La Grande (53 page)

Slowly, almost without Tomatis realizing it, all of these stories become soft and fragmentary, unraveling, and finally, like a trail of smoke losing its cohesion, thinning, they disappear. He remembers his brother, who had the same name as him, but because he died when he was seven days old, a year later, when he, Tomatis, was born, they gave him the same name, but inverted: his brother had been called Alberto Carlos, and he was Carlos Alberto, but
the Alberto only appears on official documents, he never uses it. Despite everything, it's pleasant, now, to see him play, run, ride a horse. He seems so happy! The problem is that they both have the same name, their parents should have prevented this. Maybe they should give the name to his brother now, because, with the passage of time, through one of those ironies of chance, he, Tomatis, now an adult, has become the older brother. He's overcome by an immense sense of shame, an intolerable sympathy, and he feels like he's drowning, and so, shaking his head, confused and sweaty, he opens his eyes. When he sees the sun, he realizes that he's been asleep and he checks the time: it's ten of seven. For the first time in over fifty years, he's had a mircodream, as he calls those sharp and momentary images that, without too much development, visit him in dreams, and in those two or three instants of dreaming he saw his older brother, whom he never knew, but for whom, all the same, he still suffers a painful compassion now that he's awake. Tomatis realizes that, though it didn't look like him, the boy in the dream must have been himself, as he'd been—or as he would have liked to have been, he can't remember any more—when he was eight or nine. Seven days old! You might say that, almost literally, more than anyone else, he was born to die, Tomatis thinks, a bit more calm now that the overwhelming confusion he'd felt a few moments before, thankfully, has abated.

With the changing position of the sun, the horizontal rays of light that crossed the interior of the bus have disappeared, leaving a pale and porous shadow in which, here and there, because of the vibrations of the bus and the momentary bumps in the road—patches, potholes, or transversal lines of hardened tar that mark the layers of the asphalt—short luminous bursts appear. Outside, in contrast, the sky is veneered a singular, golden copper to the horizon, and more intensely to the east over the flat and barren land. Rain has been forecast for the weekend, even violent storms in
certain regions of the plain, and Tomatis leans forward to better observe the sky through the window, but he doesn't see a single cloud. The sky is now paling to the east, and the disc of the sun, still relatively high, a yellowish green, will redden suddenly, growing, as its fall toward the horizon line accelerates. For the last fifteen days, it's rained every weekend, and then the weather clears little by little until the moment the sun reappears and the heat returns. The week that's now ending began with rain on Monday and Tuesday—there was also a brief storm on Sunday morning—and though it dawned cloudy with a light drizzle on Wednesday, by that afternoon the heat was already oppressive, and by the next day the cloud cover had transformed into enormous white clouds that appeared motionless against the luminous, blue sky, clearly visible thanks to the cleansing of the air by the rains; the summer was returning. And yesterday and today there hasn't been a sign of clouds, and the air has been suffocating. Tomatis thinks that if it manages to rain tonight, the cookout that Gutiérrez has gone to such lengths to organize, gathering his old and his new friends, will be spent under the pavilion, watching the rain fall, or at the large kitchen table, to which Tomatis has already been invited before, the previous winter. He imagines the guests eating and drinking under the pavilion, talking and laughing, but contained within its limits by the rain. Every so often, someone will be forced to cross them, to go to the bathroom or to look for something inside the house—cigarettes, a camera, papers, makeup—stored in their rain jackets or their purses piled up on the sofa in the living room, and they'll cross the wet lawn at a run before circling the white slabs around the swimming pool and turning onto the stone path that leads to the entrance to the house. It will have been raining all morning, and while the thick and loud storms may transform into a silent, fine rain by the middle of the afternoon, the water will not stop falling, just like this past week, until Monday or
Tuesday, and maybe, with that rain, the autumn will finally arrive. The party will end early on account of the weather, and at around three or four the guests will start to leave, especially if the rain cools the air suddenly; used to the summer heat, the guests will have come in clothes that are too lightweight and will be cold, and the teeth of the most sensitive among them may even start to chatter. Like so many other things in his life, apparently, Gutiérrez's party will probably not turn out the way he expected. Clearly his politeness isn't faked, and his sense of generosity seems genuine, but there seems to be something darker at work behind them, not against others, but rather against himself. In any case, he doesn't seem to expect anything from the world or, better yet, Tomatis thinks, he doesn't seem to desire any of the things that the majority of people desire. His calm and affectionate but slightly distant personality, isn't it indifference, detachment, unqualified absence? And yet, while the big things don't seem to interest him, the smallest ones, if not the most insignificant ones, attract and seduce him, like a one- or two-year-old baby whose mother points insistently at a mountain so that it'll notice it, and meanwhile it's fascinated by an ant scurrying over the instep of its shoe. Once, Gutiérrez dragged him to the San Lorenzo grill house, a hole in the wall that was last fashionable in the fifties or sixties, but which has been in decline more or less since 1968. According to Rosemberg, since he came back, whenever he takes anyone out he always invites them to the best restaurants in the city, but when he goes out alone he only goes to San Lorenzo—Tomatis wonders if having dragged him to that temple of precooked sweetbreads, of leftover steak, and of dubious empanadas was in fact a gesture of confidence, a sign of deference, almost an homage to his person, a thought that without ever having been made explicit more or less signified,
