La Grande (14 page)

On the next corner, Lucía changed sidewalks, crossed the street that intersects 25 de Mayo, and started down La India's block. Nula did the same, but when he saw that she had stopped at the entrance to his own building and was peering inside, curiously, he stopped at the corner to watch her. Lucía walked up the three staircases that separated the garden from the street and looked in, curiously, but also with a slow caution. Then, hesitantly, she disappeared inside. Nula was about to follow her in when she reappeared. She seemed dissatisfied, and also slightly disoriented. She stood thinking on the top step, quickly looked back inside, checked her watch, walked down to the street, took a few steps to the north, then turned around suddenly and started walking straight toward
the spot where Nula was standing. He was about to slip into the ice cream shop on the corner, owned by a friend of his mother, but he thought that if she wanted to interrogate him it would be better if it happened on the street, which was empty just then, and so he waited, looking right at her, watching her approach with that decisive step, neither slow nor fast, absorbed in her thoughts, as though she were measuring the words she planned to say when she reached him, but when she got to the corner she glanced up suddenly and gave him the same look she'd given him when they saw each other outside the bar, in which Nula thought he sensed a fraction of a second of recognition, but she sank back, almost immediately, just like before, into her thoughts, and she turned down the cross street. Playing it safe, Nula stayed where he was, and, as she moved down the tree-lined street, was easily able to study her. The pools of sunlight that filtered through the leaves and onto the sidewalk passed quickly over the body in red that advanced through the beams. Halfway down the block, Lucía stopped in front of a door, glanced cautiously inside, then kept walking. Nula started following her again. Just as she was turning the corner, Nula reached the door she'd stopped at and read the brass plate attached to the wall:
Doctor Oscar Riera, Clinical Medicine
. Afraid he'd lose sight of her, he hurried away, and reached the cross-street almost at a run, but he had to stop suddenly when he turned the corner, because she had stopped again and was staring, with the kind of concentrated attention that could have been called blatant indiscretion, into another house. Nula waited for her to keep walking and then started after her again. The girl's singular behavior worried him. Beyond its apparently strange, even comical or ridiculous aspect, there was also something slightly unsettling about it. He'd have preferred not to follow her, but at the same time he sensed that in the short half hour that had passed since he started following her, she had traveled deep into his own life. Lucía turned the next
corner and Nula sped up again. When he came around the corner he saw that she was stopped outside a house halfway down the block, leaning toward a door and pushing a key into the lock. Nula started walking faster and faster, hoping to exchange another quick look with her, but by the time he reached the door she had already passed through, and he just managed to hear the metallic sound of the lock as the key was turned from the inside.

He must have had a strange look on his face, because La India, who had been waiting with lunch, looked at him inquisitively once or twice, but, pretending not to notice, he only told her, in passing, that he felt like he might be getting sick. So La India prepared him an effervescent aspirin after lunch and he shut himself in his room till it was time to open the kiosk. Lying in bed, he lit a cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling. Lucía's strange behavior—he didn't yet know that was her name—must have had a rational explanation, and if what he came up with later had to be discarded, a kind of disquiet lingered. Only the last of the sudden stops in her strange circuit of the block seemed to have a rational explanation, since she'd obviously gone into her own house, or at least a house she had a key to. What intrigued him most was the symmetry of the four points: on the block (a perfect square) the four points where she'd stopped were, in fact, symmetric. The W point (for west), La India's apartment, was symmetrical to the E point (for east), also halfway down the block on the street parallel to 25 de Mayo; and the S point (for south), the office of Doctor Riera, was halfway down the cross street and symmetrical to the N point (for north), the house into which she finally disappeared. The facts were plain: she'd come to a stop exactly halfway along each side of the square that formed the block. That symmetry, if it followed some specific purpose, could be acceptably rational, but what troubled him was thinking that this specific purpose might be unknown or in fact (and has he began to suspect) nonexistent. He could also reverse
the problem and think that it might not be the behavior itself that was troubling but rather the purpose that provoked it. And here Nula started looking for the most calming explanation possible, in which both the ends and the behavior itself were rational.

