La Grande by Juan José Saer Page A

sense of euphoria and a sort of disbelief—it seemed inconceivable that the two wild animals who explored the most hidden parts of the other’s body, not only shamelessly but in fact ecstatically, with ease and dexterity, with their lips, tongues, teeth, hands, fingers, and nails, gladly swallowing and sharing their fluids, who coaxed spasms and agonizing pleasure from each other, who communicated with breaths, murmurs, moans, screams, and insults were the same people who moments before, over a relaxed meal, had described their work, their artistic tastes, their small pleasures, their travels, their childhoods, and who, for months, had barely dared to look at each other, to let their hands touch, allowing themselves, even when they were alone, only polite conversation. Gutiérrez couldn’t have imagined the double revelation that what was happening produced: a forgetting of the self and, paradoxically, the sudden awareness of being someone different from who he’d thought. Even now, as he examines the enlargement of her face, despite all her faults and failures, he has to acknowledge his debt to Leonor. For Gutiérrez, the person who could provoke that flood of ecstasy that at once transforms the person who feels it and the world he lives in, as imperfect as she may be, inevitably takes part in that splendor. Still, his continued devotion is directed less to the person than to the capacity, which, by some intricate design in the matrix of events, she, unaware of being a carrier, may have ignored or at least misinterpreted.
    They copulated from midnight until the next morning, dozing off, half waking and starting up again, rubbing against each other with violence and tenderness. For the rest of his life, he thoughtabout what happened that night. It taught him that love is filtered through desire, its own source, and that the parentheses of ferocity in which it traps its victims, who are also its chosen, are built of the illusion that in the wet embedment of their bodies the sense of solitude, which only increases in the act, is momentary extinguished. And it was this illusion that allowed the universe to seem transformed. When they turned on the light to the room, which was modest but clean and neat, they saw that in the bunk bed, the kind you find in certain family homes, there was a doll lying on the pillow, and, next to the bed, a bicycle against the wall. Before undressing, Leonor took the doll from the bed and placed it carefully on a chair. All night, every time his eyes found the doll, Gutiérrez got the feeling that she was looking back at him, and it seemed like in her frozen and at once vivid gaze there was a strange complicity with what was happening. The bicycle, meanwhile, provided him with what he called, mocking himself, as he often did, his taste of the infinite . In the subsequent decades he would sometimes get the sense, in the minutes that followed a satisfying sexual experience, that he was still in the room with the bicycle, and that a sort of continuity, or unity, rather, had synthesized his life, merging at once innumerable and fragmentary and disparate experiences that he’d for the most part forgotten. A sensory certainty of permanence, of rootedness on the edge of the ceaseless disintegration of things, of an indestructible, unique present, reconciled him, benevolently, with the world.
    Their nakedness, their exhaustion, but also the summer night, the silence that settled in, and the desire that, though it only surfaces sporadically, is by definition infinite, and, like time, whose essence, in a sense, it shares, works unnoticed on those it transforms, brought them to the daybreak, to the morning, to the warm, empty Sunday. Before dawn, in the dark breathlessness of the twilight, a sparrow sang among the trees in the garden, and, with thefirst light, the goldfinches came, greeting the sunrise, the new day, with an excited racket that, Gutiérrez now thinks, is as splendid as