You, Tomatis, who know how much things are worth, will be able to recognize the hidden treasure here
. And Gutiérrez, who frequently orders Italian
and French wine, along with champagne, through an importer in Buenos Aires, and serves it generously to his friends, drank wine with ice and seltzer at the grill house while eating precooked intestines and greasy, proletarian empanadas. Watching him eat, Tomatis tried to unravel the situation, the enigma of the man who kept the best wines in his cellar and took his friends out to the best restaurants in the city or, he was sure, in Rome or Geneva, but when he went out alone he went exclusively to the San Lorenzo grill house. It's a frequent topic of deliberation for Tomatis, and the day they went out together, as he watched him put ice and seltzer in his wine, intrigued, adopting a knowing air, but trying to provoke some sort of clarifying response, he told him with a smile that tried to be conspiratorial,
For the sake of consistency, you'll need to do that with your Château Margaux
, and upon hearing this, cracking up and shaking his head, Gutiérrez answered,
That sounds more like your style! It's not at all like that for me
, which did nothing to resolve Tomatis's perplexity. He often told himself that he, Gutiérrez, was frozen in his own past, which sometimes seemed evident, and once he even said to Soldi,
He confused his youth with where it took place
, but the explanation was altogether too simplistic, Gutiérrez was too lucid not to be conscious of that error. No, it had to be something else. And, every so often, Tomatis was stuck wondering,
Is it this or that thing, isn't it actually, or maybe . . .
But none of the explanations were consistent with Gutiérrez; there was always some detail, some trait, some hypothesis, that didn't coincide with him. The fact that he was so similar and yet so different from his friends from the city, both new and old, could not result entirely from his long absence; there was something intrinsic to him that had to explain it. And his friendliness, at once affectionate and distant, wasn't produced by hesitation or duplicity. What was most mysterious was the infantile pleasure that the most banal things gave him: a word that he'd forgotten after all that time and which someone had spoken as he
passed them in the street, or the way some children behaved when they were leaving school, or the tree buds in September, or the suggestive look he exchanged with a girl searching for a rich client from her table in some downtown bar, produced a sort of mild hilarity in him that seemed at once exultant and sympathetic, and which intrigued anyone in his company. They seemed to provoke a kind of recognition in him, and the things that had been like loose threads of unperceived experience within the incorporeal plane of his recollections, after so many years away, suddenly, in the tactile evidence of the present, were actualized. Tomatis shifts in his seat, bothered by a slight agitation, feeling that, once again, his understanding has come up against a limit. It doesn't seem sufficient to explain him through simple nostalgia and a reencounter with the things of the past. And then, suddenly, after a few seconds in which his mind, unable to think, is submerged into a kind of painful void, he receives, through an association of ideas, the revelation: he hasn't come looking for anything; he's come back to the point of departure, but it's not a return, and much less a regression. He hasn't come to recover a lost world, but to see it differently. From the series of incalculable transformations, large and small, that he suffered since the day he left, another man has emerged, modified in imperceptible ways, especially to himself, by each change. And the man who now goes into ecstasies over the banalities of the world knows, having paid for it with his life, that every banality is shored up by a brace that flowers on the surface and stretches down into an unfinished, black depth. He seems to have reached the ultimate simplicity, but only after a long tour of the inferno. He, Tomatis, has never heard him raise his voice, and every time he thinks of Gutiérrez, he pictures him smiling vaguely, the slight smile more present in his eyes than on his lips. Even when he starts in on his enumerative diatribe against rich countries, though the terms he employs can sometimes seem too cruel, the gentle irony
with which he speaks expresses more disillusion than rage, and, if you pay attention, sometimes, there's a noticeable trace of indulgence. The world that he celebrates now, with an almost constant and subtle exaltation, is not at all the one of his youth, but rather one that he came to discover over the course of his successive transformations, and the person he's become is now seeing it all for the first time. He didn't actually return to his point of departure, but rather to a new place where everything is different. And though he may have lost his innocence, his capacity for acceptance has grown, inclining toward simple things without idealization or disdain. He must've thought that if he managed to recognize and appreciate simplicity, he could reconcile himself to the world. The distant, even absent quality that is sometimes evident in him is probably a result of that exercise in reconciliation, the consciousness and effort of it long ago dissolved into the benevolent sincerity with which he regards the world; he even finds a way to qualify Mario Brando. And Tomatis elaborates a formula that seems to give him enormous satisfaction, the multiplicity of meanings it contains only apparent to him:
He left his house and had to cross the whole universe to get to the corner, and now he knows the effort required to reach the corner, and the significance of the immediate
.

