La Grande. Juan José Saer
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wouldn’t have run into her as he walked out, and might have turned down Mendoza to the west to catch a bus at the Plaza del Soldado, or if, instead, he’d decided to walk back to La India’s house for lunch, he might have turned up San Martín, and since he was more or less thirty seconds ahead of her, would’ve probably walked the twelve or thirteen blocks to his house without once noticing she was there.
Thanks to all of these coincidences, he’d bumped into Lucía as he walked out. It was just after noon, when the shops close and their employees dissolve into the crowd that comes and goes along the avenue and its cross streets. The buses fill up with people going home for lunch, with high school students, with bankers, with public servants. After one o’clock there’s almost no one left on the street, but around noon, and later in the afternoon, in the city center, the crowds swarm anew, as they say. That bright September afternoon already anticipated that intimate and possibly organic, but also painful euphoria provoked in the species, most likely from its affinity with all other forms of life milling around the biosphere, and also from our consciousness of it, by the arrival of the spring. The fibers and tissues, flesh and organs, feeling the multiple effects of the weather appropriate for the needless, and, you might say, ad nauseam iterations of the same invariable, demented shapes, tense up in self-regard, in the fullness of the present, but memory, not necessarily in a conscious way, can’t ignore that the fullness is temporary. The girl in red, tall like him, and clearly a few years older, with whom he almost collided as he walked out of the bar, surfacing from some preoccupation, looked hard at him, as though she was about to say something, but without opening her mouth she stepped aside and walked past. Without even taking the time to think about it, Nula started to follow her. They walked in the shade, which, despite the hour and thanks to the two-story houses, still covered a good portion of the sidewalk, and after a few meters, as she stepped into the street—they were on the San Martín promenade—Nula did the same, immediately feeling the warmth of the air and the light on his face and head. At first, less than four or five meters separated them, but Nula could see, in her posture and in a few uncertain movements of her head, that she already sensed that she was being followed by a stranger, and so he slowed down, to increase the distance between them, but even when he’d been following her more closely, despite the fact that her red dress hugged the full, firm shapes of her arms, her back, her buttocks, and her thighs, Nula didn’t notice her body, ensnared rather by the memory of the quick, inquisitive look she gave him as she surfaced, momentarily—only to sink again immediately—from her thoughts. Later, a kind of sexual fury, more painful than pleasurable, actually, a transferred and rarely gratified salaciousness, would periodically entrap him, but in that first meeting and in others that followed it, the question of sex, though the immediate reaction of his senses indicated just the opposite, seemed secondary.
As they left the city center, there were fewer people in the street, which forced him to extend the distance between them by a few more meters, in case she happened to turn around, because if she recognized him as the man she’d thought she knew outside the bar, she’d realize that he’d been following her ever since. She walked at a steady pace, neither slow nor fast, apparently calm and sure, and her dark brown hair, with the same rhythm as the loud clicks that her heels made against the gray pavement—Nula had observed this when he’d been closer—bounced silently against her nape and the top of the back. After a few blocks, at the end of the promenade, she turned the corner, walked east one block, and, crossing the street, turned on 25 de Mayo, the first street parallel to San Martín. Now they walked on the sunny sidewalk, opposite the cars and the buses that moved south toward the city center. From a distance she seemed taller, and Nula guessed, without checking too closely, that when she made a quick pivot on the sidewalk, or when she stepped for a few seconds into the street, it was to avoid the broken patches of sidewalk he knew by memory, the missing paving stones or the potholes where, despite the week that had passed since it last rained, there still trembled a rectangular, stagnant puddle that had yet to evaporate. The red blur of the dress vibrated in the distance, mobile and vivid in the early afternoon sun that glimmered off the windshields of buses, off the windows and the chrome bodywork of the cars, troubling the soft calm of the air.
Another thing that hadn’t occurred to Nula was that their route was taking him straight to his own house. La India’s apartment building was accessed in the middle of the block through an interior garden, faced on two sides by rows of apartments that divided the block without completely separating the two halves: despite the fact that the garden and the apartments took up the full depth of the block, the building stopped before the next cross street, and there was no other entrance but the main one, on 25 de Mayo. In the late forties, when they were built, the apartments were unusual and expensive—at that time they called them luxury tenements—and if they still conserved a sense of upper middle class dignity, time had mistreated them badly. Most of the residents were owners, and they’d formed a co-op, with La India as vice-president, to keep the complex in good condition and raise funds from the municipality for restoration. The main entrance, dominated by curves, granite staircases, and chrome banisters, evoked both the prosperous years of its construction and the avant-garde flirtations of its local architects.
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