At an open bend in the park, on the hillside, he parks the car a few minutes with the engine running and looks at the river. A long island, stretched along the same direction of the current that formed it, divides the broad channel, several kilometers wide, into two nearly identical branches. The water is a milky gray, a reflection of the sky, and owing to the invisible sun whose rays nonetheless pierce the motionless clouds, appears to be coated in a brilliant varnish. For anyone who knows its violent rhythms, its treacherous pools, its tides, the brutal countercurrents at its mouth, its unpredictable depths, its droughts, its aggressive fauna, in spite of its deceitful smoothness, as it flows to the south, is more indifferent than calm. Born of ancient, prehuman convulsions, it nevertheless has much in common with humanity, who think they’ve domesticated it, and like a sleeping beast it tolerates them on its back until one fine day, rearing up unexpectedly, swallows them up, and then, a week later, or often never, vomits up the unrecognizable rags that are left behind. The year before, Nula had the opportunity to see it from Diamante, some fifty kilometers to the south of Paraná. It was a bright October morning, around eleven — that hour on sunny mornings when, as he realized when a cold forced him to stay home from school, the silence of empty places increases to an uncanny level. Although Diamante wasn’t in his sales region, Américo had asked him to go see a client who wanted to put in a big order, which had to be taken care of immediately, because the salesman who was in charge of it was in Corrientes. He’d left the city around eight, and by crossing to Entre Ríos on the bridge over the Colastiné and then through the underwater tunnel, not driving into Paraná but instead turning directly onto the highway by the outer streets, he’d arrived in Diamante before ten and by quarter of eleven the sale had been finalized. The day seemed so beautiful as he left the client that morning that he’d been overcome with the desire, without apparent cause in the species, to check out the river before returning to the city. And following the crude signs that pointed the way to the coast, he left the city center and turned onto a dirt road that, after passing a few scattered ranches, ended at a kind of peninsula, at the top of the slope. He got out of the car and walked to the edge; he was surrounded by some sparse grass, and though the slope wasn’t very high, the peninsula projected outward, and the shrubs and short trees that grew along the coast, some almost horizontally because their roots dipped into the vertical riverbank or the steep slope above, not quite reaching the end of the peninsula, allowed an unobstructed view to the north, upriver, where great quantities of water seemed to flow out of the horizon. The opposite shore, somewhere near Coronda, was not visible, of course, though in the flatlands that end suddenly at the river it would have been visible from that relative height if it had been any closer. Nula knew that the shore was several kilometers in that direction, to the west, but from where he was standing its presence was purely imaginary. The river dropped from the north, its vast breadth fractured here and there by green alluvial islands, by banks of sand, by floats of water hyacinths that came from the tropics, or possibly from Paraguay or from Brazil, and ran aground among the islands in the delta. Having carved through colored earth, the water was red, though in some patches the surface, mixing with the clear blue of the sky, it turned a bluish rose. The reddish opacity of the surface was rough in the distance, most likely owing to the current that turned the water and made waves across the heavy masses on the surface, on which, here and there, foamy edges formed. But what struck him were the contradictory impressions it provoked: it obviously advanced, but it appeared static, and though the morning was bright, the surface was not reflective, and though it flowed to the south in silence, the ear, possibly due to the heavy rocking of the surface, seemed to hear a distant roar.
Nula looks for his cell phone in the side pocket of his jacket as he steers the car through the park, toward the tunnel, but when he accelerates downhill, he decides to call Diana after he gets out of the tunnel, so he leaves the phone on the seat. He feels like a cigarette, though since he started selling wine he’s been smoking somewhat less so as not to distort its taste and smell, as they recommended during the mandatory wine-tasting courses, but, because of the air conditioning, he doesn’t light one. Ten minutes later he’s crossing the tunnel behind an interurban bus, and after the toll on the opposite side he passes it. On the island highway he doesn’t see a single other car, but on the bridge over the Colastiné he passes a truck and two cars that follow it toward the tunnel. While he’s crossing the bridge — the river is smooth, the same pale gray as the Paraná, in fact the source of its waters — he calls home, but Diana’s voice picks up on the answering machine. It’s me. How are you? I’m just about at the hypermarket. Kisses. Talk to you soon, Nula says and hangs up, relieved not to have to speak to Diana, since it makes him uncomfortable to lie when the adventure is still recent, which some nights forces him to wander around in the car or sit in a bar for a while before going home, to make sure that Diana will already be asleep when he gets there. At the exit for La Guardia he turns toward the city, and as he reaches the hypermarket, before pulling in to the parking lot, where there are a few more cars than in the morning, he can just make out the old waterfront clustered across the opposite shore of the lagoon, with its chic cottages whose tile roofs emerge sporadically from between the foliage. He gets out of the car, noting that the afternoon is hotter but unsure whether to attribute it to the climactic differences between the cities, one at altitude, the other on the plain, or to the contrast with the air conditioning, but as he enters the hypermarket its own air conditioning returns the sense of coolness to him.
Although he almost never buys anything, except on the days when he and Diana are stocking up (but even then she’s the one who actually does the shopping), he likes to wander through supermarkets, possibly because it once occurred to him that they represent a grotesque version of his grandfather’s general store. The principles are the same, like the water vapor that on a small scale agitates the lid of a kettle when the water boils, and on a large scale moves a locomotive. As a child he believed that it was the abundance and variety that attracted him to his grandfather’s store, but as an adult, wandering through supermarkets, he realized that what affected him was actually the repetition. The stacks of cigarette packs, all the same brand, the rows of vermouth or gin bottles, all the same shape, their contents the same color as the glass, with the same black label, filling an entire shelf, or the pyramids of cans in the center of the store, which his aunt or his grandfather had built, patiently and meticulously, the night before, after dinner, produced a visual effect that he confused with abundance, not realizing that what attracted him to the jars filled with orange jellies wrapped in transparent cellophane, all the approximate shape and color of an orange slice, was the cumulative effect, further enhanced by their loose disorder inside the glass jar, which in itself had both a decorative and philosophical aspect, though as a child he was still too young to realize this, because the repetition, even of manufactured objects, is the thing that’s most familiar and at the same time the most enigmatic: Abundance can be oppressive or sublime, but repetition is always aesthetic, and its effect always mysterious, he sometimes thinks. In the hypermarket, even the background music that most reasonable people are sensible enough to loathe seems necessary to him because it underscores the environmental shift that’s produced when one passes from the disarticulated and contingent external world to the internal one, a change as stark as the one we feel when, as we dive in the river, we cease to hear the sounds of the surface world and move, half-blind, through the underwater silence. Nula thinks of the excessive lighting inside the hypermarket — and all artificial light, for that matter — as a prosthesis of our visual organs, and that even the building’s construction obeys the same principles that combine abundance, variety, and repetition, because the complex, manifested spontaneously from the primordial swamp, contains not one but eight movie theaters. At the self-serve cafeteria, meanwhile, the repetition is sustained: the carefully-arranged, small round plates filled with mixed salad, tongue in vinaigrette, hearts of palm with ham, chicken salad, are displayed in sets of three, and the white rim of the plate frames in each instance an approximate design whose individual elements are arranged more or less in the same way. Nula picks out a chicken salad, a mixed salad, and at the hot section asks for a milanesa with egg and fries, and after serving himself a piece of bread, a carbonated mineral water, and some packets of mustard, salt, and pepper from alongside the register, he pays and sits down at a table near the window that faces the stream, beside which the Warden hypermarket, which everyone calls the supercenter, in such contrast to the swampy, impoverished landscape that surrounds it, seems like a magical illusion, a colorful mirage in a desolate, gray desert.