The sun has now begun to redden; its circumference is sharper, and the flaming disc seems to have cooled and smoothed, losing its look of boiling metal and gaining a sort of gentleness. But the afternoon that is repeated on the plain has something solemn and disquieting about it, and an unmistakable impression comes suddenly and destroys every illusion, that the place where we thought we were living is another, larger, and this destructive realization removes every known sense of the verb
to live
. Our experience, which we thought so intimate, becomes foreign, and life reveals its remote and tiny quality, a momentary spark in an immense, igneous storm. The smooth surface of the red disc now emits magnetic
vibrations in which cold and torrid shades alternate. In the absolutely cloudless sky, the disc, which appears to have been drawn with a compass, grows as it falls toward the horizon, and on the plain a reddish glow haloes the grass, the foliage of the trees, the fences—cows and horses, abstracted, graze unhurriedly, as though they don't realize that the night is rising from the east, from the side of the river. In a small pond the water has turned red, and a few motionless herons have their backs to him, as though that change of color upset them and they prefer to ignore it. Along a dirt road perpendicular to the highway, a rider, mounted on a dark horse, moves toward the red disc at a slow trot, and Tomatis senses that when he reaches the horizon he will intercept the reddening form and the rider will enter into it, submerging himself into the magnetic, quivering substance contained within the perfect circumference, the fluid mass of metal in fusion that will swallow him forever unless the horse and rider, triumphant, emerge on the other side of the road, leaving a ragged hole in the center of the disc, sabotaging the fraud or revealing the illusion. But if suddenly the sun were to stop, touching the horizon tangentially, the trot of the horse, in the distortion of space and time that the detention would cause, would be frozen, without advancing, in the same point in space for all eternity, halfway along the road between the highway and the red disc, incredibly immediate and enormous. Maybe the horse and the rider are phantasmal, incorporeal figures separated from the expired and corrupted flesh that for the past few hours has been lying vacated in a field, on their way, blurrily and hastily, to the kingdom of the dead, which as everyone knows is clustered at the far edge of the west,
to the left of the world
, Tomatis thinks, raising his left hand and touching the window glass, cold because of the air conditioning.
The publisher will have arrived by now, and he'll have started negotiating with the authorities, trying to convince them of the utility of the Fourth Estate for explaining government policy
to the public, and the need for a free press in a kingdom of the dead privileged with new institutions that affirm democratic values and consolidate individual liberty and economic progress, informing them, in addition, that for a kingdom of the dead in constant demographic shift, a rigorous communication strategy is essential; he is willing to put his experience in communications at their service, of course, in addition to his contacts with the vital forces of society and his relationships among marketing and public opinion experts.
Tomatis shakes his head with a smile that is both indulgent and mocking, and, looking away for a few seconds from the red disc falling toward the horizon, he observes the ochre shadow inside the bus. The passengers in the front seats are almost invisible, and the ones closest to Tomatis are only black silhouettes encircled by a reddish halo; whenever a head moves, its dark profile is outlined in the shadow by that luminous line that emphasizes it with meticulous exactitude. But the heads that stick out above the seat backs are motionless, as if their owners had abandoned them in their seats before beginning their trip to
the edge of the west, the left end of the world
, following the dark rider trotting slowly toward the red disc that is now almost touching the horizon, and toward the publisher of
La Región
, who at that very moment is offering his
communications strategies
to the authorities of the kingdom of the dead. Behind him, on the other side of the aisle, the two boys, possibly medical students, sprawled out on their seats, have fallen silent, with their eyes wide open, possibly due to a sudden stupor or an absorbing memory, and their pupils, exposed to the sun by the excessive stillness of their eyes, glow dark red, phosphorescent, as if distant bonfires, brought to the present by the intensity of their recollection, burn as intensely in their memory as the tiny flames reflected in their pupils.
But the kingdom of the dead,
Tomatis tells himself,
isn't at the edge of the west, on the left end of the world, but rather within everyone, inside us, it's a burden carried on the shoulders of everyone that, unnecessarily and
miserably, is born and dies. Those of us traveling in this bus carry that burden, that cross. And at this very moment, everyone who squirms, from morning to night, awake or asleep, in the nest of humanity, in the ball of mud in which they struggle, overwhelmed, bears it. The living and the dead share the same indivisible kingdom
.