La Grande. Juan José Saer

livestock, the snapping of the grasses or the shivering of the corn when they pulled an ear off to eat it and put the silk to dry; the subterranean knocking of the tuco-tucos, the cries of the lapwings and the crested screamers at the water, and the cooing of the doves at midday in the summers; the hooves of the horses crossing town at a walk or a trot and so rarely at a gallop that when it happened people would come out to the street to see if something was wrong; a complicated, rhythmic sound, the creaking of leather, wood, and metal of the sulkies, wheelbarrows, and pick-ups; the conversations in Arabic between his grandfather and other Syrians or the family members who lived in town or who’d come to visit him from the surrounding villages or even from Rosario or Buenos Aires and once even from Colombia; the unsettling sound of the windmills at the bends in the Carcarañá when the wind picked up; the clatter of the bocce balls in the court behind the store; the Sunday mornings, the radio they’d take outside if the weather was nice to listen to The Syrio-Lebanese Hour on the Rosario station, the mournful voice of Oum Kalthoum filling the sunny courtyard, the house, the orchard, and garden, under the arcades covered with vines or enormous wisteria; the Arabic words: bab (door), khubz (bread), haliib (milk), habibi (darling), badinjan (eggplant), watan (homeland), and so on. And visual too: the empty horizon on the plain, always the same wherever you were; the swarms of yellow butterflies that would land on the damp parts of the street after the sprinkler passed and take off all at once and land in another puddle father off; the planters blooming with dahlias, snapdragons, daisies, and pansies; the outskirts of the village, which already were and also weren’t the countryside; the horse-drawn carts that passed at a short trot and whose driver, without even turning his head to see if there was anyone there, would direct a greeting that consisted of slowly lifting the hand that held the reins toward the corner where the store was located; the signal that dropped suddenly when a train was approaching the village, and the people waiting for it running from their houses and crossing the tracks in order to reach the station before the train; the dirt roads, sloped and dusty on dry days and covered with black mud and mess the rainy days, and always, always, straight, endless, and deserted; the owls perched on the posts of the barbed wire fences, motionless and rigid, as though they were effigies of themselves painted on the wood; the guinea pigs with metallic blue tufts crossing the road slowly when a vehicle or a rider on horseback was passing; the rabbits running full speed from the undergrowth and the whistling ducks flying high, slowly, stretched out, forming an angle; or the motionless dust kicked up by cars and which on still days hung over the road for a long time; the dogs that copulated during the siesta, the male balancing precariously, trembling slightly, over the female; or the foal and the mare that once, at a distance, Nula had been watching, and saw that, as they caressed, stroking each other’s necks and muzzles, the foal’s penis was slowly engorging. (Each time he remembered one of these sensations, Nula put it down in his notebook.)

      His grandfather was one of those assimilated “Turks” who, if he dressed like a farmer or a horseman and didn’t open his mouth, with his straight black hair, his tightly clipped beard, and his skin toasted by life in the open air, could pass, among strangers, as a gaucho or a farm hand from the area, or one of those santiagueños who, in the thirties and forties, came en masse from the villages on the plain to harvest corn. And even when he spoke he didn’t have much of a foreign accent: he’d learned Spanish well, with the exception of four or five hitches that his vocal organs probably couldn’t adapt to, and which betrayed his origins. He was anticonservative, a yrigoyenista, and a bitter antiperonist (that was the epithet he used), and he liked to recall how, during the coup in 1930, a drunk gaucho had ridden horseback into the store, and he’d taken his revolver from the counter drawer and unhooked his riding crop from the wall, and hitting the horse with the crop, had backed him into the middle of the street. And yet he read La Nación and La Capital, and every month received Selections from Reader’s Digest. He dressed in three different ways to fulfill his three main roles: for his work in the fields, where he had a few cows; for his general store, where he sold everything from yerba mate to freezers and at one point even cars, and of course clothes, fabric, paint, and what have you; and finally for his trips to Rosario, for business, family matters, or social occasions like weddings, baptisms, wakes, or parties at the Syrio-Lebanese club. In the sixties, he had a truck for the fields and around town, and a car for longer trips. Nula remembered hearing, without understanding completely because he was still too young and his parents only hinted at it, that after he was widowed he’d taken up with a mysterious lover in Rosario. Laila and Maria, his two daughters, wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of behavior in the village. When Nula was older, La India told him that his father had spotted Yusef once in Rosario, and that his grandfather, who was with his lover, had pretended not to see him, but in any case the relationship between the father and the son had already fallen apart by then. In terms of religion, his grandfather considered himself a fervent Apostolic Roman Catholic, which might have been an implicit way of underscoring his superiority, not over the Jews, of whom he seemed unaware (although, when he played truco he always teamed up with Feldman, the pharmacist, who was one), nor over the Muslims, whom he loathed, but rather over the Maronites and the Orthodoxists, who seemed more skittish than true heretics to him, preferring those extravagant variants despite having recourse to the Roman Church. He attended mass every Sunday and took communion every so often, and if the priest came by for something for himself or for one of the poor people in the village, he didn’t charge him, but he didn’t like knowing he played cards on Saturday night and would keep from going to those games so he wouldn’t have to see it.

      They brought his son back to the village to bury, near his mother and an older brother who’d only lived a couple of weeks and who, as was the custom then, had the same name. At first, La India had objected, because she’d planned to cremate him and scatter the ashes, but then she thought it would be better to leave him near his father, to see if the proximity, after the incommensurable separation, could reconcile them. She was left with, as she would often say to her sons in her colorful way, the perfect picnic before the storm. They had killed him in a pizzeria in Boulogne, near the Pan-American highway, and La India passed through the village to drop off the boys and pick up their grandfather on her way to Buenos Aires. The police interrogated them for a full day before releasing the corpse, and at the end of the interrogation a clerk read them the section of the report that referred to the event itself. He’d apparently set a meeting one night, for nine o’clock, but he’d arrived well before that and had changed tables twice. According to witnesses, at ten of nine a car parked outside the door. Three men were inside; the one who was sitting in the passenger seat got out and stood on the sidewalk, leaning against the open door to the car, which was still running. The waiter at the pizzeria said that when his father saw them he stood up too, reaching his hand into his jacket to get his gun ready, not looking away, but the man who took the shot had already been in the pizzeria for a while, drinking a beer at a table behind him and pretending to watch a sports program on the television, waiting for the car that would pick him up after the execution; he shot him four times in the back, shot him again where he’d fallen, and, according to the waiter, ran out and got in the back seat of the car, where someone had already opened the door from the inside, while the guy who’d gotten out of the car sat down again next to the driver, who’d pulled away at full speed, barely giving the others time to close their doors. After La India and her father-in-law were given permission to take the body from the hospital and had seen it to the funeral home’s van to take back to the village, they decided to pass by the pizzeria. It was a winter dusk; an icy rose stained the sky opposite the west, where the sun had almost disappeared behind a bank of clouds darkened by their own shadows, projected by the back light. In the empty pizzeria, the lights and the television were already on. They spoke with the waiter and the owner; when he realized who they were, the cook, who’d been kneading dough near the oven, put down his work, and without opening his mouth once, approached to listen. The owner didn’t seem too happy that they’d come—he must have thought the visit could be compromising—but the waiter, who’d tried to help him, and who seemed truly affected by what had happened, showed them the spot where he’d fallen and tried to console them by saying that he’d died immediately, almost without realizing what was happening. He followed them to the door. Before they left, the grandfather put a few bills in his hand, which he ended up accepting after a brief but sincere resistance. They went back out to the street, onto that anonymous corner of the tortuous