With regard to their ages, Nula is in fact twenty-nine and Gutiérrez exactly twice that, which is to say that one is just entering maturity while the other, meanwhile, will soon leave it behind entirely, along with everything else. And although they speak as equals, and even with some ease, they refrain from the familiar tú form, the older man possibly because he left the country before its general use came into fashion in the seventies, and Nula because, as a commercial tactic, he prefers not to use the tú form with clients he didn’t know personally before trying to sell them wine. Their use of usted and the difference in their ages doesn’t diminish their mutual curiosity, and even though it’s only the third time they’ve met, and though they’ve yet to reach a real intimacy, their conversation takes place in a decidedly extra-commercial sphere. The curiosity that attracts them isn’t spontaneous or inexplicable: to Gutiérrez, although he’s as yet unaware of the exact reasons for Nula’s interest, the vintner’s responses the day they first met seemed unusual for a simple trader, and his parodic attitude when they met again, as he mimed the typical gestures and discourse of a merchant, interspersed with discreet allusions to Aristotle’s Problem XXX.1 on poetry, wine, and melancholy, enabled him to glimpse the possibility of a truly neutral conversation, which would be confirmed immediately following the commercial transactions of that second visit.
The first meeting didn’t last more than two or three minutes. Dripping wet, Gutiérrez emerged from his swimming pool and walked toward him across the neat lawn with the same indifference to where he placed his bare feet, Nula recalls, as he shows now, the rubber boots stepping through puddles that interrupt the path, or onto the wet weeds that border it. Nula had been recommended by Soldi and Tomatis, among others, and had spoken to him, Gutiérrez, on the phone the day before to set up the meeting for eleven thirty. Because this took place a few weeks before, in March, it was still summer. In the harsh, radiant morning sun, Nula watched Gutiérrez advance toward him from the white rectangle of the pool, itself framed by a wide rectangle of white slabs on which sat three wood and canvas lounge chairs — one green, one red-and-white striped, and one yellow — all inscribed on a smooth, green landscape bordered at the rear by a dense grove, and flanked, beyond a stretch of green earth, by the white house on the left and on the right by a pavilion with its obligatory grill and a shed that likely contained tools, bicycles, a wheelbarrow, a lawnmower, and so on. I don’t know if it was actually Gutiérrez, but whoever built it must’ve been inspired by those California houses that, from what I’ve learned on television, are made for people who’ve succeeded in life thanks to some righteous or dark arts, suggested Tomatis the day he recommended Gutiérrez as a client. It actually wasn’t such a luxurious house, but in any case it was definitely the most expensive in the area around Rincón, and even though Nula had never been to California he’d seen a lot of the same shows growing up, and so as he took in the assemblage as Gutiérrez, dripping wet, approached him, he realized that, as usual, and possibly for purely rhetorical purposes, Tomatis had exaggerated.
Instead, what surprised him was Gutiérrez’s physical appearance. He’d expected someone elderly, but this was a vigorous man, with a flat stomach, with proportioned angles, tanned by the sun, and whose gray hair, as neatly cropped as the lawn surrounding the swimming pool, and abundant rusty gray body hair, which must have been black in his youth, sticking, because of the water, to his chest and shoulders, arms and legs, increased rather than diminished the impression of physical vigor, so much so that, considering the contradictory situation — less luxurious house than anticipated and younger owner than imagined — Nula thought for a few seconds that he’d come to the wrong address. The contracted and somewhat deformed shadow that, owing to the height of the sun, gathered at the feet of the approaching man could have indicated, in an indirect way, a somewhat more complex inner life than his appearance and the conventional tranquility of the setting it moved through suggested.
— I didn’t know how to let you know that I couldn’t meet you today, after all, Gutiérrez had said. And Nula:
— Clearly it’s the time for taking the water and not the wine.
Gutiérrez had laughed, shaking his head toward the pool.
— Not at all, he said. What happened is I received an unexpected visit this morning.
Just then Nula realized that although Gutiérrez had left the pool the water sounds continued: someone, invisible from where he stood, was still splashing and swimming around. At that moment, in a fluorescent green one-piece, its shoulders bent, with that same abstracted, preoccupied manner, tanned and maybe slightly more solid than five or six years before, the body of Lucía Riera, which Nula had come to know so well, was emerging up the metal ladder from the side of the pool closest to the house. Without even looking at them, Lucía had thrown herself onto the green canvas chair next to the pool. Gutiérrez had followed Nula’s surprised expression somewhat worriedly, and a shadow there seemed to suggest that an explanation of some kind was called for.
— Don’t imagine anything irregular, he said. She’s my daughter.
The customer is always right, I get it, Nula had said later that same night to Gabriela Barco and Soldi at the Amigos de Vino bar, where he’d run into them — they changed bars frequently for what they called their “work dates”—it comes with the territory and, thanks to my stoic indifference, costs me nothing. But I actually know Lucía Riera, married to the doctor Oscar Riera and separated for some time I believe. It’s true that I lost touch with her for several years up until this morning, but I know perfectly well who her parents are, though I never met them. A man named Calcagno, a lawyer, was her father — he died several years ago — but her mother, barring evidence to the contrary, is still alive. It took effort not to punch Gutiérrez in the teeth when he told me she was his daughter, and I wasn’t just furious but stunned too, because I couldn’t believe he’d lie so blatantly, and I was even a little embarrassed that he’d dare do that to me. He must have sensed something like that in my face because he got serious and polite and solemn and said he’d walk me out. We left it that I would call him to set up another visit, something that, obviously, I don’t intend to do. Nula stopped, satisfied he’d conveyed his indignation, but when he looked up he saw that Soldi was avoiding his gaze. After a few seconds, Soldi looked him straight in the eyes and, somewhat sheepishly, said, And yet there are those who say that it might be or at least could be true. You should probably look for something else to get indignant over.
And so, out of curiosity, Nula had called Gutiérrez again the following week, and they set a day and time for the second meeting. In a sense, the practically imperceptible incident, which didn’t quite mean anything in particular for either, but drew them both for a few seconds from the neutral and conventional territory where mercantile transactions are understood to take place, had made them mutually interesting and enigmatic in their own way, something that both took silent note of during the short telephone conversation when they set up the second meeting, and which they took pains to conceal when, several days later, they were once again face to face. The wine sale took place quickly — a case (six per) of viognier and two of cabernet sauvignon to start, plus four local chorizos — and once it was settled, the bill and the check signed and the receipt in Gutiérrez’s hands, they took up a conversation that lasted more than two hours, on various topics that had little or nothing to do with wine, and during which, every so often, Gutiérrez elaborated his serene, disinterested soliloquies about them, the inhabitants, referred to with ironic disdain, of the rich countries he had lived in for over thirty years. They had sat down on a bench at the back of the courtyard, under the trees, after touring the property inside and out, though its details, if they sparked Nula’s interest from time to time, seemed invisible to their owner. Their respective biographical details, which certainly interested them, did not form part of the conversation, at least in a chronological way, although every so often some personal element cropped up or was taken into consideration, like for example the medical and philosophical studies that Nula abandoned in succession, and his project, before selling wine, of writing his Notes toward an ontology of becoming, or the reasons (never clarified, and cited as a means of formulating an aphorism rather than an actual confidence) that had propelled Gutiérrez abroad: I left in search of three chimeras: worldwide revolution, sexual liberation, and auteur cinema.