The One Before. Juan José Saer
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the past, the present, and the future which flow, depending on how you view them, in different directions and crash into each other, forming knots and collisions that we think we can decipher, and suddenly (it was noon and I was lying naked in the sun so that its light would scorch me, my eyes closed and my pores slowly opening with a secret creaking), euphorically, I longed to be a special type of minstrel, the minstrel of the visible world, the minstrel of all things, considering them one after the other, the minstrel of the two Sybils, to give each thing its place with an impartial voice that would equalize and reclaim them, to display in the middle of the day an entire world in which every paradise, every leaf of every paradise, every vein of every leaf of every paradise would be present, so that the entire world could contemplate itself in every part by the light of day and nothing would remain anonymous.
Place: A restaurant called El Dorado, on the other side of the suspension bridge, over the costal road—more precisely, in a rough-edged tin cubicle, split in two by a wooden partition, with a wooden balcony overhanging the road and a back patio full of trees, separated from the river by a log railing. Beyond the railing the ground slopes into a ravine, and then the river. On the opposite bank, houses raised on wooden stilts expose their fragile façades to the water.
Time: One day in February of 1967, two in the afternoon.
Temperature: 99 degrees in the shade.
Protagonists: Lalo Lescano and Pigeon Garay. They were born on the same day in the same year, 1940, but while the members of the Garay family can claim to be descendants of the town’s founder, Juan de Garay, the day that Lalo Lescano was born some local women had to take up a collection just to send his mother to the hospital as his father, a waiter in a restaurant, was several hours late getting home, and one can only suppose he spent them at the racetrack.
Setting: A farewell feast, because Garay is leaving in a few months for Europe, where he will be living for several years.
The argument begins when Garay says that he will miss this place and that a man should always be loyal to one region, one zone. Garay says this looking toward the water—they are seated at a table shaded from the sun by the trees—while, with his thumb and forefinger, he kneads a piece of newspaper that came wrapped around his grilled fish. Neither Lescano nor Garay are epicures by nature, but they go to this restaurant (though neither would admit it) because they know years ago it was a haunt for Higinio Gomez, Cesar Rey, Marcos Rosemberg, Jorge Washington Noriega, and others who passed for the literary vanguard of the city. When the piece of paper has been kneaded to death, Garay throws it in the direction of the river without bothering to see where it lands. Lescano follows the trajectory of the gray little ball with his eyes, and then says that there are no regions, or, at least, it’s difficult to pin down the limits of a region. He explains: Where does the coast begin? Nowhere in particular. There is no precise point where you can say the coast begins. Let’s take two regions, for example: the Pampa Gringa and the coast. They are imaginary regions. Is there a border between them, a real border besides the one that geography manuals have invented to manage things more easily? None. He, Lescano, is inclined to admit certain facts, that the earth is different, a different color, and that they grow wheat, flax, and alfalfa in the Pampa Gringa while, on the coast, it seems that the soil is better suited to rice, cotton, and tobacco. But, then, which is the exact point where people stop planting wheat and start planting cotton? Ethnically, the Pampa Gringa is made up primarily of foreigners, those being primarily Italians, while the coast is predominantly native-born families. But would you really say that there are no Italians on the coast and no natives in the Pampa Gringa? The Pampa Gringa is stronger economically, and we know, with precision, that the part of the coast closer to Cordoba is bordered by Entre Ríos and Corrientes. All of this suggests a principle of differentiation, I admit. But isn’t it also possible to define the Pampa Gringa as the part of the coast that lies beyond Entre Ríos (the part of the coast farther from Entre Ríos, let’s say), a part of the coast where, because of characteristics in the soil, they plant more wheat than cotton? I would admit that they belonged to different regions if there were a way of marking the borders with precision, but that possibility does not exist. Proximity to the river isn’t a good argument, because there are parts of the coast that are nowhere near the river, and those are still called the coast. There is no precise limit: the final rice paddy is already inside the wheat fields, and vice versa. I’ll give another example if you like: the city. Where does the city center end and the suburbs begin? The dividing line is conventional. Galvez Boulevard, let’s say. But any one of us knows full well, because we were born here and we live here and we know the city by heart, that there are many things north of Galvez Boulevard that could easily be in the center: multi-story houses, apartment buildings, businesses, respectable families. And the city itself, where does it end? Not at the checkpoint, because the people who live beyond the checkpoint say, when you ask them where they live, that they live in the city. So there can’t be zones. I don’t understand, Lescano concludes, how you can be loyal to a region, when regions don’t exist.
I disagree, says Garay.
Sometimes we think about nuclear explosions or this used-up planet dangling in the black expanse because God is great, and a shudder runs over our entire body and makes us want to scream, but in a moment we forget and we go back to imagining all the things we could do if one day we received a laconic letter from California informing us that an unknown relative had just bequeathed us a million dollars. In winter we impatiently await the summer, but when we find ourselves at last beneath the January sun, bronzing slowly, doing nothing, we begin to feel as if our mind were circling around a retracted pinhole, a tiny whirlpool winding inward and downward, an implacable spiral. Then come the unchanging days: work, school for the kids, the possibility of a promotion or a subtle change of direction in our life that we discuss cautiously with our wife in bed, before we fall asleep, or maybe a new house, a memory, some party where the first few cups of alcohol excited us and made us say crazy things that puffed us up because everyone else thought they were funny. Our body changes. Nothing happens if we bathe in the morning, because we have to go immediately to the office and what’s more we’re still half asleep, but sometimes, later, home from work, having plunged into the bath because we will be going out to the movies with our wife or going for dinner at a friend’s place, we remain awhile under the tepid water and then look attentively at our naked body in the bathroom mirror or in the one in the closet, as we dry off. All things considered, we keep ourselves up. One day when there was a protest we decided not to go to work and followed the bulletins on a transistor radio, arguing over them. We remember distinctly how we would get worked up, especially over a new guy, a young man whom we didn’t much like because his yellow teeth had half rotted away, and how one day, all of a sudden, he disappeared without giving the least notice or saying goodbye to any of his friends. Now we don’t even remember his name. Next year, if all goes well, we’ll go to Brazil or to Punta del Este in Uruguay. When we are melancholy we take the car and drive alone in circles around the city—if we can, we even like to go out past the checkpoint and get into the countryside, and once we got all the way to Esperanza. It was a summer night and people were sitting on the sidewalks drinking beer in the bars spread out around the plaza. Coming home we saw how the moon bleached the endless, motionless fields of wheat so that they looked almost metallic. We sleep well and never dream. In another time, before we got married, we used to suffer bouts of insomnia and we would watch the green and red lines of a neon sign slip through the intermittent cracks in the blinds and project onto the white bedroom walls. Other than that, we’ve never had problems with our health, thank God, either because we don’t smoke or just by chance, and we’ve managed to keep ourselves safe from the terrible things that happen to other people. When our wife is pregnant, we entertain ourselves, in the last month, by putting our ear against her belly to hear what is moving inside, the movement of the child that is beginning to prepare to break away and fall into this multiple marvel, the world. Instinctively we close our eyes, throbbing, terrified, because it seems that from one moment to the next we can hear,