her hand delicately under the silk cloth so as not to wrinkle or tear the blouse and then gently rips away the button, which comes off easily, though it leaves a piece of thread hanging from the end, which she's loosened but which she won't be able to remove herself despite the delicacy and dexterity of her
free finger samples
, as José Carlos likes to call them in jest, because of their tiny size, which means that she'll have to use the scissors to do it. There's one with a curved tip, and another one that's much larger, so she picks up the smaller one: she inserts the tip between the cloth and the thread and carefully pries the thread away so that in the end, when the thread is loose, she can pull it away with her fingers. When it's ready—the tip of the scissors enters farther as the thread loosens—she removes the scissors and finishes the job with her fingers. So as not to lose it, she's left the mother-of-pearl button on the lapel of the tan jacket, where it contrasts more against the dark background, rather than on the light bed spread, on which it would disappear and be difficult to find. Picking it up, she starts pulling out the thinnest needles from
the pin cushion one at a time, trying them in the holes without managing to get any to fit, and then sticking them back on the pin cushion after the failure. Eventually, with the fifth needle—without realizing it, she's trying a needle that she'd already tried before, so for her it's the sixth, counting the needle she'd tried twice—it works, which is only partially gratifying for Gabriela because the needle that fits the iridescent button is so thin that she doubts whether the yellow thread would pass through the eye and then through the holes on the button,
easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven
, Gabriela thinks, laughing aloud,
where the ruling classes control the gates
.