The enormous hypermarket complex appears to his left, its eight theatres, its parking lot, its coffee shops, its cafeteria, and its restaurant all seemingly deserted despite the grandiose display of lights and colors hovering in the darkness of the countryside. The lights shine off the wet bodywork of the fifteen or twenty cars scattered around the parking lot, none of them near the main entrance. A year before, the land that is now occupied by the hypermarket was just a swamp in the middle of an empty floodplain — constantly under water, even when it was dry everywhere else — between La Guardia, where the road splits toward Paraná, and the branch of the river from which the city rises. Nula hesitates a few seconds, slowing down, deciding whether or not to turn into the complex; on Friday, Amigos del Vino starts a week-long promotion there, and he wants to finalize a couple of details with whomever’s in charge, but immediately he changes his mind and accelerates again. The network of lights and colors passes, then reappears for a few seconds, fragmentary, in the rear-view mirror before it disappears completely. Now the road widens into four lanes, and is lit up by tall, downward-curving poles projecting onto the reflective asphalt. The city lights appear overhead, to the right the straight line of lamps on the waterfront, and, to the left, less regularly, the lights on the port, on the avenues converging toward the river, on the buildings of various heights that stand out from the rest, on the regatta club. The car reaches the bridge. It’s so brightly lit that the city, despite its multiplicity of lights, appears dark on the other side. She said no, Nula says again, and, to underscore his disbelief, shakes his head in such a way that the cigarette, which he hasn’t taken from his lips since lighting it, and which he’s consumed a good potion of by now, vibrates in the air, disturbed by the words he says, by the movement of his lips as he shapes them, and by the negative sign, turning his head from left to right and right to left, several times, in the darkness, that expresses his at once ironic and confused bitterness. The combination of these movements causes the smoke that rises from the lit end of the cigarette and from his lungs, though his nose and mouth, to form a turbulent cloud between Nula’s face and the windshield, where the rain drops, swept aside by the wiper blades, rematerialize, obstinately, and it’s through this cloud that Nula, leaving the bridge, with another short, dry, and sarcastic laugh, sees the first rain-soaked streets as the car enters the city.
Gutiérrez also ended up alone early. Lucía didn’t accept his invitation to dinner, and left for Paraná almost immediately after Nula’s sudden departure. And so Gutiérrez has put the fish away in the fridge, and, to counteract any negative effects of the rain, has taken a hot shower, eaten some cheese and grapes he found in the fridge, and settled into what, with self-directed irony, he calls the machine room (satellite television, videocassette player, video camera, computer, printer, modem, radio, compact disc player, telephone, library, record collection, video collection, and so on), trying to work for a while. The millions that he’s unaware of Moro assigning him are in fact imaginary. It’s true he has some savings, and that the sale of a screenplay for Wolf Man two years before secured him his best fees ever for a movie, even though it was never filmed, but there’s nothing in the world that could get him to stop working, and at this moment he’s editing two other screenplays for which he’s already been given an advance, so he couldn’t abandon them even if he wanted to. Though it may be expensive for the area, the riverside house — the people in Buenos Aires who sold it to him never mentioned Doctor Russo, and he only heard the name after he’d moved in — cost him much less than an apartment in Rome or Geneva would have, and actually its location isn’t inconvenient: if he had to make a Thursday afternoon meeting in Rome, for example, he’d simply have to take the Wednesday morning flight at nine fifteen from Sauce Viejo, connect in Ezeiza three hours later, and he’d be at the Piazza de Popolo for lunch by noon on Thursday. Luckily, the Swiss producer, his longtime employer, is also an old friend; he considers Gutiérrez reliable, his principal collaborator on screenplays, and though he never knew Gutiérrez’s reasons for moving to Rincón, and never completely approved of the decision (for personal rather than professional reasons), Gutiérrez knows that he can depend on him, and while the producer’s business continues to operate they’ll continue to work together. Since he’s been in Rincón, he’s already made two trips to Europe, one to Rome and another to Madrid, but a week later he was already anxious to finish his work and return to Doctor Russo’s house. (Everyone calls it that, and one night Marcos pointed out that, wherever he was, in this world or the next, the doctor had once again managed, nominally at least, to hijack another man’s home.)
