La Grande by Juan José Saer Read Free Book Online Page B

back to him and can’t see that Nula’s movements so closely resemble his own, someone watching them from behind would think that Nula is deliberately aping him. Suddenly, Gutiérrez closes the umbrella, turns around, and shakes it over the sidewalk to release some of the water. Through the space he opens as he backs up, Nula can see inside the club. It looks like a newly built storehouse, made of unplastered brick, and while the thatch roof is in perfect shape (having been built pretty recently), the floor, by contrast, is simply tamped-down earth. Two small lamps hang from one of the roof beams, and a few lamps are attached to the walls, but only two or three are lit up. Three small tables and their respective folding chairs, arranged somewhat at random, a bit lost in a space that could contain many more, are scattered around the room. Two long planks, some collapsed trestles, and a stack of folding chairs is piled up against a wall. At the back there’s a counter and a set of shelves loaded with glasses and bottles, and next to that a yellowed household fridge with a larger door below a smaller one to the freezer, which, Nula thinks, some member of the club probably donated after buying a new one. When they appear in the doorway, a man with a full, smooth beard, standing between the counter and the shelves, stops in the middle of drying a glass, watching them with an inquisitive and somewhat severe expression. At the only occupied table, four men are playing cards and three others are standing behind them, following the course of the game. None of them appears to have noticed their presence yet.
    The severe look of the barman at the unexpectedness of their sudden intrusion doesn’t seem to intimidate Gutiérrez, who, Nula thinks somewhat anxiously, walks in with the same ease and self-assurance with which one of its founding members or even its president could have. Nula, following him submissively, waversbetween disapproval and confused admiration, and is so surprised by Gutiérrez’s determination that he’s not even conscious of what he’s thinking, which, translated into words, would be more or less the following: Or maybe this is all so familiar to him, it’s such an intimate part of himself that despite the thirty-some years away the words and gestures come on their own, reflexively or instinctually, or rather—and it would be offensive if this were the case—he thinks that the millions that Moro attributes to him give him the right to walk in this club as though he were actually its president.
    Without even glancing at the barman, Gutiérrez, scrutinizing each of the players at the table and the three men following the game behind them, walks slowly toward the table. He stops suddenly, staring at one of the four players, who is receiving, his eyes down, the cards that the player to his left is dealing. The man’s hair, a slicked-back shell pasted to his skull, is thick and smooth; it’s patched in white, gray, and black, like the hair of an animal. A cartoonist would represent it by alternating curved black lines with corresponding white gaps of varying width between them, and a few black, white, and gray blotches interrupting the lines to mark the spots where the black and white separate. Two hollows amplify the forehead that, along with his nose, comprises the most protrusive part of his face, which narrows into a triangle toward his chin. His skin is a dark and lustrous brown, its similarity to leather accentuated by the wrinkles on his neck, on his hands, and around his eyes, whose half-shut eyelids obstruct the view to his eyes themselves, which closely study the two cards he’s been dealt as he prepares to pick up a third, just thrown across the greasy table, itself a brown only slightly darker than his hands.
    â€”Sergio, Gutiérrez says.
    â€”Willi, says the other man, his tone neutral, not even looking up from his cards.
    Patiently,