It occurred to him that the girl in red—oh how he wanted to see her again!—could've been an architect or an urban planner. On the one hand, she could have been inspecting the houses out of curiosity, and her strange demeanor was the result of her feeling somewhat guilty for her presumption and fearful of being witnessed. And the same could be said if she was an urban planner: after seeing the unique way the forties-era
luxury tenements
had been built, that is, with the entrance that, without quite dividing the block in half, nevertheless went the full depth, opening parallel to 25 de Mayo, she may have wanted to verify the effects of that strange construction on the buildings on the other three sides that, with 25 de Mayo, formed the block's perfect square. But those explanations, in fact, reminded him of Aristotle's distinction between arguments that are absolutely true and others, in contrast, that only appear to be, and, disheartened, he couldn't tell which argument belonged to which category. Not including the garden/complex, the houses she'd stopped in front of were three typical middle-class homes from the fifties and sixties, just like so many others on the same block and on every other block in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the girl's thoughtful expression and her somewhat extravagant curiosity suggested the opposite of rationality. No: after a detached shuffle through the most likely hypotheses, among which was the possibility that she was simply looking for a specific house, but without having much information to go on, Nula, hoping to maintain the self-respect of a
rational being
, a term he liked to borrow from popular philosophical jargon, he had to discard them all. The most likely answer, as far as Nula could see, of course, was that Lucía, in a manner of speaking, and, to continue
with the architectural theme,
was missing a few bricks from her terrace
. Nula used the expression, he imagined, with detached, wry cynicism, not realizing that he was pinned to the bed by the unease that it provoked, by the profound conviction that even if it were true it wouldn't change in any way the decision that he'd made the moment that girl came into his life, and by his feverish summary of the events as he tried to make some decent sense of them: the look outside the bar, the compulsive way he'd followed her, the movement of the red blur as it moved along at an even pace, neither slow nor fast, down the bright sidewalk, the four symmetrical stops Lucía made on the perfect square that formed the block.

Now, driving back across the bridge, in the opposite direction as last night, coming back from Gutiérrez's, Nula, who has recovered his sense of calm after a night of sleep, once again remembers that early afternoon five years ago and the months that followed. The image of the girl in red walking ahead of him down the bright sidewalk is clear but impersonal, like any other distant memory, but the cloudy morning, threatening rain, that he moves through in the present—the station wagon's clock reads ten twenty-nine—his empirical surroundings, are somehow more elusive and vague than that tiny, red blur, vibrating and shuffling brightly in the center of his mind. Ever since he watched her step out of the swimming pool, and especially after running into her the night before at Gutiérrez's, when Lucía declared, as calmly as anything, that she didn't know him, that red blur has taken over his thoughts. The blur but not yet Lucía herself, just the stylized sensation of the red curves in the midday sun, without the tangled pattern of the months that followed.

Last night he stopped by the wine bar, but there wasn't anyone there he knew, so he went home. Diana, who according to Nula could spot an ink stain on a black wall in a dark room on a moonless night, when she saw the state of his shoes and his pants,
and also the two muddy yellow rings on his white sweater, asked him, feigning more surprise than she felt, where he had been, but Nula, who is hardly blind to his wife's suspicions of the evasive nature of his personality, given to wandering, had offered his usual response—
Business—
knowing that, while unsatisfying, will disarm her temporarily. She'll counterattack, as they say, later, when they're in bed. Then he put the car in the garage and went to play with the kids, since Diana prefers to feed them before he gets home and then put them to bed early. The truth is no one, least of all him, knows when he might get home. At around nine thirty they ate, talked, cleaned up together, and then worked a while in the library, both absorbed in their own thoughts. They were the average middle-class couple of their time—the end of the twentieth century—and though they had some financial support from their families, they had to work for their living, at things that were different from what really interested them. Diana, though she was missing a hand, was a talented illustrator and painter, and designed posters for an ad agency. Nula, as we know, did not pretend the wine selling was anything but a means for financing his philosophical projects. While they were together they performed the ritual of domestic life with ease and even sincerity. At around eleven they brushed their teeth and went to bed, lying next to each other, flipping through the same magazine, and, after turning off the light, after Diana's hardly systematic and rather parodic interrogation, trying not to make too much noise so as not to wake the kids, who were sleeping in the next room, taking real pleasure from it, though, because of their youth, without yet realizing that when it comes to sex the other's reality and the thing that resists desire are the other's ghosts, as they did two or three times a week, tense and sweaty, they copulated.

