La Grande Read Free Page A

be represented not by a curve but rather, more precisely, by an obtuse angle, seeming to attend the visible manifestation of the becoming that, by presenting itself through repetition or a counterfeit stillness, permits the coarse heart the illusion of stability. For Nula, who often catches himself observing the same phenomena that once occupied his Notes , the island ahead, the alluvial formation, is proof of the continuous change of things: the same constant movement that formed it now erodes it, causing it to change size, shape, and place, and the coming and going of the material and of the worlds that it makes and unmakes is nothing more, he thinks, than the flow, without direction or objective or cause, of the time that, invisibly and silently, runs through them.
    â€”See that? They’re all the same, he says.
    Gutiérrez looks at him, surprised.
    â€”The waves, Nula says. Each one repeats the same disturbance.
    â€”Not the same one, no, says Gutiérrez, without even looking at the surface of the water. His gaze passes curiously over the island, the air, the sky, darkening from the fading light and from the mass of clouds, a denser gray, that have been moving in from the east.
    Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to notice that Nula is watching him openly, as though he were concentrating on what he sees less because what surrounds him is particularly interesting than because moving his gaze over the landscape allows him better access to what’s happening inside himself. What little Nula knows about him makes him an enigma, certainly, but with a touch of irony Nula tells himself that ultimately even the things that are familiar to us are unfamiliar, if only because we’ve allowed ourselves to forget the mysterious things about them. Quantitatively , he tells himself, without a single word corresponding to his thoughts, I know as little about him as I do about myself.
    Even what they know about him in the city is fragmentary. Everyone knows something that doesn’t quite coincide with whateveryone else knows. The ones who knew him before he left—Pichón Garay, Tomatis, Marcos and Clara Rosemberg, for example—had lost touch with him for more than thirty years. One day he just disappeared, without a trace, and then, just as suddenly, reappeared. From that group, the first to make contact with him, and completely by accident, had been Pichón Garay. I was on the afternoon flight back to Buenos Aires, and he asked the man sitting next to me to change seats , he wrote to Tomatis a week after returning to Paris. (Pichón had spent a couple of months in the city, liquidating his family’s last holdings, and in mid April Tomatis and Soldi had taken him to the airport, where he caught the afternoon flight to Buenos Aires, which at that time connected with a direct flight to Paris.) Before sitting down, he introduced himself. Willi Gutiérrez, did I remember him? It took me a second to place him, but he remembered everything from thirty years ago—El Gato’s stories more so than mine, actually—and I’m still not sure if he knew which of us he was talking to. He said he saw us with Soldi at the airport, but he couldn’t come over because he was checking a suitcase. He said you looked the same as always. For the fifty minutes the flight lasted he did practically all the talking, spouting off about Europe, and I learned that he’s living between Italy and Geneva, but that he travels all over. His trip to the city lasted a day, of three in the country altogether. The afternoon before, he’d landed in Buenos Aires from Rome, slept at the Plaza that night, and the next morning had skipped up to the city to visit a house in Rincón that he was looking to buy (I didn’t offer mine because it was all but sold), saying that he planned to settle in the area. That night he was staying at the Plaza again, and then back to Italy the next day. Our destinies, as you can see,