After working a while, almost till midnight, proofreading an Italian screenplay, Gutiérrez gets up and goes to the kitchen for a cold glass of water. Still on the table are the three cases of wine Nula brought for him and, in a plastic bag, the local chorizos. Gutiérrez stops in front of the wooden cases and scrutinizes them for a moment, as though he were trying to guess what they contain, then he opens the fridge, eats two or three grapes from a plate, and, after pouring a glass of water, takes it to his office and leaves it on his desk. He takes a few sips, and then, from a metal box in the second drawer, he pulls out a black and white photograph.
It’s an enlargement of a photograph of Leonor Calcagno, from the late fifties, when she was twenty-three or twenty-four. It was taken by a street photographer in front of the suspension bridge, the major tourist attraction in the city — along with the Franciscan convent, built by the natives in the seventeenth century — since 1924, the year it was built, until 1983, when the flood knocked it down. In the desk drawer, in the same tin box from which he’s just taken the enlargement, Gutiérrez has the original photo, in which he, in a light summer suit, is standing next to Leonor. The enlargement shows the blurry edge of his left shoulder, against Leonor’s, covered by her flower-patterned dress. Gutiérrez knows every detail of the photo from memory, and every time he would look at it, during his first years in Europe, he would concentrate on Leonor’s face, its features, its gaze, its expression. The idea for the enlargement came from thinking that, in the original photo, everything surrounding Leonor’s face was superfluous, and the enlargement, ultimately, was a way of fixing, optically and chemically, on a specific point, not the image itself but rather the unstable attention of the viewer, the enlargement, at once benign and insistent, presenting the brilliance of a detail cleansed of the useless detritus of the surroundings. A photo of Lucía sits in a glass frame on the desk. Gutiérrez holds the photo of the mother up to the one of the daughter and compares them. Their similarity is apparent, but they’re also very different. Lucía’s features remind him of someone he knew or still knows, though altered, but despite how hard he tries he can’t figure out who it is. He concentrates on the photo of Leonor again. It was the summer of 1958/59 and nothing had happened between them yet. They’d go for walks sometimes, pretty much out in the open. At the end of that summer, Calcagno, her husband, had gone on a trip.
Even though Calcagno was partners with Mario Brando, and was probably richer, and enjoyed a greater reputation as a lawyer, and was at least ten years older (and at least twenty years older than his wife), his admiration for Brando as a literary figure had practically enslaved him, something that happened with every other member of Brando’s precisionist movement. Despite having been a cultural attaché in Rome during the first Peronist government, Brando had shifted to the opposition in 1953, and after the Revolución Libertadora he began occupying official posts in the provincial government. But it was his literary reputation, which overflowed the borders of the province — validated by his regular publications in La Nación and in various magazines in Córdoba, Chile, Lima, and Montevideo — that ultimately subjugated Calcagno, an expert in Roman law, an excellent litigator, and the one who did practically all the work for the firm. To his followers, the founder of precisionism was simply charismatic; to his enemies, he was an autocratic tyrant who demanded selfless devotion to the precisionist ideals, not to mention complete obedience to the leader of the movement. According to César Rey, who once threw a glass of wine in his face — this was sometime around 1957, when he was drunk at a dinner party — Brando was a talentless puppet who used his alleged literary gifts to charm the rich into giving him legal work or official posts regardless of who was in power. But there were many people who believed the opposite, and the precisionist movement and its leader enjoyed a considerable reputation. To Gutiérrez, Brando was a good writer of sonnets who tried to pass himself off as avant-garde. What bothered him was when Brando would give him work that had nothing to do with the firm, which fed a certain ambiguity that made people think that Gutiérrez, who was still very young and too financially dependent on him to protest, was one of his disciples. What at the time made him uncomfortable seemed useful in retrospect, since thanks to his work at the firm he made connections with the literary scene. Gutiérrez valued Calcagno, not only because he’d been a good professor or because he’d found work for him, but also because he was intelligent and sincere. But, along with other personal reasons, his strange devotion to Brando, who was inferior to him in every way, ultimately brought out Gutiérrez’s contempt for him.