Diana was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her wrist. They had to operate, and she lost her hand. Because she was
in fact very beautiful, and they were used to talking openly about it, sometimes, when they were alone together, having fun, Nula would sometimes whisper in her year,
you're just five fingers away from perfection
. Diana liked hearing him say that, but Nula knew that her jealous nature was a result of the stump. Reality, meanwhile, validated her suspicions: Nula cheated on her often, telling himself each time that he really loved her but was incapable of establishing a direct correlation between love and fidelity. Compassion, which can be a part of love, is alien to sex. Desire is neither compassionate nor cruel; it has its own laws, and Nula let himself be governed by them. His only concession was a compartmentalization of his sex life. Possibly to silence his own misgivings, he often said that it's absurd to find fault with an act of servitude. And every so often he resigned himself to his disloyalty with the thought that if, as a student of philosophy and wine merchant it was possible to supply his own ethics, when it came to sex the precepts of a moral sensibility ceased to make sense.
Sex is the common stock of the scorpion, the sardine, the rabbit, reduced to a solipsistic, repetitive, proliferating mania. It precedes morality infinitely and will infinitely outlast it
, he liked to announce, especially in the preliminary stages of a new relationship, though he in fact discussed these matters often with his wife, who watched him closely, at once wary and delighted.

Diana's stump inspired pathos, but it also excited him. Although she'd gotten used to it, and although a set of positive attributes, beauty, intelligence, talent, among other things compensated for the absence of the hand, Diana felt different, but when she tried to explain it to him, Nula would correct her:
Not different, unique
. In a sense, that stump, when contrasted with her other attributes, gave her an extraordinary singularity, and it was that singularity that seduced him. Nula, who was used to feeling two hands grasp his shoulders in a hug, felt a singular shudder when the warm, smooth edge of the stump rubbed, softly, against his back. And if
he imagined that when he took the stump in his hands and stroked it and kissed it he was showing his love for her, most likely it was out of love for his own sensations that he did it, or rather out of love for the possession of that unique person who belonged only to him.

Nula crosses the bridge and turns onto the highway. The rain from the day before, which continued well into the night, has not yet dried, and the gray air blends into the horizon. The vegetation is still gray, but the low, dark clouds have been replaced by a high dome, a clear, even gray that releases sparks of water against the windshield, but these are so tiny and so scattered that they don't even manage to coat it. He passes the enormous, brightly colored hypermarket, an eye-catching anachronism at the edge of a swampy expanse, and then La Guardia, before turning onto the road to Paraná. When he crosses the bridge over the Colastiné river, gray like everything else, he sees that the multiplicity of rippled, geometrical waves driven against the current, which he saw with Gutiérrez the afternoon before on the Ubajay, north of Rincón, are gone, and concludes that the southeast wind is gone, and when he looks hard at the low-lying vegetation on the island surrounding the asphalt road, he sees that it, too, is motionless. Before reaching the tunnel he sees, three or four kilometers ahead, above him, in the hills, beyond the main channel of the Paraná, the small, quiet city that, paradoxically, took the name of the excessive, turbulent river. Inside the tunnel, he starts going over the list of things he has to cover with the regional manager of Amigos del Vino, Américo, and when he emerges in Paraná, at five of eleven, he realizes that this trip could have been made the next day, as he'd planned the week before, in order to prepare the promotion at the hypermarket, but it had been impossible to wait that long to try to find Lucía.