Free La Grande by Juan José Saer

sidewalks and the street are now level, separated only by a ragged strip of weeds that reflects fragments of the white flashlight beam, and, strictly speaking, it’s already hard to tell them apart and there doesn’t seem to be either a street or a sidewalk anymore. In reality they now walk down what, had there been one, could have been considered the middle of the street. Seeing Chacho covered in the sack, Nula feels a bit ridiculous under the small, multicolored umbrella, his left arm constantly rubbing against Gutiérrez’s right elbow, elevated because he’s holding the umbrella in his right hand, making their walk so difficult that Chacho, just ahead of them, has to stop every so often to wait, but the rain, fine and silent, is too heavy to face unprotected. When they reach the trees that darken the path, Chacho leads them to the right, onto an embankment that is somewhat more slippery and wet than the rain-tamped, sandy street.
    â€”This is clay through here, Chacho warns them, and slows down a bit. Nula and Gutiérrez move cautiously, feeling the wet mud against the soles of their shoes, squeaking under Gutiérrez’s now hesitant boots. The flashlight beam, projecting over the earth, reveals a brilliant, glistening circle of reddish mud. After walking some fifty meters over the embankment, noisily and with a few slips and hasty acrobatics, and crossing a scrub, they come out on another sandy road. To one side stands a large, whitewashed ranch, a light shining through a small window, and, to the other, they can sense the splashing and unmistakable smell of the river. A sudden watery upheaval betrays the rise and immediate submergenceof a large fish. Chacho probably hasn’t even heard it, and though Nula and Gutiérrez are both familiar with the sound, it produces, because they don’t often hear it, a sense of pleasure.
    Chacho, passing the flashlight beam quickly over the roof and white facade of the ranch, says, That’s my house , and turns back toward the river.
    A cluster of young acacias struggle near the riverbank.
    â€”Watch your step, the water’s up, Chacho says, and he stops so suddenly that Nula and Gutiérrez, pressed together under the umbrella and colliding as they brake, almost run him over. He passes the bright beam over the trees, the earth, the bank, the water, and eventually the light collides, somewhat weakly, against the vegetation on an island across the river. As the light beam retraces the same path, in reverse, Nula is able to make out, on the surface of the river, the parallel waves pocked with rainfall and formed by opposite forces, the downstream current and the wind from the southeast, apparently the same ones they saw upriver earlier that day, and whether they’re the same waves or identical waves it’s difficult to know, because the law of becoming, manifested here as false repetition, constructs its shabby platform of permanence right in the eye of the whirlwind.
    A red canoe, shining in the rain, rocks gently among the reeds. Three damp ropes, tied to the trunk of a tree, extend from the water’s edge. Chacho studies them a moment and then, crouching, grabs one of the three, lifts it slightly, and starts to haul it in, energetically but carefully. Then he turns around and extends the flashlight to Nula.
    â€”Shine it here, please, he orders politely. Obligingly, Gutiérrez raises the umbrella slightly, not enough to cover the other two, and Nula, with a hint of treachery, thinks he must want to play a part in the scene—singular, at least to men from the city—that is developing in the rainy darkness. Pulling up on the rope, slowly, carefully,Chacho takes out a wooden cage built from a wine case, its interior compartments disassembled and a few panels added to the outside to cover the openings without closing them off completely, allowing the cage to fill with water when it’s submerged.
    â€”Shine it here,